What we're writing week: Hallie assesses the mess

 

HALLIE EPHRON: Lately I've been writing *about* writing. Musing about something I heard when I was the panel moderator at a mystery conference. Walter Mosley drew a distinction between story and plot.

Story is what really happened. Plot is the order in which it's revealed to the reader.

I’ve been pondering that distinction ever since, because it perfectly captures why mystery novels are such fun to read, and why they can give you a brain cramp to write.

Here's an example from The Maltese Falcon. In the first scene, Detective Sam Spade meets a prospective client. He agrees to help the alluring Miss Wonderly find her missing sister who has run off with ne’er-do-well Floyd Thursby. Soon Spade (and the reader) will realize Miss Wonderly isn’t Miss Wonderly, there is no sister, and a bullet that takes down Spade’s partner who goes to investigate the missing sister was meant for Spade.

But the story begins long before Miss Wonderly set foot in Spade’s office. It involves the theft of a priceless artifact, a falling out among the thieves, with Spade’s affair with his partner’s wife thrown in to complicate matters. All of which is revealed to the reader by the end of the book.

One of the biggest challenges in writing a mystery involves reconciling the sequence of real events (Moseley's “story”) with the order in which they’re revealed to the reader (“plot”). The story should obvious and logically airtight, only in retrospect. The pleasure in reading a mystery comes from seeing past the characters’ lies and obfuscations, past the author’s clever misdirection, and sussing out each characters’ true motivations and actions an instant or two before the author reveals them.

Because I’m more of a pantser than a plotter, I often arrive at that glorious moment when I type THE END for the first time, only to find that my novel is riven with plot holes. I’d like nothing better than to pick up a blue pencil and start editing words and sentences, create more shapely paragraphs, more compelling beginnings and endings. But when I raise my head out of the weeds, print out the manuscript and read it through, I find inconsistencies and head-scratching moments. Sometimes, even I’m not sure how the villain pulled it off.

For instance, in the first draft of CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, a murder victim misbehaves in a coffee shop after, it turns out, he’s already dead. I hadn’t worked out exactly how that happened without “Jiggery Pokery” or an “Act of God” which the Detection Club (formed in 1930) required their mystery-writing members to disavow. I had to assess the mess and make a million tweaks so that in the end it was physicall plausible and logically airtight, and yet the reader wouldn't see it coming.

READERS: Do you ever finish reading (or writing!) a mystery novel and find yourself muttering But but but... and reeling off the inconsistencies the author never properly addressed?

WRITERS; What do you do when you read your first draft and spot those gotchas and even you aren't sure how your character pulled it off?