The “Why” Fork
We’re going to take a step back this month, harking back to a question left at the feet of the “Eternal Questions 1” essay at the end of March.
In that piece, I wrote:
“It’s the WHY that centers them. And it’s a WHY that has to remain overtly silent – because if the reader is putting the book down and asking, frustrated, “But WHY did he do that?” you’ve lost the battle for that reader’s willing suspension of disbelief and the fabric of your story falls apart. The trick to the WHY is to supply the BECAUSE which your reader never realised they were asking for, or thought they needed to ask. A good writer poses the WHY question in the form of the BECAUSE answer, and the reader is given all the building blocks of that necessary bridge within the narrative framework itself.”
Then a comment asked, “The part that seems tricky, though, is where you talk about providing the “because” while leaving the “why” unstated. Any chance you could talk on that some more?”
So here we are, at the Why Fork, figuring it all out.
When we are very little, “Why?” is the ultimate question. (Oh, come on – you’ve all met the three-year-old who can keep it up for an hour…) And it’s legitimate – we need to know. We’re new on this world. Inexplicable things happen every day, and have to be questioned, and let’s face it, adults are sometimes sadly lacking in the explanation department. “Because I said so” leaves a lot to be desired. It isn’t enough, when we are young, to know that the sky is blue – it’s brand new to us, that sky, and for all we know there IS no real reason why it shouldn’t be burnt orange or lime green, hence “why?”
But that is the beginning of the question, the shallow end of the pool, the very start of the road just before you come to your first Why Fork. It’s explaining the fundamentals, defining the parameters of a world. However, once you’ve taken your first turn down that first fork in the road you discover an interesting thing.
Answering a question may not satisfy you at all.
An answer may merely lead to another question. And another, and another, all the way down. And the deeper you go, the more complex the questions get and the harder it is to understand the answers.
“Why is this so?” is a basic building block of the scaffolding one needs to build a world, any world, because this is an empirical why, and there are usually answers which are cogent and to the point and can be used in a relatively scientific manner. But “why” is a multi-purpose question, and it’s when it dips its toe into the pool of philosophy and human motivation that things get really interesting.
Because – and this is important – there are NO EMPIRICAL ANSWERS when it comes to a human being or that human being’s motivations. There is no such thing as a right answer or a wrong answer. There is just an answer which is appropriate for the context and the timing of a patricular question, and this answer may change in time as the parameters of the question do.
Understanding this is important in building characters in fiction. The character and their story, you might say, are the brick-and-mortar, the stone, the shingle on the roof, the support beams, the great cathedral ceilings, the windows, the passages, the arches, the gates. You are bulding that story, brick by brick, stone by stone, slowly and with care – you are an architect of an edifice of dreams. But what you really have to have in order to build this solid thing… is a scaffolding of glass.
You will ask many questions on your way. Each answer you receive, or find out, or fight for, will provide you with a piece of scaffolding on which you can stand in order to build the next layer of your story. But these answers are not PART of the story. They must not lodge into the brickwork and spoil the patterns you are trying to achieve. They support your edifice while it is being built. Your reader will know when your next brick has been placed properly and with care; they will see that brick being cemented in, THROUGH the glass, and in an act of literary alchemy they will be able to discern the correct motivation for a character’s action because they’re seeing that motivation through a layer of support which is not in the actual story at all.
It’s hinted at, implied, you can feel its presence and you know its sturdy support is what’s holding the whole thing up – but you aren’t thrown out of the story by tripping over its rubble on the floor and stopping to examine each individual piece of the evidence. A great character is partly transparent, so that the reader who encounters that character may see the inner workings of a mind, but not so transparent for every action to be utterly predictable and boring.
The best kind of see-through scaffolding is to portray an event which doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything at all… and then use that event to shape a character in a manner which provides an answer for some action of that character’s some way down the line in your story.
Spoiler for one of my books here – and yes, I have used this example before, but it just FITS here –
I did something like this in “The Secrets of Jin Shei”. In the beginnings of the book, establishing character, I described one of my eight protags (who is still a child here) as someone who is so enamoured of the tenets of honour and courage and a sense of noblesse oblige that she takes on superior numbers and a superior force in defense of something weak and unable to defend itself. She didn’t defend that weak and defenseless object – in this instance, a kitten – because she was particularly attached to the object itself; it was the principle of the thing that mattered.
It is the principle of the thing that explains to that particular character, and the reader, why it is acceptable for her to lay down her own life, much later in the book, in circumstnaces which do not remotely resemble that first scene… until they suddenly, savagely, do. Until that scaffolding falls away at last and you, the reader, realise that you know precisely how and why that character is going to respond to a certain situation – because the scaffolding has built her in a certain way and there is nothing ELSE that she can do and remain herself. You, the reader, have NEVER asked the question “why” at this point. That’s because the scaffolding has already supplied that. What you get, in the story, is the answer, not the question which you never knew that you were really asking.
It’s this art of second-guessing a reader’s questions about a character and then providing the answers to those questions already built into the story itself, giving the reader those answers before they have the chance to be stopped cold by a question which pops up cold at an inconvenient time, that makes a story flow, a character become an intimate acquaintance about whose fate and welfare you as the reader passionately care about and are invested in. In its most fundamental form you will hear people pontificate to new writers: SHOW, DON’T TELL. And that’s part of it. Because you are SHOWING the answers, one little bit at a time, letting the reader piece together themselves what their original questions might have been.
Yes, this is a hard one to grasp, and tougher still to explain. But trust me, if you getit right… you will know it. These are the moments where you stare at your page with a frisson of astonishment and you wonder how on earth your story was clever enough to weave itself into this particular pattern.
But you wove the pattern. With the questions never quite asked. And the pattern is all the answers that your readers need.
The deeper you go, the more complex it gets.
Have a care, heading off the Why Fork. It might lead to deep and dangerous places. But you go there so that your reader does not need to – and if you tread gently, and know how to sidle past the traps and the alligator pits, the road will take reader and writer, both, to a destination that’s nothing short of breathtaking.
