Many thanks
for your patience. Sorry I missed last
week, but—as suspected—travel stuff kind of overwhelmed me. Texas Frightmare was pretty amazing. If you’re a fan of horror, or any subgenre of
horror, I highly recommend it.
Enough of
that, though. Let’s make some noise.
Actually,
let’s not.
Writer and
writing coach Damon Knight made an interesting observation about how we receive facts as we read. When we come across a
fact that we don’t know, it’s information (I have four different statues
of the Egyptian god Anubis on my desk).
Information is new, and we tend to pay attention to it.
A fact that
we already know, on the other hand, is noise (the sky is blue, candy is
sweet, the KKK is bad). Noise is
annoying. It’s repetitive and distracting. We try to block it out and focus on other
things, because we know listening to noise is a waste of our time.
Let me give
you an example...
I saw the
pilot for a television show a few months back.
Well, most of the pilot. I shut it
off halfway through. Normally I wouldn’t
call out shows or movies for mistakes, but since this one’s already been cancelled, I don’t think it matters. The entire first act of Once Upon A Time
In Wonderland goes back and forth between young Alice adventuring in
Wonderland with her Djinn boyfriend and adult Alice in an insane asylum, where
she’d been for years because she insisted her childhood stories were all
real.
As we kept
going back and forth, the style of storytelling (and, granted, the
whole premise of the show) made it very clear that Alice actually experienced
these things. So the ongoing inquisition
at the asylum became doubly pointless. I
knew they thought she made it up and I also knew it really
happened.
And
information we know is just noise.
What’s
interesting, though, is that as this back and forth continued, a shift happened. The Wonderland sequences became noise,
too. Even though they were giving new
information, it was still couched in the frame of “this really happened.” And I already knew it really happened,
because that was established early on. So
I began to glaze over the entire first act of the show and wondered when the
actual story—something new—was going to begin...
I just
finished a book where everyone in a small village is being affected by mood-altering
technology that are making them dull and listless. The most vibrant people are tired and
apathetic, and even pale from lack of sunlight.
As our young heroine returns home, she keeps observing how everyone is
tired and apathetic and pale. The girl
at the local Quik-E-Mart is tired and apathetic and pale. The clerk at the grocery store is tired and apathetic and pale. The deputy who she confronts about it is
tired and apathetic and pale. And she
comments to her as-yet-unaffected friend about how tired and apathetic and pale
everyone seems to be, and they wonder what’s going on.
And I’m
sure you were skimming a bit at the end there, because there’s only so many times you can see “tired and apathetic and pale” before you start
glossing over it. It’s what I ended up doing.
I have to admit, I skimmed large swaths of the book because it kept
showing me the same things over and over again.
Y'see, Timmy, I need to
be aware of noise not only in my story, but in the way I tell my story. It’s unavoidable that I’ll need to repeat
something every now and then. But this
should be the rare exception, not the standard pattern of my
storytelling.
My story
should always be moving forward. My characters
should be growing and learning and developing.
This is all progressive motion, and it’s what every story needs to
survive.
Because if
my story doesn’t have forward movement, it’s just me sitting there making
noise.
Next time,
I’d like to speak in code for a bit.
Until then,
go write.
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