Complex Concepts in Plot Hooks

Hillsy7 said:

Hi all,

I'm after a bit of advice/some anecdotes about having a core complexity within the central idea of the plot. I started on a novel, got about a third of the way through and basically hit a wall. I realised a lot of what I was doing hinged upon the readers understanding of two core concepts: One is the "on page" mystery plot the characters are trying to resolve, and the second is the high level concept around what this mystery means to the world (and both are essentially resolved at once). Without this understanding, I suspect the plot will seem confusing and derivative, turning readers off.

I know I'm not a professional writer, and therefore assessment of this problem is very difficult - I have no gauge with which to measure reader understanding. I've had a few alpha readers who've loved the book so far, but on the specifics of the core concepts their understanding is a little sketchier than I'd like - meaning that as I tighten the screws, there's a chance the motivations and action don't maintain the realism I want.......I should probably give some specifics.

I went for a twist on the Prophesy trope: Book opens with the prophesied invasion of a Kingdom to retrieve a special Maguffin that will save everyone. Except it wasn't there - someone stole it. This gives the high level concept: What do you do when Prophecy fails? What lengths will you go to to ensure it happens? What is belief anyway, and how does it change us. During the early scenes, an previously unknown version of the prophesy emerges which might've motivated the thief: This is the core mystery of who took the Maguffin, why, and who convinced them in the first place this new version was legit? This drives the chase across the world trying to locate and retrieve said maguffin in order to ensure the prophesied saving of the world actually takes place, even though it's already gone wrong. Add to this, what differentiates the versions of the prophesy is subtly semantic - 3 additional words - and drives not only the thief's motives, but underpins the final reveal.

I hope you can see why I've frozen into inaction for a long, long time (not aided by the fact the insecurity and perfectionism underpinning this has bled into other areas). So how do you weave in levels of complexity, and have faith in the fact the reader has "got it" sufficiently to continue through the plot, when simplifying the plot means pretty much tossing the book? Where in the process do you pause and assess all the elements are in place before continuing, and then how do you know if the foundations are solid enough? Do you even care about plot coherence because you think character and story and writing quality will carry anything - and if so what led you to believe that?

I'm just after some guidance here, so all comments are welcome.

Cheers

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Some thoughts, in no particular order:

• I write books which have the level of complexity that I want to read.
• The level of complexity you put in is largely out of your control; you cannot write above or below what you are comfortable with.
• The more complex a book is, the better you have to write it, and the more clarity you have to wield. Clarity is NOT simplification, clarity is about the skill with which you express concepts concisely and cleanly. (Damn, that alliteration. Sorry.)
• My order of what I believe is important *to most readers*: Character, storytelling, plot coherence, writing quality (this will be contentious, and doesn't apply if you're aiming for literary)
• Complex books still show in hooks. Consider the hook for Shadow of the Torturer: a journeyman torturer is exiled from his guild for showing mercy to a client who he falls in love with. Cue an intensely philosophical novel which examines the breadth of human existence.
• As for perfection, well, I keep revising until it's right. And it's "right" when it stops being wrong.
• And finally... what complex scifi do you like reading? What philosophical fantasies do you enjoy? How do they handle it?

This does sound like an interesting premise, though I honestly don't find it especially complex. It has some layers, but that is a good thing; a story without layers of meaning and complexity will be pretty bland. So I think you're on the right track. I think it's perfectly alright to build up certain expectations for your reader and then artfully subvert them--that seems to be what's happening here, subversion of trope and expectation. The artful part comes in subtly priming your reader that this is going to be a story where things aren't always exactly as they seem or as the reader expects. This is going to be mostly down to tone, the way you present your world. When you start subverting things, you don't want your reader to be confused or put off, you want them to think, "Yes, this is different from what I was expecting, but it fits within this world the writer has created for me."

And as for not being a professional writer, well, you aren't until you are, if you know what I mean. That's got nothing to do with your actual skill or ability to write well. Write well (and go through the hell of trying to get published, etc), and the "professional" thing will follow (with luck), not the other way around.

Been thinking about this more, esp since angelisks post, re subversion of expectations.

I think you show this in the writing. By which I mean, if the sentence level craft is clever, with surprising turns of phrase and unusual observations, little surprises scattered throughout, my expectations will be set for larger scale surprises and subversions.

heh, I don't think I am at the higher end of the range. I definitely don't write at the level I like to read; I'm not capable of it.

There's not really an easy answer to what you ask beyond getting feedback, though. Seek out people who are your target demographic, who enjoy the kind of style you want to write in. Weighing up valuable feedback versus inapplicable feedback and working out how to apply it is pretty much the ongoing difficulty of writing, and unlike some other elements continues to scale over time.

