Category: information

Let’s have a little moment of truth between us. At some point or another, for any number of possible reasons, most of us have been in a position where it’s in our best interest not to answer a question.  Or, at the very least, to take as long as possible to answer it.  A few such questions might be….

— “Hey, what’s in the bag?”
— “Do these jeans make me look fat?”
— “Are you actually claiming this as a deduction?”
— “Did you eat the last piece of cheesecake?”
— “So, where were you last night?”

Now, by the same token, there are questions that should take no time at all to answer. Things where, if someone asks us and we know the answer, there are very few situations where it makes any sense for us to delay or be evasive. These are the ones where I have to seriously wonder why someone isn’t answering–and they’d better have a damn good reason for their lack of response. A few examples of that would be things like

— “Do you love me?”
— “How the hell do we get out of here?”
— “What are tonight’s specials?”
— “Which one of these is the antidote?”
— “WTF is that thing and how do we kill it?”

I mean, why would you hesitate on any of these? If we need the antidote and I know which vial it is, that’s a no-brainer, right? Grab the yellow vial marked #23 and pour it down his throat.

For example, I loved LOST.  Yeah, sorry, absolutely loved it. Even the questionable third season. Yes, I will fight you if you say foolish things about the ending.

But… I can admit LOST suffered a bit when Benjamin Linus became a regular member of the cast. And a big part of that was because we all knew there was a lot of stuff he wasn’t telling anyone. There were still lots of cool mysteries on the island and Michael Emerson is a wonderful actor… but there were also lots of times where the “mystery” was just Ben sitting there… not talking.

A concept I’ve brought up here a bunch of times is withheld information. I’ve mentioned it a couple times recently, but it occurred to me I haven’t’ really explained it in… wow, ten years? Seriously? Okay, so this is long overdue.

Withheld information is when the characters (or really, the writer) hold back information from the audience for no other reason than to drive the plot forward. Characters just don’t talk about things, even though it’d be very natural for them to. Or they make vague statements when they could just as easily make clear ones. We’ve all seen things like this, yes? Where the only reason there are conflicts or challenges is because characters just aren’t saying what they know.

Withheld information’s the clumsy, unskilled version of mystery and suspense. It’s what I fall back on when my story doesn’t actually have a mystery but I’m trying to create the illusion of one. Because there’s more to a mystery—or suspense, or a twist—than me just not telling my readers stuff.

The thing is, withholding information is really just me and my characters… not doing anything. The plot may keep advancing in a clumsy way, but it’s almost always going to end up falling flat. Because information in a story tends to hit a tipping point. There comes a time when that knowledge hasto come out because it just makes absolutely no logical sense for it not to. And when it doesn’t…

Y’see, Timmy, the one thing withheld information definitely creates is frustration with my reader. If Wakko’s been poisoned, Phoebe knows which one of the vials is the antidote, and she’s just not telling anyone—that’s just going to annoy the hell out of my reader. I mean, yeah, it makes the scene more tense, but why wouldn’t Phoebe save her friend? Why wouldn’t she help? If she’s the villain, sure, but other than that…?

And, wow, if we get to the end of the story and that’s when we find out Phoebe knew which one was the antidote and didn’t say anything? I mean, I need to have some ironclad reasons for her silence then. That’s when my readers are going to be looking to punch holes in things, so I need things to be sooooo solid if I’m going to go this way.

Now, all of this doesn’t mean I need to tell my readers everything. But what I don’t tell them depends on what kind of effect I’m trying to create in my story. If I withhold (or give out) information at the wrong points, my story’s going to trip over its own feet. So to speak.

So here are three story elements and how they use information.

A mystery is when the main character and the audience are aware a piece of information has been hidden from them, and my story usually involves a search for that unknown fact. At it’s simplest, a mystery is a question someone in my story is asking and trying to find the answer to.

Suspense is when there’s an important piece of information the audience knows and the characters don’t. The key here is that the characters don’t know that they need to know this vital fact. ussually as soon as possible. Like that Phoebe (who Wakko’s taking back to his hotel room) is the murderer. Or there’s a bomb under the table. These are common suspense situations we’ve all been in, right?

A twist is when a piece of information is revealed that my characters and my readers didn’t know was being kept from them. They didn’t even suspect those facts were out there, waiting to affect the story. A twist comes from out of nowhere and changes a lot of perceptions for the reader and probably the characters. We’ve all been assuming <<SPOILERS>> Luke Skywalker’s father is dead, so when we learn that Vader is his father, it’s a twist that alters our view of several things we’ve been told up until now.

Yeah, sorry. Blew the big Skywalker family secret there.

