Aunts and Gunpersons, Disruptors and Disruptions

What Raymond Chandler and P G Wodehouse both knew about building a story, and why it helps writers now.

Famously, Raymond Chandler said in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’* that in writing for the pulps, ‘if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand’ - though it should be said that in his novels and stories, door-opening, gun-toting girls - blonde or otherwise - are an equally regular feature.

[ETA 29th March 2025 to add the reference]: More recently, Sue Gee has recalled novelist Eva Ibbotson saying that when she got stuck, she often introduced an aunt.

This, inevitably, made me think of P G Wodehouse* and his Bertie Wooster, whose harmless, hedonistic life is routinely disrupted by the demands of Aunt Agatha - ‘my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon’** - and Aunt Dahlia, ‘my good and kindly aunt’, who Bertie always wants to help. More generally, googling ‘aunts in fiction’ truffles out some excellent round-ups including this one, which name-checks aunts from Jane Eyre to James and the Giant Peach.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

And yet, as Quote Investigator notes***, Chandler wasn’t presenting his comment as advice for good writing, but advice for churning out stories to put bread on the table, when the journalist’s ‘don’t get it right, get it written’ trumps most other considerations. It’s certainly true that Chandler afficionados like me agree that even in his greatest books some of his less coherent plot points involve such a gunperson. But there’s clearly something going on here.

What on earth do Aunt March, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and assorted hardboiled, gun-toting baddies have in common?

Very often, when I’m helping writers with developing an idea and beginning a story, we’ll start from an individual main character. Since humans will trundle along the same predictable path unless they’re given reasons to change direction, to create a story not just a portrait, the writer has to come up with causes for the protagonist to change their actions - and change is the motor of fiction.

The thing about aunts is that they’re part of the family system but they’re not mothers. As Colm Tóibín points out in his brilliant essay ‘The Importants of Aunts’, ‘Mothers get in the way in fiction: they take up space that is better occupied by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality’. Whereas aunts, like mothers, may be good or bad, neglectful or controlling, stern adoptive parent or madcap almost-a-sister, but as quasi-mothers they are more versatile tools for the novelist: they can appear and disappear, arrive and depart, may give up on you and can be given up on, but they’re family so they can’t be ignored.

Of course, the thing about a person appearing with a gun is also that they can’t be ignored: your character has, perforce, a relationship with them, whether it’s slavish obedience, insane defiance, or low cunning and the biding of time. And in a society like Philip Marlowe’s United States, which is increasingly urban but has nonetheless been persuaded to go on buying guns, a quite peripheral element in the plot can become potentially lethal.

Some of the classic story-arcs are, essentially, predictable: forseeable in the overall shape if not the details. Frodo meets a series of obstacles which he overcomes with guile, but the ultimate goal of his journey doesn’t change; Elizabeth Bennet has the same problem - achieving an independent, solvent future - all through the book (and two, crucial aunts feature here, too).

The usefulness of an aunt or a gunperson walking through the door is that they need not have been foreseen by the character, the reader or the writer, to be something that has to be coped with. They can disrupt even the path-full-of-obstacles which reader and therefore writer thought we could all foresee, and set up a whole new drive for what-will-happen-next.

This, of course, can be super-useful even if you’re not a jaded, hung-over Chandler, in giving the writer’s brain something self-contained and practical to chew on, with the bonus that new story-avenues and details are likely to emerge. It’s perhaps the plot-equivalent of a poet putting a right-but-awkward word into a poem, so their word-finding engines have to jump the boring tracks of normal meaning, to come up with full- and half-rhymes. It’s bringing the spontaneity of writer’s yoga practices, into the creative process of the novel itself.

But it’s not enough just to make someone unexpected turn up on the doorstep or the telephone.

A surprise is just a surprise, just as a twist is only a twist: they don’t turn a dull or implausible story into a vivid and convincing one. So how do you make sure that the new element you’ve just come up with ends up feeling like an organic part of the whole?

Even if you do suprise yourself with the gunperson’s entrance, you’ll obviously then need to do some back-thinking, if not back-writing: for the story to be coherent, their appearance needs to be a believable outcome of the situation up to this point and, crucially, have a place in the causes and results which follow.

As Colm Tóibín says further on in that essay,

A novel is a pattern … a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled and given shape. Characters in fiction are determined by the pattern, and they determine the pattern in turn.

Readers sense when an element of the story is not earning its keep by playing a full part in the pattern.

And readers sense, too, if the pressure and the result of the pressure are not part of that overall pattern, or (as with other kinds of over- or under-writing) not in proportion to each other. If your disrupting aunt, gun or other unforeseen but plausible entity does their thing and then just vanishes from the story, readers won’t feel as satisfied as if the pressure is properly coped with, and the event has knock-on effects: the gunman may vanish but their existence, however brief, turns out to be a crucial clue; the aunt may be seen off, but what if she tells the protagonist’s parent?

For example, Aunt Agatha is iconic in the Jeeves and Wooster cast, but she largely figures in the short stories, not the novels. I think Wodehouse’s plot genius knew that Bertie’s abject terror of her forceful and bullying personality isn’t enough to support the longer structure: when, thanks to Jeeves, Aunt Agatha is bested and has to shut up and retreat, Bertie’s return to an absence of fear is only a negative kind of happy ending. It’s fine for a short, but the stakes just aren’t substantial enough for a novel.

Whereas, if Bertie’s love for Aunt Dahlia isn’t enough to get him risking arrest and ignominy, then the threat to ban him from dining on the peerless Anatole’s cooking always works: he has something concrete to gain from risking everything for his aunt. This double pressure, in opposite directions, hugely raises the stakes, and can support a whole novel’s worth of fortunately-unfortunately reversals.

What if neither an aunt nor a gunperson are suitable for your story?

What you need is a disruptor who works in a similar way:

• their action is not foreseeable within the viewpoint characters’ and reader’s current boundaries

• with hindsight their action is plausible (as my reverse Chekhov rule suggests****)

• the way that your character acts in response is proportionate to the stimulus of the gunperson’s or the aunt’s demand

• this encounter raises the stakes on both sides: thanks to what the gunperson/aunt does, what your character might lose and what they might win both get more urgent and important.

• this incident gets resolved in a way which fits into the larger pattern of the novel: the threat doesn’t just evaporate but is actually dealt with, at least for this book.

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*It has always tickled me that Wodehouse and Chandler, whose fiction is so amazingly different, were near-contemporaries at Dulwich College. And yet are they so different? Both are wonderful builders of plots and peerless constructors of sentences: it couldn’t be that public school (AmEng = private school) obsession with Latin and Greek, could it? If Wodehouse is pure, golden escapism that floats above the often horrible history of the 20th Century, Chandler’s ‘mean streets’ stories work because it is Philip Marlowe who walks down them: ‘a man […] who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.’ That’s escapism, I’d argue, of an even higher order.

**This trope appears elsewhere in the stories as ‘the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth’, and a couple of other variants.

***Quote Investigator also notes that this line appears in the version of the essay which appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1950, but not a 1944 version in The Atlantic Monthly, and in collections of his short essays it varies which version is reprinted.

**** The key passage from that link: ‘Chekhov said that you should only have a gun on the wall in Act One if it’s going to be fired in Act Three; Reverse-Chekhov states that if you need a gun to be fired in Act Three, you should make sure it’s on the wall in Act One.’