Below is an example I frequently use to demonstrate an exchange which I think has clarity, conciseness, and complexity. I like it because it's straightforward to read, but covers a lot of interesting ideas in a few amount of words.

Green Man: “I am not a talking vegetable, as you should be able to see. Even if a plant were to follow the one evolutionary way, out of some many millions, that leads to intelligence, it is impossible that it should duplicate in wood and leaf the form of a human being.”


Severian: “The same thing might be said of stones, yet there are statues.”


— Claw of the Conciliator, Gene Wolfe

I think you're wondering how much faith you can put in your reader to make connections, read between the lines, and deduce theme. And that's a very tricky question. I tend to trust the reader to come up to my level, rather than me coming down to them. I think my audience is a certain type of person who will appreciate that. I write historical, and it's always a question of how much you explain and don't explain, both about historical details and about how society works. Do I explain who the Wide Awakes were? Do I explain how big a deal it would be for a Yankee to don a Confederate coat behind Rebel lines? Or do I let it unfold? Do I trust readers will get the themes of understanding and forgiveness?

So, what do you think your audience can take?

The only way to know whether your readers are picking up what your laying down is to get readers. Sounds like you've done this thus far. You will need to keep going and get readers to take on the ms as a whole. That's the only way you'll really know. For now, I'd say trust *yourself*. You can tweak and rework later if it isn't landing with readers as you'd hoped.

write the story. Have betas look. It sounds like you did some of this already, but what *I* wasn't clear on, in reading it--did THEY say they had issues following, or did you decide "they weren't fully appreciative of every nook and cranny of sheer awesomeness"?

I'm not mocking you, but you need to understand those are 2 remarkably different scenarios. If they have issues, you have to make some very real calls on if you need smarter betas (occasionally happens) or to be more clear in your own writing (way more common)…..if they are happy and you feel they sort of under-explored your world, you need to instead decide if it really matters, and if so, what you intend to do to fix it. But for me, from here, I'm not sure if they actually had a confusion issue or not.....

Through practice, experience, trial, and error ;-) there is no trick to it, I am afraid. Writing is hard, revision gruelling, and those are big reasons why.

The good news is that everything (yes, everything) can be fixed or adjusted with time, patience, and a lot of editing.

I have no idea.

I wrote what made sense to me and, when finished, showed it to my partner. He asked if it was all like that, after the first 200 words, because he felt like stopping already.

So I rewrote until t was readable (many times) and sought feedback until people could follow what I was saying. I focused on clarity (being understood) and did not eject my concepts from the ms. Basically, improving sentence level craft. Once I was understood I focused on making it interesting, making it logical (in terms of story progression), and so on. Leveling up each part of the story until it kept the original ideas, couched in a way people could follow and still want to read.

If there is a better or shorter way than that, I have no idea. Although writing short stories is great practice which doesnt take as long.


Seriously, I am still in the dark. When I write a short story, I do not know if it works until I get feedback. Every Single Time. The stories I think will be quick sales, have struggled to find a home. The one story I was convinced no one would buy (Ice Cream) has the the fewest rejections. A story I thought my CP would like, they mostly panned. Or whatever.

In terms of longer fiction, I do the best I can with different chapters but sometimes a chapter I think is fine, turns into a scrap-and-redo. Some I think are a disaster, get a thumbs up from CPs. It is just really bloody difficult to gauge your own work.

Hillsy7 said:

I disagree....sort of. Practise, trial and error, repetition and so on, are all well and good.....if you can tell the difference between where you were and where the iterative attempt has put you. If you are in a vast dark room, and you need to reach the door, the only way to progress is if you know if you've moved closer to, or further away from, the door each time you take a step - a stone that gets hotter or colder, or a radar ping. The room is simply too large to just wander about in and hope for the best.

The "Trick" I haven't developed that you, and anyone else who rightly counsels hard work (I'm not adverse to that at all), must have is either a) a way to assess whether any movement is progress or degradation, or b) a way to be comfortable with the idea that you might never find the door and will wander in the dark room forever, but that's OK.

How do you do that?

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By

Harlequin said:

...practice, experience, trial, and error...

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and reading a lot, both for pleasure and for analysis.

If you're in a dark room, you have to feel your way around.

There's no trick.

Harlequin said:

I have no idea.

I wrote what made sense to me and, when finished, showed it to my partner. He asked if it was all like that, after the first 200 words, because he felt like stopping already.

.

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LOL, I would never show in progress work to my partner. Ever.

