By odd
coincidence, this is post 404.
There’s an
old development saying you’ve probably heard—let’s throw it at the wall and see
what sticks. The premise here is that if we use every single idea we have,
surely the good ones will do something to get noticed. They’ll stick to the wall or rise to the top
or... something.
The
unwritten part of this premise is that you’ll also end up with a serious
mess. Yeah, my two or three good ideas stuck to the wall, but look at all the crap piled up on the floor under them.
Hell, look at the wall itself. It’s all
stained and smeared and streaked. This
isn’t a clean-up situation, it’s a straight repaint. I can say with confidence that we're not
getting our security deposit back.
With all that in mind, I’d like
to tell you the story of Phoebe McProtagonist...
Phoebe
struggled through life from an early age, born ten months premature on the same
day her father died in the Middle East, one week before his two-year tour
ended. Overwhelmed with grief, her
mother committed suicide during the birth.
Phoebe’s years as an orphan in child protective services left her hard
and jaded, and she never had a single role model—growing up without parents,
foster parents, inspiring teachers, sports heroes, pop icons, internet stars, or
even a giving tree.
In high
school, Phoebe struggled with drug addiction, alcohol addiction, adrenaline
addiction, video game addiction, sex addiction, a hoarding problem, OCD,
Tourette’s syndrome, and extreme boredom because she wasn’t being challenged
(no inspiring teachers, remember). She got pregnant three times on prom night,
couldn’t get any abortions because she lived in a red state, then suffered four
miscarriages from drinking lead-tainted Jaegerbombs after graduation.
(alcohol
addiction, remember?)
Determined
to honor the memory of her unborn children, Phoebe withdrew from society and
home-grad-schooled herself, eventually receiving magna cum laude, perfect
attendance, and a triple doctorate in music theory, film criticism, and genetic
engineering. Thus armed, she applied to
be an astronaut and, after months of rigorous testing, was finally accepted
into the astronaut training program by those goddamned f@¢%!#g bastards at NASA.
(Tourette’s,
remember?)
But when
the rest of her team was killed in a launchpad fire that also burned down her
house, Phoebe took time off to sort out
her life. She sorted it out, got her
groove back, got her ducks in a row, realized what’s important, and was struck
by lightning walking along the beach. As
she sprawled on the shore, feeling a moment of divine bliss and agony as all the hair on her body burned away, giant mutant fiddler crabs came out of the ocean, the product of
unregulated industrial waste dumping—
(red state,
remember? See how it all ties together? That’s what good literature does!)
—and dragged her away into the water. In her final moments, the race between drowning and
being eaten alive by the mutant crabs, she realized the single secret to clean
energy, FTL travel, and how to make the perfect 7&7. But there was no one to tell before she died,
because she walked the beach alone.
~The End~
Okay, that
was maybe a little bit over the top, but you might be surprised how common this
kind of storytelling is. I saw it in
writers’ groups in college (part of the reason I don’t belong to such groups
anymore) and countless times when I used to read for screenplay contests. You wouldn’t believe the number of dramatic
stories that are just brimming with excess plot devices and story threads. Hell, I freely admit some of the early drafts of The
Suffering Map were the same way.
This
springs from a common misconception--that writing a bunch of plot points and character elements is the same thing as writing a story.
The logic is that if I load up my story with every possible dramatic
idea for every single character, one of them’s bound to hit the target,
right? And then, eventually, the story
will be dramatic. Plus, adversity builds
character, therefore it stands to reason all this extra adversity in my story will make for fantastic
characters.
I mean, Phoebe
comes across a great character, right...?
Simple
truth is, this is all just excessive. If I’m doing this, I’m wasting ideas and wasting words, using thirty or forty examples instead of just three good ones. It’s the kind of thing
that tells a reader I was more interested in creating art than I was
in telling any kind of decent story.
Of course,
in all fairness, it’s not just the artsy literature types who do this, although
I must admit, they seem to be the most common offenders. We’ve all read (or seen) the action story
where every punch draws blood, every car chase ends with an explosion, and
every leap rattles bones. Plus every
character had a snappy one-liner to toss out (or at least think about) before,
during, and after offing one of the villains. And there were lots and lots of villains...
Then
there’s the sci-fi stories that have vast interstellar conflicts and near-magical
technology and unstoppable cyborg monsters and omnipotent, cosmic beings
and sacred orbs Seriously,
reading contest scripts I was so sick of orbs.
I came to loathe the word. Know
what else? Nobody in bad fantasy ever
has eyes, they all have orbs.
Friggin’
orbs.
And sooooo
many horror story that have cubic yards of blood and gore everywhere. Plus there’s a little chalk-skinned child who
moves in high-speed “shaky vision.” And
a secret psychopath. And one person who snaps
and gets dozens of people killed because they opened a door or invited something
in or played with the puzzle box.
It’s been almost
thirty years, people. Thirty. Years.
Haven’t you figured this out yet?
Nothing good comes from opening the damned puzzle box! Even my mom knows this!
Y’see,
Timmy, whatever my chosen genre is, just loading a bucket up with plot elements
and flinging them at the wall does not create a story. It’s the opposite of writing in just about
every way possible. No, not even if I
only consider the leftover stuff. As I mentioned above, all those other ideas
are still going to leave stains and streaks, no matter how solid the good stuff
is.
Take that
as you will.
Next week I’ll
talk a bit more about cons, and I might talk about excessive stuff a little
more, too.
Until then,
go write.
Oh, the blog looks different now! I'll say this design is better. :)
ReplyDeleteI know this is not exactly your point, but as I read Phoebe's backstory, I couldn't help thinking of comic books. You know, any A- or B-list character in the Marvel or DC universes has now what amounts to a whole library of backstory. *Everything* has happened to *everyone*, more than once, even. The "retcon" and the artificial division between canon and non-canon continuities have made a mess of every character's personality and it looks like there are no truly exclusive defining traits.
Comic readers must be much, MUCH more forgiving than the rest of us. Maybe because when a story arc has been developing for years, in an episodic form, it becomes some kind of background blur against which any new developments can happen. But still. Pepole nitpick over very minor inconsistencies in the *Star Wars* movies as if they were capital sins, while comics are seemingly made of inconsistency.
When I was in college, I read an essay about *culebrones* (soap operas I guess?). The author said that once a show had been on air for long enough, the romantic encounters, betrayals, secret reveals, etc. tended to multiply and overlap each other as the writers were forced to find interesting interactions for any conceivable pair of characters. This inevitably diluted them, making them less memorable and distinct, and leading the public to lose interest.
If that man had been a comic reader, I guess he would have been even harsher in his appraisal.