Special thanks to the article below. While not the impetus for this essay, it was an essential part of my ruminations.
I am a character writer. All my books, flash fictions, and short stories (generally) revolve around a character or characters and the things they experience either through their interpersonal relationships or through the plot. This has been a staple of my writing since I was six, some eons ago.
About two or three years ago, I picked up The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and immediately adored his style. It seemed tailor-made for my type of writing: character focused, deeply emotional highs and lows, fluid and colorful prose. Suddenly I wanted to write about hard-boiled mysteries, create a suave detective, pen down an epic reveal at the end of the story. These desires doomed my adventure into mystery writing, and it led to a burnout so severe I still struggle with the page today.
While I read Chandler’s oeuvre, I set to work on a mystery novel of my own. It was to be dripping with characterization, wit, intrigue, and—of course—lots of bodies to keep the reader satisfied. But the harder I worked on it, the more frustrated I became—not with the difficulty of writing a mystery (and it is difficult), nor with the looming shadow of Chandler behind me (I am competent enough to know what and what not to imitate), but with, of all things, the characters. I, a professed character writer, could not for the life of me put a character on the page that felt as real and loved as so many others in so many of my stories.
Why was this?
To answer this, I will have to digress a few times. First, consider the following proposition: there is a chicken-and-egg argument in mystery that stems, in my opinion, from the two different styles of mystery fiction: English and American. We all know the English style—long walks in the estate garden, a loud noise that causes 12 house guests to run up and down the hallways, an incompetent inspector who reaps the rewards of his post, and a clever or unexpected detective who solves the crime. And the American style is everything the English style isn’t—long sits behind a dusty desk while rain pelts the windows, late-night soirees with the bombshell blonde who hides a .38 in her purse, gangsters sneering over roulette tables, and corrupt police officers ready to thrash the detective for hiding evidence to protect his client. This chicken-and-egg proposition is fairly straightforward, and goes as such: when creating a mystery novel, which comes first, plot or character?
To step ahead of the self-assured and ingenious commentator, “both” is not acceptable, mostly because you cannot do two things at once (though you can develop both in tandem)—and, unarguably, there is always a start point for how a mystery develops when the author puts his hands to the keys—or perhaps when he first conceived the idea in his showertime daydream some months ago. So which comes first, plot or character? This was part of the thing that caused my burnout. If the puzzle is unclear right now, fear not: the mystery will be solved, and to your satisfaction. But we must digress again, though not very far from our topic.
Long ago, I wrote a multi-novel series that involved a set of characters I loved beyond measure. I treasured every last one of them as if they were my children, genuinely, such was the care and love I poured into them. And then I set them on an adventure, and they got powerful and they got hurt and they stood up again and achieved everything I had hoped for them, and more. It really, honestly, is a blessing to see such a magnificent vision as a multi-novel series be completed. These characters formed the core of the series, and the plots I created for them to move through were often made spur-of-the-chapter, with little regard for anything other than a vague end goal that I desired the characters to reach. How they got there was inconsequential, because intuitively I trusted that they would reach the end point. And there were some wonderful surprises.
For one character, I planned for her to become the leader of a tribe she encountered. But instead she demurred, kept her path, and arrived at her ending all but alone. Another character I intended to use as the steady voice and logician of the group. Yet he chose to leave the story all but entirely to selflessly prepare things for the final battle against evil. These twists and turns I could not anticipate by writing a plot for them because they appeared as functions of the characters I created. In mathematical terms, they were immensely sensitive to their initial conditions (their creation by my hand), and so from their birth were destined to cause chaos—a delightful chaos, as many of my less stupendous plot machinations were rubbed away by their coming into the page. Yet when I tried this with a mystery novel, it only brought me misery. The characters I created came out with tin voices and wooden legs. They spoke, they sneered, they turned bodies over in the woods, but they weren’t there at all. There were only shades of characters miming things I’d seen others do, but unlike mimes, they were not even painted. There was no life to them. Why?
To answer this, we must first look—again, pardon my digression—at my recent novella Prince of Saidon and observe the design choices made there. As mentioned in the review above, many of the characters in Saidon are not characters per se. They are operatives, set dressings, stage pieces. Nobody necessarily needs to care about these characters because they only exist to serve the purpose of the story. This was by design. I did not go into the story with any character other than Oscar and Howl of the Desert in mind, and Howl was more of an afterthought—a way to move Oscar through the desert. I’ll stress this again: this was by design. All of Saidon focuses on and revolves around what Oscar experiences. He is a one-man play, and everything in the story serves only to give Oscar experiences. It is a novella of pure spectacle. There was no need to make, say, Jezebel have her own wants and desires, because it would muddy the throughline of the story. She exists solely to perform her function with respect to what Oscar must experience on his journey. This story was character-centric, in keeping in line with my style. Everything in Saidon revolves around Oscar. This was not so in my forays into mystery, though I wouldn’t understand why for several years.
