Experts learn how to break the rules
A response to Orion Anderson, Victoria Stanham, and Eleanor Konik
Experts don’t keep the rules - but they’ve learned how to break them.
That’s true in math, where in some sense in calculus you can divide by zero. But, still, it’s true to tell an elementary-schooler that you can’t. It’s true in physics, where Newton’s Laws are not exactly true but mere approximations (as is general relativity, though we don’t know exactly what the more-true form is). It’s also true in writing.
There’s been a discussion lately: starting when my friend Eleanor Konik doubted back in November whether crises are necessary to reveal character in stories, continuing through Victoria Stanham talking about plot, and my friend Orion Anderson trying to expand the definition of crisis and discussing genre, and then Victoria questioning whether there’s a difference between expert and novice writers, and Orion again questioning whether conventions are needed for novice writers or whether they too should try the tricks that break convention.
Ideally, everything in a story would be there for a purpose and intertwine simultaneously toward several themes, subthemes, plots, and/or subplots. Ideally, the story would be written knowing what its readers are going to come to it with, and be designed to hook their interest and play off their expectations so they’ll better appreciate the story.
In practice, that’s not going to be the case.
Writers are human. They couldn’t keep that level of intertwining straight if they tried, and they often can’t think of a scene or line to simultaneously fill whatever three holes might be ideally desired by the intertwining they do have. Plus, there’s more than one type of reader (including politically, and including those who read it when published versus those who read it ninety years later, but also on many other qualities), so they can’t play off every reader’s expectations at once.
But, really good writers approach this. They recognize things that can serve multiple themes and subplots, and often put them in. Good, experienced writers have started to do this sometimes. You’ll get more misses than with the best writers, but still enough hits that people like their stories. Novice writers are trying but - being novices - usually don’t get so close till they’ve gotten some experience.
The ideal writer, who effortlessly grasps several themes and plot arcs that will interest readers and thinks of how to make every point serve them all simultaneously, can of course structure their story however they want. We’ve postulated that - being the ideal writer - they’ll choose something that will work. They know their themes; they know their plot; they know their characters; they know (somehow) that readers will like it. They can retreat to the Platonic Realm of Ideals until they hand their finished manuscript down to earth. Presumably, the earthly publisher can then print it unedited.
Here on Earth, us actual writers can’t do that.
Too often, we don’t know what readers will like. We don’t know what themes a story might have when we start writing it. We don’t know how to make our characters people that readers will want to read about. Sometimes, we even forget to have a structured plot.
We actual writers can often use some help.
Good, experienced writers have usually developed habits that will help here. But most novice writers haven’t yet.
What I contend is, most good advice to writers is scaffolding to help build that goodness.
There’re many stories that will interest some readers without following that scaffolding. I’m reminded of one novel by a practicing paleontologist (The Dechronization of Sam Magruder) that violated so many rules of characterization - but I enjoyed it as a kid. Or, we see from online fanfiction that readers will read many stories with only the faintest shadows of plot. Or, as Victoria points out, LeGuin’s award-winning Left Hand of Darkness violates so much standard pacing and plotting advice.
And yet, these all had something else that made them good. The Dechronization of Sam Magruder had the sparkle of being written by a practicing paleontologist; I as a kid also liked reading about time-travel to the age of dinosaurs. The online fanfiction gives people more time with characters they love. Left Hand of Darkness (as Victoria points out) shows a culture intriguing to its contemporary readers, and keeps showcasing its core relationship excellently.
And - as Orion said, there’s a spark in good writing that can’t be described briefly in words.
Certainly, a new writer can write something like this. A lot of online fanfiction is by new writers. But most online fanfiction is also badly written - and people who aren’t eagerly devouring everything about a particular set of characters will say even more of it is badly written. (People for whom it doesn’t “happen[] to target my vulnerabilities perfectly”, as Orion put it.)
Eleanor’s correct to say that “give your characters a crisis to reveal their character” isn’t necessary scaffolding. For one, it isn’t sufficient scaffolding. As I said when talking about Shakespeare, you need to give them the right crisis; putting Macbeth in the plot of Hamlet would solve the story so quickly the audience would lose interest. But for another, it isn’t quite right. You do need to give your characters something to reveal their character and interest the audience. One good way of doing that is a crisis.
