some of my evaluative patterns
The first 28
added 2008.0127
| 2 |
Similarly, comics should have good art. If not for the
great art in Age of Bronze and
Murena, I would have little
reason to read them — after all, Homer and Gibbon are still
in print. There are, of course, all kinds of good art; though I
generally prefer comics with very realistic and detailed art, I
certainly wouldn't want to see Zot!
in any other style.
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| 3 |
And it probably comes as no surprise that I think films should
be beautiful to look at. Note that there are all kinds of
beauty! I don't just mean pretty landscapes, though the landscapes
in Calendar played a big part in
making it my second-favorite Egoyan film; on the contrary, the
dystopian scenes in Winged Migration
impressed me just as much as the more conventionally beautiful ones.
But it's like my point about comics above: I enjoyed Kurosawa's
Ran and
Yojimbo largely for the beauty of those films. If those
films had been ugly, well, Shakespeare and Hammett are still in
print, so...
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| 5 |
But let's move beyond the surface. Non-fiction, in particular,
must have a clear structure. The whole point of non-fiction,
I would argue, is to organize information and thereby aid
the reader in understanding it. Rambling books such as
1491,
Salt, and Mathematics for the
Nonmathematician may be full of interesting data, but
without a framework for it, not much tends to stick.
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| 6 |
Non-fiction also tends to fall into the trap of failing to
communicate with the reader. All too many writers, especially
in academia, act as if they are
programmers in 1980 trying to fit an entire videogame into 4K.
Write to communicate; don't just densely encode information
for storage. It's hard to escape the feeling that these
writers are trying to convince the reader that they're smart.
But a good non-fiction book, such as
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,
makes the reader feel smart.
The Ancient Engineers did a decent job of this;
The Pleasures of Counting, not
so much.
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| 7 |
And just as non-fiction writers often need to unpack things for
the reader, narrative writers must resist the temptation to
summarize. It's one of the most basic rules: show, don't
tell. Pacific Edge is a
major offender here: "Alfredo defended himself bitterly. The
other council members pitched in with their opinions." So is
Stories of Your Life and Others:
"Instead of sympathy, what Neil got from Sarah's parents was
blame for her death." Dream Children
, An Army of Angels,
First Kyu... be concrete!
Abstraction is fatal.
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| 8 |
Writers of narrative have much more structural freedom than
their colleagues in the non-fiction world. It is wonderful to
think you're watching story X and then discover you're watching
story Q; The Shawshank Redemption
is an inexplicably popular example of this, while
Zodiac has impressed a lot of the
Internet movie geeks in this regard. The
Prestige does it so well that Roger Ebert's head exploded.
Even a crazy left turn at the end can be a real treat, as
AI and
25th Hour demonstrated.
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| 9 |
However, twists only work if you have some investment in the
story being twisted. (Spoilers for The Matrix and
Atonement follow.) The Matrix
fails because the revelation that the world isn't real is no
big shock — the world didn't feel real in the first place.
Atonement fails because the
revelation that the last ten minutes of the movie weren't real
is no big shock — the audience hasn't even had a chance to
register those last ten minutes at the point that they're suddenly
invalidated.
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| 11 |
One trick I see less often is the creation of a false ceiling.
False ceilings are risky, but among the most rewarding tricks
a narrative can achieve when successful.
Mulholland Dr. and Pleasantville
both featured characters who seemed to have a very narrow
emotional range, making it very powerful when those characters
escaped that range. Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind took even more of a gamble, seeming at
first to be a bad film until vindicating those wince-provoking
initial scenes with the revelation that, yes, they were on
purpose.
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| 12 |
Related to the idea of the false ceiling is a phenomenon I have
termed "redemption of the ludicrous." The redemption of the
ludicrous is wonderful. It involves revisiting a work that
is either for children or just plain not very good and turning
it into a respectable work for adults.
Ed Wood gave resonance to some of the worst movies
in the world by showing how they fit into the context of the
lives of those involved; New X-Men
turned formulaic adventure stories for children and
melodrama for outcast teenagers into hip science fiction for
intelligent adults; Zot! is
interesting in that instead of revisiting someone else's text,
it simply grew up over the course of the seven years it
ran. Very cool. A counterexample is
The Incredibles, whose politics are far more ludicrous
than the superhero comics it seeks to mock instead of redeem.
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| 13 |
A mild form of the story-X-story-Q phenomenon I mentioned above
is genre blending. The most basic version of this is a blend of
comedy and tragedy. Comedy and tragedy can and should coexist,
as they do in, for instance, The Tragedy of
Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins
and White Noise. Life, after all,
is pretty funny from moment to moment but then heartbreaking when
you step back and look at the big picture.
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| 15 |
All of those works can be classed as science fiction. However,
even "literary" science fiction rarely qualifies as literature,
because it treats characters as sets of traits rather than as
fully realized human beings with unique life stories.
