Fictional Flash Points

“I’ll tell you something,” said Francis, urgent with shoe-lace, “if we keep on saying things weren’t when we know perfectly well they were, we shall soon dish up any sort of chance of magic we may ever have had. When do you find people in books going on like that? They just say ‘This is magic!’ and behave as if it was. They don’t go pretending they’re not sure. Why, no magic would stand it.” – E. Nesbit’s Wet Magic

One of the things I find most challenging about writing in the genres I love is handling the moments when everything changes: the part of the mystery when the protagonist puts all the clues together and figures out what’s going on (I knew it all along; how do I make it seem like she didn’t?), or the point in a fantasy when our heroes stumble across magic for the first time (of course there are zombies/fairies/vampires/ghosts! That’s the whole point of the story, isn’t it?).

In what follows, I’m going to focus on the fantasy problem not only because it’s what’s on my mind now, but also because I’m pretty sure that if I talk about ways to deal with “eureka!” moments, I’ll end up mentioning Sherlock Holmes or Dr. House again, and then at least one of you will stab me through the Internet.

(Also, in some ways, the mystery and fantasy flashpoints are the opposites of one another: with “Aha! The murderer is…”, you want everything that’s been confusing to the reader and the protagonist to come together for them both, and you kind of want the protagonist to figure it out before the reader. With “Oooh! Werewolves really do exist!”, it’s okay for the reader to understand before the protagonist does (sometimes it’s even better that way), and you want to avoid confusion as much as possible. Maybe I’ll talk about mysteries some other time, since I actually use many more “Aha!”s than “Oooh!”s in my own writing…)

When I think honestly about how I’d react if I saw a see-through figure on the castle turrets or happened to find $20 after wishing for more money, I doubt my first reaction would be, “Hey! Magic exists!” It’d probably be more like, “Hey! I need more sleep!” or “Hey! I understand probability!” In fact, if I were Agent Scully, even after 9 seasons and 2 movies, I likely still wouldn’t believe in aliens because the other possible explanations (I’ve gone crazy, I’m ill, etc.) make more sense.

But my characters can’t react that way. Sure, maybe the first time my protagonist sees a cloaked figure seem to transform into a bat, she can be all like, “Whoa, time to stop drinking so much caffeine!” But after that, the reader starts to get annoyed with her if she doesn’t believe. After all, we picked up this book from the fantasy section — we know that vampires have a high probability of existing in this world, even if she doesn’t*.

On the other hand, if that same character goes, “Whoa! Vampires are real!” right away, it either tells us something about this protagonist (she’s credulous and/or kind of wants to believe in vampires already) or this world (namely, that it’s a very different from our own). If the writer wants the world to be realistic-except-for-fantastic-plot-device, there has to be some reasonable amount of doubt.

But how much doubt is too much doubt? How gently must the writer ease the reader into whatever conceit drives the plot? It’s easy to sacrifice the pacing for the sake of developing the right atmosphere for credulity**, but it’s just as easy to drop in the supernatural front-and-centre at the expense of the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. Sure, if I spend 10 pages detailling every creak of the floorboard in the creepy old mansion, how a crash of lightning makes the protagonist jump, and the moment he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and thinks his reflection’s an intruder, it’ll make it more sense that he instantly believes in the disembodied hand he sees skittering across the floor. But that’s… 10 pages before the plot actually starts. Then again, if I spend one page talking about the mansion and suddenly drop a ghost-bomb, I risk you throwing away the book or short story in surprise and annoyance.

(Curiously, the exception seems to be first lines. If you open a story with “The disembodied hand skittered across the bathroom floor”, the reader is suddenly committed to this world containing disembodied hands (because they’re already there, right?), and will have no problem with the next sentence being something like, “‘Holy #$%^!” Juan screamed. ‘A disembodied hand!'”)

The problem is so tough, I admit, that the solution I seem to favour avoids it completely: start in the middle of things with the magic as established fact, and go from there. Karen, the protagonist of the YA fantasy I’m working on, lives in a world where elementals have co-existed with humans for centuries, and so doesn’t need their existence proven for her; similarly, Meyer, the narrator of some short stories on my plate, grew up in a world in which creatures called daimons were discovered in the late 1800s. Even my project in which the protagonist meets a couple ghosts on the first page sort of cheats by having him narrate the incident as an event from his past — he met the ghosts when he was little, but by setting it up as having happened in the past and before he could reasonably be expected to have trouble believing in magic, I get to avoid any Lieutenant-Commander-Data-ing: “That is impossible, Geordi. Ghosts do not exist.”

But the price I pay for all this is having to set my narrative in a secondary world. If I wanted a story about someone living in the “real” world who encounters a fantastical plot device — and genres where this is normal range from children’s fantasies like Harry Potter and Narnia*** to horror like the work of Stephen King and Dean Koontz**** — I’d need a different strategy.

One of the points of attack I admire as a reader but have never quite been sufficiently competent or inspired to manage myself is the one I associate with Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones: adopt a subtly comic tone and underline people’s amusing tendencies to approach strange things with everyday attitudes. This tactic actually plays off the fact that the reader sees the truth of the magic and the character is hamstrung by his or her mundane attitude; by emphasizing the contrast between the two, the author can humourously comment on how habits of thinking lead us to behave in silly ways.  Really good authors, like the two I mentioned above, can do this is a way that’s funny and yet allows us to identify with the character in question, because secretly we know we’d act the same.

In the end, I guess the moment of omgmagicsreal is one of the things readers of fantasy are willing to overlook, since it’s necessary to the story, and since the reader usually already knows that magic exists in the fictional world. I can’t recall ever abandoning a book or movie because the characters believed in magic too quickly*****, although I can remember plenty of bits I wished we could just get over with. Poorly handled, these moments become the pages readers flip through impatiently, or the scenes that inspires that slight AWK-ward… feeling in the pit of one’s stomach. But those two reactions are only a step away from throw-the-book-across-the-room, so it behooves writers to handle it as well as they can.

* One of the (admittedly many) reasons I didn’t enjoy Twilight was that I opened the book knowing Edward was a vampire, and it seemed to take Bella forever to catch on. C’mon: has perfect features, stays aloof, never eats, is super-strong, never goes out in sunshine, has pale white skin. Buffy would’ve hit that in in five seconds. With a stake, I mean.

** I find horror fiction does this a lot.

*** Where they benefit somewhat from being able to contain omniscient narration.

**** Horror, it seems, has a particularly difficult problem in this respect, because part of the genre is you don’t want to reveal what’s going on until the end, so it can be scarier. On the other hand, all your protagonist and reader have to understand to make the plot work  is that something dangerous is out there. I recently picked up more horror than I’m used to reading, and I was floored by how they universally seemed to me to start so slowly (see above at **). Sometimes it seemed like the whole story was nothing but 20, 50, 400 pages dedicated to revealing a single dubiously spooky idea as gradually as possible: “Guys, guys, I’ve got another one! Okay, so, like, the scariest thing in the world would be…”

***** Hello, X Files fan over here!