Unlocking the Door Versus Finding the Key

Our plots are complex. We strive to get our readers following the flow and being invested in the characters, but we don’t agonize over whether they can recite back all the beats. It’s nice to see people getting most of them, though. We’re not monsters.

In the reader feedback for the third book in our trilogy, we saw a clear trend that certain specific events got away from people. Characters end up making choices based on things that were opaque to most of our audience, which is the same thing as characters just doing crazy stuff without any apparent motivation. Not good. Jen and Kent agreed about where the trouble was, and agreed that it was something that really needed fixing.

The comments came up fairly late in the manuscript, but clearly the place to deal with the problem was earlier. The topic should also be revisited a few times, letting different characters’ impressions shape what the readers learn, so later on it’s just something they know and it doesn’t need bulky explanations. Again, Kent and Jen were in total agreement on all of this.

So we started talking specifics and suddenly were talking past each other. There was a major disconnect in how we were viewing the problem, of which we had hitherto been unaware. It was frustrating as hell and it took a while to diagnose why communicating about this issue had suddenly become so difficult. We threw metaphors at each other until we finally got it sorted out.

There were actually two issues.

Basically, the characters need to unlock a special (and very complicated) door. The readers were asking “what’s this supposed to do?” Whereas Kent perceived their confusion as relating to how the key works, Jen saw them being puzzled over the purpose of getting the door open. When we launched into our discussion of “the” issue, we each jumped directly to how we wanted to address it, assuming we were in agreement about what “it” was, so naturally our suggestions made no sense to each other.

In the end, it was a case of two heads being better than one. Together, we were seeing twice as much opportunity to enrich the experience of the story. Along the way, it was a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was talking about. Working in a partnership can offer fantastic advantages, but it adds complexity by requiring communication. A good partner will stick with the discussion.