Or, more precisely, it’s something that would be a crisis to your characters. P. G. Wodehouse can give Bertie Wooster an unwanted aunt laying on social expectations, because that’s a crisis to Bertie Wooster. To Harry Potter, that’s an everyday thing - so J. K. Rowling needs to give him a bigger crisis: Voldemort.
Technically, neither of them need to do that - Rowling could in theory give us a book of character interplay without any Dark Lords, showing us “what someone does consistently over time” in Victoria’s words - but a crisis is a good beam in many good scaffoldings for a story.
All the structure of standard story formulas (when they’re good) is trying to give writers more specific scaffolding in the same way.
David Brin said that when he was starting to plot his first novel, he decided to make it a mystery (in addition to science-fiction adventure) because that would force him to pay close attention to his story structure and details of scene-setting. The resulting story, Sundiver , is very good. Afterwards, he decided not to write more mysteries, because he thought he’d gotten into the habit of paying attention to them. His second novel, Startide Rising , wasn’t as well-structured in my opinion... but his later novels absolutely are. The formula of a mystery helped him when he needed the help.
Of course, Brin was still following variations of the standard adventure plot structure for most of his career. In fact, I’d say that his later books where he didn’t (like Earth) are worse than the earlier ones where he did. But why?
To some extent, it’s because readers (often subconsciously) expect stories to mostly follow that structure. If they expect (say) a call to adventure the hero chooses to accept, or the hero to have a crisis of confidence and self-revelation before the victory, that’ll be hanging in the back of their minds. The author can fulfill it or play with it without fulfilling it, but if the author ignores it, for many readers it’ll be a point against the story.
Take, for example, the famous science-fiction story “The Cold Equations”. As I wrote earlier, readers at the time fully expected some character to come up with an ingenious solution to save everyone’s life - and the author played into that expectation, only to dash it by having the Naive Girl die. An average science-fiction story of the time would fulfill those expectations; “The Cold Equations” didn’t, but was still playing with those expectations.
Playing with the expectations of a plot structure is usually harder than playing into them. It can, as Orion says, rise well above the standard. That’s why we remember “The Cold Equations” today, and not the other stories published next to it in Astounding magazine.
But there’s another reason, too. All else equal, I think the standard plot outlines really are more interesting to more people. Some people are really interested in just reading about Harry Potter or Bertie Wooster, but more people are interested in reading about them doing things - facing challenges and (at least in some sense) overcoming them. In the same way, more people are more interested when overcoming their challenges isn’t simple; when their first plans fail and they must forge newer and more complicated plans. I know I am.
Orion is right to say that all else isn’t always equal: there’s a spark to great writing that isn’t related to whether it follows conventions. But I’ve read plenty of stories with conventions that also had that spark.
And what’s more, most of the people who happily read lengthy slice-of-life fanfics probably wouldn’t be so interested if they hadn’t already seen these characters in action in the original stories.
Once Dorothy Sayers had published many successful detective stories, she was able to bend the conventions of the genre with Have His Carcase, and then bend them even farther with Gaudy Night. They’re both great novels in their own rights (including by normal plot and action standards), but they bend detective-novel conventions. In the same way, once J. R. R. Tolkien had published Lord of the Rings, his son was able to posthumously publish myriads of notes that don’t form cohesive stories in History of Middle-Earth. Similarly, the success of Lord of the Rings - and other novels - also granted an audience to myriads of fanficcers breaking normal story conventions.
Orion is right to say that great writing can have that spark without following conventions.
But Victoria is also right to say that there’s something else needed besides that spark, some emotional and structural core to the narrative - and a lot of it can be found in the standard advice about plot and structure. I’ve read plenty of online fanfics and some self-published original novels, and there’re a lot of them that had at least one really good idea. Unfortunately, too often it got lost amid other problems that standard story formulas would’ve fixed. For the sake of your spark, you shouldn’t ignore that standard advice.
"They can retreat to the Platonic Realm of Ideals until they hand their finished manuscript down to earth. Presumably, the earthly publisher can then print it unedited."
Need writing advice: How do you do this without someone building a golden calf to worship while you're gone?