If I’m trying to use one of these devices, I want to make sure I’m using them correctly. I don’t want to just withhold information. My characters should be just as smart and clever as my audience, and if they aren’t talking… well, I should be sure there’s a solid reason why.

Next time, I’m going to try to answer another question that got tossed my way.

Until then, go write.

So, hey… anything interesting going on in the world?

I kinda touched on this a month or so back, but since we’re all suffering from a bit of information overload right now, I thought it’d be a good topic to talk about. I mean, we’re all familiar with this feeling, right? Dealing with that person who just feels the need to tell us a little too much about things. Seriously, I get that Wakko’s excited about having a kid but do we need that many details about how the child was conceived? No, I completely understand why you thought she couldn’t get pregnant while she had her no y’know what, let’s just stop there.

Actually, let me stay here for another paragraph or three so I can tell you a porn story.

Years ago I was mildly obsessed with a little Canadian show called The X-Files. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It was kind of famous for bold storytelling choices. Multi-part stories and arcs. Realistic lighting. And some bold tricks for getting around the standards and practices rules for what you could show on television. As someone working on a television show at the time, I was amazed by some of the things they did. Especially one time when a recurring character killed a man by pistol-whipping him until he dropped to his knees, pressing the gun against the man’s head, and blowing his brain out.

Of course, we didn’t actually see this. Seeing something like that on broadcast television in the early 90s was strictly verboten, as Kurt Wagner would say. So the X-Files had Mr. X drag the nameless thug around a corner and we saw all this action the same way Mulder did, playing out on the walls as shadows and half-muffled sounds. You can probably picture it in your mind, even if you haven’t seen it. They showed less and did so much more.

The next day at work I was lamenting to my boss, Brad, that we never did anything this cool. Our little martial arts show was kind of… blunt. In the sense that sledgehammers are blunt. Brad just shrugged and said “It’s because all we do here is porn. Doesn’t matter what kind of show it is. Porn is when you show everything. That’s all anyone here knows how to do.”

That was many, many years ago, but I’ve always remembered it. I mean, porn really is the ultimate TMI situation, isn’t it? It’s pretty clear those two (or three) people went off to the poolhouse to have sex, but in porn we see… well, all of it. Every minute. From multiple angles.

Sometimes… our writing leans into porn. I’m not talking about sex, but like Brad said, we start showing everything.  We explain things that don’t need to be explained. Sometimes with far too much detail. A distracting amount of detail. Can you imagine if Ant-Man & The Wasp had a ten minute scene explaining how Pym particles work? Or how Hope controls her wings? Not only would it slow thing to a crawl and break the flow, but I bet anyone with even a thin grasp of science and physics would be able to punch a dozen holes in it.

But there’s another aspect to TMI as well. Experiencing a story is a personal thing. We’re reading it, but we’re feeling it in our gut and filling in a lot of details ourselves. As writers, we try to guide (and maybe even manipulate) how readers imagine things, but in the end a lot of it’s going to be very individual. If you’ve ever read a Jack Reacher book, you’re probably not picturing Tom Cruise, but you’re also not picturing the same person I am. The way I picture Danielle in the Ex-Heroes booksprobably isn’t the same way you picture her, and I probably don’t envision Veek from the Threshold books the same way you do.

So when I start describing too much, things stop meshing in my reader’s mind. I’m breaking the flow again. I’m repeating “six foot blonde” again and again while you’ve already decided Phoebe should be a brunette.

And there’s another way too much information hinders things. In the bigger, overall world of the story, we like having space to wonder and imagine. Especially in speculative fiction. We enjoy filling in some of the blanks ourselves.

For example, when I was a little kid growing up on Star Wars, I assumed the Rebellion was poor (like me) and couldn’t afford to buy cool new ships to fight the Empire. So most of what they had—the X-wings and Y-wings—was essentially kitbashed stuff they cobbled together. They had the basic instructions and diagrams, and they just made the ships out of whatever parts they had (which is why they all had little differences). Heck, I was so convinced of this, I assumed when the Rebellion started using A-wings in Return of the Jedi they were retrofitted snowspeeder hulls, now with airtight canopies and stronger engines. 

Was I right? It didn’t matter—the story had space for me to fill things in on my own. Which is a big part of what I loved about it. Sometimes, leaving things unanswered and unexplained is good. It leaves room for my reader (or my audience) to fill things in on their own and create their own mythology.

