foreshadowing the questions
Sep. 4th, 2013 10:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliSometimes revision turns up a lack of foreshadowing.
You didn't give a character a skill he will need; you didn't expound enough on his hatred to make the reader believe he would betray the cause for it; you didn't make it clear what the gem's powers are; you didn't give the law that will govern the consequences of his actions.
Sometimes you didn't foreshadow the right questions.
Or, of course, you answer the wrong ones, but climaxes are hard enough to devise that it's easier to go back and establish the right questions even though it has to be a lot of places.
If, for instance, the heroine stumbles on the city that created the enchantment that is such a problem at the climax, there has to be a point -- or many points -- where she wonders what the source of it was. If she's preoccupied solely with containing it -- after all, its history could be what it pleases, it's its present antics that are the problem -- something else has to hint at it. (And probably she has to have character development that leads to her realize that, hmm, that "the past is not dead; it is not even past.")
Readers aren't going to wonder about questions that the writer doesn't raise (at least, if the writer manages to draw them into the story properly) and so won't be curious for the answers.
You didn't give a character a skill he will need; you didn't expound enough on his hatred to make the reader believe he would betray the cause for it; you didn't make it clear what the gem's powers are; you didn't give the law that will govern the consequences of his actions.
Sometimes you didn't foreshadow the right questions.
Or, of course, you answer the wrong ones, but climaxes are hard enough to devise that it's easier to go back and establish the right questions even though it has to be a lot of places.
If, for instance, the heroine stumbles on the city that created the enchantment that is such a problem at the climax, there has to be a point -- or many points -- where she wonders what the source of it was. If she's preoccupied solely with containing it -- after all, its history could be what it pleases, it's its present antics that are the problem -- something else has to hint at it. (And probably she has to have character development that leads to her realize that, hmm, that "the past is not dead; it is not even past.")
Readers aren't going to wonder about questions that the writer doesn't raise (at least, if the writer manages to draw them into the story properly) and so won't be curious for the answers.
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no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 04:17 am (UTC)I am biased because I have to like characters first or I am not interested in any story. I think what I like most is to be surprised at something a character has done, good or bad, out of character. That most mimics life, to me, where the heroic is more so because the hero is not a stereotype or a prototype and the pratfall is funnier because the victim is not necessarily the clown.
As far as foreshadowing, I prefer that they not be heavy-handed or manipulative - more faint whisps and ghostly whispers that invade the conscious and make more sense after the fact but never stark images that shriek "Look at me!"
Not a criticism, just an observation of what I am reminded of in myself.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 12:30 pm (UTC)Anyway, a character who does something out of character is just a bad character. A character who does something that appears out of character but is exactly what he would do is the best.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 05:11 pm (UTC)Is that the first half of the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote? If by that you mean that plot is the decision a character makes when confronting a conflict or decision I agree to an extent, but that is a limited definition.
If character is plot and vice versa in books, movies, & television, there wouldn't be so many cardboard characters or forced/contrived plots foisted upon us. There wouldn't be arguments about which is most important either. And if characters always acted as "programmed" in their DNA it'd make for predictable outcomes.
If a character acting out of character is a bad character, then life, within its predictable recurring timeline of idiocy, is filled with "bad characters" who occasionally go against the grain and their instincts and make it more interesting.
And then there are the literary creations who have impacts too.
In the novel Psycho, Robert Bloch's creation, Norman Bates is a balding, creepy, paunchy middle-aged man who you knew was capable of nasty things from the first few pages.
Alfred Hitchcock turned the character on his head and cast the young Tony Perkins as a seemingly shy, unassuming, boyish, non-threatening young man who we slowly come to realize is not what he appears to be.
Was the Bloch version a better character and the Hitchcock a "bad character" given that the plot was otherwise basically the same?
no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 05:25 pm (UTC)That's Henry James.
Anyway, "so many cardboard characters or forced/contrived plots" are bad writing, so I'm not sure about the relevance.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 05:27 pm (UTC)Are we shown, or informed of, either of those characters actually doing, or preparing, anything nasty early on? Is the Perkins later acting out of character, or just out of stereotypical appearance?
no subject
Date: 2013-09-05 08:03 pm (UTC)Of course, subtlety in the clues is often important.