Dumb moves

A post by James Scott Bell at Kill Zone Blog, which ties in nicely with a recent post about how novels fail: How to Avoid Dumb Moves

We’ve talked before about the TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) character. That happens because it violates a rule (yes, I said rule): Every character in every scene should make the best move possible in pursuit of their agenda. Violation of the rule results in the dumb move, and readers hate that.

Very true, very true. How does Bell suggest avoiding character stupidity?

Oh, there’s no suggestion in this post other than having all the characters always make the best move they reasonably can in pursuit of their specific goals. Bell refers to this as “acting at maximal capacity.”

Well, I don’t necessarily agree. It’s actually perfectly fine and reasonable and, come to think of it, essential for characters NOT to always make the best move they can. That’s because every time a character does something self-sacrificing, that act could very easily be defined as “not the best possible move.” It’s true that this depends on shifts in the character’s agenda, but still. I mean, what if it goes like this:

Character A — “I’m going to win! Watch me crush my rivals!”

Character B — struggling

Character A — “You know what, maybe I should step back and let Character B win.”

This looks to me like Character A choosing not to make the best possible move in pursuit of their agenda. Unless you track the agenda as it changes, and then maybe?

But to me, nothing about this seems all that helpful in avoiding character stupidity. The author isn’t (generally) setting out to write a stupid protagonist. Character stupidity generally happens because the writing process goes like this:

a) I need xxxx to happen, so the protagonist needs to do yyyy.

b) Protagonist does yyyy.

c) Hmm, does that seem okay? Maybe that’s a dumb thing to do?

d) I will add this justification to make it reasonable that the Protagonist does yyyy.

e) Did the above work? Oh, it’s good enough! I’m moving on!

And then what the author needs in the worst way is to have an early reader point to the story and say, “What the hell is this when the Protagonist does yyyy? That’s idiotic.”

To this feedback, the author’s reaction should be, “Damn, I guess the justification totally did not suffice. I’ll have to come up with a different justification for the protagonist to do yyyy, or else come up with something else for the protagonist to do.”

Which is practically always possible.

This is identical to feedback about problems with characterization, by the way. If an early reader says, “What the hell is this when the Protagonist does yyyy? He would never do that!” then that’s precisely the same. An act that is severely out of character is exactly as bad as an act that is severely idiotic. I don’t think there’s much an author can do to avoid either, except —

First, become aware of (e). When you notice yourself thinking that something is good enough (barely), that something is passable (if the reader isn’t too picky), then stop right there and fix that. That will give your early readers less to do and make the revision substantially less painful.

Second, when you fail to notice that your plot justifications haven’t quite done the job and an early reader points this out, take that seriously.

I think it’s probably relatively rare for the author to have a protagonist do something stupid and NOT try to justify it. I think it’s probably relatively common for the author to say, “Oh, good enough!” when it isn’t good enough.

Of course, that’s based on my experience. For all I know, lots of authors just don’t notice when they have a character do something blindingly stupid and therefore don’t try to justify it. I just find that harder to imagine.

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