Mystery

Being a Better Writer: The Mysterious Character

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Emergency update: Got my right arm smashed at work Saturday night. Seven stitches. All is recovering well, but can’t type well and am restricted from hand use until at least Wednesday. Further updates will come when I can give them.

 

Welcome back readers! Today’s post was written in advance since I’ve got a shift at my part-time this morning (when I would normally be writing the post). So I’m sacrificing my Saturday—or chunks of it anyway—to bring you this post!

With that said, there’s not much news out there to bring up save the slow climb of the reviews and ratings left on my books. The end-goal by year’s end is 400 ratings and reviews between Amazon and Goodreads, and as of writing this everything is sitting at 193! Only seven more to go to the halfway mark, and it’s only February!

That is literally the only news I have for you all this Monday. Or at least it was at the time of writing. Only future-me knows for sure. But since I lack the capacity for time-travel on that scale, let’s dive right into today’s topic: the mysterious character.

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Being a Better Writer: Ambiguous Stories

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Today’s topic is going to be a bit of a vague one, I’m afraid. At least initially.

No, that wasn’t a deliberate play on words (okay, maybe a little), but more as a starting admission of my own limited experience with this topic.  Which makes it sound like I’m admitting a lack of knowledge on it. Which isn’t true. It’s just that I (and my posts) tend to have come at this topic with a different approach than what has been asked after for this one.

What am I talking about? Well, the request for this was “Ambiguous characters and plots” IE characters and stories that are “vague” about what’s actually going on. An ambiguous character, for example, is a character where the reader is unsure of their motivations or objectives, or even facts about the character themselves. Likewise, an ambiguous story is one where the reader is unsure about what’s really happening, even as the story is being told, such as a story told by an untrustworthy or unstable narrator being ambiguous because we don’t know for certain if events happened the way that they’ve claimed, or if the narrator is “fictionalizing” their own account.

There can exist a certain bit of charm to these types of stories and characters (which is both why they’re written and why they’ve been asked after as a topic here). A story in which events or even the characters are ambiguous, when written well, can be exciting and teasing at the same time, constantly keeping the reader guessing and striving to put the clues together on their own to separate fact from fiction to discover the real story.

At the same time however, that’s written well. A poorly written ambiguous story or character, by contrast, will confuse and irritate its audience, often to the point that many of them will put the book down and find something else to read.

The trick, then, is being the former and not the latter. But in truth … it’s really hard to be the former. And unfortunately easy to be the latter. Because ambiguity is more than just cutting out certain details so that the audience doesn’t know what’s going on. Sure, you’ll end up with an ambiguous story … but one that’s also a mess of cut content at best, a disaster of confusing elements at the worst. No, crafting an ambiguous story (or an ambiguous character) involves careful cutting and replacing in such a way as to keep things balanced on the edge of a knife.

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Being a Better Writer: Mysteries

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I think it was inevitable that this post was going to happen sooner or later.

I’ve not written too much about genre thus far on BaBW. It just … hasn’t happened. I’ve written about other, closely critical elements of story, such as pacing, stingers, hard and soft openings, or what drives a story forward, but to date I’ve not actually talked much about genre-specific writing. Not so directly, anyway,

Maybe that needs to change. Perhaps starting with today’s post. Which would be a fitting one to begin with, considering that of my earliest five major works, three of them were direct mysteries while the other two contained trace elements of it. So, when it comes to writing mysteries, I have more than a passing bit of experience with what goes into them.

So, with that in mind: what is a mystery?

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Being a Better Writer: Some Tips for Writing Mysteries

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What a weekend. I don’t know about you guys, but I finally got my hands on a copy of Halo 5: Guardians and played through it. The short? It’s a good thing the multiplayer is so good (and I do mean good) because the campaign and story are flat-out awful. And I do mean awful. The shooting’s fun, and the environments are neat … but the story is a hackneyed, jumbled, poorly thrown-together mess, and the dialogue … oh the dialogue …

Look, Halo has never been pushing for awards for great writing, I get that. But the first three games at least put together a fun, grand story that had some great moments. Guardians, on the other hand … Well, lets just say that there are a few scenes that couldn’t bemore poorly written. No joke: if I ever teach a class on creative writing or fiction writing, I’m using one of the cutscenes from Halo 5 as an example of what not to do, because it’s just that bad.

So yes, great gunplay, dialogue and writing so bad it made me cringe. Everything you heard about Guardian‘s poor story is absolutely true. In fact, it might be truer than you expected. If they handed out razzies for poor writing in games (and maybe they do, I don’t know), I’d be nominating Halo 5 this year.

Right. To business. Mysterious tips!

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