misdirection or fair strategy?

Novels require the characters to go forward, and that means they must take action.

If the fireman's warning spurs your protagonist into action, then I don't think you necessarily need for the winds to shift. The warning accomplished its intended story purpose: It got the protagonist into motion.

If the character had chosen to not act on the warning, then I think you would need the winds to change, because that will cause a more immediate threat that will succeed in forcing the character into action.

Or you could have your character say, nah I don't think that's gonna happen and even if it does, I'm gonna protect my house with this here fire hose. (And yes, people really do this.)

And the whole neighborhood vacates except for this one guy and then the wind doesn't shift and because he's the only one still hanging around he witnesses....

What? Something. The tardis materializing. A freak meteor that lands in the center of town. A giant rodent burrowing up from under the cemetery. A sudden invasion of zombies. Or maybe the firefighter was a bad guy in disguise and simply used the fire as an excuse to get everyone out while he robbed the bank-the mansions on the street-or something else.

A story can go in any of a dozen different ways.

And I never heard of that rule, btw.

Or, have the firefighter say, "You have to get out! The wind might shift and you'll be trapped!"

The character doesn't get out, but while s/he's alone in the neighborhood a villain arrives, takes him/her hostage in his/her own home, and variously does villainous things.

The fire provides a reason no one comes looking for the character or notices s/he's missing, why no one just wanders in, and why there are no cars on the road to flag down.

The shifting wind is never mentioned again.

Or the fire turns out to be his father.

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

lorna_w said:

(I know you'll say you hate rules, but how about this particular one?)

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RULES ARE FOR BABIES *rides flaming motorcycle baryonyx*

(As long as it's somehow relevant to the plot.)

Maybe the fire is an illusion and the "fireman" is just trying to get the guy out of the house because it is sitting on his demonic evil altar that will release the zombie Kraken from hell and wake the werewolf sluts. And the man's presence is befouling because he is of a race that is part mermaid, the purest being there is, with angels next and ponies below that.

....DUN DUN DUUUUNNN

At some level, I feel novels should mirror life. Not every potential danger we hear about actually happens. As long as it doesn't seem out of left field, I think you should be fine.

As proved by some of the other posts here, I don't think the "bad thing" that happens has to be what the character says need to happen. Whether that's a fire or anything else. However, I do think there has to be some kind of threat there, even if it's just the potential of a threat. There needs to be some kind of tensions or stakes.

buzhidao said:

Maybe the fire is an illusion and the "fireman" is just trying to get the guy out of the house because it is sitting on his demonic evil altar that will release the zombie Kraken from hell and wake the werewolf sluts. And the man's presence is befouling because he is of a race that is part mermaid, the purest being there is, with angels next and ponies below that.

....DUN DUN DUUUUNNN

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I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

And be prescribed the same medicine as you.

And read that book. Get going on it, please.

lorna_w said:

A fire fighter comes along to your POV character's house and bangs on the door, says, "You have to leave. The winds could shift and the fire could cut off the escape route from this neighborhood. So get out now."

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POV character: "I've got your fire right here." Wiggles hips suggestively.

jaksen said:

And I never heard of that rule, btw.

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The rule to me sounds a lot like it's been built from Chekhov's gun (warning: TVTropes link). And going with that, I think as long as it is somehow relevant to things that happen later, like the other suggestions here say, that it works.

It might even work better for the wind not to turn because people will be expecting it to once you've said the line. I'm actually a little sick of knowing that when someone says "oh, I hope the roof doesn't cave in" that, indeed, the roof will be caving in.

I think that as a reader, when something goes bang, you expect it to be Chekhov's gun.

SomethingOrOther said:

Or the fire turns out to be his father.

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

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This made me laugh out loud.

lorna_w said:

... have you given an implicit promise to your reader that, yup, the winds will shift in a few pages and POV will be caught by the fire?
... I just read some craft article that said, in effect "you have to make the bad stuff happen that characters say might happen."

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That's kind of a silly rule, even in a craft that collects silly rules the way a ship collects barnacles.

There are three slightly related concepts worth considering:

-- You need real stakes.
If the agonizing journey to deliver a message turns out to be unnecessary; if she really didn't care about the boyfriend who cheated on her; or if the protagonist wakes up and it's all a dream ... the reader feels let down.
Peril or tension, once introduced, cannot later be trivialized. What the protagonist strives for must matter.

-- You need to shoot Chekov's gun.
Fiction is an organized world. Every detail is relevant. Your foreshadowing foreshadows something.

-- The worst possible thing happens.
If you go down into the mines of Moria, a balrog is gonna get you.

So, what about the "you have to make the bad stuff happen that characters say might happen" rule?

Random dialog doesn't telegraph future events. Not every walk-on postman and storeclerk is omniscient. The fictional world is full of the universally unexpected.

If a ranger comes by and warns about a fire, you have promised the reader the next hour will be full of tension and drama. Deliver drama. Do not let that tension dribble away.
But you have not promised the wind will shift.
Maybe some guy shoots the ranger. Maybe aliens land in Chapter Fourteen.

There's nothing wrong with misdirection. Mystery stories thrive on it.

I think the point some of us are trying to make is that the firefighter moving everyone out of town serves as a sort of trope - it's a way to remove all the people from an area so...

Something nefarious-weird-mysterious-bad can happen ...

That is, if you want to play the story that way. It's like killing off the parents of the orphan who will then go on to have great adventures. It's a way of isolating one (or a few) people so there are no authorities, no parents, no one saying omg you can't do that!

But btw bad things can happen in a crowd, too. All my neighbors saw a kid climbing into a window of my house when I was gone - and ummm...nope, no one called the police. The kid was a relative, but just the same, no one knew who he was. And he shouldn't have done that and I'm upset with him and nm...derail...

My favorite isolate trope is - you stay right here where you'll be safe while I go search the cave-house-cellar-attic-spaceship-lighthouse.

Yep, right, okay.

If a ranger comes by and warns about a fire, you have promised the reader the next hour will be full of tension and drama. Deliver drama. Do not let that tension dribble away.
But you have not promised the wind will shift.
Maybe some guy shoots the ranger. Maybe aliens land in Chapter Fourteen.

There's nothing wrong with misdirection. Mystery stories thrive on it.

Click to expand...

Spot on.

There is also another silly rule: Three.

As in the rule of three.

Three little pigs.

Goldilocks and the three bears.

The first manifestation can be pure luck. The second crystallizes a pattern in the audience mind. The third one is where the character, having also recognized the pattern, chooses a different path.


Take for example the movie 'Twister' (co-written by Crichton) where the film begins with a tornado appearing out of nowhere and killing the main character's father. Then you have meteorologists commenting on the unpredictability of tornadoes. Then you have Crichton's trademarked sidekick-asks-silly-questions method, whereby the main character's girlfriend is explained how tornadoes work and how unpredictable they are. It all reinforces the Opponent's characteristics: unpredictable and devastating. So when Wichita is later hit, it's no surprise. And then you have the main character pair, having recognized a pattern, choose a different way to defeat the Opponent - by weighting down their instruments with a pickup truck.

Hope this helps.

-cb