Fixing Deus ex Machina

In the previous post, I pointed out how even an accomplished author such as Robert Harris can get caught in the Deus ex Machina trap. Let’s talk about how to avoid it.

The Machina bit—how to tell

It can be hard to identify this. You may have had a sudden brilliant idea which would work things out for your heroine and wrote it out. But when you’ve done that, pause for a moment.

First off, take a skeptical look at your climax and resolution. Is there enough build-up to make both credible? That is, is it what most reasonable people might do to resolve their problem? Does the heroine have the skill, experience, guts, etc. to pull it off? Or has someone suddenly ridden out of the blue for the rescue? And yes, Prince Charmings would fit this description.

If you’re not sure, ask friends, family, etc. They don’t have to read the whole novel. Just explain the issue that the heroine is facing and how it is resolved. If you get nods, you’re probably good to go. If you get puzzled expressions and lots of questions you may have an inadvertent Deus ex Machina.

The fix bit

It may look like an insurmountable mountain but actually, the fix can be easy although possibly time-consuming.

Deus ex Machinas, almost by definition, come out of nowhere. And make the solution you propose unlikely or unbelievable.

But the answer is not necessarily to change the ending. The answer is more likely to be going back into your story to introduce enough elements so that the resolution doesn’t feel to your reader like an easy way out for you.

An example

Let’s go back to our hero on a crumbling cliff. A bomb goes off and kills the enemies but not the hero. If you really want to keep this ending, think about how to make it credible.

Could the hero take a huge risk and jump down to the rocks beneath the cliff before the bomb goes off? If so, you need to establish earlier that he is a dare-devil type with highly developed agility (and show, don’t tell, please).

Or could the enemies be fairly incompetent bomb makers and the bomb just stuns them? If so, you would need to have more than a couple of scenes showing the enemies’ incompetence and particularly in bomb deployment. An opportunity for some humor if you want to take it that way?

I’m not saying that any of these would be fabulous saves to your story but the point is that you can go back into the story and build in what you need to make the ending credible.

For example, in Munich which we discussed in the last post, the author Robert Harris could have included some subtle scenes where the secret agent/secretary does things which are unremarkable at the time but, on reflection, are clues the reader fails to pick up. For example, the hero could be irritated because the secretary keeps trying to tidy up his papers. Or he keeps running into her as he is going about his mission. He remarks on it but in a by-the-by way.

It is often effective to introduce these hints when the reader is being distracted by some high drama related to the main plot.

So, it’s not that you can’t have a bomb going off. But make sure there are enough illustrations/clues/hints in the preceding scenes so that your reader’s reaction is “How clever,” rather than “Huh?”

March 5, 2021February 17, 2021

Deus ex Machina: Robert Harris’ Munich

I love Robert Harris’ books but even such an accomplished writer can fall into the trap of Deus ex Machina.

Love Robert Harris’ novels

I just want to repeat this as I would not want to put you off reading Robert Harris. He is an exemplar in using research to illuminate and not drown the story (memoir and historical fiction writers, take note). Fatherland, one of his earliest, brilliantly uses what might have happened in Nazi Germany after the war. The Cicero Trilogy is another example of meticulous research turned into compelling reading. He also writes exciting contemporary novels like The Ghost, which has been turned into an equally gripping movie called The Ghost Writer directed by Roman Polanski. So, are you convinced that I like his writing? Let’s proceed.

What is Deus ex Machina?

Deus ex Machina is a literary term which loosely means that the writer writes himself into a corner. He creates a great dilemma for his protagonist but there is no way out. The hero is on a crumbling cliff and his enemies are waiting just below him on the mountain. Suddenly, a bomb goes off and blows up his enemies. Our hero makes his way safely down the mountain and lives happily ever after.

Which leaves the reader thinking, “Wait a minute—where did the bomb come from?” and/or “How come the blast didn’t destroy the cliff, too?” This is Deus ex Machina. The resolution to the story through an unexpected and often unbelievable event not engineered by the hero.

Robert Harris’ Munich

Munich covers the events which led to the signing of the Munich Pact in 1938. The Pact was negotiated between Nevil Chamberlain, the then Prime Minister of Great Britain and Adolf Hitler, Chancellor and dictator of Germany. It was Chamberlain’s attempt to stave off conflict with Germany through yielding to Hitler’s demands and is widely seen as an at least an ill-advised and at worst, a shameful piece of appeasement. Which did nothing to prevent the outbreak of war.

Hugh Legat is an ambitious but junior member of the British diplomatic corps who is taken to the Munich conference because of his friendship with Paul von Hartmann. They met at Oxford and Hartmann is now with the German Foreign Office but secretly opposed to Hitler. He has promised the British government a document damaging to Hitler only if he can turn it over to Legat.

He does so but it is stolen from Legat’s briefcase and it seems inevitable that Hartmann will be arrested.

Okay—spoiler alert but necessary.

All is saved because a British secretary, also in Munich, but barely mentioned in the rest of the novel, is a secret agent who stole the document for safekeeping.

This comes out of the blue. Harris is known for his clever and unexpected endings but this one, I think, slips into Deus ex Machina territory. Instead of “Oh, how clever—makes sense but I didn’t pick up the clues,” I thought, “What? Where did she come from?”

Next post: Let’s talk about how to avoid Deus ex Machina in your writing.

December 11, 2020December 13, 2020

Not My Biography, Exactly

In the last post, using anecdotes as starter dough, I encouraged you to use your own biography as a launching pad for a story. The end product doesn’t have to resemble the initiating thought and may take you to an entirely different place than the ‘real’ story.

But while I think it is a great idea, there’s one caveat. This can be a way, however inadvertent, to slide into retelling the story so that your David wins against Goliath, your weasel against the lion.

The temptation in writing your own biography

In giving yourself permission to take off from the original memory into something possibly quite different, there can be a lure to weave the new story in a way where you look better/smarter/more prescient than you did in real life. I stood up to the bully and didn’t slink away; my ridicule was actually a gentle joke. It’s easy to shape things so that the story turns out as you wished it had or what you want people to believe.

Trust me, it almost always turns out to be way more compelling writing if you stick with the truth. I know it sounds as if I’m talking out of both sides of mouth—take flights of fancy and stick with the truth.

But the truth I am talking about is emotional truth. I don’t care if you change your school yard to another planet or make the stakes earth-shattering rather than hurt feelings. But I do care whether the underlying emotion is real. If you can capture the feelings when you let the bully to beat up another kid, so long as you were safe or the consequences of being less than what you aspire to, then the story can take off in any direction you like and still be true.

Memoir or fiction?

You would think that how close you need to stay to the truth would depend on whether you are writing fiction or a memoir. More truthful for a memoir, not so important for fiction.

Well, maybe, but it isn’t as easy as all that. For one thing, the two genres are often conflated. More than one author has used actual events in his fiction and we have all read memoires which we know have got to be more fiction than fact.

Sometimes this conflation seems purposeful. I didn’t want to be President anyhow; I was never wrong. But other times, the mixing of the genres may not be intentional. As I mentioned in my last post, I wrote a whole sub-plot which I thought was auto-biographical until my sister pointed out the event had happened to her rather than me.

But examples of this bleed between genres don’t have to be as blatant. You may use an anecdote whose interpretation is obvious, only to discover that another participant in the event remembers it completely differently. One of you is talking fiction but you’ll probably never figure out who.

Truthfully, I just can’t get worried about what genre you call your manuscript. As long as you keep close to that core of emotional truth wherever the story takes you, your writing will have the ring of reality to which readers respond.

December 4, 2020October 31, 2020

Using Your Anecdotes as Starter Dough

We all have anecdotes. Memorable moments, good and bad, which swirl around in memory. Carol Shields suggests that, like Alice Munro, you use your experience as starter dough[1]. For the non-bakers among you, starter dough is a piece of dough kept from a previous batch which is used as leavening for new bread. By careful tending, starter dough can last for years or decades and continue to provide the umph for bread. Great analogy, no? Remembrances from your life can be the starter dough to create the new bread of a story. It is a jumping off point to add the ingredients you want.

Norman Mailer, author of both fiction and nonfiction, had a similar although somewhat different take. He came to the world’s attention with The Naked and The Dead, a novel set in World War II. I saw an interview with him, discussing its writing. I paraphrase, but he said that he had never been in a war but he knew what it was to fear for his life. He used that life understanding to inform the writing of the novel.

So great writers have used their lives to infuse their writing with reality.

Starter dough anecdotes—an example

Although this seems like good advice, I realize that it may be a bit difficult to imagine how that might happen. So, an example might be helpful.

My novel, Kimono Spring, is a semi (emphasis on semi)-autobiographical novel. In it, the seven year old protagonist, Julie, is picked to play a child in an amateur Japanese theater production where her father is the lead. Julie only has two lines but her father won’t translate their meaning. The reader figures out that Julie is playing an illegitimate daughter and her father is loath to tell her that. But because she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she confuses them during the performance and forces the other actors to improvise around her blunders.

As anecdotes go, it’s all right, no? I used my memory of the event and embroidered it. I mentioned it to my sister who was three years older than me. She instantly took exception and said it was her not me who had been in the play. Well, honestly it did make more sense that they would use a ten year old rather than a seven year old. I guess I was so jealous of my sister getting the role that I implanted in my memory that I had been the star. Even to the point of remembering mixing up the lines.

So, in this case, it turned out to be borrowed starter dough. But it allowed me to take off into a whole sub-plot of the novel.

How do I do this in my writing?

In the example above, because I ‘remembered’ confusing the lines, I had to come up with a reason why she fluffed them. To add to the mix, I showed a seven year old preening in her role while the reader realizes that the father is slowly falling in love with a woman from Japan also in the play. This ‘memory’ allowed me to expand into story.

You can do the same with your recollections. Although I’d suggest using your own starter dough. Next post: Where starter dough and truth collide.

[1] Shields, Carol, Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing Random House, Canada, 2006, p.17

October 2, 2020October 4, 2020

Avoiding Predictability

In the last post, I said that I hated Downton Abbey because of its predictability. I want to spend this post on how to keep your stories fresh.

But isn’t all fiction about predictability?

So here is where it gets complicated. Kurt Vonnegut, author of many iconoclastic, often sci-fi, novels like Cat’s Cradle and Slaughter House Five, maintained there were only six basic plots. Boy Meets Girl, Cinderella, etc. So readers, however unconsciously, are looking for your novel to fall into one of these formats.

If you buy this idea, and perhaps surprisingly, I tend to, then you’ve gotta think that it’s one for predictability and zero for freshness.

However, I don’t think that’s true. As Vonnegut also points out in A Man Without a Country, it is the unique perspective you bring to the writing which makes the work exceptional and worth reading.

So my writing should be unpredictable

Not that either.

Not if it means that your calm, cool and collected protagonist suddenly grabs a kitchen knife and stabs her calm, cool and collected husband. Because one of the annoying things about readers is that they also have unconscious rules for your characters. And one of them certainly is that what they do has to make sense in the context of the personalities you have already established for them.

Otherwise, the reader will find the action puzzling, erratic, and even unbelievable. And if so, you kick them out of the continuous dream you’re trying to create.

Creating surprising/fresh stories

Now, I’m not trying to suggest that your characters can’t or shouldn’t do surprising things. Not at all. But they can’t come out of the blue. One of the most convincing ways to do that, I find, is to imbed clues in your narrative which might not be noticeable to the reader. Then when the character does something startling, the reader should be able to remember those non-obvious moments so that you can retain the element of surprise while still making it consistent with the traits established thus far.

I know that’s a bit wordy but here’s an example.

The spouse of an abusive husband seems to just take it and even, in that sickening but common tendency, does all she can to please him. A friend comes over when she is doing the dishes. The friend urges her to leave him but she maintains she loves him. Right about then, she drops a plate which breaks. You might have the wife be terrified of her husband’s reaction to mask this clue.

Later, the wife notices that her husband’s suit jacket is split at the back. She widens it. He makes an important presentation without realizing the problem. He returns, boasting of how well it went. That evening, she quietly repairs the jacket and rehangs it.

So, if she eventually stabs her husband, while it might be surprising, it doesn’t come out of the blue nor would it seem unbelievable.

A unique perspective which keeps your writing fresh doesn’t mean erratic.

A final note

The problem with writing is that there are almost always exceptions to prove the rule. While generally, readers expect continuity in the story, techniques such as stream of consciousness have worked, James Joyce’s Ulysses being an oft-cited example. The movie Moulin Rouge starring Nicole Kidman is another example where a coherent story is lacking and it totally works. That’s writing for you.