What Shall We Do with a Plot Device?

Early in the writing oh --

You’re working on a story.

In the very earliest stages.

And that story has a plot device.

Not just in the sense of something that moves the story along, which is a definition so absurdly broad as to be useless.

Something that is obviously there to move the story along, and not for any logical reason in the world.

But does there have to be? Or at least, can it wear a clever disguise?

This is important because plot devices undermine the reality of your story. Though not in the looser sense that is wildly used, anything where the reader can deduce what the author intended, more or less quickly, breaks down realism.

I have heard claims that red herrings are, in themselves, plot devices. This is false. Nothing requires that there be anything implausible about a fact that appears to have bearing on the case, only to turn out to have an innocent, or at least unrelated, explanation.

What is a plot device is the red herring that has no particular reason to happen at the time where it would complicate the murder.

If Lord Blackcliffe returns abruptly to his family estate and is found murdered in his gazebo -- if there are footprints in the mud near the gazebo --

It is one thing if it turns out that Mr. Peregrine Jones took that path several times a week in order to woo Miss Marigold Smith.

Likewise if Miss Hephzibah Clerk hurried to return a book to the Blackcliffe library so that the lord wouldn’t discover that she borrowed it, where the least consequence would be the servants learning that the lord had not, in fact, granted permission for her to borrow books.

It’s when Mr. Mortimer Robertson just happened to go into the village to pay off his debt at the general store while Lord Blackcliffe was being murdered that things start to get iffy. Especially if Mr. Robertson also had a motive to murder Lord Blackcliffe from, saying, the lord’s stiffing him on his wages.

The timing can probably pass muster, being not so extraordinary.

The more improbable, the worse, of course. If Mr. Jones and Miss Smith had just happened to decide to elope the very hour of the murder -- well, detectives generally start to comment on how odd coincidences do happen. But it would help if they had a reason to get away before Lord Blackcliffe could notice them.

Other plot devices are worse.

The Chosen One, for instance. It can be deployed for neither more nor less nor other than the writer has no hand at developing motives, and thus has the character go kill the Evil Overlord for no other reason than being the Chosen One.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use various effects to pressure the character into going to to kill the Evil Overlord. After all, the number of people who would spontaneously take it on as a quest is rather small, and they tend to be distinctly nuts. (Read Bill Maudlin’s Up Front, or at least the passage about American soldiers who enjoyed fighting. They tended to have peaceful professions of mafia bodyguard and swamp hunter, and be nuts.)

But all sorts of actual motives could be given. With greater and lesser degrees of locking the character in regardless of his personal desires.

The Evil Overlord burns down your village because his men were attacked nearby, and the captain tells you that he even knows you are innocent, but the villages about don’t know that.

You kill a ravening red bear, and you did not know that it was magical, and an escape from the Evil Overlord. He is furious that you prevented its recapture.

The Evil Overlord cast a great spell such that he can not be killed by anyone born on land or on sea, by day or by night, and his killer must be someone who looks on the world, but not with two eyes of blue or two eyes not of blue.

You were born in a tidal marsh at dawn, and you are odd-eyed, with a blue eye and a brown. You alone can deliver the lands from the horror of the Evil Overlord. And if that doesn’t work to get the character moving -- the Evil Overlord has learned of your existence. And feels personally insulted that his careful spell has a loophole.

There’s a lot that can be done to make plot devices less noticeable even without just ignoring them.