Some writing thoughts
Jun. 15th, 2017 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkMystery plots
Writing a good mystery is extremely difficult. It's something that I didn't really realize until I started writing a mystery plot myself, because it's easy to think, "Oh, mysteries are everywhere, over half of TV shows are mystery/police procedurals, so how hard could it be?"
Answer: Very hard.
For one, I found out I have a personal quirk, which is that if I know the answer to a mystery ahead of time...I tend to get bored with writing the story, placing the clues, making it seem believable that the characters don't know the answer yet when the answer seems so obvious to me, the writer. (Yeah, I know, I'm terrible.)
For another, it is hard to write the investigations and space out the clues so that there's tension (the unsolved mystery + possibly other stakes) & momentum, but the answer isn't super obvious from the get-go. What I realized from reading a mystery novel recently is that pure investigative stuff can get boring if there are no other stakes present—which is probably why many mysteries story combine a mystery investigation with a threat on a character's life, or some other kind of time limit, in order to add tension. Of course, not every mystery needs to be a life-or-death situation (that would go from exciting to repetitive pretty fast), but at least in the realm of TV shows (which are, to be fair, subject to more stringent time limits than books), mundane investigative stuff tends to be skipped over/summarized for the viewer—likely not just for saving time, but also for streamlining the momentum of the story.
Also, a good mystery will involve misdirections and temporary dead ends, not just a straightforward "every clue pointed directly to the right answer."
Violence in fiction
As I was describing my manuscript to my mom (due to attention span problems, she can't/doesn't read), she asked me if my descriptions of violence in my book were too tame, because mass audiences prefer more graphic violence, and she brought up Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight as an example.
(That wasn't a comment I expected from her, to be honest...)
I don't avoid writing graphic violence due to squeamishness, but rather due to a combination of other factors:
(1) It's easier to describe graphic violence if there are characters dying and/or getting seriously injured. I usually don't write about characters dying, because to me, if a character dies, that death has to have some kind of weight, not just death for the sake of being "edgy." Otherwise, if too much meaningless death occurs, readers tend to get desensitized to those deaths, and that's absolutely something to avoid. And it's often hard to write about characters getting seriously injured because that tends to change the plot (e.g. they need time off to recover, which affects the pacing).
(2) One way many stories can maintain a high level of violence is to have the protagonist(s) take out tons of "faceless" and/or "nameless mooks," like foot soldiers or security guards. If I'm writing about a heroic character, or at least a character who's supposed to have relatable morals, I hate doing this because (as mentioned above) it treats their deaths as nothing. Also, I don't personally find it heroic if the hero is killing security guards, because security guards (at least the garden variety ones, not like a private military contractor) are literally just hired to do a job; they're not evil or anything.
(3) I don't want to sanitize violence, but I don't want to describe it just for shock factor either, and graphic descriptions of violence often end up in "just for shock factor" territory. In fact, I would say the way not to sanitize violence is not necessarily by describing it in graphic detail, but rather by describing the effects of the violence on the characters, showing how they react to it, etc.
Writing a good mystery is extremely difficult. It's something that I didn't really realize until I started writing a mystery plot myself, because it's easy to think, "Oh, mysteries are everywhere, over half of TV shows are mystery/police procedurals, so how hard could it be?"
Answer: Very hard.
For one, I found out I have a personal quirk, which is that if I know the answer to a mystery ahead of time...I tend to get bored with writing the story, placing the clues, making it seem believable that the characters don't know the answer yet when the answer seems so obvious to me, the writer. (Yeah, I know, I'm terrible.)
For another, it is hard to write the investigations and space out the clues so that there's tension (the unsolved mystery + possibly other stakes) & momentum, but the answer isn't super obvious from the get-go. What I realized from reading a mystery novel recently is that pure investigative stuff can get boring if there are no other stakes present—which is probably why many mysteries story combine a mystery investigation with a threat on a character's life, or some other kind of time limit, in order to add tension. Of course, not every mystery needs to be a life-or-death situation (that would go from exciting to repetitive pretty fast), but at least in the realm of TV shows (which are, to be fair, subject to more stringent time limits than books), mundane investigative stuff tends to be skipped over/summarized for the viewer—likely not just for saving time, but also for streamlining the momentum of the story.
Also, a good mystery will involve misdirections and temporary dead ends, not just a straightforward "every clue pointed directly to the right answer."
Violence in fiction
As I was describing my manuscript to my mom (due to attention span problems, she can't/doesn't read), she asked me if my descriptions of violence in my book were too tame, because mass audiences prefer more graphic violence, and she brought up Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight as an example.
(That wasn't a comment I expected from her, to be honest...)
I don't avoid writing graphic violence due to squeamishness, but rather due to a combination of other factors:
(1) It's easier to describe graphic violence if there are characters dying and/or getting seriously injured. I usually don't write about characters dying, because to me, if a character dies, that death has to have some kind of weight, not just death for the sake of being "edgy." Otherwise, if too much meaningless death occurs, readers tend to get desensitized to those deaths, and that's absolutely something to avoid. And it's often hard to write about characters getting seriously injured because that tends to change the plot (e.g. they need time off to recover, which affects the pacing).
(2) One way many stories can maintain a high level of violence is to have the protagonist(s) take out tons of "faceless" and/or "nameless mooks," like foot soldiers or security guards. If I'm writing about a heroic character, or at least a character who's supposed to have relatable morals, I hate doing this because (as mentioned above) it treats their deaths as nothing. Also, I don't personally find it heroic if the hero is killing security guards, because security guards (at least the garden variety ones, not like a private military contractor) are literally just hired to do a job; they're not evil or anything.
(3) I don't want to sanitize violence, but I don't want to describe it just for shock factor either, and graphic descriptions of violence often end up in "just for shock factor" territory. In fact, I would say the way not to sanitize violence is not necessarily by describing it in graphic detail, but rather by describing the effects of the violence on the characters, showing how they react to it, etc.
