What Can Your Character Know

I really must apologize for my previous post; that really was quite a rant, but the issue needs to be addressed and perhaps my cooler head can prevail and I can get the point across better.

The primary issues in that book were 'what can a character know' and 'what will a character do'.

So what can a character know? For the sake of simplicity, I will use 'he' here, but in reality, it applies to either gender.

When you create a character, it doesn't matter the age, from maybe six to a hundred and sixty, he will start out with what you put in his head. He might be a genius and he might be an imbecile, he might even be a savant of some sort, but after you make your character whatever he is, he is a closed cell. After that, he is restricted to what he can perceive through the senses you gave him, generally sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, for the most part, in that order.

After his personal senses have been explored to their limit, his next option is to search out answers. This is generally what carries the story along. The ways a character can go after information is pretty much infinite, if you ask me, but it can also be accidental.

The issue with the before mentioned book was that the kidnapped father seemed to know that his daughter would be looking for him so he left her clues, clues only she would be able to find. This premise is fine by itself. It's just how it was handled. First, the daughter didn't bother to even start searching until the last minute. Second, it seemed as if the father was leaving clues where he couldn't, leaving information he wouldn't have the time to assemble, not to mention leaving information he couldn't possibly know at the time. Ahhh I'm getting way to close to another rant. Let me get back on track. The father couldn't possibly have known where his boat was going to be hidden, and if he did, if he was there (possible), would he have taken the time to create the clue containing the name and number of the attacking ship while his crew and friends were being murdered?

This question brings us to the second issue. What will a character do? Your characters make logical decisions all the time. Anything from whether or not to pick up a pen to which direction to walk to what color shirt to wear. Logically, a lost character who knows where people are will head in that direction. A lost character who does not know where people are could head off in any direction, but in reality, they would weigh the possibilities before picking a direction. It might be as simple as heading downhill or picking a direction by the sun.

For a person to stumble upon information, there needs to be a feasible reason for him to be in the same location as said information, and there needs to be a logical reason for that information to be there in the first place.

For me, logic is very important when it comes to what people decide to do. Logic can come in variety as uncountable as there are people, but it's still logical within that character. Stress can make a person make choices that are less than logical, but the theory is that your reader will know about the stress, and can digest the choice. The personality of your character can also affect the choices he makes - one reason why it is important to have a variety of personalities within your story.

Back to the story. Of all the people on this earth, the father was leaving clues for one person capable of deciphering them, and yet the only reason she found the clue that set her on the track was idle curiosity in a case she should never have been exposed to. I also didn't get the sense that she was an avid diver since she hired the man to be her guide, therefore there was no better reason for her to come across the information necessary to carry forward the story. With key changes in this one character, many loose ends would have been smoothed over.

So, what can your character know, and what will your character do? Keep it all logical, people.

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Frayed Tapestry

There's nothing worse, if you ask me, that loose threads in your story. I'm willing to accept most any premise an author is willing to throw out there, but miracles I'm not so easy with, not when they happen over and over.

I'm reading an investigative story at the moment and I don't really know too much about investigation procedures so when the writer has their FBI agent throw the people from two different crimes together for convenience, I'll roll with it no matter how out of character I find it.

There are smaller details in this story that are irritating but I'll cut to the bigger ones.

We have one FBI agent who is supposed to be afraid of water but recovering (shoulda left that detail out), one marine biology student whose boss was murdered while he was on the bottom of the ocean looking for the man's wedding ring, and a brother and sister looking for their very rich scientist father. They were thrown together because the father went missing in the same location as the murder even though the two crimes happened months apart.

The agent allows for the siblings to pay to go find whatever the diver's boss was killed for just cause they're curious. Well, okay. I understand that these two parties need to be thrown together, but this is kinda lame. Anyway, they find the thing and it's not a ring, it's a flash drive in a water tight container weighted with fishing lead. Now this is the crucial link between the two cases so fine, but it's still a frayed end as you'll see.

A little while later, these four people have found the missing father's yacht. While the sister and the student and the agent are searching the boat, the brother is left with the rental. Supposedly, he falls asleep and the boat drifts away and quite some ways down stream, past a town (seen by no one though those playing on the water are many) to lodge in the bushes on the far bank - at least that's his story and he sticks to it, and it isn't refuted anywhere I've found so far, so okay, fine. Meanwhile, the other three are stranded upriver. Now the water's not deep where they are; the boat they were searching was sunk but not submerged, so they need to jump into the water and wade to shore (remember the agent's fear of water). Fine, but they go upriver, away from where they need to go to find help. They're on the wrong side of the river from the town, but still, all the people are down river; only the occasional sightseer (like they were pretending to be) goes as far up river as they went. CONVENIENTLY they find some innertubes. I simply cannot come up with any logical reason for perfectly good innertubes to be located in the jungle off the river. How did they get there? If someone took them up there to ride down the river, where are those people now? And most troubling, if those mysterious people only just took those innertubes up there and decided to walk upriver before their float down, now that our people have stolen them, how are they going to get down? No other people were ever mentioned so this is just a convenient piece of equipment miraculously dropped into their path so they could go find the brother and their boat. This little bit of scenario simply makes no sense.