Hillsy, I think you seem concerned about the author's skill to anticipate what the reader is thinking or feeling at any given point of the story. This is a high level skill. It might take years and years to get it. It has taken me that long, with the help of amazing professionals, and I'm still not always sure what I put on the page is what is going through readers' minds.

Seriously, the only way to acquire the skill is to practice. Write, write, write. Revise that novel ten times if you have to. Show it to trusted readers, and at least a couple should be writers too. Expect to revise more after that. This is how the process works for a lot if not most of us.

At a different level, the most important thing you have to do is gain confidence in your own vision. You have great ideas, you have an idea of where you want to go. It will take a lot of very hard work to get there, and the final result probably will not match your vision exactly. Perfectionism hinders, it doesn't help. All this is another way to say believe in yourself and your story even if you have serious doubts about it. We all have serious doubts. The determined ones work through it over and over again until we produce work that is maybe not perfect, but good enough for whatever your goals are.

And there's like a limit to how much you can direct the reader. There's no way on God's green Earth you can stop me reading your ergodic splatterpunk bildungsroman as an allegory for WWII, Nor from picturing all your characters (even the talking marmoset) as straight white men. Because I am bringing a whole heap of neurological baggage to my reading that you can't expect to control for.

Hillsy7 said:

I'm guessing what I'm saying is: How do you move forward with something that's precariously balanced based on reader understanding, without being able to assess that understanding meaningfully, AND given that people have a broad range of things they "get" (And I'm not talking qualitatively, like I'm somehow better - I mean that everyone comprehends and internalises differently, and in a novel you can't really reframe for everyone)?

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You write it, and then you hand it off to some beta readers and see what they say. That will at least give you some notion as to whether you were successful in conveying what you wanted to convey. Although even if you were, that doesn't guarantee that every reader will have the understanding you'd like them to.

Beyond that, I don't think what you're proposing sounds particularly difficult in itself. I think you may be concerned because you can't yet see how you're going to express it in the story. But you probably won't know that until you get into it. Clearly, this is something that must be revealed through the characters--through their suppositions, discoveries, or failures of understanding. I don't know how you could be expected to know how that will all play out until you actually write it.

Hillsy7 said:

The "Trick" I haven't developed that you, and anyone else who rightly counsels hard work (I'm not adverse to that at all), must have is either a) a way to assess whether any movement is progress or degradation, or b) a way to be comfortable with the idea that you might never find the door and will wander in the dark room forever, but that's OK.

How do you do that?

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I think you can do a couple things: Read a number of similar books with hooks or twists to try to de-tangle how they did it. Also, beta. Get some folks to read it, and ask them for their thoughts. You seem to want us to tell you "you can't just use eight tells, that's sheer madness, but clearly fourteen is way too many--eleven, that is the true sweet spot" and it doesn't work that way. Even if I knew exactly what your twist was, different styles and abilities will lead to vastly different amounts of space being used, or needed.

You're going to have to write it, then see if folks can follow it, if you really want to, yanno, know if folks can follow it.

Basically, finishing the book is step one you learn a lot from seeing what a complete narrative shape looks like

Hillsy7 said:

Thanks again for your input.

I think you've kinda hit upon the lynchpin of the argument, though it's not mostly how much faith I have in the reader, but my ability to work out where I need to introduce details, and what details to drop, to make sure the reader is given all the right information to bounce happily along.

Ok, to use a metaphor, you're a flight controller trying to keep an approaching airplane moving down a specific corridor of airspace to land safely. Through plot reveals and twists, you hope to keep the plane (Reader) navigating safely through this tube by adjusting their position. The more complex the plot, the thinner the tube. If the plane drifts outside this safe airspace, too late you've lost the reader.

Now, straight off the bat you have a problem: you don't really know where the plane is. This is normal. To mitigate this, you speak to the plane and get feedback so you can assess where they are, and guide them in line with your safe tube of airspace. I have a second problem - I don't know exactly where my corridor of airspace is, or how big it is (Or indeed if it's big enough to even fit a plane down). I'm guessing. And if you miss the corridor of safe airspace - the plane crashes and everyone dies.

So I guess what I'm needing advice on, specifically, is: how do you square the problem of knowing what size to build your plot corridor when you don't know how to measure the corridor's size in relation to the plane, knowing there's only so much adjustment you can do before you have to just throw it out and start again, and that you don't want to crash planes and abandon the approach vector all together.

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You don't--you can't. You can't square a circle. Experience will help guide you, as it will with a great pilot, but you just don't know ahead of time, because it isn't like flying a plane. If it could be figured out easily, then everyone would be able to do it. The only way to find out if your story has "landed" is to test it with your audience.

