Making the impossible plausible

Ideally, all stories should consist of a series of events that arise organically from the characters and their decisions, based on a rigorous understanding of how the world really works. In practice, and especially in genre fiction, it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes a writer just has a plot development that he really wants to write, and isn’t entirely sure how to get there from here. Frequently he’ll construct a story out of a number of unrelated ideas, and needs to cobble them together in a way that will seem inevitable after the fact. And sometimes he’ll simply paint himself into a corner, or realize that he’s overlooked a monstrous plot hole, and wants to extricate himself in a way that leaves his dignity—and most of the earlier material—intact. A purist might say that the author should throw the story out and start again, proceeding more honestly from first principles, but a working writer doesn’t always have that luxury. Better, I think, to find a way of keeping the parts that work and smoothing over the connective bits that seem implausible or unconvincing, while keeping the reader immersed in the fictional dream. And in the spirt of faking it until you make it, I offer the following suggestions:

1. Make it a fait accompli. As I’ve mentioned before, a reader is much more likely to accept a farfetched narrative development if the characters take it for granted. Usually, this means putting the weakest link in your story offstage. My favorite example is from Some Like It Hot, an incredibly contrived movie that shrewdly refuses to show the most crucial moment in the entire plot: instead of giving us a scene in which the main characters decide to go on the run in drag, it just cuts to the two of them already in skirts, rushing across the platform to catch a train to Florida. The lesson, clearly, is that if something in your story is obviously impossible, it’s better to pretend that it’s already happened. And the best strategy of all is to push the most implausible element of your story outside the boundaries of the plot itself, so it’s already in place before the story begins, which is what I’ve previously called the anthropic principle of fiction. If the viewer doesn’t see something happen, it requires an additional mental effort to rewind the story to object to it, and by then, the plot and characters have already moved on. It’s best to make like Jack Lemmon in heels, and just run with it.

2. Tell, don’t show. Normally, we’re trained to depict a turning point in the action as vividly as possible, and are taught that it’s bad form to describe an important moment indirectly or leave it offstage. When it comes to a weak point in the plot, however, that sort of scrutiny can only raise questions. It’s smarter, instead, to break a cardinal rule of fiction and get it out of the way as unobtrusively as possible. An implausible conversation, for instance, might best be rendered as indirect dialogue, leaving readers to fill in a more convincing version themselves. And if you can’t dramatize something in a credible fashion, it might be best to summarize it, in the way dramatists use the arrival of a messenger to convey developments that would be impossible to stage, although it’s best to keep this sort of thing as short as you can. There’s a particularly gorgeous example in the novel The Silence of the Lambs. Thomas Harris shows us Hannibal Lecter’s escape from federal security in loving detail, but when it comes to the most astonishing element of his getaway—the fact that he peels off another man’s face and wears it like a mask—he lets Jack Crawford describe it after the fact in a few terse sentences. It’s still hard to buy, but it’s more acceptable than if he’d allowed us to question the action as it unfolded.

3. Use misdirection. The secret of sleight of hand is that the audience’s eye is naturally drawn to action, humor, and color, allowing the performer to conduct outrageous manipulations in plain sight. Similarly, when a story is engaging enough from moment to moment, the reader is less likely to object to inconsistencies and plot holes. A film like Inception, for instance—which is probably my favorite movie of the last fifteen years—is riddled with logical problems, and even the basic workings of its premise aren’t entirely consistent, but we’re having too much fun to care. In some ways, this is the most important point of all: when a work of art is entertaining, involving, and emotionally true, we’re more likely to forgive the moments when the plot creaks. Some of our greatest books and movies, like Vertigo, are dazzling precisely because they expend a huge amount of effort to convince us of premises that, if the artist proceeded with uncompromising logic, would never make it past a rough draft. Just remember, as Aristotle pointed out, that a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility, and take it from there.