The Courtroom Scene
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
So, in the draft of MOTHER DRAGON, there is a fantasy courtroom scene. Not literally a courtroom - it's a fantasy culture and our modern court system is not quite how they do things - but a sympathetic character is essentially on trial because of something they did. They had their reasons, but it’s pretty serious. Damages have to be assessed. Restitution has to be made.
I really did not want to write a courtroom scene, but given the way I'd set up the story, there really wasn't any way around it.
You see, I am actually very sensitive on the topics of justice, restitution, and punishment. I have seen too damn many rounds of Internet drama in my time, and too many piles of people talking about Acknowledging Harm and Being Held Accountable To The Community when they actually just want to harass someone. Like many autistic people, who are frequently punished and ostracized from a young age for social mistakes that we didn't understand we were making, I have a bit of a guilt complex. I'm working on it in therapy.
So, I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to this stuff and I also feel ashamed of my knee-jerk reaction. I worried a lot about imaginary readers who might yell at me for giving the character too harsh a punishment on the one hand, or not enough of one on the other, and who might have long, politically-charged opinions on what that said about me and my biases; either way I was worried that my unreasonably strong, mentally ill feelings were about to splash all over the page, and then nobody would want to read the book, ever.
But I wrote the scene. I focused on figuring out the details of how the fictional culture of the book handled justice. It's a culture that puts a high value on autonomy and consensus, and the trial process was highly consensus-driven. Did everyone involved agree on the facts of what happened? If not, why not? Given these facts, did everyone agree on an appropriate penalty, in accordance with tradition and precedent? If not, why not?
I was nervous showing the courtroom scene to my alpha readers - but their reactions really surprised me.
Were they offended? Did they think I'd Gone Too Far? Did they think I failed at reparative justice forever? No, they were bored.
The problem with the courtroom scene was that, in spite of all my emotions about it, there just wasn't a lot of tension. After all the buildup about how much depended on the outcome of this trial, everybody just came into the courtroom, sat down with each other, and sorted things out in a reasonable manner.
I was so afraid of overreacting, too afraid of being unreasonable somehow, that I'd under-reacted.
Now, there are various ways to fix a scene like this, mostly outside the scope of this post. I could have gone through and put in more sense of stakes, more conflict, more division and disbelief. But after discussing it, and other edits, with my agent, I’m actually planning the reverse. Make the scene shorter, skip some of the procedural details, summarize more. The crucial insight my agent had is that the courtroom scene isn't the actual climax of the story. Some other stuff right before and after it is. I’d been assuming it was the climax because of all the emotions I had, but apparently that was wrong? It’s necessary for the trial to happen, but it doesn't need massive drama or painstaking detail. It’s more like a loose end that needs to get wrapped up before the end.
So, here’s the lesson I want to leave you with this week: a scene that feels very emotional and very risky for the author isn’t necessary an emotional climax for the reader. It doesn’t necessarily result in a flood of emotion on the page. Sometimes it does! But other times you can over-correct. You can end up writing a scene that's too safe, at just the moments when you're most aware of danger.
Meanwhile: so far, the new WIP that I'm secretly drafting has even more to say about guilt and judgment, both the "hyperscrupulous autistic person with a guilt complex" type and the real type, and also how they relate to each other. Let's see how this goes. :D