I reached out in facebook groups, and in places like Absolute Write or other forums. I participated in critiquing first, and then offered to do swaps.

Method for doing swaps - I usually swap 1-3 chapters at a time, so that nobody gets ghosted and everyone has motivation to finish the swap. But I also say upfront that I'm happy for readers to bail/stop reading if they're really not enjoying it; I only ask that they tell me where and why they stop reading (this is really useful to know.) For MS1 I had about 14 readers in a row who bailed by ch3 or sooner. It took me over a year after completion to get my first novel readable, let alone not-terrible.

Critiquing others' writing is time consuming, but it is of equal importance (imo) with reading published books. Reading and critiquing are the two legs that writing stands on; without them, writing is hobbled. I beta-read 22 novels last year, and around 16 this year. My writing has gone from unreadable to sometimes sellable and I put that mostly down to pouring a lot of effort into critiquing. The process of critically analysing what does or doesn't work in someone's writing is absolutely transformative, I can't emphasis that enough (sorry, I must sound like a broken record...)

Many of the people I did swaps with are now reliable beta readers and/or critique partners, which is an added bonus. Some I would call good friends We read each other's stuff and grow together.

If leaping into a swap seems daunting, have you tried SYW forums? Password is vista. https://absolutewrite.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?26-Share-Your-Work

Posting short excerpts has benefits, too, especially if the feedback can be applied across an entire novel.

I would say very, VERY few people become skilled writers without critiquing. Even if you could care less about altruism, etc. there is just a very fundamental difference in the process of analyzing someone else's work, and then physically communicating back what you feel works or does not work, and why, than there is in writing, or even reading other works critically.

You want to learn, it is arguably part of the heavy lifting involved in doing so.

As for being good at critiquing, you will get there, it takes time. And, like walking before you run, you'll suck before you don't suck. You don't have to beta full novels, you could do a lot here in SYW and QLH, but again, I'm not sure how easy it is to improve your own writing while skipping actual dissection and critiquing--I am sure folks do it, but also suspect it makes the process way harder than the work of critiquing is.

Harlequin said:

/.../
[*]The level of complexity you put in is largely out of your control; you cannot write above or below what you are comfortable with.
/.../

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Ha! I have some thoughts on that. I think you can write above the level of complexity you're comfortable with. It's hell, but it can be done. Going by pure writerly intuition, I'd point the finger at Robert McCammon and David Wingrove as authors who, during the 1980's/1990's, wrote novels that punched far above their weight, and this burned both out at one point, and it took each of them a decade to bounce back. So it can be done. It's just highly not recommended.

Likewise, when in the early 1980's Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison both wrote epic trilogies to finally make some dough, I think both were also overtaxed by writing stuff far more complex than they had ever written before or since. A sort of one-off grueling burst to 'get it over with' and finally produce a damn bestseller. (They both succeeded, but they were both pros at the top of their subgenres for like thirty continuous years before that).

Ditto Jack Higgins, who started with simply pulpy thrillers in the late 1950's, then threw everything he had into jumping above his level during the 1970's, and produced The Eagle Has Landed, which success-wise was the Da Vinci Code of the 1970's, and then slipped back into his simpler pulpy mode and has been producing one of those a year ever since to this day.

So if one were to try to write above one's level of comfortable competense ("writing beyond one's means" as in total health-threatening, relationship-threatening immersion as it were) , I'd definitely recomend a focused one-off burst like Higgins, Aldiss, and Harrison did, and certainly not the McCammon and Wingrove way of trying to go on like that forever, and then have to stop writing for a decade. And not at the start of one's career, but rather when one's natural comfortable level is already obvious, and can be used as a basis for the tortured temporary quantum jump.

Whereas writing downward--this I think can be seen with for example Ramsey Campbell, who kinda stopped bothering writing big books structured along mainstream thriller lines, after decades of doing that (perhaps he was also forcing himself, though), and is focusing on shorter weird fiction in the Lovecraft vein, with which he obviously feels much more comfortable. Returning to type, in a sense, just like Brian Lumley--they both started as Lovecraftian writers, then both mastered the "modern thriller" skills, and then a few decades later, went back to the original format.

I also suspect Guy N Smith, James Patterson, John Saul, and many others of making a conscious choice to write books which take up like 40% of their potential. Something one can do for 2-4h a day for a few weeks or a couple of months and is basically done. Which is also cool, if readers react positively, and one has no ambitions to become a towering artiste master of the age, but is content with being a succesfull craftsmaker.