This was published in the anthology Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations, edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville and published by Writer’s Digest Books in 2006.

Rule of Thumb: Make it More Complex

By Peter Turchi

I remind myself to make a story more complex when it seems one-dimensional, single-minded, predictable, familiar, or thoroughly understandable. Often the first draft of a story will feel flat, its options limited; I’ve allowed the events, dialogue and character’s lives to become too narrowly focused. Make it More Complex is a reminder to cultivate another aspect of the main character’s life, a secondary character, a secondary line of investigation, a tertiary line of investigation, a pattern of images—something intriguing that is not (yet, apparently) directly related to whatever has become the story’s whirlpool, it’s enormous, powerful, potentially reductive vortex.

Some writers need to have the ending of a story—or an ending—in mind before they can begin. Others of us have trouble writing a story if we (think we) know the ending. The problem with knowing where you’re going is a problem of over-determination—of limiting a story’s possibilities from the outset, so that the writing is an execution of a notion, a literary equivalent of a mathematical proof. If I suspect I know a story’s ending before I’ve started writing, I need either to write past that ending (“So then what?”) or to consider which of the givens along the way bear further exploration—ways to add to the story’s journey, and to make it more complex.

For writers of conventional realism the ongoing challenge is to create characters of realistic psychological complexity. This means constantly working to allow characters to think more, and differently; to allow them to be self-conscious, self-critical, and contradictory. There’s an element of perversity to this, because writing about simple-minded people facing clearly-delineated conflicts is easier. So another way to state the rule would be: Make it More Difficult. Increase Your Ambition. For writers of fiction other than psychological realism, the challenge might be to avoid writing to a thesis, or to avoid creating work that merely illustrates a design strategy. “What more can this be?” “What more should this be?”—these are questions we ask ourselves in order to Make it More Complex.

Do I need to acknowledge that there is beauty in the austere, that we admire Shaker furniture, primitive paintings, and the song of a single voice? Complexity in itself is no virtue.

Rules are reductive, rules are constraining, rules are what the beginner wants and the experienced distrust. Create rules, follow them; but know when to ignore them. Like any “rule” that comes to mind—to my mind, anyway—this one immediately leads me to recognize the virtue of its opposite. But that in itself is a demonstration of the need to Make It More Complex: Question Every Rule.