Answers...

I’ve half-read a book this week.  Well, blow me, I can hear you muttering.  That’s exciting news.  I’ve read a book too...  Yes, well, wait a minute and I’ll explain.

You see, the book wasn’t actually very good.  Oh, it sounded all right; a science-fantasy complete with magic set nowadays. Fine.  The author can certainly write, too, in the sense of sticking one word with another word and making it sound okay.  So why did it fall flat?  The answer was quite interesting, for anyone who wants to know about creative writing.

The trouble was, there was nothing to pull you into the world.  The hero arrives in a world where magic rules and that’s about it, really.  He’s got no problems to solve or questions to answer and neither have we.  (At about the halfway point, a villian seems to have suddenly cropped up, so I’m going to persevere for a bit longer, as it might get interesting, but halfway through is too late.)

Now, at this point you might think that I’m unduly attached to problems.  (Fictional ones, that is -  if anyone wants real life problems, be my guest!)  After all, I write mysteries and a mystery that isn’t mysterious isn’t much cop, so you sort of expect random corpses and dodgy goings-on.  However, all books need to pose some sort of question and have some sort of problem.

In Anna Karenina,(not, you notice, a detective story)we know by the third line that Prince Stepan’s affair with the French governess has been rumbled by his wife.  He’s sleeping in the spare room and life isn’t particularly tickety-boo.  How, we ask, is he going to get out of that one?

No prizes for guessing where this one comes from!

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”

So which daughter and which man?  We want to know...

In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy has two problems at the start of the book.  Having got into the quietly sinister Narnia, how’s she going to get out again?  Especially when she finds the apparently friendly Mr Tumnus is actually working for the White Witch.  Then, having got safely home, she has to convince her brothers and sister that Narnia really exists.  I doubt if there’s a person on Earth who hasn’t suffered the frustration of trying to convince others of the truth.  There’s some very fervent celebrations in the wizarding world at the start of Harry Potter.  Why’s everyone so excited?  And how – this question crops up very early – did baby Harry survive the hitherto infallible killing curse?   And, not to blow my own trumpet unduly, what, Jack wants to know, really did happen to Mark Helston in Trouble Brewing?

So what are the questions and what are the problems?  When an author gets it right, we want to know the answers and that means we want to read the book. Result.