An Authorial Tool: Watsonian And Doylist Perspectives
Or how defining plot elements in terms of both their Watsonian and Doylist needs can help define and develop your plot
The concept of Watsonian and Doylist perspectives on fiction is an old one, with the terms being derived from the Sherlock Holmes stories. (TV Tropes has a good write-up, here).
Put simply, a Watsonian perspective is one that comes from inside the universe of the story, as though the story was real, and is so named because it’s the perspective you would get if you were talking to the fictional Doctor John Watson, the first-person narrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories. (If all you know about the written works is that they contain the phrase “‘Holmes!’ I ejaculated”, Watson’s the guy who was doing the ejaculating).
By contract, a Doylist perspective is one that comes from our universe, looking at the story as a fictional work, and is so named because it’s the perspective you would get if you were talking to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the stories.
This style of analysis is often used when discussing works of science-fiction. For example, if you ask “Why do Federation starships in Star Trek have transporters?” you might get the following two answers:
Watsonian: it enables personnel to be instantly transported down to a planet without the time, cost, or risk of a shuttle voyage.
Doylist: when Desilu Productions started filming Star Trek in the mid-60s, they didn’t have the budget to build a shuttle set, a shuttle model, and do the shots of the shuttle flying around and landing, so they came up with the idea of the transporter to avoid having to do all of that.
Similarly, if you ask “In Doctor Who, why do time lords regenerate?” you can similarly get two answers:
Watsonian: a long and complicated series of speculative explanations (see this answer on the Tardis Wiki site for a more detailed set of entirely Watsonian answers) that essentially boil down to “cheating death and extending life-span”.
Doylist: By 1966, the actor who initially played Doctor Who, William Hartnell, was increasingly suffering from ill health which eventually resulted in the BBC recasting the role, coming up with the concept of regeneration as a means of doing so.
But once you know to look out for Watsonian vs Doylist explanations, you see them everywhere, such as the question of why the character Dr. Drake Ramoray in the American daytime soap Days of Our Lives died, with the Watsonian answer being that a lift malfunctioned, and the Doylist answer being that the actor who played him, Joey Tribbiani, pissed off the writers by telling a TV interviewer that he ad-libbed most of his lines.
Anyhow, to get to the belated point in this piece, it’s literally just occurred to me that when trying to work out the plot of a story — and I’m writing this while midway through the “headbanging jelly against a wall” phase of plot development — that these two perspectives are a good tool for an author to use to analyse the plot they’re trying to write.
Let me give you an example. In an action novel of a group of grifters, you know that you want your protagonists to do some sort of clever heist; you’re just struggling to figure out exactly what the heist is.
First you can define the Watsonian requirements that your characters have:
They don’t want to get caught.
They want to evade detection (i.e. they don’t want the bad guys to come after them afterwards).
They want to be able to succeed.
So you need to come up with a heist target against which they can then create a plan that to them seems to have a reasonable enough chance of pulling it off according to their above three requirements.
But then you can start defining the Doylist requirements that you, the author, have for this heist:
You want it to be hard (because if it was easy, it would be really boring for the reader and completely lacking in tension).
You need it to involve all the protagonists.
You might need this to be something where they only have one shot to do it, where if they don’t do it this time, the chance is lost for ever, because this is supposed to be a point where the plot reaches a “do or die” point or climax.
If it’s not the final act of the novel, you might need it to partially fail with a particular complication (like one of them getting captured) or maybe completely fail (if you need them to get captured).
You might need it to occur at a particular time, or a particular place in order to fit in with your geography or timetable.
In the story I’m working on, I had the bad guys working on a continuing conspiracy / scheme where there was no particular deadline or single opportunity as to when my characters could disrupt it. The longer it took before the characters disrupted it, the more likely it was that the bad guys plan would succeed. But there was no one moment where the bad guy’s scheme would go from something they were planning on doing to something they had succeeded in doing.
From a Watsonian point of view, it all makes sense. But I’ve now realised from a Doylist point of view, I need there to be one moment where the bad guys make their move, where my protagonists have to be right there, right then, to disrupt it, and if they fail, they’ve lost completely. I need them not to be able to do the disruption ahead of time. I need there not to be a second chance.
So I need to change what it is the bad guys are doing from an ongoing, building process, to an action built around a single plot-changing event.
Anyhow, that’s today’s insight. Now I’ll go back to trying to turn lumps of jelly into lego blocks.
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