DZ-Jay's Random Blog - Christmas Carol: A Short Story - Part XII

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Back in Part XI I mentioned how I forgot to have Carol find a new uncharted tunnel -- which is important to the plot -- and that instead of going back and re-writing the passage to add the missing discovery, I decided to leave it as is. I then had to employ a special device to advance the plot, essentially just making Carol come back to the cave and do a second walkthrough looking for presents, just in case she missed some.

I think it worked, since a lot of us tend to do this sort of thing. I know that before I leave, say, a hotel room, I always stop and do a run-through inspection through the entire place just to make sure I didn't leave a shoe or a tie or my wallet behind. Better safe than sorry, I say, and Carol is always cautious.

However, this whole device exposed a new problem: The cave has now been seen three times -- once by Finnley Elf, the original cartographer who made the map, and twice by Carol -- and yet that stupid tunnel kept getting missed. It must be really hidden then, so now I have to come up with a way to discover a very secret tunnel in some spectacular way that justifies not having seen it before, yet still serve its purpose of giving Carol access to entirely new areas to explore.

My biggest concern was that I had already come up with the way Carol would discover the tunnel: She would feel a breeze and follow it to a crack in the wall.

So you see, that put me in a pickle: I don't think I can use that discovery device any more since the tunnel must now be really, really hidden and secret. I wracked my brain trying to think of a way to describe such a hiding trick. I already used the "secret tunnel" device, concealed by snow, when describing the entrance to the caverns. I've already had Carol discover a small hole on the bottom of a wall that was barely visible. What else could I do?

I had to describe how much hidden this tunnel was, in order to explain how it was missed by Finnley and Carol (twice) ... I've been writing Carol's whole traversal through the caverns in a cinematic way, as if I were describing a movie unfolding before my eyes, so I needed to come up with a visual design for this super-secret hidden tunnel ...

Or ... did I really?

In my desperation, it occurred to me that this is very much not a movie, that writing is a non-visual medium, and that I have something at my disposal that no movie does: a direct, almost hard-wired connection to the reader's imagination.

So, I cheated. I just hand-waved the whole thing and left it to the reader to design.

When the next gust came, Carol thought she felt the chilly breeze on her finger coming from the East. She walked over to the eastern wall and felt the surface of the icy blocks with her hands, up and down, until she noticed a large crack. It was plain to see now that she knew where to look, but the tricky light refracting through the ice concealed it, making it look like just another feature of the wall.

The rather large opening was wide enough for an elf to fit into—or a ghost to run away through.

Did you see it? I've bolded the critical bit on the passage above.

Is it a mirage? Is it like a house-of-mirrors effect? Is it a reflective "invisible cloak" like the Predator creature uses? What is it and what does it look like?

I don't know. I really have no idea -- but more to the point, it really does not matter. Let the reader figure it out if he wishes, and let Carol go about her business. She has a new cave to explore. Ta-daaa!!!

It's quite liberating, really. You know that thing people say, "some things are better left to the imagination"? Well, some things indeed are better left to the imagination; especially if you can rely on someone else's imagination to do the work for you.

And yet ... it doesn't really feel like cheating (oh, it totally is -- I completely hand-waved the whole thing just for the sake of keeping the plot going). It feels right, as if anything I could have come up with would have just been either lame or silly or just too conveniently coincidental.

I don't think I'm a genius for that. For all I know, they teach you that in the first three pages of chapter one in Creative Writing 101 class (perhaps even as a thing to avoid). I also really do not know if it works as well as I think it does, but it feels fine to me and that's as good as I need it to be right now.

So that's it for now. Carol moves on. She's got a new tunnel to explore, she'll soon discover the Snowflake Gardens and have a major encounter with the Evil Snowman, leading to the final confrontation. All good things to come.

Until next time.
See ya'!
-dZ.


http://atariage.com/forums/blog/743/entry-15106-christmas-carol-a-short-story-part-xii/