Managing the flow of information

One of the reasons I hated Tenet, the movie that flopped last summer at the height of the epidemic and failed to save old Hollywood, was the obscurity of its action. Some of this could have been fixed with better acting, editing, sound mixing, and musical scoring. But most of it owes to the central conceit of the movie, that people and things can pass through a portal and invert their passage through time.

The Protagonist: "The cause comes before effect."

Laura: "No. That's just the way we see time."

Leave it to Christopher Nolan to make a $200 million action movie that reverses the order of cause and effect. The result is action that's impossible to understand, a muddle that doesn't make sense until it ends—or starts, whatever.

I've thought about that movie and what I can learn from it a lot since last summer. These big-budget blockbusters have no equal in terms of production value, but their scripts, whether written by committee or by one man, consistently fall short. Tenet doesn't work because of the fatal flaw of reverse chronology. Nolan's so devoted to the concept he withholds information until after you needed it. The action, instead of thrilling, is confounding like a Rubik's cube and similarly lacking in kinetic energy.

That's not to say I don't make these kinds of mistakes. A writing skill I've yet to master is managing the flow of information to the reader. That's giving the reader what he needs before he needs it. No more, no less. It sounds simple, but you can get really mixed up writing a scene with just two people, each one trying to deceive the other. I was working on a book years ago, which I never finished, that had a scene just like that. I must have written 10 versions of that scene. I couldn't keep straight what the two men knew, what they were pretending to know, and what they didn't know.

My go-to tactic to manage the flow of information is to hide it from the POV character. This can be achieved through simple ignorance or deception by other characters. That necessitates a reason for the POV character's ignorance, such as he's new in town, or young and naive. In the case of deception—well, people lie for all kinds of reasons. If you can link that reason to a unique facet of the setting, you're doing well.

The Martian by Mike Weir is many things. What I admire about it is the amount of information Mike Weir includes without being boring. The choices he made for the main character's personality, the narrative structure, and all the screw-ups and surprises facilitated the exposition. That information was essential to the book's plot and tone, which created a vicarious feeling of working side-by-side with NASA engineers on a high-stakes space mission.

It's wild thinking about the general lack of information in the pre-Internet era. Remember when you had to look things up in an encyclopedia? Now I can find the answer to any question that pops into my head in seconds. That we can instantly satisfy our curiosity about any topic under the Sun caps our imaginations a bit. When Michael Crichton wrote Timeline, he counted on the fact that you couldn't see through his quantum deception without doctarate-level research. If he wrote that today, would he take the same risk with the facts, knowing we could fact-check him on the spot? If not, we would have been deprived of what I regard as his best book.

With so much information at hand, it takes as much time to discern what's important as it does to discern what's true. The book I'm writing now has stonemasonry in it. I know nothing about stonemasonry, but the Internet knows everything. I don't have time to become conversant in stonemasonry or a hundred other topics my book touches on. I don't want to regurgitate every fact about stonemasonry to show the reader the stonemasons in my book are the real deal, either. What a writer does is show the basic knowledge of what's necessary for the scene to unfold—to know what's important—and discard the rest.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.