The Garden Gnomes Beckon

by Gigi

Several years ago, I was traveling with a friend in Italy. While out walking one day, we came across this beautiful gate, beyond which we could see a number of stone garden gnomes standing within the greenery. (That's the gate in the photo at below.)

My friend and I looked at each other, and without a word we took the mysterious path beyond the gate.We knew those gnomes would lead us somewhere interesting.

Sure enough, after hiking along a hidden stream, what we encountered was one of the most beautiful gardens I've ever seen, filled with flowers and stone caves.

I remember the experience so well because it hadn't been planned. If it had been a tourist spot that we had planned on visiting, I doubt it would have made the same impression on me. 

I don't believe the garden is even really that beautiful. But because it was an unplanned adventure, it stuck with me. I don't remember where we were initially headed that day, but I remember that secret garden.

The reason I love unpredictable adventures in real life is the same reason I devour mystery novels. I want to be surprised. To be wowed. To think "ah, of course!" when I reach the end.

I love where I am in my life right now, but at the same time it's quite predictable. I rarely have adventures like that of the mysterious Italian garden gnomes these days. (Getting stranded due to the Icelandic ash cloud while on vacation last spring doesn't count--at least not until I've forgotten the details of our 40+ hour journey getting home.)

I'll take these adventures when they come along, but in the meantime I've got mysteries to provide my twists and turns. The set-up has to be done right, like those gnomes that beckoned to us, and then I'm along for the ride to see where the adventure takes me.

p.s. All right. You got me. My life isn't that predictable these days. I've got my first author reading coming up at noon on Saturday, June 4, at M is for Mystery in San Mateo, CA. I'll be joining other Sisters in Crime mystery authors--including Juliet Blackwell--and reading from my locked-room mystery short story that appears in Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology. If you're in the area I hope you'll stop by!

Martha's Take On Unpredictability

Unpredictable story twists comes in three forms.

1. Delightful
2. Deus ex machina
3. Dud

The second never fails to piss me off, even when used ironically (I'm looking at you, Adaptation). I don't care if it was good enough for Greek tragedies. If I wanted a random act to solve all the story's problems, I would have asked my five year old niece to weave a tale.

This leaves us with Delightful and Dud. Please pardon this spoilerific post as I break down the most famous unpredictable moments in movie history and how they cross the line for me.

DELIGHTFUL

1. The Usual Suspects
A gimp describing to the police how a mysterious and nefarious mob boss toyed with and took down his gang turns out to be the mastermind he's been describing.

2. Planet of the Apes (original)
Human trying to escape back to earth from a planet overrun by apes realizes he is on earth...in the future.

3. The Empire Strikes Back
Whiny teenager learns the big bad guy he's trying to take down is his father.

4. The Sixth Sense
Psychologist trying to help a kid overcome his ghostly encounters realizes he himself is one of the ghostly encounters.

5. Memento
A man with no long term memory avenging his life will never remember he's already had his revenge but will never remember it and thus never know peace.

DUD

1. Life of David Gale
Man allows himself to be wrongly executed for murder to make a point about the death penalty.

2. The Village
Simple villagers learn their life is a grand experiment to leave behind the evils of the modern world.

3. Fallen
Guy describing his attempt to stay alive at the hands of a demon is oops, really the demon himself.

4. The Forgotten
Woman tries to find her missing son who everyone insists didn't exist and realizes she's part of an alien sociological experiment to test parental bonds.

5. Identity
Ten strangers die off one by one in a motel and turn out all to be the imaginings of someone with schizophrenia.

Here's my call on the difference between the two: the twist needs to be on a character, not on the audience.

While The Usual Suspects gives us an aha moment, Kaiser Soze was pulling a fast one on an arrogant police detective, not us, and we feel along for the ride as the lame stuttering character proves to be the clever one.

In Planet of the Apes, Charlton Heston realizes his arrogance in assuming humans were the top of the evolutionary ladder.

In Empire Strikes Back, it's Luke's world that is ripped apart.

For Six Sense, Bruce Willis's revelation of his dead state comes with character catharsis.

For Memento, Guy Pierce doesn't even get to be in on his unpredictable twist, only we realize that his quest for revenge is fruitless in every possible way, as most quests for revenge are.

Point is, across all five, we live the lesson only secondary to the characters in the story. For the five duds, the characters almost seem not to be the point.

The Life of David Gale crams a message down our throat about the death penalty and didn't bother to make me care about the issue nor the characters involved. It doesn't matter to the guy who dies nor the reporter telling his story because they were already on board with their respective moral codes.

The Village does the same on the perils of modern life. We don't see this realization change anyone - it's supposed to change us. Well, no thanks.

Same with Fallen for making me root for a demon. We end the story exactly where we started (literally, same scene) and I'm supposed to be the one who feels taken for a ride instead of any particular character.

The Forgotten was just so bizarre - aliens, really - and a message about the bond of parenthood being unbreakable. Geez, thanks.

And Identity - once I realize the ten people are essentially not real and neither are the murders I checked out.

