wednesday, may 11, 2022 — ramblings of a writer (from the archive of google docs)

Writing is hard. It usually starts with an idea which was spawned from a real event, or concept, or even just an inkling of what could happen if things continue in a certain direction. Us being humans, we’ve decided that the best way to tell a story is with characters that mimic our behavior. If you’re telling a bunch of dogs a story, you’re going to try to tell it using dogs, or at least creatures that a dog can recognize and that mimics a dog’s behavior. Of course, we’re not telling dogs stories, and I find that even when we do, we don’t even attempt to explain it to them using their own language. We’re so self-centered as a species, we haven’t bothered to learn Dog to tell a dog a story from our mundane lives.

The idea soon becomes a story. One less mundane than the ones we tell our dogs, but one we think other people will consider as interesting as we consider our own. Yelling at a woman in a Walmart parking lot is interesting the first four times you tell it, but soon you’re just “that lady” at a cocktail party, and everyone wants you to stop. They get the point. I personally have always aspired to tell stories where no one can ever “get the point,” and not for the reasons I’ve most been criticized for; that my story simply doesn’t have a point. Formulating a storyline is shockingly difficult when all your brain has given you is a vague concept, or worse, a specific story that you want to imitate, but you feel guilty and lazy when it’s too similar. But what are you going to do? I say, become a journalist. Fiction is for creativity, not reporting.

So, let’s say you come up with a basic storyline. Us being humans, we need to fill this story with a set of actions carried out by humans much like us. This is where things get complicated. We’re all such control freaks, we want these characters to do nothing but serve the plot. In fact, professors will use this term very frequently. Every moment in your story should “serve” the plot. Willingly and loyally. I don’t think we give our characters enough appreciation. The most difficult thing to do when you’re writing a believable story (not a realistic one, mind you, but a believable one that keeps the audience engaged and interested, unlike your Walmart story where you just come across as insane by the fifth pass) is to make characters that the audience can engage with. That means making humans… human. The problem with humans is that we’re not all serving just one plot. Of course, everyone would like to think that people just shut off as soon as they’re out of sight, and they’re revived as soon as you need to engage with them, but everyone has their own little plots (side-plots if you’re that self-centered, which we all are) that they’re working hard to move along. Even staleness is a plot that required constant pruning. When a person gets sick of caring for their own little plot monster, they go meddle in someone else’s. Somewhere in this network of meddling and nosing around out of pure desperation for action, comes entertainment. Any story is just a perfect combination of cutting out scenes from certain plot lines when they get stale, and focusing on one that the mighty powers that be (you, the writer) have decided is the most important.

I’m always tempted to just write a single plot. Fuck the B-plot. I know it’s beat five or whatever, but I’m focused on communicating this grand idea which will keep audiences mesmerized for hours after they leave the theater, keep them silent at dinner that night, keep them lying awake at night, have them discussing at dinner parties (even though they swear they’re not that pretentious), and I think we all have dreams to write something like that. I don’t blame you. I want my work in the back of everyone’s mind all the time (because maybe I can crowd-source a “point”). We all seek the balance between quiet simplicity and grand action, a mesmerizing collage of small moments, a dramatic close-up of a blinking eye, to a loud screaming match paired with physical violence that keeps the audience on the edge of their seat. But we often forget about what characters do when we’re done with them. Where does Johnny go when we cut away from him to focus on Maria giving birth in a hot tub in a 2-star motel in New Mexico? He needs a life, too. He needs someone to go home to, or an empty house decorated with self-portraits because he’s just been unable to find anyone he can care about more than himself in the past 50 years of his sad, lonely life.

So if you oversimplify a storyline and don’t give anyone any personality or backstory or create any side quests or keep things dry and simple, people complain. That’s not natural. Life is bustling, messy, complicated, people have shit to do, places to go. Our lead sitting on a motel bed, soaking wet, crying with her premature newborn in her arms for ten minutes is great, but, for a lack of better phrasing, where’s Johnny? When you grow up with the worldbuilding greats like Harry Potter and the MCU, etc., and the idea that anyone can be an activist, and the idea that creativity will save the world, it’s easy to get a little over-ambitious. Things get complicated… and not in a good, human, way. But why are we not allowed to write stories as complicated as people demand from their lives. There’s a lot of criticism being thrown around from an audience we know can’t stand existing for a second without stimulation.

A lot of people I know have been criticised for trying to “tackle too much”. Now that’s a valid complaint. We’re told “write what you know” but then shamed for not being creative enough to come up with original stories, but we’re canceled for trying to write about experiences we have not directly had, but we’re also expected to write maturely, show an instant empathy for any situation, but we’re also called performative if we try to show support or we’re judged for not showing enough support to every issue. Basically what I’m saying is: there’s no winning. So fuck it. Don’t write what you know, write what you want to write.