Weaving a More Complex--and Interesting--Story
Hello again from the road. We’ve made it across seven states now, in our little camper van plus two dogs, and everyone is holding up pretty well. Some days I’m kinda lost, not sure where I am—everything looks so unfamiliar, much like the territory I’ve traveled this past year with my book release efforts. Do you ever feel that way, as a writer?
But this is my “between-time” trip—the limbo between two book launches—and I’m valuing it as pure medicine. Each day I feel a difference: more myself, more able to find joy in writing again, the overworked brain settling down and emptying out. Last night I ate half a pint of coconut ice cream and curled up with a thriller (novel).
Camper life is not simple, though: Unmechanical me, forced to learn unknown facts about our van’s inverter, a mysterious character in our travel story that converts DC to AC, and fix it in the rainy dark somewhere in Virginia. I must honor that small box tucked under the bed, so hard to access, because it so important: when we had no lights the other night, because it overloaded from poor campground electricity, I reached out to my other support community (van-life folks online) for help. I am in awe of strangers holding others up when they most need it.
Things are looking brighter now (electricity OK, and we’re traveling from 21 degrees to 61, seeing the first greening on trees).
But what appeared simple—a winter trip—was incredibly complex that dark wet evening in the Virginia mountains. It brought me to today’s topic: complex version simple stories. What’s the benefit of complexity, in any aspect of life?
Here’s what I learned!
Hosts Roland and Craig of Hidden Gems Books invited me on their show to talk about ways writers might complicate their scenes. At first, I wasn’t sure why any writer would want to make things more complicated in their writing—many have a hard enough time writing simple scenes. Then I thought about books I love, how I crave as a reader what I might call layered storylines.
When we got on the show together, Roland in the UK and Craig in the US and me, talking about these multiple levels of conflict or struggle, both internal and external, it became a fascinating conversation.
After the show, after our fun conversation with lots of great ideas, I kept thinking about what else I might say about weaving complexity into story. I wanted to mull over what makes a scene complex, in the first place, then take the question to another level: What makes a book complex?
I looked at my own recently published and soon-to-be-published novels, which readers and early reviewers are calling “complex.” What elements exist in these stories?
I came up with three:
The story is told by more than one narrator.
The story asks bigger questions—such as moral ambiguity, a current theme in my new novel, Last Bets—which do not necessarily get neatly resolved.
The story-writing process becomes unpredictable to the writer too—writing the book forces the writer into unknown territory where they can be surprised.
Let’s look at each.
The complexity of multiple narrators
As both reader and writer, I have evolved in my enjoyment of more than one narrator—and it’s tricky, I’ll tell you that. Much easier to stay in one person’s head than two or three.
I write in third person limited, which means I do not like to hop heads. I don’t do the global “God” point of view, that omniscient person who feels and thinks from many people at once. I find it hard to read, unless the author is excellent at transitions, and I find it hard to write. I prefer getting into one narrator and staying there for a while.
After all these years of writing, though, I just found I couldn’t tell a full story within one person’s perspective. So I tend to use two or three in my novels. And I like the effect and complexity.
But a writer has to be able to do a couple of things well, to pull this off in a way that gives the reader satisfaction:
The story must present each character very differently from the others, so readers immediately know whose voice we’re in.
Writers must be extremely skilled in transitions between narrators—scenes or chapters where we switch pov.
The first task requires good character writing—differentiation is part of my revision process when working with characters. Once I get to know them enough to see their individuality, I push it. I separate them from everyone else in how they speak and move, their gestures, their spoken and hidden goals and desires, their appearance, and how they relate to all the other characters.
Smooth transitions are harder. Easiest technique I know is to keep one voice per chapter, rather than jumping characters within a chapter. I also look at the ending and beginnings of any section that moves to a new narrator. What quality, concept, idea, or even wording can echo (repeat in some way), to create a bridge for the reader?
Poor execution of either of these two elements means frustrated readers. Feedback is essential, if you’ve chosen this way to complicate your stories.
One of my favorite ways to study both transitions and differentiation is via certain films. Filmmakers/directors are very skilled at this. Two older movies that expertly show this in action (especially expert narrator transitions) are Sliding Doors and The Hours.
Creating complexity with bigger questions
I love exploring the big questions of life in books I read—and I enjoy working with such questions in my own writing. Not everyone wants to: if you’re trying to adhere to a particular genre, like romantic suspense, or you’re going for a certain audience, unsolvable questions might feel out of place. You need to wrap everything up very neatly by the last page, and these questions rarely behave.
But if you want to bring in more complexity—say, you’re interested in moving from commercial fiction to more literary fiction—you might get interested in something unsolvable.
Most of the bigger questions in literature are unsolvable; characters don’t get an easy answer on the gray areas of morality, for instance. Is a person justified in doing harm to prevent harm, for instance? Is a small crime or lie a good way to advert a crisis? These may be clearly defined in some rulebooks but I personally enjoy when they are open-ended, left to the reader to decide.
In my newest novel, Last Bets, my two narrators are struggling with individual versions of the big question of moral ambiguity, or what constitutes right and wrong in life-and-death situations. My goal is not to solve this for the reader by the end but to convincingly present all sides of the argument. It definitely makes for complexity, or so my reviewers have said so far.
It also kept me on my toes throughout the writing process. I was constantly surprised by where the story went.
Creating complexity by not knowing
Do you like being surprised by where your story goes? Does it delight or horrify you to be so out of control, in a way, with its direction? I personally find that whenever I’m surprised, when I’ve let myself venture into unknown territory, when I’ve loosened the reins a bit, the story takes off on its own. It never fails to both thrill and chill me.
I believe that stories are their own selves, if you want to get woo about it. When I’m able to relax my hold and my need to know, the story takes off in new directions that are always better than what I had in mind.
It’s the old situation of letting the Muse take over. Of showing up each day to your desk and taking dictation, in a way.
Again, not for everyone.
Roland and Craig reminded me of this. Not all genres lend themselves to all or even one of these methods of complexity. For the romance writer, to use the example given earlier, the story needs to follow a more traditional pattern: two people meet, fall in love (or in dislike), break apart, and come back together. If the writer strays too far afield, the story moves out of genre.
Another example is the epic fantasy. I think of George R. R. Martin’s immense and already-complicated storylines in Game of Thrones. Such a huge cast, so many locations and eras, infinite plotlines. All elements that create automatic complexity. Readers must track so much in their heads as they read these kinds of books, nothing more is needed.
But if you are slightly bored by your own story, if you want to entice the reader with more unknowns, one of the above techniques below might be worth exploring.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Two options this week for you.
Watch the video of my interview with Roland and Craig as we discuss complexity in scene and story.
Download or rent either The Hours or Sliding Doors. As you watch, study how the director chooses shots and angles that repeat images whenever we’re transitioning from one narrator to another (in The Hours) or between the two possible lives the narrator is leading (Sliding Doors).