The latter five try to be clever at the expense of the audience, try to be didactic. Don't make me part of your story. Don't have your message, your twist, depend on me. I'm a mixed bag. You never know what you're going to get. I'm as unpredictable as you're trying to be in your story.

Just tell the story.

"Somewhere in the English countryside...

in a stately manor home, Madonna is weeping!" Quote from Sue Sylvester, Glee, The Power of Madonna

or

Unpredictability: What Makes Characters Interesting

by Lisa Hughey

Have you ever had a friend you thought you knew and then you found out something about them that really surprised you?

Every person has a secret passion or hidden dimension. In fiction our job is to discover what secret our character is hiding.

Creating characters who are real, fully dimensional, and not boring requires the surprise of unpredictability. Of course as writers we’re required to find the deeper meaning beneath this surface unpredictability and use that motivation to give our characters depth. That unpredictability is what can make a character more sympathetic or more likeable and hopefully more interesting.

Sometimes the secret is the source of a hidden vulnerability. Sue Sylvester from Glee is a perfect example. The writers of her character are pure genius.

Sue constantly criticizes Will Schuster’s hair, poking jokes about elves baking cookies inside and giving him shopping tips for buying hair gel in bulk. And then in the Madonna episode, we find out she is insecure about her own thin hair. Before the hair jokes were just plain mean, but they take on a whole different context based on that hidden vulnerability.

Initially Sue comes across as a horrible woman who has it out for anyone who isn’t popular. She’s the grown up example of the popular kid who makes the unpopular kids feel terrible about themselves. She seems to hate anyone who is different. When she recruits Becky, the cute little girl with Down’s Syndrome, for her beloved award-winning Cheerios squad, everyone believes she is going to do something horribly mean to her.

And then we find out that Sue’s sister has Down’s Syndrome. Watching her read to her sister is heartbreakingly poignant. Their parents basically abandoned them and Sue is both mother, father and sibling to her. She guides Becky, not always nicely, but in every interaction, the writers manage to reveal some new and softer side of Sue.

By doing this, they change her from a caricature into a more dimensional and sympathetic (sometimes!) person.

Whether it is in the written word or a visual performance, that unpredictability is what we search for in our fiction.

For your listening pleasure, here's one of my favorite songs from the Madonna episode.



Sadly, apparently, Fox doesn’t put very many video from the episodes online for people to share so you’re only going to get music, no actual video. And just to be unpredictable, it isn’t Sue. :)

Lisa


ps. I only realized as I was looking for video, tonight is the Glee Finale for this season. Gleeks unite!

Pattern Recognition

L.G.C. Smith

I’ve been thinking about unpredictability all week, reading the other Pens posts and nodding along in agreement. I’m pretty much in Adrienne’s camp in that I don’t wholly support unpredictability. Serendipity is fine. Unexpected events are often interesting, if not always fun. Unpredictability can be way too challenging.

Except in fiction. It occurs to me that one of the more salient distinctions between popular and literary fiction lies along the unpredictability fault line. In general, and there are scads of exceptions, I know, in literary fiction it’s entirely acceptable to explore the predictable and how characters shape, respond to, and cope with it. There’s some magical realism here and there, but it’s mostly lots of secrets and emotional pathology, heaping helpings of death, disappointment, loss, love, failure and regret. Small victories loom large. Quiet moments resound with import.

Popular fiction can be a lot more unpredictable and maintain credibility. This is the realm of time travel, zombie apocalypse, vampires, werewolves, elves, ghosts, ghost cats, regular folks who solve murders, journeys across the galaxy, and epic romances. Treasure maps and worldwide conspiracies abound. Urban shamans wrangle with the gods of a hundred cultures in five hundred nameless cities while aliens walk amongst us. Angels, demons, nanobots and electric sheep prance across the page.

I enjoy popular fiction because I rarely run into these potentially interesting things in everyday life. In good popular fiction, the emotions are as real as they are in more literary fiction, but they come in response to much more unpredictable events.

This is fun. This is one big reason more people like popular fiction better than literary fiction. Again – not everyone. Obviously. But if literary fiction were called Unpopular Fiction, it wouldn’t be as far off the mark as we might wish.

So. Time travel. A popular fiction staple. Love it! Not only would it be unexpected in my regular life, it would be totally unpredictable. Nothing in my experience or my limited understanding of physics and our current state of technological development leads me to predict that any of the kinds of time travel by which fictional characters zip through time and space are going to occur in my natural lifetime.

This, predictably, brings me to a pet peeve. Why do so many characters in time travel romance novels, and I focus on romance because that’s what I know best, act like going back and forth in time is normal and predictable once it’s happened to them? Let’s say Missy Schoolmarm-1885 gets zapped into the present by a lightning strike. Odds are she’ll assume she can go back. Why? Why doesn’t she assume it was a one-time deal, a total fluke, and will never happen again? Has she ever seen lightning induce time travel before? How many thunderstorms has she seen? Balancing previous experience against the one time occurrence, only a moron comes up with, “Yep, I can now travel in time.”

Wait. What was my point? I’m not sure I had one. Because that would be so predictable. But you all know me by now…I’m down with predictable.

