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Learning how to detect what is necessary in your fiction allows you to write an inevitable narrative. A narrative that is inevitable is structurally solid and leads to a sense-making ending.

Therefore, it should be fairly obvious that learning to see what’s necessary and what’s not when writing is very important. To put it simply, without having an inevitable narrative you will likely have problems with narrative pace as well as a problematic ending.

Moreover, a non inevitable narrative… inevitably creates problems with over-explaining and exposition. The reason? If something that shouldn’t be there actually is, you tend to (sometimes subconsciously) rationalize it with superfluous content.

In this post we’ll take a closer look at inevitable narratives. I’ll show you how to decide what is narratively inevitable and what isn’t, as well as how to structure your narrative in a way that precisely favors its inevitability.

Inevitable Narratives: Plot and Character Development

An inevitable narrative begins with deciding what is necessary and what isn’t.

Generally speaking, something is not necessary when it neither drives the plot forward nor helps us better understand a character and their motivations.

However, complexity arises from the fact that – as virtually everything in literature – this, too, is not easy to assess objectively. An author could argue that what seems unnecessary in terms of both plot and characters does, in fact, shed some more light to our understanding of the situation.

In other words, it would be rare – though not unheard of! – to face a narrative where a secondary plot is entirely irrelevant to the primary one, and hence utterly unnecessary.

And so, in most cases we must find a balance.

Finding the Balance for an Inevitable Narrative

A textual structure (a paragraph, a scene, or a whole chapter) might to some extent drive the plot forward and/or explain a character. However, this has to be assessed in terms of impact against narrative pace and overall structure.

Is it worth writing a long paragraph to explain why the antagonist couldn’t make it to a meeting?

Is it worth using a whole chapter, slowing down the pace even more, just to show why the protagonist is afraid of spiders?

Obviously enough, only the author can answer such questions. There certainly aren’t any one-size-fits-all solutions. Sometimes the answer is “yes, it’s worth it”, and sometimes the answer is “no, it isn’t worth it”.

So, how can you learn to detect necessity? How can you learn to find the balance?

It’s about the Affective Bigger Picture

If you haven’t yet got bored of me talking about affect, you haven’t read the blog for long enough. But the only reason I do is because the concept of affect is by far, hands down, the single most important point of failure for a narrative.

Your characters might be a bit unrealistic. Your plot might be a bit meandering. You might have a tendency to confuse character roles. All these are not ideal (and obviously add up), but if you have a narrative with high affective impact, they can be forgiven.

Now, the thing is, affect can inform our decision about necessity. Affect is what makes an inevitable narrative.

In other words, if you’re facing a decision in terms of balance, as we saw in the previous section, the decision has to be weighed in in terms of affective impact.

Affect Overrides Pace

Let’s revisit the two questions I posed earlier:

• Is it worth writing a long paragraph to explain why the antagonist couldn’t make it to a meeting?
• Is it worth using a whole chapter, slowing down the pace even more, just to show why the protagonist is afraid of spiders?

The higher the affective impact you’ll get by writing these structures, the more justified you would be taking the penalty in e.g. narrative pace – and the closer you’d be to narrative inevitability.

Recall the example I mention in my post on reader manipulation, about American Psycho. The long chapters containing Hi-Fi descriptions and critiques of singers are meant to be boring. They certainly don’t drive the plot forward and they don’t seem to tell us something about the character, either.

Only, they do.

The purpose of these chapters are to help you feel the immense boredom the protagonist feels. Although there is a price to pay – and a serious one – in terms of pace, the affective return is worth it.

Facilitating an Inevitable Narrative

As I mentioned, an inevitable narrative favors a sense-making structure that leads to a solid narrative ending. There are some things you can do to help your narrative become more inevitable. Some of these things are obvious, others less so. Let’s start with the obvious ones.

• Have a clear idea about where the narrative is headed. True, books sometimes take over, and you might end up changing your mind about something, but the clearer you are about the direction, the easier it will be to make the narrative inevitable.
• Make sure you understand your plot’s divergence points.
• Have characters with clear roles. If a character serves no purpose, there is no need for them to exist; period. At the very least, downplay their importance.
• Secondary plots are there only as a mirror (enhancing the affective power) of the primary plot. If you don’t have a strong, direct parallel between them, the space you dedicate to a secondary plot isn’t worth it.

And here are a couple of less obvious ones.

• Learn to work with concepts. Truly, this is a game-changer in terms of inevitability in narratives.
• Favor simplicity. Go deep, not wide. Even if you’re a genre writer – fantasy comes to mind – avoid numerous characters and plotlines.