BRANDON KELLER.NET

I watched a video on writing by Alyssa Matesic that discusses 9 Mistakes You’re Probably making in the First 10 Pages, which has me rethinking how I want to start the short story I’ve been working on. I don’t think my first few pages are all that bad and might work better further into the story, but Alyssa makes a lot of great points in her video and it’s the last one that has me considering shuffling the narrative a bit.

I think my problem is exactly what Alyssa says in her video. I know my characters and my instinct is to write about them so that the reader knows everything about them too. But is that really necessary? Maybe not knowing something about the character is better than knowing everything. Tactical omissions is how I keep thinking about it now. What I keep asking myself now is – is that cheating?

Let me explain.

I absolutely hate it when you’re reading a story and the stakes are getting high and you don’t see how on earth the hero is going to get out of this one. And then as if by magic you read something like “Fortunately they learned to do this while in the Navy and was able to defuse the bomb.” or something like that. You know what I’m talking about. That the hero just so happens to have the solution tucked away in a skill, locker at the bus station, or some miraculous way out of whatever trouble they are in. It feels cheap and like cheating and I don’t want to do that to my readers.

So now the question is how am I able to incorporate into my story enough history of my character that when the solution does arise it’s something the reader doesn’t feel cheated, but rather accepts with an “ah, ha! That makes total sense!” moment that feels genuine and not pulled out of my ass because I wrote myself into a corner.

I’m a huge fan of “ah, ha!” moments that make sense and when looking back at the story the signs and answers were there all along but the writer was so clever that you missed it as just part of the narrative. One of the best scripts to a book I have ever seen play out in a movie was “Winter’s Tale” by Mark Helprin. I remember after watching the film sitting in the car taking to my wife at the time how brilliant the writing was. How everything was there the whole time! Everyone just missed it.

I really need to order a copy of that book to see if it holds true in the original story.

It saddens me that the movie by Hollywood standards was a flop, costing $75 million to make, yet only earning $30.8 million at the box office. The story and writing were absolutely brilliant, and if you haven’t seen it, and judging by those numbers, most of you haven’t, then I highly recommend watching it. It is almost winter after all, so it fits the mood and time of year. You can thank me later.

Anywho . . . where was I? Oh yeah – shuffling the narrative deck and creating that “Ah, HA!” moment . . .

That is where I am and instead of writing a few rough outlines of that for my story I’m writing here hoping this will be enough of an exercise to jar loose some creative juices that will do the trick. As I’m writing this nothing like that has happened yet.

At least I was able to grab a copy of Winter’s Tale. (affiliate link, btw . . . )

So there’s that.