[Perry] How to Write Intrigue

There’s a lesson I picked up about writing intrigue into plots that I learned by reading The Gap Cycle by Stephen Donaldson. I’ll share it with you today.

I think the key to writing good intrigue lies in the separation between the facts and the interpretation of those facts.

In essence, there should be a single string of events that can be interpreted a number of different ways based on the character witnessing it and what they fear or hope is the cause of said events.

That got a little abstract so let’s work with a few more concrete examples.

A) King Mynock dies and the crown prince, Jormund ascends to the throne.

This example is fairly bereft of intrigue potential, simply because there aren’t that many ways to interpret the event. It basically comes down to either the king passed away peacefully/accidentally and the prince gains the throne or the prince hurried his father along into the grave. There aren’t many shades of meaning to be gleaned from the event and as such, it makes pretty poor fodder when it comes to adding a bit of intrigue to the plot.

But what happens if we add just one more event to the proceedings? Something that opens it up to a little more interpretation…

B) King Mynock dies and the crown prince, Jormund ascends to the throne. His first act is to throw the queen (his mother) into the dungeons.

Just like that, possibilities spawn like a bundle of baby rabbits. We went from an event with two potential explanations and spilled a can of worms all over it. Now it could be that the king was hurried along by the queen. The dutiful son, learning this, throws his mother into prison. Or maybe it was a plot by both the prince and the queen and after he gains the throne. Jormund fears the queen will reveal his part in the regicide and imprisons her. Maybe it was just Jormund that orchestrated his father’s murder but the queen found out and he had to lock her up before she revealed his terrible secret. Hell, maybe Jormund kills his father for the throne and then locks up the queen for a completely unrelated reason.

The point is that for intrigue to work, it needs at least two things. It needs events that are capable of holding more than a single layer of depth and those events need to have some wiggle room for different characters to interpret them in different ways.

The reason why The Gap Cycle worked so well as a hotbed of intrigue is that while there was only one chain of events, everyone sitting on the sidelines interpreted those events in a different way.

A single chain of events links together the plot and the people at the nexus of those events know exactly what’s happening and why. Everyone else, the cops, the gangs, the politicians and the invading aliens all come up with their own interpretation of the motivations that drive said events.

The best part about it was that every single interpretation could have been right. Based on what they knew of the facts, every interpretation could have been accurate and fit the actions of those involved. And depending on which set of motivations was the correct interpretation, the final outcome of events would have turned out very, VERY differently.

In that way everyone is kept guessing as to what will happen next based on what they think is happening now until it all comes to a glorious close at the end of the series.

When writing intrigue, remember that everyone wants different things. It’s only human to allow our hopes and fears to color the cold, hard facts.

Characters will be after differing goals. Based on those goals, characters will also unconsciously color the facts according to what they think will happen, in essence, creating a story to link the events that they see/learn of. And when they come into conflict with one another’s interpretation of the facts is where the climax of the story can arise.

Now this isn’t the only way to write intrigue and make it work. Far from it. But the main ideas behind this version of intrigue can be used as the driving force for intrigues of other types, be they political or other.

Go forth and add some intrigue to your worlds!

Fictional worlds could always use a little more backstabbing.

 

 

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