The Density Paradigm

Lots of novelists think hard about the total impact of their story, their characters-in-plot. 

That’s right, obviously. Is this ending impactful enough? Does my middle section hold the attention? Do my characters engage the reader? 

All good stuff. And of course, impact can be measured in a lot of ways. Yes, car chases and shootings have a very clear kind of impact. But humour makes an impact. A really strong emotional drama does. An astonishing revelation. A creeping sense of dread. And so on. 

That’s impact. You want to maximise it. Good. 

But personally, my obsession comes to its peak with a slightly different metric. Not total impact, but impact per page. I want a book where each page feels thick with some kind of adhesive force (excitement, humour, romance, revelation, whatever.) 

That obsession of mine – with density not just impact – gives rise to a few different sub-obsessions. So I’m Mr Stingy when it comes to words. If I reckon I can clip two words out of a sentence, I’ll do that every time. If I can remove one word, I’ll do that. Because my first-person character also tends to the extremely laconic, I find myself dropping main verbs often. Any tiny bagginess in the prose feels like a mainsail flapping loose. 

That’s the first, easiest, most obvious way to increase density, but there are plenty of side-tricks too. So I’m very interested in a rich sense of place, because a rich sense of physical being just makes any scene feel more vibrantly present. I’m interested in humour, because it’s a brilliant cheaty way to hop your way through relatively dull passages and scenes. Any interesting and engaging character also gives you a get out. You just wind them up, let them do what they do, and let the reader peep horrified/delighted/thrilled at the results. 

But I want to talk in this email about one specific side-trick that just always works. It may or may not suit the story you’re writing at the moment, but, you know what?, it probably does. 

And it’s this: 

Family. 

Harry’s Law on Family is this: Take any set of interactions around any set of characters and  that set of interactions will feel more profound, dramatic and consequential if some portion of that inner group of characters are family. Oh yes, and it’s fine if some of the family are dead/missing. 

The easiest way to understand this is to observe just how often family signifiies. To pick a few bestsellers: 

Harry Potter: Harry’s orphanhood and the role of his real vs fake parents is absolutely crucial to the whole architecture. Yes, JK Rowling’s use of family is interesting in that HP’s parents are dead … but as we’ll see that trick isn’t so uncommon. 

Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Same thing. Lisbeth is (effectively) an orphan. That’s absolutely central to her depiction in the stories. 

Da Vinci Code: OK, in this rather silly story, Robert Langton’s family is of no consequence. But the goal at the end of the rather silly enterprise is understanding something astonishing about a rather famous family story. 

Gone Girl. Amy’s relationship with her parents (and their creation of Amazing Amy, a sort of surrogate daughter) is also central. 

Wolf Hall. Family, admittedly the family of a court, lies at the heart of the whole enterprise. 

And so on. 

It’s absolutely true of my Fiona books too, where Fiona’s series-length quest is to find out who her biological father is (and why she landed up with the adoptive one she loves.) 

Strip the whole family story out of any of these things and they feel thinner poorer things. 

Still don’t believe me? Then ask yourself which of these lines packs more power: 

Luke, I am your father. 

Luke, I’m a roofing guy who did a bit of work for your cousin Mark a little whiles back now. 

(And yes: I know that even the first line there is a misquotation.)

The moral of these thoughts? Well, it’s mostly to keep your story architecture compact and to pull things back to family where you can. I’d say that birth family has most force. Then the protagonist’s own children carry next most force. Actual marriage relationships are weaker, but still important. After that, nothing else really signifies in our tiny little reptilian brains. 

(With one big exception: I have a theory that books aimed at teenagers don’t really care about birth family. Because teens are so impelled to look outwards from their family, you often don’t get a lot of power from bringing family into YA books. It’s all about the love interest.) 

You can think about these things from early on. So let’s say that you are writing a standard police procedural. Your character is a cop. The structure of the book is going to be: murder, investigation, solution. But you can still bring family in. Is the criminal somehow involved with a parent? Or is the parent? Or a parent is actually the Chief of Police? Or a famous prosecutor? You only have to toss out those questions to see how instant the sense of enrichment can be. And how multiple the sense of potential new storylines.

Best of all: enrichment = increased density of impact.

And I love density. 

Thanks all for your reaction to our promotional stuff last weekend. The response pretty much blew our socks off and we’ve been walking barefoot through the cold, cold frosts ever since. But happily of course. Who needs socks?

So, tell me, does your story have family at its heart? And if it doesn’t, could it? What’s your set up? Do you think Harry’s Law is right or wrong? Let’s take our socks off and all have a Heated Debate.