writing your way out of the pit

I just watched Lost in Austen with 16 and 15 last night. 15 was very emotionally invested in the show. Early on, she started to "stab" characters on screen. At one point she asked me if it ended with everyone bleeding with stab wounds. It is certainly a good thing for a writer when your readers are so invested in the characters that they care desperately about the ending. I am not sure, however, if 15 cared about Jane Austen's characters more than she cared about the characters written into this show. Was she just angry that Jane Austen's character's lives were being disrupted?

We sat on the couch for fully ten minutes after, as she kept asking when we were going to watch the real ending. I myself was not as frustrated by the ending, but I ended up having a discussion with her about the pit that writers put the characters into and the difficult of writing them out of it. A good writer puts the main characters of a plot into a difficult situation. Usually, the difficult situation gets worse and worse as the story moves on. Often, it gets worse even as the characters are desperately trying to get out of the situation. This is the "pit." Its depth depends on the writer.

The problem is that it is easier to write a deep pit than it is to figure a way out of that pit. Whenever I see the season enders of Dr. Who or almost any episode of television, I have the same problem with the solution. It doesn't work for me. The pit is too deep and the writer's way of getting out of it is too neat and simple. The doctor is aged a million years and people chanting his name together heals him? Nope, doesn't work for me. Booth gets a brain tumor and then he has an operation and is healed and never has any after effects from that again?

On the one hand, this kind of hand-wavium works perfectly well for many, many viewers and readers. They are willing to forgive the easiness of the solution because they have suspended disbelief. For others, it does not work as well.

The truth is, we writers are always cheating a bit, aren't we? We always write our way out of impossible situations in ways that wouldn't work in real life. Or maybe not. Maybe that is just me. When I write an ending to a novel, I really experience it like a reader, in that I do not know how I am going to get out of it. This is one of the pleasures/horrors of being a pantser, a writer who does not outline. I have to hope that my subconscious will be working madly to figure out the ending because my conscious mind doesn't know how it will turn out until I write the words.

Sometimes, it works. Often it doesn't, and I get subsequent chances to fix things, to plant clues in the beginning. More on this tomorrow.