The Demolished Man,
Pacific Edge,
Quicksilver, and Stranger in a
Strange Land are all examples of supposedly superior SF
populated by types rather than by people.
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| 16 |
Of course, most SF doesn't even aim to be literature. Few books
of any kind do. Some even aim to deconstruct the very notion of
literature as anything more than the freeplay of signs or some such
crap. These are the worst. Aim to fail, and you will; you will
prove nothing thereby. Malone Dies
is a prime offender, but The Driver's
Seat and its ilk haven't struck me as much better.
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| 17 |
One phenomenon that I have encountered a lot both in the most
highbrow corners of the literary world and the lowest is the
idea that somehow Christ imagery adds quality to a work. It
doesn't. It really, really doesn't. Enough with the Christ
imagery! From Malone Dies
and The Road down to
Godbody,
Stranger in a Strange Land, and
Kingdom Come — seriously, give it a rest.
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| 18 |
These last few titles also serve of examples of SF's trouble
with subtext. One thing that keeps a lot of SF from qualifying
as literature is precisely its lack of subtext — a lot of
stories, though, both SF and other types, short-circuit their
own subtext by blurting it out. Don't speak the subtext!
Stories involving psychiatry are a classic example of this, but
sociological stories such as The Years of
Rice and Salt and The Dispossessed
are spoiled by having characters sit around and discuss
society. Show, don't tell! Even Pale
Fire disappoints by spelling out things that are manifestly
clear. And ham-handed metaphors such as the one in
Sideways aren't really any better.
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| 19 |
Some books are such egregious offenders in this regard that they
should have been essays: the stories exist purely in order to trot
out characters who essentially say, as a Lyttle Lytton entrant
once wrote, "I have ninety minutes and lots of unpopular opinions,
so let's get started." Let's not! Native
Son, Stranger in a Strange Land,
and The Girl Who Owned a City do
pretty much exactly this. A Clergyman's
Daughter has the narrator do it, which is at least a little
more honest.
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| 20 |
Some books do the opposite, using characters not as mouthpieces
but as anti-mouthpieces to beat over the head. Piñatas
don't make good characters. Burmese Days
and A Clergyman's Daughter
are unambiguous examples; a more interesting case is
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
whose characters were meant to be grotesque but become less so, and
therefore stronger, with real children playing them.
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| 21 |
One of the major strengths of film as a medium is that it can make
even outlandish things seem as though they're really happening. I'm
not talking about special effects here, but the simple fact of fleshing
out a story with sets and actors and stuff. So unlike Mike D'Angelo,
who seems to have a penchant for movies that blur the line between
reality and artifice, I tend to think that movies should save the
theatricality for the theater and be realistic. Things like
Woman in the Dunes do nothing for
me and things like The Night of the Hunter
actively annoy me.
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| 22 |
Old movies tend to be more theatrical than more recent ones,
and their conventions strike me as foreign if I'm feeling
charitable and wrong if I'm feeling grumpy. So in general
I have a hard time relating to older films.
Only Angels Have Wings,
The Lady Eve, and even
North by Northwest felt to me
like artifacts of a distant era. So did
The Good German, which aped a 1940s style.
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| 23 |
As long as we're talking about foreignness, here's another meme for
the list: I grew up in California, and to me, Britain is a foreign
country. The fact that British people and I happen to speak
variant dialects of the same language doesn't make the UK feel like
home. I have much more of an affinity for Canada or Australia than
for Britain. Britain I would class alongside a country like Japan:
familiar as a developed country that has had an influence on my
culture, but still, not my culture, not even a first cousin of
my culture. Riddley Walker's
Britishness made it incomprehensible to me every bit as much as the
spelling; even something as innocuous as
Tom's Midnight Garden struck me as alien.
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| 24 |
But hey, going to alien places can be fun!
Film is especially good at conveying a sense of place, which is a
huge asset, because geographically (edit: and chronologically)
grounded narrative is great.
Napoleon Dynamite and
The Last King of Scotland and
Rome are all about evoking a specific
place and time — and even when, as in all three cases, they're
not places I would want to spend much time myself in real life even
if I could, I enjoyed being a vicarious tourist. Even some books do
a good job of conveying a sense of place:
Was and Lanark spring to
mind.
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| 25 |
Actually, films are so good at conveying places and faces, images
and sounds, that oftentimes narrative doesn't just take a backseat
but ends up in the trunk. Movies and television series tend to be
experience delivery systems more than they are stories. People watch
Sexy Beast to see Ben Kingsley play a thug;
Capote to hear Philip Seymour Hoffmann do
the voice. Ghost World to spend a couple of
hours gazing at Thora Birch and daydreaming about an alternative chyk like
that having a crush on you, loser that you are. They watch
The Matrix for bullet time and
Kill Bill for girl-girl swordfights. Not
so much for stories.
