I recently parked my little crime ditty with a developmental editor. There’ll be an article on that once I recover from the financial trauma. Meanwhile, her comments were (mostly) constructive and helpful. However there was one point that stuck with me.
In my final-act/final-conflict set up, I have my character state that a decision he made—a pivital decision—was stupid. That’s right, my boy keeps it 100.
The editor’s notes, and I quote, “It really was stupid. Why would he do that?” Now, please believe me, I don’t “do” defense of work, my guiding principle is if you have to defend it, it didn’t work.
I developed this view from years of crit groups in which too many writers, when pressed on a point, throw up their hands and state the character:
- is bereaved/lovestruck/crazy
- had no choice
- wasn’t thinking
First if the writer has done their work in building up to that scene/decision by foreshadowing, establishing circumstances, and or options, then either they need to sharpen all of the above or the reader wasn’t paying attention.
The latter is most common. In a first draft, the writer’s only responsibility is to lay the bones down. Plot holes, logic lapses, etc. are fixed as you finish out revisions. It only becomes a problem when the writer gets lazy or write themselves into a corner and just like cleaning up any mess, there’s no cute way to do it. You just have to do it.
However the former, (reader not paying attention) is not out of the question. Crit group readers typically read/critique as terms of getting their own work read/critiqued. More than once I have had to point out that “I didn't forget X as part of the group. X was killed on page Y.”
Oh, and I NEVER TRUST THAT READER AGAIN.
The full folly of the three excuses above can be pigeonholed in one work but let’s not dog pile on Shakespeare. The Bard needed horrible decisions (of a 13-year-old girl and an guesstimated 15-20-year-old boy) to sell his tragedy. No, let’s look at contemporary examples.
“I have done a hundred things strange in the last three days, nothing normal,” August King
Grief clouds judgment. People regularly trust friends, family, or funeral directors that they shouldn’t. Mostly people do not act counter to years or decades of developed character. Of course, there are exceptions. John Ehle writes an excellent demonstration in his The Journey of August King. August is a white farmer, (grieving the death of his wife) who helps a black woman fleeing slavery.
Lesser writers would shorthand this redemption and/or white-savior story with a nice-neat bow, (including) fit for the Hallmark Channel. Instead, Ehle guides August from hopeless grief back to life. But "back to life" is not the central conflict.
Loneliness is the central conflict of August’s journey. In the cruel slave-owner, Olaf Singletary, August sees what becomes of loneliness untreated. More than life diminished by grief, loneliness infects life like a disease and becomes a rot of the soul. Annalees [sic], the woman fleeing slavery and the diseased Singletary is not August’s redemption as much as his savior. With WAY more insight to loss than August will ever know, Annalees shows him a life beyond his grief.
“Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.” Mark Twain
People do stupid things when they’re in love, (or think they’re in love). When Ethan Frome decides to flee his wife for her younger cousin, he calls it love—and not a full-tilt dash from his previous bad decisions (like marrying his wife). By contrast, Edna Pontellier leaves her husband and children, not for love of another man but for love of a life unexplored—again after the impetuous decision to marry a domineering man in the first place. If not evident, both Wharton and Chopin lay important groundwork to make both characters ultimate decisions credible.
What choice did I have?
Mostly the “he/she didn’t have any choice,” is the last refuge of the writer defending a painted-in-the-corner scene. The question then is not the decision but the scene.
In Jeff Somers’ Electric Church assassin Avery Cates catches a reporter following him just as he prepares to storm the titular church, he captures her but then ties her up with the intention of releasing her when he’s done. This is a needle-scratch from Cates’ established cold-blooded characterization. Cates’ associates salvage the situation by waiting until Cates is incapacitated and then they kill the reporter. Tidy. Yet, neither the scene, nor the reporter were necessary.
“I guess you could say I wasn’t thinking, Captain.” Luke Jackson, Cool Hand Luke
Don’t believe that line for a minute. Drunk though he was, Luke was thinking just fine when he cut the heads off the parking meters. A petulant boy who fought a no-win war, Luke could not reconcile himself to adulthood in the society that he fought for.
In Louis Malle’s EXCELLENT movie, Atlantic City, Lou (Burt Lancaster) is a gangster, well past his shelf life. He hustles nickels and dimes to support Gloria, an aging beauty queen and the widow of Lou’s boss. The affection between them need not be voiced, it's demonstrated.
When Lou comes out of retirement to help Sally (Susan Sarandon) it looks like a late-life atraction for a younger woman. Sure everybody likes sex but Lou is a man of the street and the cocaine Sally stolee from the mob represents far more than sex. Sure, he is infatuated with Sally but Lou is still thinking when he “slips” up and allows he to “steal” half the money and the keys to his car. With enough money left to support himself and Gloria, Lou returns to his quiet life as the mob chases Sally for the remainder of hers.
The bottom line is the foundation work you put in will redeem your characters’ “stupidest” decisions. If you plan to have your protag take a path that runs counter to good judgment you must pave that path with reasoning. It may take repeated drafts. It will most certainly take some good beta readers.
So, no, I didn’t argue with the development editor. In the end, rather than quibble, I went back to my beta readers. Unlike my editor, they felt that I had done the foreshadowing to lay the groundwork—lack of sleep, use of drugs, fear of a more immediate risk/consequence—for my bad man to make a bad decision. And, ultimately, beyond editors, beta readers, and other well-meaning advisors, you have to trust your writing.
I trust the groundwork that I laid and left the scene as-is.
The photo at the top, the Dumb and Dumber movie poster is the property of New Line Cinema. Its use here, for educational/instructive purposes, is covered by the Fair Use Doctrine.
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