The brain solves problems at 4 ayem. It does so while writers stare at the digits on the clock that have become all too familiar, lately. The problems you solve there are not always the ones you wanted to set right. And they don’t get solved the way you expect them to.
The question I’ve been facing is a huge one: how to make plausible the pivotal—but improbable—device that drives the new book’s plot.
Without this device there is no book, plain and simple. If it fails in being real, even for a moment, the book dies there. One does not have to believe that such a thing exists, or even that it might. One must only accept that it is alive in this world and that it is worthy of the story that one has raised around it.
One cannot muscle this things into a reader’s belief. One can’t create truth out of the fantastical with glowing prose. One can’t apologize for the choice. One cannot pretend that the device is anything but what it is, and try to do it well enough that the reader will want to stay for the ride.
I look to The Time Traveler’s Wife as an example: a book built upon an impossible notion—and yet, we don’t mind that it does. The improbable idea is the vehicle for greater meaning. It is the pathway to something bigger.
In the current work, I have plagued myself with questions about how this pivotal phenomenon happened; where it came from and how much needed to be explained. Was it a cop-out to just ask it to be? Did the character get hit on the head and–bam!–it appeared? (The answer is NO.) Did its simple existence push the entire story past the point of acceptance?
Tough questions that can kill a book before its born.
But Sleepless-Writer-Head works in mysterious ways. At 4 ayem, the stubborn question began to answer itself…but not in the way I expected it to do.
Sleepless-Writer-Head turned the stubborn, resistant question inside out.
Suddenly, instead of asking myself how the phenomenon happened, I found myself asking what the creation of the thing looked like…which turned into an examination of how we affect the space around us in every living moment, in ways seen and unseen…which turned into an understanding part physiological, part philosophical, part mystical. An explanation improbable, still. But an idea naked and vulnerable no longer.
4:25 ayem. The trail marker on the path to Suspension of Disbelief. The workaround. The ethers work in mysterious ways.
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
September 13, 2012 at 8:41 am
writerdood
My current novel involves quite a bit of time travel. I adopted the eastern model of alternating realities primarily because it fits for me, but realizing that not all readers are going to understand it, and relying on suspension of belief to take care of that. While it’s a fantasy, it involves quite a large amount of science. At first, I rather balked at the oddity of injecting that into a medieval environmental. The society is a rather strange mix of technology best described as feudal steam punk with esoteric physics. But after writing it for a couple years (and many drafts) I think it’s actually workable, enjoyable, and unique – at least to some extent. Surely there are rehashings of ideas that appear elsewhere, but the mixture produces a bizarre flavor that is very enjoyable once the reader understands that these conventions follow specific rules.
If you are converting deus ex machina into feasible logic, then I wish you the best and hope you are having fun with it. Temporal alteration is a wonderful plot convention. I frequently turn what “had to be” into “what could have been” and leave the reader to assemble the multiple futures that had to occur in order for the past to be assembled in the way they have viewed it. Given the right pieces, they can do that fairly easily, and it’s an enjoyable exercise.
LikeLike
September 13, 2012 at 3:41 pm
mywithershins
“The ethers work in mysterious ways.” And we, your readers, are glad they do! 🙂
LikeLike
September 14, 2012 at 12:15 pm
Alexander M Zoltai
My series of books depends on an extension of the qualities of Electromagnetic Plasma—using it to extend folk’s ability to communicate, mentally and emotionally—having Plasma be a “character” in the story…
Reviewers are accepting it…
LikeLike