Once You Eliminate the Impossible, Whatever Remains…
(PRE-POST NOTE: There are lots more important things to blog about this week than what I prepared for today. But it takes me a long time to think about things until I’m satisfied with my conclusions and even longer to write them up in a way that makes sense to other people. So this is what I got. For now. Stay safe, friends, whether protesters, bystanders, or plain Torontonians.)
Remember when I pretended I wasn’t going to blog about how difficult it is to write the “Aha!” moment in a mystery in which the protagonist figures everything out? I lied!
And remember when I didn’t want to mention Dr. House or Sherlock Holmes? Actually, I still kind of don’t, because they’re cop-outs. Using a detective-at-a-distance like Holmes, Poirot, or Nero Wolfe allows the author to get away with not showing how our figurer-outer came to his or her conclusion. Instead, all you have to do is let your genius stare into the middle distance making the Epiphany Face, have him or her exclaim, “I have it!” (optional), and then pen in some dialogue in which everything gets explained bit by bit to Sidekick McEveryman and, hence, to the reader.
Those are relatively easy to write, from my admittedly minimal personal experience.* The hard part — maintaining psychological realism without giving the game away — is already taken care of. The right diagnosis can hit House like a strike of lightning, and that’s okay, because it’s one of his defining traits. But with a less plot-device-driven character, it’s challenging to strike the balance between capturing the suddenness of inspiration and keeping the character understandable, especially when he or she is a viewpoint character, and you’re an author like me who finds herself writing in first-person a lot of the time. We need not only to believe that this character could figure this out at this moment, but we also need to follow her train of thought and to believe that she wouldn’t have figured this out before and to believe the way the discovery makes her feel.
I guess another tension that’s difficult to manage is how the writer is hoping both to surprise the reader — he or she shouldn’t see this revelation coming until the actual moment it hits the page — and to draw the reader to the correct conclusion along with the character. Ideally, the reader’s thought process should follow the character’s as they go through the journey together.
There are always going to be the readers who guess who the murderer is on page three, and there are always going to be readers whose excursions to the cinema go like this: “I don’t get it.” “Sssh!” “But why did he say that?” “Because he just figured out who the killer is. Sssh!” But, as with most things in writing, I still think a good writer can hit most of the readers, most of the time, with something well crafted.
In fact, a really good writer can use the need for psychological realism to his or her advantage. A vivid character can mask the answer to the plot through his or her feelings. If you can convince the reader to trust and love Aunt Secretly Murderous as much as Protagonist Nephew does, you’re well on your way to keeping her guilt under wraps until the climactic discovery. A lot of the mysteries I love best work this way: the guilty party is someone the reader and the main character both care about, so even if you begin to suspect him or her, you want to believe you’re wrong.** This has the double benefit of making the final revelation a real punch to the kidneys — an ending the reader won’t be able to put down.
A different strategy, one of which I’m more wary, is to have the moment of revelation be inspired by a new discovery. For instance, in one Sherlock-Holmes-vs-Jack-the-Ripper story I’ve read, Watson discovers the Ripper’s identity by seeing him cutting up one of his victims. So, not much putting-together-of-clues going on — in fact, it’s more like the omg-magic-is-real moment I discussed last week, because the main challenge for the writer is negotiating Watson’s journey from skepticism (“No, not him!”) to belief.
Moments like this, in my experience as a reader, have to be used with care. I’d feel cheated if Poirot solved a murder by walking in on the perp knifing someone else.*** It works in the Sherlock Holmes pastiche I mentioned only because the big question isn’t “Who is Jack the Ripper?” but “Can we stop Jack the Ripper?”. Some stories have the protagonist(s) figure out everything except the correct identity of the bad guy, which is then revealed this way (“We set a trap for X, but it turns out the killer was really Y!”), but, again, those tend to focus more on the action and less on the whodunnit. (And it is a great trope for action, because then the writer can pull the rug out from under the heroes’ feet right before the big showdown, raising the tension: “We came prepared to confront our little-old-lady principal, not our six-foot gym teacher who’s armed with a javelin!”)
Personally, although I’ve used (or tried to use) each of these strategies in different stories, I find each revelation scene is different, because each viewpoint character is different. But one thing that helps me in any scenario is making sure the protagonist isn’t alone. It’s so much easier to have two characters spur each other on than to figure out how a single character might draw conclusions all by him- or herself. And the most difficult part of writing emotion into “Aha!” moments is when you have to have a single character realize something, explain it to the reader, and react to it without any outside stimulus. It’s so much easier when you can give some of those jobs to a second character whose emotions you don’t have to show directly.
My favourite way to draw characters on to a conclusion is to grow the answer out of an argument. That way, I can try for some snappy dialogue, amusing in itself (I hope) and fast-paced to keep the reader turning the pages. And because I can have one character provide a counterpoint to everything the other character says, the discovery doesn’t seem too unbalanced. It’s like the way an essay where you bring up and work through a couple counterarguments to your thesis is more convincing than an essay where you act like those arguments don’t exist.
Another trick that seems to work for me (again, in my admittedly limited experience): I try to make sure that the answer the characters are looking for is something that inspires them to immediate action — the murderer’s about to kill somebody else, so now that we know who she is, we have to stop her; or, we’ve accused the CEO of polluting the river, but now he’s trying to escape; or, we’ve deduced the treasure’s hidden in the old lighthouse, but we have to get it before the bad guys!
I guess this is sort of a cheat, too, because although it does move the story onward and keep the reader hooked, it’s still there so I can avoid having to stop and dedicate chapters to how the characters feel about whatever they’ve just uncovered. So your grandmother’s an axe murderer — too bad, so sad. Luckily for me, I’m going to send you off to stop her from killing the President, so the reader and I don’t have to deal with twenty pages of how much you loved her apple pie and how couldn’t you have seen this coming and whether you’ll ever be able to trust anyone again.
In the end, there’s no single tried-and-true formula for the climax of a mystery. But because it is the climax, it has to be carefully constructed. One false step near the end is enough to invalidate the entire story for a choosy reader, and every detail has to be in place.
In other words: back to revision for me! Later.
* All right, there’s a bit more to it than that: you still have to devise some way your detective could’ve reasonably deduced the answer from a minor clue, and you still have to figure out how to have someone re-emphasize that clue in conversation in a way that doesn’t telegraph WILL AWKWARDLY INTRODUCE TOPIC TO INSPIRE YR EPIPHANY STOP But it still has to make only logical sense, not emotional sense, and the latter is the more difficult of the two.
** Hmmm… another difficulty of focussing on this moment rather than the one I looked at last week is that any example I could give will spoil great stories for anyone who hasn’t yet read them. “Vague as possible” it is!
*** However, genius-detective-style mysteries often end with a revelation like this for the reader and the sidekick — the detective has an epiphany and yells something like, “Hurry, Watson, it may not be too late!”, and the two of them bust in on Clever O’Villainous about to commit the last foul deed entailed in his or her plan. This is perfectly OK, because there’s still thinking going on that the reader feels he or she could have done, too, given the necessary intelligence. In fact, it’s sort of having your cake and eating it, too — enough deduction not to feel like a cheat, enough action to be exciting.