I actually wrote another Saturday Note for this week, and personally I think it’s quite good (probably better than this one, sadly), but I question the wisdom of writing and publishing something like that, and if there’s the tiniest chance that it could go horribly wrong… well, let’s pass on that.
Anyhow I started the next Wheel of Time and also reviewed the Cassandra Clare “Draco Trilogy” plagiarism debacle thing (for Reasons?). I can’t do a Note about that because I don’t care enough but feel free to go look that up.
And I need to work on my Gunpowder Milkshake review...
---
The Faithful & the Fallen and Predictable Plot
So with Wrath I finally finished The Faithful and the Fallen quartet by John Gwynne. It was good. But something I said in my Book Diary post was that I found the conclusion to be more than a little predictable, but if it wasn’t clear there I want to point out that I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Just because I know some of the story beats on what’s going to happen, that doesn’t mean the story has failed.
There are a bajillion Tumblr posts about this these days because of reactions to popular media, but floating around is a notion among writers of pop cultural media that a good story is one that surprises you. And it is good when a story surprises you, sometimes, but that in and of itself is not good writing.
It’s probably… not great to quote Doug Walker given how crap Channel Awesome turned out to be towards its employees, but I remember his commentary on one of his negative reviews, in which his brother points out that the plot twist he spent a chunk of the review eviscerating, well, it is unexpected, and he certainly didn’t see it coming. To which Doug replied, “I wouldn’t have seen it coming if the movie revealed that the main character’s mother was actually broccoli, but that doesn’t make it good writing.”
I think about that a lot.
In the effort to shock you or get a reaction, sometimes media will do something really dumb. Sometimes it’s characters acting in a way that’s contrary to their natures or common sense. Sometimes it’s a villain pulling something out of his armpit to make everything worse when the story’s about to wrap up. Sometimes it’s a reveal that contradicts everything you’ve been told. It’s not good writing is what I’m getting at, but the decision was made because the story needs something that the audience didn’t predict and that’s what the writers came up with.
The Faithful and the Fallen doesn’t really do that. Not much, anyway. There are some twists, yeah, but the conclusion of the story isn’t far from what you might expect. By the end of the third book, you have a pretty clear idea of where all the characters’ arcs are going to go, and now you’re sticking around to see them get there. And because you’ve spent all this time with them, you want to see it happen.
Basically, if you care about the characters, if you’ve been following their stories, and you’ve been paying attention to the overall story, then you know where it’s going. You don’t know how it’s going to get there, but you have the general idea. When you finally reach the end of their stories, it feels like a reward. And I’m not saying that every story or character arc needs to feel like that; there’s something to be said about character arcs that end in non-standard ways. But that should not become a new standard. You shouldn’t just twist out of satisfying endings when they don’t make sense because you absolutely MUST make sure your audience doesn’t know what happens in the end.
[The biggest twist, as I said in the Book Diary post, is that Lykos lasts as long as he does. Honestly, he’s a character that outstayed his welcome and continues to be a pain in the butt. I get that it’s probably the point of his character, that the author wanted to create this absolutely detestable villain, but I just found him annoying and I couldn’t quite figure out how he wasn’t dead two books ago.]
Maybe the story could have done with more twists in it. The only really big one to the Plot happens at the end of the third book, and while it’s a big character moment for our hero, it’s not actually that much of a game-changer in terms of Plot, and I can’t help but wonder if the story would have done better without it.
If a story does insist on surprising you, it shouldn’t necessarily be with a plot twist. You can very easily surprise the audience by playing with the expected tropes; that way you’re not actually changing something in the Plot, you’re just showing a different perspective that isn’t what you usually get. The opening to the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes to mind. It doesn’t rewrite Plot or undo any character development for it to work. That one has the advantage of being the first scene of the series so it can’t really overwrite anything that came before (except the movie, I guess?). But it’s something that sets the tone for the series and your expectations without derailing the story.
I don’t want to know how every story ends. But I like being able to read serieses and thinking to myself about what the characters’ actions mean, about how they relate to the Plot, and about how it all comes together, and then feel as if my thinking actually had merit, whether I was right or wrong. I want my thoughts on the story to actually have some weight, and not be something jerked around for the author’s fun. And it should certainly feel like the author’s been traveling down a planned road by the time we reach the ending.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment