4 ways your protagonist can learn the truth

It's not just detective stories that require the protagonist to discover hidden truths. An MC actively pursuing some hidden knowledge will provide strong narrative propulsion to any story – providing it is done right. Here are four paths to discovery that you could use in your work.

The chain

This is perhaps the simplest causal structure outlined here, whereby the MC discovers a series of indicators that eventually lead him to the truth. One discovery leads him to a place where he discovers another piece of knowledge or understanding which leads him to another place where he discovers something else etc. etc.

The pieces of knowledge could be a clues, insights into a personal trauma, understandings about a relationship he didn't have before or a mixture of all the above – anything that is appropriate to your story. The key is that each discovery drives the character onto to the next – hence 'the chain'.

The convergence

This is where a series of possibilities are known or suspected by the MC and the story is about him discovering which one of these is correct. In the simplest sense this could be a detective trying to discover the murderer from a fixed set of suspects – the classic Agatha Christie-esque situation – but it could equally apply to a whole heap of other stories. The MC then (either knowingly or unknowingly) eliminates all the possibilities until alighting on the correct one.

You can have all sorts of fun with this set-up – using dramatic irony where the audience/reader knows the truth while the MC doesn't, or keep the reader as ignorant as the MC. Exceptionally clever writers can convince the MC and the reader that one possibility is a dead certainty, only to discover it's false and a least suspected option is actually the case.

The divergence

This is where the truth seems simple to the protagonist but the situation is far more complex than he imagines. A classic example of this is where an event occurs, which could be quite innocuous, but there turns out to be a massive conspiracy behind it. With 'the convergence' the solution is simple and manageable, but with 'the divergence' it is anything but. Perhaps the MC can do something about it, perhaps the reality is so large (or cosmic) that he can do nothing at all. One way to make a distinction between 'the convergence' and 'the divergence' is that in the former the problem gets smaller and more is known, but in the latter, it gets bigger.

The thunderbolt

Probably the simplest and cheapest device of the lot – where the knowledge comes right out of the blue for the character. This can be a twist (re. Sixth Sense) or reveal (Darth and Lukes' relationship) – and can provide dramatic interest or insight, but used alone will not provide narrative drive unless it leads on to the more causal structures outlined above.

Obviously your not compelled to use only one of these devices, you can use them all – and it's worth noting that these aren't the only ways to provide narrative drive. Mash it up and use of many of them as you can, and you'll be half-way to writing a story that's unputdownable.

Happy New Year and good luck.

Four ways to kill narrative drive

If you took all the books that were ever written and laid them end-to-end you'd have a very long line of books – the point being that with so much to read if you're lucky enough to have a reader take a look you don't want to give them any excuse to put your book down and move onto the next – but if you insist, here's four ways to do it.

Withhold information

A sure-fire way to maintain reader interest is to not tell them stuff, right? That way they'll keep reading just to find out, right? No. Utterly, utterly wrong. Giving the reader a question she wants to know the answer to is not the same as withholding the interesting stuff until the end. If you don't put the interesting stuff at the start then, well, the reader just isn't going to be interested enough to keep reading. It's obvious really.

The key is to give the reader interesting stuff right from the start with the promise of more interesting stuff and then keep delivering interesting stuff right to the end. Nobody said this was going to be easy.

Nothing Happens

The power of your voice, the detail of your description, the depth of your characters, all mean nothing if nothing ever happens. Your voice will quickly become droning, your descriptions pointless and your characters irrelevant and uninteresting if not tested by events. 'What happens next' is the simplest mechanism for narrative propulsion – don't be afraid to use it.

Uninteresting Protagonist

So your MC is a humourless plank? Or a spotless do-gooder? Or a bore? Or two-dimensional mouthpiece for your own Freudian hang-ups? I don't want to read about that sort of chump and neither do you. So don't write them.

Predictability

Your scenes should be the natural consequence of previous scenes, and your ending should be inevitable but not predictable. If the reader has your plot figured by page 2 they are less inclined to read on to find out what they know already.

This doesn't mean you can't play with the form – many great stories start with the ending already known (which can have a propulsive effect of it's own), but unpredictability must remain - why and how did this known ending happen? How is this story going to get to that point. Inevitable but unpredictable.

Ok, so that's how not to do it - here's how to actually do it. 

Good luck.

How to create great content for your blog

Producing regular content for your blog can be a daunting task. It can also be a difficult psychological shift for new bloggers to assume the position of authority required to blog with confidence, or to believe that anybody will be interested in what they've got to say – particularly if the last thing you feel like is authoritative or interesting. But the truth is, for your blog to get read, you have to have great content and you have to deliver it in an authoritative and interesting manner. Pretty much like any kind of writing. So how can you produce authoritative content without feeling like a fraud? And how can you talk about stuff without coming across as a pontificating bore? Here are some ideas.