Not to mention, it gets harder to tell stories. A good story is about things we don’t know. It’s about the characters (and us) learning and experiencing new things. But the more I know about a character or event, the harder it is to tell a really strong story about them. All the information’s already out there. People give Disney a lot of crap for wiping the Star Wars slate clean and starting over, but the simple truth is it opened up tons of storytelling opportunities. Most of the great Star Wars stories of the past eight years couldn’t’ve been told before, because all those spaces had been filled up and sanded smooth. There were no gaps of knowledge left to fill in.

This can be tough, the idea of not explaining things. There’s a lot of empathy needed. I really need to understand what information my readers will want to know, what they’ll enjoy figuring out for themselves, and when they’ll be fine with nothing more than a handwave explanation of me saying “the flux capacitor is what makes time travel possible.”

It’s also tough because—like with research—sometimes we’ve worked out a really cool explanation or some ironclad reasoning, and we want to share it. We want people to see how clever it is and how well we thought it out. We want them to know we’ve thought of everything.

And let’s be very honest with each other… sometimes we want to fill pages. Nothing wrong with that. Filling pages is kind of the job. I mean, pretty much the first 100 pages of The Fold is scientists and engineers talking about how their little project works. But I’ve also never explained how the Cerberus armor works in the Ex-Heroes books or how Barry turns into Zzzap. And nobody’s complained yet.

Y’see, Timmy, I shouldn’t be scared about not explaining things. Look at some of the explanations and descriptions in your book. It might be new information, but is it necessary information? Does the story need it or does it maybe run a little smoother without it?

Next time… I’d like to talk about how we start things.

Yeah, I know. Great post to do halfway through NaNoWriMo.

Until then, wear your mask, wash your hands, and go write.

 No, no, I’m not talking about you.

 I’m talking about him.

You know who you are.

There’s an issue that came up in one of my weekend B-movies recently, and it also came up in a book I was reading last month. Not the first time I’ve seen it in either format. And I thought it was worth talking about for a minute or three.

And that issue is cheating.

I’ve talked about twists many times here on the ranty blog. I friggin’ love a good twist.  Seriously. I will forgive a story a lot if it can knock me over with a completely unexpected reveal that seems obvious in retrospect. That’s the kind of thing that makes me want to grab a book and read the whole thing again. There are movies I love to rewatch just to see how beautifully the filmmakers set up a fantastic twist.

Now, in the past, I’ve addressed a problem some writers have when they try to set up a twist. And that’s when the revealed information—the twist—is something the reader couldn’t possibly have known or even guessed. If I tell you Wakko is actually the clone, it makes us realize how we-misinterpreted some parts of the story and a couple things line up now that didn’t before. If I tell you Phoebe is actually the clone, it makes us ask who the hell Phoebe is. Is she even from this story? Also, wait, this story is about clones…?

In the past I’ve tried to soften this criticism by saying the writer didn’t understand how to set up a twist. And while that’s still true in the big scheme of things, I think it might be  a little more helpful to just be direct. When this happens, the author is cheating in how they tell the story. They’re lying to the readers.

And sometimes, you just have to call out the liars.

Yeah, this sounds a little harsh and a few folks may already be raising their defenses, so let’s take a moment and be clear what we’re talking about. This is a very specific thing I’m referring to. Cheating is a deliberate thing, a choice, as opposed to a simple mistake.

All that said, let’s talk about what makes a good twist. I’ve talked about these all at different times, but I think a good twist always has four distinct elements.

1) My readers and my characters don’t expect a twist is coming. If I tell you there’s a big secret about my cat you’ll never guess, you’ve been flat-out told there’s something about my cat you wouldn’t expect. Likewise, if the shadowy figure is constantly referencing things only certain people could know, they’re probably connected to one or more of those people. It’s hard for any twist to land well when people are on the lookout for it.

2) The information a twist reveals has to be something my readers and characters didn’t already know. Telling you I have cats is not a big reveal, especially if you follow me on Instagram. This information has no weight. Telling you one of my cats is a cyborg is a reveal—that’s something you didn’t know.

3) The information revealed in a twist has to change how my readers and characters look at past events in the story but (very important) this information can’t contradict the information they’ve been given up until now. I can’t say my cat’s actually a plush toy dog after calling her a cat for a hundred pages and talking about the vet bills when she got her cyborg parts. Worth noting—this is when a lot of twists go wrong.

4) Finally, a twist needs a certain amount of time to build up strength. It’s really tough to have a good twist in the first five pages of a novel. As I mentioned above, a twist needs to alter our view of past events, which means… there have to be past events. If my cat’s showing off her laser eyes and adamantium claws on page eight, this isn’t a twist—I’m just introducing a character.

