We’ve all heard the expression, “You can’t make these things up.”
For instance, you might get an eviction notice and be served divorce papers on the same day that your dog dies and you have an auto accident that puts you in the hospital with a broken back, which leads to your ex getting the kids full time and you being fired since you missed picking the kids up from school and you missed completing a crucial report at work. Whew! I’m glad I actually did make that up, because I’d hate to be this person! She’d probably be impossible to console, too.
If you saw all of these events happen at one time to one character in a novel, you’d probably make the decision to suspend disbelief along about the time the dog dies because surely nobody in real life could have this much bad luck. But the fact is, a number of great or terrible events can certainly come in clumps. Yet for the reader of a novel, there must be a method to your madness, and each event must cause the plot to progress and the character to grow.
How about emotions that don’t make sense?
Renaldo says, “I don’t like that guy.”
“Why?” Evangeline asks.
Renaldo shrugs. “I dunno. I just don’t.”
And “that guy” can give Renaldo and his family a week-long all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas but Renaldo still won’t like him. Renaldo himself may never know why.
We can get away with listening to gut feelings in real life, going about our business and trying to avoid “that guy” as much as we can. But rarely does this work in fiction. There must be a clear and understandable motivation for emotions. True, you can write an exchange between two characters like the one above. But that exchange is used as a foreshadowing that Renaldo is on to something and the reader better keep a close eye on “that guy” because a plot twist will hinge on him. When it does, Renaldo’s feelings need to be justified when we find out just how cruel “that guy” really is.
Readers read novels to entertain, but also to learn. Through fiction, we can see characters struggle with this thing called life. And we can learn from fiction all about a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.
Your turn:
What is the best nugget of wisdom you have learned from a novel?
Name a novel where as a reader you had to believe the extraordinary. Was the story worth suspending disbelief?
How Do You See God?
I like longer novels because they aren’t forced by word-count limits to have the characters’ emotions swing unbelievably fast. They also let events unfold in real-time instead of fast forward.
Good point, Carol.
I prefer the more obvious answers: It turns out Renaldo missed all the subtle clues and never realized them until after he found out that people don’t just give free vacations away. All the pieces finally fit together when Renaldo’s wife decides she wants a divorce so she can run off with that guy.
Interesting post, and very useful!
I’d find it a bit more interesting in the example if Renaldo’s dislike for ‘that guy’ was actually related to something inside himself, that the relationship forces him to look at things he would rather not see.
It’s rather like the initial relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere in T.H. White’s “The Once And Future King”. Lancelot takes a dislike to the young queen because (in the book) he’s surpassingly ugly, and her attempts to be kind serve to underscore the chasm he sees between himself and the rest of the world. He’s not the ‘perfect man’ in Lerner and Lowe’s musical; he’s driven to physical and martial prowess by his inner demons of shame in his appearance.
The relationship and plot ultimately hinge on his realization, phrased so beautifully, that she was not a symbol of his perceived isolation, but “…she was merely pretty Jenny, who could think and feel.”
It’s a testament to the power of White’s writing that I have that line memorized, forty years after I last red the book.
Nice example, Andrew.
As for people looking inward when expressing dislike for another? In reality, very few people realize that the thing they dislike in someone else is the thing they dislike in themselves. I remember Abigail Van Buren once saying, about her advice column, that people rarely see themselves in the letters she published.
However, the mature character can learn from his own dislike of another, and that could provide interesting material.
Thanks for sharing!
“Cat’s Eye” by Margaret Atwood: “It’s easy being a girl. All I have to do is make something and pretend I don’t like it.”
That’s too funny! It describes a fifteen-year-old girl perfectly!
Thanks for the chuckle, Catherine!
A few years back, Angela Hunt wrote a book called, The Pearl. It was about a mother who’s young son was killed and the process of how she tried to get him back through cloning. It was definitely a story where I had to believe the extraordinary. I found it fascinating as Hunt wove together so many aspects of the story–emotions, science, relationships, dealing with life. It was worth suspending disbelief to read this story. It left me thinking about it for weeks.
Jeanne, that sounds like a great “what if” story — and those are always compelling when handled by a wonderful writer like Angela.
You can take the chromosomes and insert them into an egg with its DNA removed, but will the body that grows possess a human soul? Probably not. If not, then no conscience. Scary prospect!
Tamela, the best nugget I gleaned from a book was actually the Mitford series where Father Tim is loved- the people of the congregation couldn’t believe that Cynthia could possibly love him as a wife.That taught me that you can’t judge other folks’ taste………suspension of disbelief was called into question when a friend loaned me the 5th Wave and then wanted to know what I thought about it……space aliens in the form of owls coming and inhabiting human bodies????????Yes, it was still an interesting story but, really?????
Sheri — I love owls but that’s definitely a wild premise! I just might check it out!
The only problem with The 5th Wave was the cussing. Really grated on me. Other than that, it was extraordinarily well-written, and I thought the premise was sweet. BTW the aliens aren’t actually owls, that’s just a “mental smoke-screen” to give the people’s memories something to latch onto. The aliens “have no physical form because they abandoned it for a digital hive-mind existence.” But I haven’t read the last book yet so that may just be wrong. 🙂
Watership Down. I’m not a fantasy fan, but I love Watership Down and it never felt false to believe in how these wild rabbits talk and act so they can establish a new warren.
I’ll make a note of that one, JPC!
Things you can’t make up but are real life: a brilliant attorney making 400,000 a year plants narcotics on a school volunteer because she mentioned his kid moved slowly!
I read about that, Murray. The attorney’s Mama Bear mode went into overdrive!