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how-tostory

Track what your characters know: events, not notes

A practical way to keep a secret straight across a novel: write it as events with effects, so a character's knowledge at any scene can be asked for instead of remembered.

The Author team, AVS Media
· 2 min read

Secrets are the engine of plots and the main source of their errors. A reveal works only if the reader, and each character, learns the thing at one point and not another. In a long book you will, at some stage, write a scene in which someone behaves as if they know what they cannot know yet.

Here is a way to make that impossible to miss.

Write the secret as events#

Take a secret from your book: who wrote the letter. List the moments it changes who knows it:

  1. Chapter 1: the letter arrives. Nobody knows who wrote it.
  2. Chapter 5: Pieter suspects but does not know.
  3. Chapter 7: Ilse learns who wrote it.
  4. Chapter 11: Pieter is told.

Each of these is an event with an effect on one or more characters: Ilse · knows + who wrote it. Give each event a place in the story: anchored to the scene where it happens, or a time.

Then ask, don't remember#

Now the question "what does Ilse know in scene 5.3?" is a query. It folds the effects up to that moment, in story order, and lists the answer with the events that produced it. If you wrote scene 5.3 as if she knew, you can see at once that the event that teaches her is in chapter seven.

That is also what a check does for you. A scene can state a fact the character relies on; the check knows too early compares it with the moment the character learns it.

Make facts small and plain#

Effects work best when they are short, plain statements: knows + the letter was hidden by the captain. They are for you and your checks to compare, not for readers. A long effect is a sign that you are writing prose in a field that wants a fact.

Not only secrets#

The same shape holds for other things that change:

  • Where someone is: a travel event with a place.
  • Injuries: add on the event that causes it, remove on the one that heals it.
  • Possessions: the letter, the key, the knife.
  • Relations: "engaged", "enemy", "estranged".
  • Mood or status, when the story depends on them.

Habits#

  • Add the events when you finish the scene, while you remember what changed.
  • Prefer many small events to few large ones.
  • Do not backfill the whole book in one weekend. Start with the thread you are most afraid of.

What it will not do#

It will not find events in your prose. If you never tell it that Ilse learns something, it cannot know. That is a limitation, and it is the reason the answers are exact when they exist.

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