Granted, these are my own requirements, not something (to the best of my knowledge) taught in any courses or books. For this little rant of mine, it’s 2) and 3) we’re most concerned, because that’s where the cheating often comes into play. Because cheating (and lying) usually involve the manipulation of information to suit your own needs.

Now, right up front, it’s really common for me, as a writer, to lead my audience into believing something. To carefully choose words and phrases to make them think X when the truth is Y. This is a standard aspect of storytelling—what I want the reader to know and when I want them to know it.

But it’s important that I don’t cheat. I may leave a few facts out. I may deliberately guide them down a different path. But I can’t lie to them. The moment I lie—even if I’m doing it to make the story “better”—I’ve broken the contract. They’ve got no reason to trust me, and it’s not unfair for them to start doubting and questioning everything in the story.

So what do I mean when I’m saying cheating or lying? Let’s break it down by those two points from above…

As far as 2) goes, I need to be revealing information the audience doesn’t know, but it has to be information they could know. It can’t break the characters or the world I’ve established. It needs to fit within that context.

For example, if my twist is that Bron from Game of Thrones has psychic powers because he’s actually a mutant from an alternate future timeline… well, it’s definitely information we didn’t know. But we never could’veknown it. With everything we’ve been told it’s just an impossibility in this story. Likewise, if I’m writing a murder mystery and the big twist is that the murderer is Phoebe… we should all know who Phoebe is. Revealing a name we’ve never heard before at a critical moment doesn’t really solve anything.

A good way to think of it is whatever information I’m revealing in my twist is something my readers should be able to guess—even if it might mean a few guesses. If I have twenty characters/potential suspects in my murder mystery, the reader shouldn’t need thirty-seven guesses to name the murderer. If I’m three hundred pages into my grimdark medieval fantasy story, I can’t abruptly say the dark lord’s secret weapon that’s wiped out armies is a battlemech with a meson death ray. Why would anyone ever guess that?

When we’re talking about 3), the big cheat is usually just a straight contradiction. The facts I give on page 150 or 200 just don’t line up at all with the facts I’ve given you before. I’ve told you two or three times that Wakko’s a computer programmer but then it turns out really he’s a genetic engineer.  Numerous characters have said there’s nothing within a hundred miles of our village, but then they escape to the town on the other side of the valley. And if you find out on page 175 of my political thriller that the secret informant is actually an angry ghost… well, I’d understand if you tossed it aside at that point.

One of the worst examples of cheating is when we’ve been seeing over a character’s shoulder or “hearing” their thoughts for a hundred or so pages and they just, y’know, never happened to think about the fact they’re the serial killer the whole city’s searching for. Or that Wakko constantly calls himself as a computer programmer (even in private) until we find out he’s the genetic engineer who activated Dot’s Zoanoid genes (double-geekery reference). This is the kind of things that make readers grind their teeth, and it really stands out on a re-read.

In the end, these lies are just about no being honest with my readers. I’m lying to them about what Wakko does. I’m lying about what’s going on in his head. I’m cheating to create a certain effect rather than actually creating the effect.

Y’see, Timmy, I think the reason some writers fall back on these blatant cheats and lies is… it’s easier. Doing the work is tough. Lying is simple. And if I just don’t feel like doing the work, it’s really tempting to just say Wakko’s a computer programmer and move on.

Good writing is tough. It’s work. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it is. There are a lot of nuances to this art and they’re going to take actual effort if I want to come close to mastering them. To pull off a really good twist is probably going to mean going over my manuscript two or three times, making sure everything lines up and fits together just right.

But when you do it–when you do the work and don’t lie, don’t cheat—that’s when you make something that sticks with people. Something fantastic they’ll remember and talk to people about and recommend constantly. Because a great twist makes a good book twice as good. The readers get to enjoy the whole story, and then they get to enjoy it again, seeing and appreciating how everything fits seamlessly together.

True story. Like a lot of my books, Ex-Patriots has a twist in it. It’s such a big twist that, when one reader hit it, she couldn’t believe I could’ve slipped this past her for the entire book without her noticing. In fact she immediately re-read the whole book, convinced I had to have cheated. And when she realized I hadn’t, she (somehow) hunted down my phone number and called me to rave about it and congratulate me.

And that, friends, is how I met Seanan McGuire.

Do the work. Don’t cheat. Don’t lie.

Good advice for writing and life.

Next time, I wanted to talk to you a bit about characters.

Until then, go write.

 There’s a storytelling idea, sort of a method, I suppose, that I’d been batting around for a while as a possible topic. Something I see crop up enough that it was worth mentioning in that “something else to keep in mind…” way. I decided to add it to my list of topics here and then, in a weird synchronicity, said problem showed up in a TV miniseries I finally got around to watching and a book I was reading (some formats may be changed to protect… you know).