Except in fiction.

Never In Doubt

--Adrienne Miller

Unpredictability is overrated. Yeah, I said it. I know most of say that we like it when life throws a few curveballs our way, but we really mean is we like it when we like it pitches us surprises that go our way. I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly batting a thousand against Life.

Enough with the baseball metaphors, I hear you say. Ok. Ok.

Which is why I love me some genre fiction.  I always have. You always know what you’re going to get.

My first love was horror. Monsters and murder. Demon dogs and reanimated children. Scary stuff, and I faced everything alongside the protagonist. I never knew who was going to fall away during your journey to the last page, but I knew by the time I got there the worst of the shadows would be vanquished. They just had to be.

There were a few mysteries in there too. Sherlock Holmes (still a major literary crush) and Hercule Poirot (not so much). Big puzzles and concrete answers. Satisfying stuff. 

Then came romance and its HEA’s, and I was lost. Nothing I read before could compare to the promise of a happily ever after at the end of every story. No matter how bleak things seem at the beginning, no matter how much animosity exists between the hero and heroine, they will find happiness. Together. And that’s a promise. 

The end of these stories is never is doubt. You know it before you ever plop down your cash. Some critics point to these predictable endings as proof of the inferior nature of genre fiction, but I think they’re missing the point. The joy of them comes in witnessing the dance that happens in that middle bit, the adventure. That’s really why I love these books. I know something that our hero doesn’t--that the monster isn’t invincible, that the mystery is solvable, that the two of them were meant to be together--and because of that I can focus on the journey instead. 

Simply Unpredictable

--by Juliet

Not long ago I was asked to provide a "five word bio" to the woman introducing me at a book signing. This is a tough exercise on a number of levels (go ahead, try it, I dare ya). My first couple of tries sounded like laundry lists of my occupations, attributes, or interests...*yawn*... Finally I happened upon a string of words that actually reflects my life:

Happy Accidents Trump Best-Laid Plans

(Okay, maybe I cheated a little...but "best-laid" counts as a one word adjective, right?)

I make plans all the time-- I daydream about them, think out detailed scenarios-- but they never come true. Instead, the best parts of my life have been the results of happy accidents. Like the time I sort of forgot to apply to college, then ended up at the perfect school for me (rather than the one I really wanted). Or all those friends who just happened to cross my path throughout the years, and became essential parts of my life. Or the times I backed into a job as an artist, or wound up living in Oakland, or had a baby -- my son was my happiest accident of all.

When I look back over the years, all the best moments of my life have been serendipitous. The stars aligned and the moon was on board and all was set for a perfect confluence of people and place and events....all completely unplanned, and unpredictable. Luscious.

Conversely, when I try to make things perfect, they slip and slide until they escape from my controlling hands...and they tend to wind up mundane and mediocre.

Also, I have found that there's very little use in trying to plan for unhappy accidents. Other than setting a little money aside, and making sure you have some friends to lean on, you can't really plan for the bad stuff.

Are you all familiar with the graduation speech (later made into a song) called Wear Sunscreen by Mary Schmich? The whole thing's great, but this is one of my favorite parts:

Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

So roll with it, trusting that life will throw out some doozies from time to time...and learn to love the unpredictability of it all. If nothing else, it's sure to make a good story.

Didn't See That Coming (Never Do)

Things today were unpredictable.

1. I wrote a scene I'd been planning on writing, but instead of it being about Kate and cleaning out her child's room, it turned into being about Kate trying unsuccessfully to cover a homeless person with a sleeping bag her son once cherished.

2. I received a tax adjustment saying they owe me money! (I still don't believe it, and if they give it to me, I plan on handing it all back, just in case. I think there may actually be a mistake here. See this NYT article on how things are jacked this year for some of us.)

3. The car, which we dropped off last night (at the mechanic's, in a sketchy part of town, with the doors unlocked and the key under a hammer on the passenger's side floor), was still there in the morning! And it didn't take long to fix. Surprise!

4. I suddenly needed to get to the mechanic's shop to pay him before he closed. I didn't have a car. So, for the first time in fourteen years of living in Oakland, I got on the bus. I'm a big BART-rider, but the bus? Not so much.

5. And EVERYTHING on the bus was unpredictable. My favorite person was the smallest, oldest Asian woman I have ever seen. She couldn't have been more than four feet tall, and my border collie Clara probably weighs more than she did. She wore a black sweat suit and, surprisingly, a Raider's skull cap. On her back she carried an old white wicker crate-shaped basket held to her shoulders with frayed green ribbon, and inside the basket were fish that I swear were still twitching. She played with a cigarette the whole time she was on the bus and when she disembarked, she only took two steps before lighting and inhaling deeply. She was lovely.

6. It started to rain when I finally picked up the car, and I sat stuck in a traffic jam, thinking longingly of the bus and the way it zoomed along without me having to do anything. I couldn't have predicted that.

And my day isn't even done. I think I'm going to go lie on the couch and try to be as boring as possible, with a book and a cup of tea. It's not unpredictable, but it's nice.