State the obvious

Just because you know something doesn't mean everybody else knows it. Don't be afraid to talk about things that seem obvious to you – there's a whole internet out there and quite a few people who won't know what you know. The added bonus of explaining something obvious is that you'll automatically be an authority on the subject. Believe. Know how to tie shoelaces? Someone doesn't. Know how to make toast? Someone doesn't. You get my drift. A 'How to...' post title always gets a lot of interest because a huge amount of internet traffic is people seeking information – particularly about things that are so obvious that they are afraid to ask their mum/wife/boss about in case they laugh.

Recognise your successes (and your failures)

Getting through your day is a success. Getting enough money together to pay the bills and feed the kids is a success. Getting this far into my blog-post is a success. Recognise these successes and use them as material. 'How to get through your day without killing your boss' is a post anybody would like to read – detail the mechanisms you use to avoid boss-homicide, no matter how trivial they seem. Readers will empathise with situations they recognise, no matter how trivial-seeming they are to you.

Write what you don't know

To produce regular blog-posts requires a lot of material. Eventually you'll come to a point where you feel like you've blogged about everything you know or have ever experienced (in fact, you haven't, but that's beside the point) – this is the time you have to start making shit up. If you've blogged about everything you know now it's time to blog about what you'd like to know. This is an opportunity to broaden your horizons. You've blogged about how to cook risotto, but you'd like to know how to cook a curry – learn how to cook the curry and then blog how to do it, or blog how you learned to cook it, or how you failed to learn how to cook it. All of these things are lessons that readers of your blog could learn from. Obviously you're going to have to do a little research for these kind of posts, but hell, you'll be learning about stuff you want to learn about as well as delivering interesting content.

Write the post you'd want to read

When stuck for ideas come up with a great-sounding post title and build up from there. 'How to fly to space with only a saucepan and a hairclip' is a title that's going to get hits. The challenge then is to come up with the content to support the title. Build five bullet points to support the title, then use these bullet points as sub-titles to support with content. You'll find that as you start writing ideas to support your headlines you may come up with better ones – don't be afraid to change them – the punchier or more interesting the better. Ok, flying to space in a saucepan is a tricky one, but I used this mechanism to produce this post and some of my more audacious (and popular) posts.

Just do it

I'm frequently surprised at what posts get a lot of interest – posts I dashed off shame-facedly go viral, while lovingly crafted sure-fire winners get ignored. Sometimes you've just got to take a chance with a post. Ones you think controversial may barely raise an eye-brow and others you think harmless may kick off a shit-storm. The lesson here is a bad post is better than no post at all – because you never know, that post you thought was hopeless may actually end up being the post that puts your blog on the map.

How to keep on writing when it all seems pointless

No-body is reading it, no-body is buying it, no-body cares – so why bother? What's the point in pressing on wasting your rapidly diminishing time on earth pursuing a hopeless cause? Why would you do it? Why would anybody do it? Here's why...

Someone's got to do it

So it might as well be you. How you going to live with yourself when the guy who lives two streets down from you with half your talent makes the big-time because he kept plugging away while you gave it all up to focus on your office-admin career? You're not going to feel very clever then. Give yourself a chance, keep yourself in the mix, and you'll keep improving in the meantime.

Practice makes perfect

All those years writing and being ignored aren't wasted – because all that time is spent improving your craft – by the time you do hit the big-time you'll be bloody good. Not only that, you'll have an immense backlog of work to publish which, perversely enough, everyone will think is great now you're famous, even though they wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole before.

What the hell else you going to do?

Let's face it, who wants to be in office-admin their entire life? It's not like your other job is 'rock-god'. Giving up the writing moves you from the person-with-shit-career-and-little-hope category into the person-with-shit-career-and-NO-hope category. Which one would you rather be in?

You're going to do it anyway

Writing gets under your skin - if you're the real deal, you're going to keep doing it no matter what, so get a smile on your face and keep on keeping on. If you're going to quit later, you might as well quit now and get on with the rest of your life, because a quitter is a quitter.

An unpursued dream is never fulfilled

Dreams aren't cheap. You can't buy them in Tesco. You have to define them, hew their likeness from stone with your bleeding hands then eternally pursue them as they fly from you like phantoms. Chances are you'll never catch them, chances are you won't even know where to look, but I'll tell you one thing for sure, you won't find them in the office-admin department.