Writers Are Shitty Time Travelers

There's a great scene in BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE where time travelling Bill S. Preston is trapped in a police station. He's up a creek without a paddle, but then he reminds himself to go back in time and leave a garbage can for himself to use as a means of escape and said can suddenly appears, as if dropped by magic. It's very stupid and very funny, and it's incredibly illustrative of the point I'm trying to make.

When I write a piece, I the writer lay out a series of things for you the reader to encounter. As we travel down the primrose path of perfect prose, we encounter things... I, the writer lay them out, and you the reader have a reaction to them. This is how the reading process works.

Except I'm not all that bright... despite my high-falutin' philosophies and admirable vocabulary, it's very hard for me (or anyone) to string together the exact right combination of words, to craft the sentences that have the best shot of delivering the concepts in my head from my imagination to yours.

Fortunately, I have my time machine, or, more accurately, the rewrite process.

Here's an example.

I want to write this scene: Hero Alice and villain Bob have a gunfight. I want Alice to kill Bob with a hairpin. The irony is that Bob gave Alice this hairpin when they were married.

Except in order to make this work, I have to "time travel" back and set this information up, so the later scenes seem to flow organically from what came before. So I time travel back, insert the relevant information and come up with:

Bob and Alice are happily married. Bob gives Alice an antique hairpin. "For luck," he says...

CUT TO: TEN YEARS LATER. Bob and Alice shoot at each other in a warehouse. Alice runs out of bullets, so she backflips over to Bob and stabs him to death with the pin...

Except that's not so good either. Alice is supposed to be the hero, for god's sake. We just saw her kill a man in cold blood. So to make Alice's actions "relatable" we need to travel back and insert more information:

Bob and Alice are happily married. Bob gives Alice an antique hairpin. "For luck he says..." Except all is not well. When Alice inherits a fortune from her Aunt, she comes home and finds Bob screwing the maid. Bob poisons Alice before she can divorce him, but Alice crawls away and survives by hiding in the sewers...

Except we still need to account for the ten years that pass between Bob's abortive homicide and Alice's well-deserved vengeance. We have to travel back again... maybe Alice kills Bob after two weeks... but how does mild-mannered Alice gain her ninja-like killing skills? So we travel back again, and again, and again, until we're so goddamned burned out on time traveling that we want to smash the machine to smithereens with a crowbar... but, the resulting story unfolds like a seamless, elegant chain of events to the ordinary reader, who reads the tale with virgin eyes, blissfully unaware of all the work it took to bang the story out.

Perhaps there are savants who can create brilliantly causal narratives with effortless ease, but the sad truth is that most writers just aren't that good. So we have to write out clumsy sentences and continually travel back in time to make sure that the events unfold in a graceful, unbroken chain.