Moving Violations
I’m not going to get specific about the TV show in question–not because I’m calling it out for anything, but just to keep things sort of general.
Let’s just say you’ve got three characters. One is traveling by car to a specific location, which is known to all three. He intends to get there for an event that is happening the next day at a specific time. The destination is several hours away, at least, so maybe he’ll arrive early or maybe he won’t make it on time, but at least there’s a known time at which he means to be in a known place.
So, car guy drives away. That leaves two characters. One is just a guy. The other is a teleporter. He is not, for the purposes of this example, a clairvoyant. The teleporter and just-a-guy decide to join the car guy at his destination.
The guy in the car arrives at the destination. He immediately gets into some (not unexpected) difficulty and is about to have his ass (not unexpectedly) handed to him. At just that moment, the teleporter and the just-a-guy guy show up. It is convenient as all get-out.
How did they happen to arrive at that convenient time?
Well, they were all shooting for a specific time of day, for one thing. It’s possible the car guy got into the area early, waited nearby until the appointed time, and rolled around the corner to the destination. The other two could have looked at their watches and said, “It’s go time” and went. That would have resulted in all three characters arriving in the same place at roughly the same time.
Or the teleporter and just-a-guy could have decided at some earlier point to go to the destination and hid there, watching and waiting, until the guy in the car showed up.
It’s also possible, given the nature of this particular story, that the teleporter and just-a-guy were hanging around somewhere feeling like useless jerks and they decided to go to the destination and they did this at exactly the right moment because it was fate or something. That’s not really as good as the other options, but it’ll do… as long as it was what the writers had in mind. It’s all about the writers actually having something in mind.
The above is an example of credibly having characters show up at just the right moment. There were a couple of ways it could have happened and it was both physically possible and in character for everyone involved.
I can’t count the numbers of times I have seen this done wrong. Characters meet each other without any way of knowing where the other person will be. They show up at the same time for no reason except that the writers need them there at that time. They get places far more quickly than they should be able to. That’s fine if you’re writing for Strange Luck (oh, the freedom of Strange Luck… the genuis of that premise, however imperfectly it was executed) or if you’re writing for a show in which time is strange for some reason, such as Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes. But it’s really not okay in most settings.
Even when characters can physically get somewhere and they know where they’re going and, hey, maybe they know what time they should be there… do they have a reason to go? Would they do that? Do they have something better/more urgent/more compelling to do? I’ve seen TV/movie/novel characters pop up with no apparent motivation other than the convenience of the writer.
It’s as if some writers think of their main character as the only real person in their world and all the other characters as stick figures. Furniture. Prods and roadblocks and damage soakers, but definitely not people with their own lives. Fair enough, if you’re writing, oh, They, but generally you’re not.
You have to know what all of your characters are doing. Okay, not every second. I couldn’t keep track of all of my weird bastards all the time. The best I can do with most of them right now is tell you what city they’re in, and there are some for whom I can’t even do that. (Drop me a line, would you, Gabe?) But, when they’re active in something you’re writing and especially when they’re going to meet in a scene, you have to know what’s going on with them. You can’t just focus on your main character and think, okay, this is the point in the scene where it would be good/useful/interesting for the others to walk in. So here they come.
I should amend that–strangers can walk in anytime. Chandler’s guy with a gun can walk in anytime. But characters you know something about, whose lives and activities you know something about… they should make motivated and credible entrances.
I’m not saying you can’t push them around. I’m not saying you can’t perfectly time a phone call or a traffic detour or even an epiphany to get them where you want them, when you want them there. As long as you’ve thought it through and it makes some damned sense, it’s fine.
I’m fortunate that many of my characters have access to magic, or have superpowers… because a lot of them live to show up out of nowhere and catch bullets in their teeth. Weird bastards, I’m telling you.
Current Bedside Reading: Lonely Planet, Morocco
Commentary: No, I’m not planning a trip. Sadly. But I am planning the sequel to The Dominion. These Dominion books, btw, are a stupid amount of work.
My iPod Is Singing: “Wrote my will just to get to you.”
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