The Kudzu Plot

I am off of Tumblr for Lent, so everything that you see posted there throughout the next few weeks is pre-queued, or possibly an imposter. I am also cutting back on TV, so presently not watching any shows. I did just finish an obscenely long YouTube video about BIONICLE, which in part inspired this Note. And I’m reading Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment!

I’ve talked about “Aragorn’s Tax Policy” before, but here’s a good post about it by someone smarter than me. People are also still crying over the canceled Ben Solo movie from Lucasfilm, which still makes no sense to me.

Oh, and I have a new laptop!  So far, so good, but it’s still going through the setup phase.

The Kudzu Plot

Sometimes, writers just need to stop.

When James Rigney, Jr. (better known by his pen name, Robert Jordan) pitched Wheel of Time to his publisher, he said it would be a trilogy. The publisher didn’t believe him, and told him to sell it as six books, despite Rigney’s insistence.

Rigney wrote eleven Wheel of Time books. Twelve if we count the prequels.

It didn’t need that many books. The fanbase was torn about how much padding the series got. Basically, the author kept introducing characters and subplots, which ended up somehow creating more subplots and characters, and instead of moving forward, things would just keep happening to all of these new people and places we didn’t care about to begin with. You’d be forgiven for forgetting that there was a big apocalyptic battle that was supposed to be incoming.

This is more of a recurring problem in the world of fiction than you’d think.

Look, there are stories in which writers give you dozens of characters inhabiting a massive world, and that’s fantastic. And I get that writers are attached to the worlds they’ve built, and the characters they’ve created, and wanton to explore so many of them that they get sidetracked. But man, I cannot be made to care about every little thing that goes on in the fictional universe you’ve shaped. I just can’t.

A lot of fictional universes lose popularity because writers just could not rein it in. I was thinking about this topic because of BIONICLE. Towards its end, the main writer for the toy line, Greg Farshtey wrote, along with the main books and comics, several web serials, mostly featuring characters that the story was no longer focusing on. The fact was that BIONICLE, being a toy line, had to keep producing and promoting new sets, so often characters from previous storylines were left by the wayside. The web serials provided a good way to keep fans updated on their favorites. However, these serials soon spun out of control, with long, complex subplots that often ended up going nowhere, even before BIONICLE got canceled. 

Yeah, everything was connected, sure, and as a fan, it’s certainly cool to see where your favorite, non-main characters are. It’s great to see that the writers haven’t forgotten about them. And it’s rewarding if you can see the little side stories and have the realizations of how everything lines up from the big picture.

But guys! This is not practical! You cannot keep producing heaps of new storyline, if you can’t just finish what you’ve already started talking about in the first place! 

The problem is that you often get lost in it all! You’re wasting time telling us things that aren’t ultimately that important to the overall story. Sometimes, you’ll lose sight of what the actual story was about. Game of Thrones was famously about feuding kingdoms, yes, at the same time a massive threat that most of the characters didn’t know about (the White Walkers north of the Wall) was on the way. When the final season aired, famously, the show had gotten so invested in everything but the main Plot (the White Walkers) that they got dealt with in an episode and then rushed to an ending that no one liked.

And even worse, your audience will stop caring. The reason a lot of people gave up on Wheel of Time and BIONICLE was because the Plot had become way too complex for them to follow, and because so much of that was essentially fluff, they saw no reason to care. Yeah, okay, this character is secretly a spy for the good guys–but he gets killed before it amounts to anything, so how do I know that you won’t do that with other ongoing Plots? And so why should I care if you’re going to unceremoniously drop characters and subplots for quick drama? Because there’s no way you’re going to make all of those subplots resolve in a way that seems worth following every Plot thread.

You cannot keep spiraling out subplots like fractals. You’re going to give everyone a headache, including yourself. You’ve got to cut some stuff out. If you find yourself getting too bogged down, tell yourself you need to stop.

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