I’m not 100% sure where I’m going with this, but please bear with me. I think there’s a writing thing at the heart of what’s in my head – the heart of what’s in my head. Going out on a limb, shouldering the responsibility… I’m chancing my arm, trying my hand and burning my fingers.

Anyway.

This line was put back in my head last week: “Why look for the way out when you know the way in?” It’s from an episode of The New Avengers by Terence Feely and Brian Clemens, which means I’ve had that line lurking around my noggin’ since 1977.

The context is that baddies are trapping people in a maze — look, it was the 1970s — and the only one who survives is the one who just waits where he was put in.

I think sometimes you and I — okay, maybe I’m projecting, maybe this is just me — look for ways out for our characters in our plots when really the answer is to leave them right there.

For some reason, I keep coming back to a moment decades ago where two people were telling me about their mobile phones. They recounted how they had sat side by side in a car and phoned each other, and then consequently found there was no sound difference compared to when they were phoning across town.

They thought that mobile or cellphones were site-to-site, that they worked like walkie-talkies and so there should be better reception when close up. I won’t fault anyone for not knowing how something works, and if I know that the signal from one mobile went to the nearest cell tower and then to the other phone, that’s about all I do know.

But they had gone to some thought constructing this little experiment in the car and comparing it to previous results. And they had no possible way of being right, because they had fundamentally not understood what they were trying to test.

I think of this when I have a character in a situation and the clear answer is to get then out of there and onto the next thing in the story. But not only might it be better to have them stayed locked up, or delayed, or whatever it is, maybe I am fundamentally failing to understand what my own story is about.