Pet Peeves: Hated Advice

And really, this is just a pet peeve. No need to explain the ways in which the advice is useful, or works, or whatever. It’s just something I find annoying.

What is it?

“What is the absolute worst thing that can happen to your character? Make it happen. What will be impossible for them to overcome? Do it.” Most recently per JA Konrath, but the advice has a long and distinguished pedigree, and it has bothered me ever since I first heard it.

Why? Because it’s silly on its face.

What’s the worst thing that can happen to my main character? Well, for starters, he could die. Or maybe just all his friends, allies, and everyone he ever cared about could die. Or whatever. The imagination can conjure up all kinds of bad things that are worse than what usually happens to a protagonist in a story. Sure, you could kill a protagonist once (as Bujold did in Mirror Dance), but if you’re hoping to write about them more than once, then you’ve kind of shot your wad on that one.

And really, once you’ve killed them, what could happen to them that would be worse?

Naturally, that doesn’t apply to fantasy or horror where the dead live on, but let’s take dead as the shorthand for “going away forever, never to return.”

I don’t like this advice, not just because it’s sloppy shorthand for good advice, but because it leads to sloppy fiction. I’ve read more than one story where I can almost see this advice churning through the author’s hind-brain. I prefer the variations on the advice, that probably predate the “worst thing” nonsense, along the lines of “have two men burst into the room with guns.” I think the “worst thing” encourages a kind of Act of God randomness into the writing, where the author is excused from setting up compelling obstacles in favor of whatever obstacle is handy and treats the protagonist shabbily.

But they rarely elevate to the level of “the worst thing.” The “worst thing” is that the protagonist loses, decisively, finally, and forever. (Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons I just can’t read GRR Martin’s Fire & Ice books, but that’s a separate rant.)

I think that if you’re not setting up obstacles and complications in the middle from early on, then you need to start asking yourself why the story needs to be as long as you think it needs to be. If you’re really just throwing stuff in to be obstacles and complications, then I think that’s called padding and needs to do more than just slow down the protagonist on the way to the ending. The obstacles themselves should have beginnings, middles, and endings, which is exactly the sort of thing that the two guys with guns bursting into the room implies, and what the “do the worst” does not. The guys with guns need motivation, they need to have had a reason for their timing, and the problem of them needs to be resolved. And, overall, it needs to impact the main plot. I don’t think Chandler ever had two guys bust into the room with guns without explanation and without having some bearing on the main thrust of the story. They’re meant to be a complication that either illuminates the main plot in some way, (”Aha! We must be on the right track, or Mr. Big would never have sent those goons after us.”) or further muddying the picture, adding more questions (”Why did Mr. Big send those goons? Didn’t he hire us to find the Cypriot Starling?”) or adding some kind of subplot (”I never would have taken you on as a client if I knew you were in trouble with Mr. Big.”)

Obviously, that specific advice became a cliche a loooooong time ago, but it doesn’t take much thought to come up with relatively novel twists on the idea, or genre-specific variations. Two girls with swords burst into the room, two starships with photon torpedoes burst into the system, two monsters with ichor dripping burst out of someone’s chest. The idea, the better idea, the better headspace is to look for something that is going to help transform the story and push the plot off the rails. An obstacle is just an obstacle, it’s something that you surmount, or hurdle, and be on your way. Present it as just an obstacle, and the reader’s going to be able to see it for what it is: padding. The trick of the middle is to make it integral, but surprising. Consistent, but course-changing.

You’ll know you’ve got the hang of it when you stop thinking of it as the middle.

Crossposted with klech.net