MYSTERY: FICTION'S FAVORITE FORCE
To be radiant, fiction needs the canny and the uncanny. The Machine and the Spirit. Or put simply: Conflict and Mystery.
The Star Wars Universe might have only one Force, split between Dark and Light, but fiction boasts two separate Forces, two primary sources of profluency that hold the reader to the Story and keeps them turning pages. We could just as easily call profluency a Story’s capacity for “immersiveness” or “limbic investment” but I’m a Gardner fan so we’ll stick with profluency.
Fiction’s first profluent force is of course the great structuring mechanica of Conflict. We have spoken regularly about Conflict here. Conflict drives/organizes so many of our stories — on screen, on page, in newspapers, in our own lives. Often when people talk about Story they are talking about the Conflict that gives Story its charge, momentum, and its reason-to-be.
If fiction has a System or a Machine within, then that System or Machine is Conflict.
Like the machines I’m analogizing, Conflict can be isolated, analyzed, disassembled, modified, copied, mass produced. Its functions and processes are often easily parsed by those with experience, swapped out, retrofitted.
Some writers have a knack for Conflict; others of us have to learn its many majesties. (Fortunately for those to whom this element does not come naturally, Conflict needs Character to work, and even if your Conflict is mid, a powerful Character can give you all the narrative fire you’ll need.)
But Conflict alone cannot animate Stories. Conflict alone cannot pull the reader into the magic circle of Story and hold them in that spell, turning pages.
The Machine is not enough.
Fortunately, Stories have another essential force that fires them and helps them achieve their ultimate radiance — a second force that allows Stories to mirror life’s extravagant exuberant complexity and when done right reaches deep into readers’ hidden selves, into their shadow quadrants.
We are speaking, of course, about Mystery.