Let us briefly reconsider the chicken-and-egg argument. Plot first or character first?
Most initial attempts at mystery start by building the plot first. After all, a mystery is nothing without an ironclad plot, right? Well, let us consider The Big Sleep. Marlowe is called to the general’s house to investigate a case of blackmail. A few chapters later he’s looking at a body on the floor, and a chapter or two later another body is being pulled out of a sunken car. Now he’s after a gangster gambler, and then he’s following up on leads about pornography and other murders. What happened to that blackmail angle? How did a gangster get mixed up in this? And why does everyone keep asking about what happened to the general’s adoptive son, Rusty?
What is beautiful about this novel is that the author lets Marlowe follow the trail and interact with the world and the characters. He presents a scaffold for Marlowe to cling to when the case gets cold, but ultimately we follow a plot built by characters competing, fighting, cheating, and dying for things that mean something to them. That makes the story exhilarating and classic. We believe the characters are people who could exist, who could murder or blackmail for their own motives, and we simultaneously would balk at the idea that the characters pop out of the ground like moles to seize Marlowe’s attention and drag him back to “the plot” as if he were straying from a lighted path.
Similarly, in The Lady in the Lake, Marlowe is tasked to find a missing lady. Five chapters later, a body appears in a lake. A playboy gets murdered. Hotel staff give several accounts of missing persons that seem to clash, and then corrupt cops arrive to beat Marlowe for harassing a quack doctor. What? What about the missing lady? Why can’t we leave the body in the lake to be the police’s problem? Where is the lighted path? Steward, I appear to be lost.
At the strictest definition of the word “plot”, yes, the pedantic will say that Marlowe stories have definitive plots. But let’s put aside the oversized glasses and Machiavellian argument strategies and talk plainly. At no point in time is anyone reading a Marlowe novel and thinking to themselves they know what the next beat will be. Most of us will not be looking for any familiar plot structure. We don’t expect it because Marlowe stories are famously not concerned with plot. They are concerned with character. Chandler once professed that he didn’t know who murdered Owen Taylor, a minor but key character in The Big Sleep. This is a glaring plot hole with huge implications, as pinning the blame on one character or another dramatically changes the story’s outcome. But as mentioned before, Marlowe stories are not concerned with plot. This deliberate choice allows the characters to move and act with complete freedom, to surprise the author and the reader with their movements and their reasons, to spring a .38 on the detective when his back is turned. Delightful chaos.
The point to be made here is to discern authorial intent, and in this case, I firmly believe Chandler wrote characters first, and the plots followed. Plot mattered to Agatha Christie. When and how people were killed was positively essential. Plot didn’t matter to Chandler. That is a mere difference between the English versus American style, between two well-respected writers of the same blend of literature. However, for me, this was the key thing to remember: that character interaction necessarily begets plot machinations, and often in unexpected ways.
Now, at last, we can answer my original question: when I wrote mystery fiction, why couldn’t I make characters feel real?
Consider the following and call it Design A. When I sit down at the blank page, I want to achieve an effect with my writing. I want to provide a body for the detective, thereby laying the roots of a complex plot, while also providing a sympathetic reason for the murder. So I write three characters: Amanda, Bob, and Chrissy. Amanda and Bob are married, and Chrissy is Amanda’s sister. I write that Bob starts cheating on Amanda with Chrissy. Amanda finds out and kills Chrissy. Simple enough. We have our body, the roots of a plot, and the most sympathetic reason for murder: love. Chrissy is gone, Amanda is a suspect. What happens to Bob?
I think a better question is, “Who cares what happens to Bob?” He has fulfilled his purpose in the story. He could stick around, he could fly to Thailand, he could kill himself, and I argue that none of it would matter at all. Why? Because he exists only to serve one purpose: to provide a reason for Amanda to murder Chrissy. He may pop out of the ground and give exposition, or serve as a bar on the plot scaffold for the detective to cling to, but he doesn’t need to be around for the story to continue. He could be retooled for other things—perhaps a conspiracy subplot, or a murder cover-up, but he will always only truly exist as the reason for Chrissy’s murder.
Now consider the following and call it Design B. When I sit down at the blank page, I create the same three characters. Amanda is married to Bob. Amanda has a sister named Chrissy. I write that Bob starts cheating on Amanda with Chrissy. Amanda finds out and kills Chrissy. What is the difference here? I achieved the same effect, but I didn’t start from the effect. I started with the relationship of the characters, instigated a conflict, and allowed it to unfold without interruption.
