how to tell a story #3
Can quantifying the attributes of a TV show tell us something about its quality? I reckon some of the flaws in House of the Dragon would be reflected in statistics like amount of dialogue per minute and number of decisions made per character. A non-negligible amount of time is spent on dramatic montages and orchestral music that create a moody atmosphere and remind us of how serious the situation is. This comes at the cost of time that could be spent on actual situations and actual drama, or at least character development that would contribute to future drama.
These two elements – dialogue and decision-making – each give us an independent perspective into a character, but their combination is especially powerful because it gives us a third angle: insight into what a character is thinking, including what they are thinking unconsciously. From this we get what might be the critical ingredient of great story-telling: three-dimensional characters.
My qualm with shows like House of the Dragon is that their plot feels designed and implemented. I sense the presence of writers and their attempts to show me what’s happening and persuade me that it makes sense. I can’t get lost in the fictional world as if it were a real one because I see the pencil marks from when it was sketched out. My suspension of disbelief never takes off. One might say, Well, yeah, all fictional plots are prescribed. But they’re not, and writers like Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy have
attested to itwhere do ideas come from?
Plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible.
The plot isn’t yours to invent. It’s yours to discover:
My basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow, and to transcribe them of course…I believe stories are found things, like fossils in the ground…Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use [their] tools…to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.
Other prolific writers agree. David Lynch fishes his ideas out of the depths of his subconscious:
Ideas are like fish. You don’t make the fish, you catch the fish.
Or in the words of Cormac McCarthy:
Writing is like taking dictation.
On this topic, Karl Pilkington echoes both McCarthy and King:
If you just talk, I find that your mouth…comes out with stuff.
If you sit there and try and use your brain to do it, it doesn’t work the same. Just – just keep talking, just keep your – keep your – keep your mouth talking…and eventually, it will come out with something pretty good.
If what these accomplished men say is true and we don’t come up with our own ideas…
who does?.
In great shows like The Sopranos, plot is not implemented, it’s incubated. The show feels to me like it’s happening spontaneously, developing by itself as a sequence of events, reactions, and actions. In every episode there is constant dialogue between characters and a steady supply of situations that require characters to make decisions. And much of the time, these have nothing to do with plot. Every season has at least one major narrative arc, but the dependence is flipped. Episodes don’t depend on an overarching plot for their meaning. Episodes generate the plot. Characters are agents, not passengers. I don’t feel like the writers are leading me to the plot’s predetermined destination. In fact I don’t feel their presence at all. I feel like I’m
witnessing somethinghow to tell a story
(This is an edited excerpt from my piece The Virtual Book.)
Decades ago, The New Yorker and other magazines experimented with the journalistic form by introducing literary techniques into it. Writers aspired not just to document scenes but to recreate them for readers to witness. Though some writers criticized this practice for warping truth through interpretation, other writers flourished in it. Tom Wolfe, a practitioner and evangelist of the method, compiled exemplary articles in his book The New Journalism. According to Wolfe, using techniques of literary realism was like
adding electricityinto the otherwise mechanical machine of journalism. By using dialogue,
point of view, and symbolism, writers could achieve “absolute involvement of the reader”.
The anthology includes a passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s nonfiction novel on the Hell’s Angels, which he wrote after a year of living with them. Thompson depicts a tense confrontation between the Angels and the locals of Bass Lake, the gang’s preferred destination for their Labor Day tradition of binge-drinking and mayhem-making.
“If you play straight with us, Sonny, we’ll play straight with you. We don’t want any trouble and we know you guys have as much right to camp on this lake as anybody else. But the minute you cause trouble for us or anyone else, we’re gonna come down on you hard, it’s gonna be powder valley for your whole gang.”
On the day, Thompson’s newspaper editor requested “no more than an arty variation of the standard wire-service news blurb: Who, What, When, Where, and Why.” But in his book Thompson gives us much more. He doesn’t report the events in the cold, detached voice of the typical journalist observing from the sidelines. Nor does he simply list the facts and state the outcome. He recounts, in first person, the experience of being caught in a stand-off between outlaws known for their brutality and a makeshift militia of locals determined to defend their town:
“The first one of these sonsofbitches that gives me any lip I’m gonna shoot right in the belly. That’s the only language they understand.”
The reader leaves not with memorizable facts, but a secondhand experience based on Thompson’s point of view:
I was standing in the midst of about a hundred vigilantes…as I looked around I saw that many carried wooden clubs and others had hunting knives on their belts. They didn’t seem mean, but they were obviously keyed up and ready to bust some heads…under these circumstances the only neutrals were the tourists, who were easily identifiable. On my way out of town I wondered if anybody in Bass Lake might take one of my aspen-leaf checks for a fluorescent Hawaiian beach suit and some stylish sandals.
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