Why isn’t this passage working?
“Living at home was truly intolerable for Lorraine, especially after Mom started putting up the visiting high school marching bands she loved so much, and Dad began using the kitchen and both bathrooms to mix chemicals for his new Magic-Gro plant formula. Lorraine took shelter in the attic, thought about it, and finally decided to make the mature decision. She would accept the challenge of dealing with adverse conditions and stay, to help her parents heal and become normal again. Smiling, sure of herself at last, she began to unpack.”
See the problem? Nothing but thinking makes this resolution happen. No action even spurs Lorraine’s mental process. She starts thinking because it’s time for the story to be over. Instead of providing true motivation the story embraces one of the primal cop-outs of fiction writing–Author Convenience.
The only worse example I can think of would be if her Fairy Godmother appeared and made the case for her.
Fairy godmothers, falling pianos, thinking-to-conclusion, and other deus ex machina devices are okay in fairy tales, myths, and allegories. But if you’re writing contemporary fiction, avoid them like anthrax.
Why? Because fiction that isn’t propelled by honest means will lose readers quickly, so many so quickly that no one is likely to be around for the ending. Readers come to a story eager to experience something. If at the key moments, there is no first-hand experience, only second-hand interpretation of experience by way of thinking–thinking about what is, or could be, might be, or possibly will be–then you have a problem: readers are likely to disengage to the point of boredom, and then you’ve lost them.
Certainly there’s nothing wrong with thinking–Shakespeare did pretty well with it when he created the character Hamlet. But notice how Shakespeare was careful to place Hamlet in a dramatic environment where he was required to act, again and again.
As for Lorraine, what if she really does have an inner revelation that convinces her (and the reader) that staying is a fitting conclusion to this plot? Fine. Just make sure that it’s motivated by something other than “…and then she thought.”
All it takes is to have the thinking TRIGGERED by something said, something seen, a smell, a snatch of conversation, a newspaper headline, etc. In the attic, say, Lorraine spots her old journal from middle school years. Thumbing through it she comes upon an entry she had forgotten all about: “Dr. D told me something today. He said Mom and Dad needed help and I didn’t. So anything I could give them would be an act of supreme unselfishness, and maybe I could help them more than any drug or any doctor.”
Because of this entry she decides not to leave but to stay home with her nutty parents. End of story.
And yes, I know, she decides the conclusion, an act of thought which would seem to contradict my whole premise. Except for one thing: the decision is TRIGGERED BY something outside her, the journal entry that inspires her altered attitude. It’s palpable (we can see it), it’s dramatic, and it’s devoid of the taint of author convenience.
I’m usually terrible at aphorisms, but here’s an attempt to come up with some iconic wording for this principle:
Thoughts alone don’t have the power to drive plot until they rise to the status of revelations. A thought you think is just a thought. A thought forced on you by experience is a revelation.
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This post is so in line with my current problems. Thanks.