In Design A, these three characters perform actions because of their relationships to each other. In Design B, because of their relationships to each other, these characters perform actions. This is a very, very subtle differential, almost so subtle that you wouldn’t be remiss to argue they’re identical. But they are different. Let’s consider it again.
Bob is in love with Chrissy. Amanda doesn’t like it. Amanda kills her sister. Consider this very carefully. Chew on it, slowly. This is a plot-centric construction. The relationship that Amanda, Bob, and Chrissy have only exists to facilitate the action that follows, rather than the action that follows being a natural facilitation of the relationship itself! Amanda, Bob, and Chrissy don’t exist to have a story; they exist to ensure Chrissy gets murdered. That is their only point of reference! Potential characters are reduced to mere vehicles for the plot.
This demonstrates a simple truth: if you start with an effect in mind and then create a character to fulfill it, then that character’s whole purpose, by definition, is to cause that effect. They have no reason to be anything else but a vehicle for that action. This has a damning effect on character creation: namely, no characters are actually created. Only reference points and facilitators. This is why it doesn’t matter what happens to Bob in Design A. It is also the whole reason why I struggled with my mystery novel for so long. I didn’t design characters and observed what occurred. I designed an effect and built relationships to make it occur. I forced the action. In small doses, this may not be so bad. Perhaps sometimes it is even necessary. But when you make this the foundation of the story, I can tell you from experience it sends you down a long, deep rabbithole.
In my writing of the mystery novel, I focused on plot first and then used my characters as vehicles to try to get from beat to beat. I often asked myself questions like, “what should this character do next?” in the reference frame of moving them to uncover a clue, learn a piece of information, etc. At first this helped patch holes in the mystery, kept the plot well-paced, and bounced my detective along from beat to beat. But then more questions piled up. The whys and the hows. The specifics of movements and motives. I had to write these all out, test them and re-test them, remind myself over and over again about reasons and methods, and then as some whys and hows became tangled and messy and imperfect, I had to change characters to fit new plot directions—and that is where it all came apart at the seams. I lost the plot for the details and became consumed by trying to juggle an ever-expanding number of questions. My detective became a tool to push the story along. The secondary characters became signposts to deliver dialogue and unceremoniously disappear. I didn’t have a story, I had a checklist. I didn’t have an adventure, I had a quest log. To use a modern phrase, nothing in my story was agentic. They were just following the script because that was the story’s base design.
I should be careful here and say that I don’t think a story with a plot is flawed. You need structure to carry a story along. I have found, however, that a plot-driven narrative in the specific case of mystery fiction has a detrimental effect on the quality of character and atmosphere. What works so, so much better is to give the characters reasons to go forth and create the mystery for you. Give them reasons to cheat or blackmail. Give them petty dislikes or long-nursed grudges. Make them patient or make them impulsive. Ultimately, this is the foundation of human conflict and the true source of plot: someone has a relationship with someone else, and they’re trying to do something with it. Blackmail, protection, influence, murder, defamation, whatever it is, and as a sheer byproduct of human connectivity, of how humans interact and desire and live, plots manifest naturally! And this can all be done automatically by building characters first, writing their relationships and competing interests, writing their passions and charting out the barely stable status quos, and then throwing a body into the crowd and watching them scramble to get what’s theirs.
My discovery of this little change felt cathartic beyond all measure. I felt foolish for being so blind and wise for discovering my weakness. I am a character writer, after all, and have been a character writer all my life. I have always used plot as a means of observing character interaction, and stupidly, I went away from this simple idea in favor of constructing a plot to shove characters into. Children rarely fit into the mold made for them, and so it is, I’ve seen, with my characters. You there: go forth and defeat the evil king of the nation. Oh? You want to study in the library, then ascend to the heavens and battle the gods among the stars instead? Very well, have your adventure! And so it goes.
The cover picture of my Twitter currently reads “Writing is infinite. A million words and I still don’t get it.” It is a cut-out from a manga called Hikaru no Go regarding the game Go, and reads essentially the same. “Go is infinite. A million games and I still don’t get it.” We as writers, and all artists for that matter, reach for the infinite and just as we think we’ve made a discovery, we realize how much further we have to go. Sometimes our discovery is actually a glance back to see how we could have become so lost. I got a little lost on my way to infinity, but I am now back on track. I will be scrapping that mystery novel for the third time and, perhaps one day, I will revisit it with new ideas for my characters. Perhaps they will welcome me back with their own ideas and plans. I would find that more than humbling. I would find that very comforting, indeed.
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This is BIG news. Can't wait to read post-timeskip Miles.
I think that if the mystery is thr main aesthetic thing ypubwant the reader to experience then thr plot logic comes first, and everything is painted into the lines. There is a lot of stuff to paint into the lines if you can do it. Ie seven