Moving on in the story and inserting the kidnapped father:

It was given early on that he knows how to insert information into the junk DNA of cells - fine, he uses it to copyright cells he finds - it is also given that his daughter, who followed in his footsteps, knows about this - also fine - What was on the flash drive was the key to decoding whatever message he used - fine - that gave them the clue as to where to find the sunken ship - fine - BUT in the story, he has freedom enough to toss the flash drive in it's sealed box, but doesn't weight it down to sink so it is recovered, and some of his freedoms are curtailed. I'm three quarters of the way through the book and I've seen nowhere where he was able to make that drop, and no mention of it has been made. Maybe these loose ends will finally be explained when they finally get to talk to him, but until then, this is really annoying me.

Another loose thread: Remember the search of the sunken ship? They happened to find a jar of ocean water in the submerged lab, and from that DNA sample they learned the name of the ship where the father was being held. Maybe we'll find out how he left that message later too.

Later, the father makes a big escape by using chemicals found in his lab to create an explosion and blow his way through the wall - fine - labs use all kinds of caustic materials that can be flammable and explosive, enough so? I don't know but I'll accept that he was able to accomplish the deed. So he's this marathon swimmer (keep in mind that he has two grown kids, one of which is a successful scientist in her own right. The other, married and divorced and not so ambitious, but I'll allow that though he sits at a microscope every day all day, he stays in shape). He swims the mile (every time someone has to swim to shore, it's a mile, and remember the agent, her too) to shore with a pair of scissors in his waistband - fine. He beats two guys on a three-man jet-ski and reaches another wreck near the end of a beach full of summer tourists and swimmers who ignore the scenario - a bit of a stretch, but fine. One of the chasers goes into the wreck after the father and they tussle. The father wins - it could happen. The second guy leaves his jet-ski and comes after the first guy. Meanwhile, to escape, the father climbs farther into the wreck and finds a hole he can climb out of - fine - he snags the now riderless vehicle and makes a mad dash for population and supposedly safety. He guns the machine onto the beach, and thanks to an incoming wave, is carried a mite farther than he'd planned. A couple convenient surfboards leaning in the right place offer his out-of-control projectile a launching platform that throws him onto a road where he clips a biker and is clipped in turn by a truck. He is, of course, thrown free. (just like in the movies) - all fine so far - BUT a man rushes up, yelling that he's a doctor and the father passes out - - - and wakes up back on the ship where he has been being held prisoner for the last few months. So how did that guy get there so fast if he'd left everyone behind?

Back to our group of people trying to follow the father's DNA leads that seem to drop out of nowhere. An hour after all this has transpired, our agent hears about police investigating a disturbance at the beach (no mention of what happened on the highway). Apparently tourists reported an explosion on a boat that was no longer there, so on a whim, they go have a look at the wreck where the father fought the one chaser. By the time they get there, the police have left. I can see no reason why they would want to investigate that wreck since they were only in that location to refuel their plane - see they were flying around looking for a suitably sized boat with the name left on the DNA found in the jar on board the father's sunken ship. Now, they do find the scissors which is fine, but they also find two test-tubes full of water, presumably another clue left by the father for his daughter, only he has no way of knowing they are even looking for him, not to mention the fact that, there is no mention of him packing said test-tubes, and have you ever seen one of those things? They are incredibly fragile. You have a man swimming and stumbling across coral and sand (with no pockets) and wrestling with a guy with a gun. Later cops have apparently tramped all over the place and a tiny glass tube with a cork would be very nearly invisible under water if it was filled with water. How did these things survive? How did they get there?  

I don't know, maybe it'll all be explained but right now, three quarters of the way through the book, there's just WAY too many loose ends and miraculously found bits of information. This story could have been so much better if other choices could have been made.

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What to Say to Who

Ever have trouble knowing what and when to say to who in your stories? A lot of it is a matter of rhythm. One big no-no is to say something to someone they already know. Saying something like -> "As you know, Philips cannot possibly have climbed that hill since he broke his legs."

Of course, if the guy doesn't know what you're telling him, that's a different story, and in that case, there would be no 'as you know' part. That's a pretty well-known no-no, and it's been a long time since I've seen it.

Another one is the information dump. You might be writing along and suddenly you need to get something across to your reader, so you insert another character and tell him everything you think your reader needs to know. Take my word for it, your reader doesn't need to know all that information any sooner than anyone else, and if they do, it's time to back up and put it in the story where it belongs, even if that means adding in a new first chapter. Or you can simply allow your character to stumble upon the desired information as your story evolves.

And then there are some people who simply can't seem to find their tongue at all, falling back on the 'he told her' strategy. While this is a viable strategy to use occasionally, really, most of the time, we want to actually hear the words. Conversation is a unique opportunity for you to allow your reader to get to know your character. With each sentence, you can show your reader a little something about who is speaking.

Let's say one of your characters pulls her braid every time she gets nervous. It could be some little tell like this that would clue your reader into the fact that she's lying through her teeth. Or let's say you have a guy who polishes the toe of his shoe on the back of his pant-leg. This guy is always worried about how he looks to others. There's also the person who talks more with their hands than they do with words, gesturing when he can't come up with the right word.

There's other things you can put in there too. Walking, sitting, standing, groaning, sighing and the list goes on. It is important to keep your character in motion in one way or another, for a character that doesn't move = a story that doesn't progress.

One small thing that should be mentioned; variety in the tags - said, asked, and so on - do try to resist the urge. The purpose of tags is not to add flowers to the tabletop. The purpose is to forestall confusion, and if you pair action with dialog, very few tags are necessary.

Happy Writing

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