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| 26 |
As such, movies shouldn't be coy. Coy is
Mrs Henderson Presents, a movie
about nude theater that thinks its subject is naughty. Ugh. Movies
should take a cue from Bully
and Where the Truth Lies and even
Ken Park — if you're going to
make a movie about, for instance, people getting high and fucking,
well, then, you should probably show people getting high and fucking.
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| 27 |
Two final patterns here. There is a point at which "clever"
devolves into "cutesy," and cutesy is death. This can happen
at different levels. On the language level,
The Rivals tried too hard to jazz things up with wordplay,
while Tomorrow! was a disaster with
lines like "She was still masticating when her mother and older
brother, having dispatched the paterfamilias, returned to the table."
Aieeeee. Lanark went overboard
playing postmodern games; the structure was clever, but the inline
bibliography was way over the line. Watch
Your Mouth's structure and operatic conceit were unbearable.
And Amélie hit the FDA limit
for whimsy after about thirty seconds.
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| 28 |
Last, one of the most important patterns of all, which builds on
many of those above. A text's awareness of its shortcomings does
not make those shortcomings okay. At its worst, this is the old
"It's stupid, but it knows it's stupid and has fun with it!" gambit.
Seriously — if you know your project has a problem, don't
cover your ass by commenting on the problem. Fix it. If your
book is boring, like Dream Children,
don't think having characters comment on how boring everyone is makes
the boringness easier to bear. If your characters are annoyingly
long-winded, as in Julian, having
them chuckle about their prolixity doesn't make it better.
Adaptation stretches this phenomenon
to feature length.
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added 2008.0131
| 29 |
Storytelling is about communication, but dreams tend to be meaningful
only to the dreamer; film is a visual medium, but dreams tend to be
a tissue of internal states that can't be seen; narrative is a web
of causality, but in dreams the links between cause and effect are
tenuous at best. Therefore dream logic is the enemy of narrative
and should be avoided, particularly in movies. More on this in my
writeup of The Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie, but seeing it on the heels of
Woman in the Dunes helped me to identify my objections.
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added 2008.0322
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Pattern 1 indicates that the prose in a written work need not be
transparent. Heck, clever phrasings are a big plus. But the
meaning of each sentence should be transparent. No
colorless green ideas sleeping furiously. If the world of the
story is sufficiently surreal that some strings of words might
need a bit of setup, do the setup first.
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added 2008.0404
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A lot of stories rely heavily on keeping one or more characters in
the dark about things the audience knows. This is supposed to create
suspense, but it just makes me want to shout the secrets at the
characters in question. Suspense doesn't heighten attention;
rather, it creates impatience, which dampens the effect of what goes
on until the secret is revealed. I want to know what will happen
next, not when the characters will catch up to what I already know.
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added 2008.1214
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Some stories exist in order to convey ideas. Great! But those stories
should illustrate their ideas; don't just stick the ideas in the
characters' mouths. That doesn't mean that characters can never say
anything of substance. But the things a character says should tell us
something about that character — and "in agreeing with me on
this vital political/philosophical/etc. issue, my character proves to be
a right-thinking individual" doesn't count.
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added 2009.0320
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I'm quite fond of the uncanny valley between realism and fantasy. I
like fantastic milieux to be treated naturalistically, with careful attention
to mundane detail, and I like real-world stories to be full of people with
extraordinary qualities and abilities.
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added 2009.0412
| 34 |
There are certain media in which form interests me.
Interactive fiction is one, though I have little patience for it as a member
of the audience. Comics is another, though I seem to have settled into a
pretty rigid style in my own efforts in that medium. But the specifically
cinematic aspects of film form don't particularly interest me. Any movie
whose chief raison d'être is to explore how to convey something with a
camera is pretty unlikely to be my thing.
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added 2010.0204
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A story should have a beginning, an ending, and a
planned middle, not a beginning, possibly an ending,
and an indefinitely drawn out and episodic middle. The latter
structure is endemic to American television, which is one reason I
don't have a TV.
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added 2010.0802
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Many authors have attempted to demonstrate the boundlessness
of human potential by writing stories in which human potential is boundless.
For instance, Richard Bach's Illusions argued that you could fly around
like Superman if only you could, like, free your mind or something. It proved
its point by telling the story of a guy who freed his mind and thereby gained
the ability to fly around like Superman. Same deal with
Stranger in a Strange Land. The problem is that fictional
examples don't prove anything. You don't actually prove the existence of
time travel by writing "I have the ability to go through time, he suddenly
remembered while at a bus stop near a tree."
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Anyway, this list is nowhere nearly as well organized as
A Pattern Language, but I know it's
disorganized and I had fun with it, so that makes it okay!
Return to the top page!
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