The miniseries I mentioned involved an aggressive computer virus. And it explained how the virus worked. In detail. It used a few specifics and a few generalities, but it spent three whole scenes explaining this virus, the logic behind how it worked and how it selected targets.

The problem was… even as I was watching this, I could see a bunch of holes in the explanation. Holes that were only pulled wider as the story went on. And my computer skills more or less peaked in the very early 00’s. But I still knew enough to know the virus wouldn’t work the way it was described. Couldn’t. If it chose targets this way, why didn’t it go after that or that? If it propagated like that, how had it reached here and here?

For a brief time I was wondering if this was some sort of foreshadowing that there was more to the virus than was being let on. Maybe some sort of AI or a living virus that had been transcribed but then… mutated or something? But no, in the end it was just a computer virus that didn’t make any sense.

Which was doubly annoying because the virus didn’t really need to be explained in this story. The plot was much more about the repercussions of this thing being loose on the web and how it was affecting lives, society, and so on. The explanation slowed things down.

And, yeah, sure—part of this is on me. Any genre story is going to involve a degree of suspension of disbelief. Nobody wants to be the guy picking apart the energy requirements of a lightsaber or arguing how the Hulk can’t be that strong because his muscle/bone density would mean he’d sink into the earth. And as for Mjolnir, look…

Okay, yeah… there are some people out there who love being that guy.

(looking at you, Neil…)

But here’s the thing. I couldn’t’ve picked it apart if the writer hadn’t put so much down in front of me. I wouldn’t’ve had anything to pick apart. I can’t complain about your wardrobe if you never show me your wardrobe. But this writer decided they needed a whole scene (three scenes, really) explaining the computer virus in detail. And the details didn’t match up.

So what does this mean for me if my story needs explanation? I mean, speculative fiction is filled with different forms of technobabble. It’s got FTL drives and magic systems and AI computer viruses and alien life cycles and bringing dinosaurs back with cloning and mutant superheroes and… I mean, I’ve got to explain it all somehow, right?

Maybe? Consider Jurassic Park. How much does Crichton (or Spielberg and Koepp) actually tell us about the process of recreating dinosaurs? No, seriously—what do they tell us? If you look back, it’s actually a pretty bare-bones explanation of what’s a fairly complicated process (especially twenty-five years ago!). In fact, it encourages us to fill in a lot of the blanks ourselves and make it seem more complete.

So here’s a few things to keep in mind as I’m writing out that long explanation…

First, be clear if the story really needs this explanation. Is this what the story’s actually about, or is this a minor element I can handwave away or just skip over? Back to the Future gets away with a ridiculously simple explanation of time travel because it’s not really about the time travel. It’s about actions and consequences, and becoming a better person. Time travel’s just the mechanism that lets it happen. It’s just short of being a MacGuffin. We don’t need that explanation the same way we don’t need to read about someone hitting every step on the staircase, how many keystrokes it took to log into their cloud account, or a list of every item of clothing they put on when they got dressed (in order). The reader will fill it in.

Second, if I decide I really need to explain this at length, it’s got to be solid. I’ve waived the right to say “just trust me, it works” and now I need to make this as rigorous and believable as possible. I need to do my research, double-check my logic, triple-check my numbers, and let it marinate overnight in plain-old common sense. Trust me when I say if I get a fact wrong or use garbage science or make a math mistake… people will let me know. I don’t even have to ask them. Not only that, but…

Third, I need to keep in mind the more something gets explained, the easier it is to punch holes in that explanation. Like in the example I first mentioned. As the characters went into more and more detail about the computer virus, the flaws in that explanation became more and more apparent. How often have we seen the person digging themselves deeper and deeper because they won’t stop talking? It’s soooooo tempting when we’ve done all that sweet, cool research, but I need to figure out how much explanation my story really needs and stop there. I’ve mentioned screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin here onceor thrice, and his idea that we experience stories in our gut, but we analyze them in our head. I never, ever want my explanation to drive people into their heads.

Fourth, closely related to the last one, is that this sort of explanation is almost always going to be exposition. Yes, even if I try to work it into a conversation or presentation or something like that. As we’ve talked about here a bunch of times, exposition gets boring really fast because so much of it is either things we already know or things we don’t need to know. For our purposes here, there’s a chance the reader doesn’t even want to know. So if I decide I need this explanation in my story, I need to make sure it’s going to be clever and engaging for the reader.

And that’s me explaining how to explain things.

Next time, I’d like to talk about if you should be reading next week’s post.

Until then, go write.