How Simple Can It Get?

I’ve been reading a lot of e-books recently. I don’t mean books that have been ported to the electronic format. I mean books that were never in hardcopy to being with. These are written by a new class of writers. I’m talking about the self-published, the quick-to-embrace-new-technology, the guys who write and upload and repeat. 

What’s remarkable is how simple these stories are. We’re restricted to a handful of characters, only the barest of descriptions, context-setting as an afterthought, and just enough dialogue to get the ball rolling. These writers have a style, and it’s very pure. They’re like those guitar-bass-drum power trios that really crank it out. You listen to them, and you think – it’s not that hard. It rocks. 

One such hallmark of this story telling style is its immediacy. The authors jump right into their tale. There’s no boring exposition. There’s no obligatory family-scene-before-the-massacre. They just go right to the massacre. I found it a little jarring, at first, but then, I found myself appreciating it. 

At this point, aren’t we all a little jaded? Even in today’s age of cross-genres and combo-pack stories, pretty much every reader beyond grade school knows what to expect. A thriller starts with a sensitive, heart-warming portrait of that person most close to the hero’s heart. Your first thought: that person’s doomed. Then you have to keep reading until the inevitable moment. It’s painful for the character, but worse, it’s boring for you. These e-books, like they’re excising a sore, simply cut that out.

And the plot lines are so simple. I’ve read a few e-books recently that had almost no plot at all, other than the hero-villain conflict. I suppose Hollywood has done that to all of us. Their compressed story format has dramatically shortened both our attention span and their linear range. Depending on who you talk to, this plot simplification either distills the story to its purest essential elements, or dumbs it down to its lowest common denominators.

          I’m also surprised at the characters. They’re so familiar. Regular guys working regular jobs, they’re thrown into extraordinary situations. They’re fighting space aliens, taking on the Mob, romancing the beauties, and saving the day. But they're just normal people! It used to be that the Everyman was unusual. Now, everyone’s an Everyman. Are there no more exceptional characters, or have they simply returned to their neverland of make-believe?

Character Development. Really?

They’re lying to you. Every book you’ve ever read, every teacher you’ve ever had, every workshop you’ve ever attended – they all tell you the same thing. Character Development Is Critical.

They tell you that a character can’t occupy the same space at the end of the story that they did at the beginning. The character has to undergo some type of ordeal or feel some kind of experience. They have to adjust, to see the world in a new way, to appreciate their new place in it. What’s more, the entire story must be subservient to this personal odyssey.

They call it Character Arc – and it is SO IMPORTANT.

Oh, please. If a character’s development is so critical, then why do so many great characters never develop at all?

Dirty Harry and his .44 Magnum blasted their way through five movies spanning seventeen years, and it’s debatable which one developed more.

James Bond, Jack Bauer, Batman – the same thing over and over and over. Even their names are similar.

Those crazy women on Desperate Housewives are still crazy, even after eight seasons. But we love them, because in their own soap-operatic way, they seem real to us. In fact, the more they resist learning from their mistakes, the more real they seem.

No villain, in the whole long history of story telling, has ever changed their stripes. And the villain is the most interesting character!

Character development is overrated. You know whose character I’m most concerned with? Mine. I want it to be in a different space when the story’s over. That’s it. If I can relate to a character and track my development with theirs, all the better. But it’s not an end in itself; it’s just a means to an end.

Writing By Scenes

They say you want to construct a story starting with the characters. Each character has their own agenda, and the inherent conflict between these competing agendas drives the story. Hence, each scene is a vehicle for expressing the unfolding conflict between these characters.

But what if you invert that dynamic? Instead of crafting scenes around the characters, what if you craft the characters around the scenes? Let’s say you’re dying to write a scene around some really, really emotionally charged moment – love at first sight, a death in the family, a chest bursting with pride, a crushing disappointment – but you can’t put it in context. Do you wing it? Do you hope you can put the characters together as you go along?

Of course not! You create characters around the scene. Does that sound odd to you? Maybe. On the other hand, consider that almost all your interactions with people ITRW (In The Real World) consist of scenes. 99% of the time, these interactions go off as expected. But the last 1% -- that’s where you need to focus. That’s where a person’s life hits its turning point, where its ship comes in, or where it goes off the rails. Think about a romantic advance accepted or spurned, a violent confrontation with long-term consequences, or a pitch for salvation taken to the next level. Like Bud Fox said, life comes down to a few moments. Why not make the best of them?

If a character’s life is really created from only a small subset of scenes, why bother with the character backstory at all? Just start with the scenes, and work from there.

Those old Quentin Tarentino movies were great for channel surfing because of their non-linear scene sequencing. Remember how Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction jumped all over the place? It was a little disorienting at first, but you got used to it. It wasn’t until later, when you saw them on late night cable T.V. that you realized how brilliant they were. Every single scene stood on its own. Since your attention span was so short by then, you were happy to see one before you moved on.

I loved the first Harry Potter novel for the same reason. It was sooooo structured. Every single chapter told its own story, even as it drove the overall plot of the book. That’s what was so great about it. Every chapter could be consumed in the amount of time it took to get the little one ready for bed. The next night, you would have a new one ready to go.

Back in the day, serialized comic books gave you that feeling. Then that self-contained episodic movement morphed into T.V. shows, like those serials that let you miss an episode or two without completely losing track of the main story.

Who was Alberto Giacometti?

The artist creates. The conduct of creative expression can be normalized along a bell curve. At the end of one tail, you have meticulous planning which adheres to a strict regimen of checks and balances. An example of this kind of artist would be Norman Rockwell. For every painting, he created a ridiculous amount of preparatory work. Everything was soooo structured. Nothing was left to chance.

At the far end of the other tail, you have Alberto Giacometti. He was a mid-twentieth century visual artist best known for his pared-down sculptures and hacked-at portraits. Unlike Mr. Rockwell, he approached his work with brutal directness. His was an immediate attack rapidly followed by a furious layering of applications, one on top of the other, until he reached a palimpsest of expression. No preparation was necessary. Every piece was an existential journey.

When a person entered his studio to sit for a portrait, he was often faced with the realization that there was no end in site. Mr. Giacometti would brush and hack at the canvas for hours, days, and weeks, applying brush stroke after brush stroke. It was not uncommon for these marathons to end only when the gallery owner would send his delivery men to collect the canvas for the show. Often, the painting would go up on the gallery walls still wet. The finished state was irrelevant. Each piece was a journey to the heart of his subject matter.

For sure, such an approach required tremendous chutzpah, overwhelming technique, and a truly twisted perspective. The upside was that he probably never had a “blank canvas” moment. The downside was that he may have hated everything he painted.

Think of fiction as a painting. You have a blank page, and you have a subject. Let’s say you’re subject is Aunt Petunia. You start with a rough description of her – size, weight, age, identifying characteristics, and so on. Then you layer on some background material – her upbringing, friends, family, occupations, and all that. As you proceeded, you would conjecture about her mindset, decisions, and everything else. Before you know it, the line between her existence and your perception would blur completely.

That’s the Giacometti approach. As long as it’s all internally consistent, it should be okay. But, the consistency – that’s the rub. Without consistency, it’s just a great big mess.