If you have ever played the little kids’ board game Chutes ‘n Ladders, you know that there are possibilities to win and lose right up to the end. There is always hope.
This past weekend debut author Carol Rifka Brunt authored the Word Craft column in the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Brunt, an early enthusiast of board games, realized this principal. She carried it over to her writing. “It was my job,” she wrote, “to make it feel like there was hope for all the characters right up to the end.”
Yesterday I finished The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle (WARNING: potential spoiler alert), a novel about upscale families and illegal Mexican families living side by side in Southern California, but hardly ever running into or acknowledging each other except under extreme circumstances. Boyle prefaces the novel with a quote from John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, and then early on in the novel the reader learns that the Mexican woman is pregnant. I expect that the baby is going to die, because that’s what happens to the baby in The Grapes of Wrath. Boyle, however, gives you hope.
Sometimes the action in a novel is predicable, almost to the level of disappointment. The reader is fooled, however, by the irony they didn’t see coming. A friend of mine wrote a short story in college about a King who has a premonition dream in which one of his warriors overthrows him. The king imprisons the warrior, sentencing him to death. On the eve of the execution a local maiden, curious about the warrior, comes to the wall of his cell outside the prison and finds and removes a loose brick from the wall (there is hope). But alas, the rest of the bricks hold fast. Unable to facilitate escape, the maiden does the next best thing. She bares herself against the opening in the wall, allowing the doomed warrior to have sex with her (okay, you need to suspend belief a little here). The next morning the warrior is executed.
What, you say? No hope. Ninth months later the maiden gives birth to a boychild. That child begets another, and that child begets another, and the great-grandson of the executed warrior overthrows the great-grandson of the king—establishing a new dynasty.
There is hope, after all.
“A writer needs to give characters all sorts of possibilities right up to the end,” writes Brunt. “How do you achieve inevitability in a story and at the same time make it seem like anything could happen?”
I have struggled with this in my own novel—Rules for Giving. I’m concerned that part of the plot is too predictable. One of my alpha readers told me that she knew what was going to happen with that plotline, but it didn’t matter to her. I hope she was surprised by the other developments.
Perhaps it is what Ms. Brunt means in her column when she writes: “But still, the reader is right there … waiting … For the Possible to trounce the Inevitable.”
See ya’ later.
P.S.: Check out the review of Ms. Brunt’s novel—Tell the Wolves I’m Home, in the same edition of the WSJ. Looks like a good one (Wow! A column and a review of her novel on the same day—someone has a good publicist).
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