So you think the formulaic writing of both film and literature are staples that must be conformed to? Maybe you’re right. But after the 32nd Hallmark Christmas Movie of the season, who hasn’t thought aloud at the 118 minute mark, “I hope Lacey Chabert throws that empty coffee cup at his face and kicks him in the crotch”?
Hallmark Christmas Movie season is just ending. Talk about formulaic—small town; Christmas lover converts a holiday agnostic to the festive side; overly elaborate Christmas celebrations; token black guy; closed-mouth kiss in the final scene. It’s okay that each movie is basically the same because these aren’t movies people often actively watch. They’re background stimuli that we can glimpse every now and again while wrapping presents or decorating the tree. Fifteen seconds of viewing every 15 minutes and you know exactly where the movie is in its plot progression. In this instance, formulaic writing is wonderful.
Every Christmas and birthday, my brother and I used to buy our mother the newest Danielle Steel novel. Eventually Mom started to claim she’d already read the one we’d just bought her. Turns out, a few dozen novels of formulaic writing will result in readers that can’t differentiate one book from the last. It will also get the author a 55-room San Francisco mansion to go along with her other home in Paris. The moral here is romance novels are huge, consistent sellers because readers want to be taken on a journey, knowing the ultimate result will be two lives lived Happily Ever After. Here, too, formulaic writing is perfectly fine.
Other readers, though, want—need—to be challenged.
We’ve been taught as readers and viewers that every scene in a story will accomplish one or more meaningful things. A scene can further the plot, provide characterization, define a relationship, something . . . anything. If questions are still unanswered when the credits role or that final page is turned, we’re left with a sense of broken trust—a belief that the author made us a promise they failed to deliver. But why does it need to be this way? Not everything in life is relevant. Shouldn’t entertainment mirror life?
Chekhov’s Gun is a dramatic principle stating that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. It’s best referenced by some version of the saying, “If you have a rifle hanging on the wall in the 1st act, it must go off in the 3rd.” I’m not a subscriber to this line of thinking, especially in longer works like a novel or movie. If writing becomes too formulaic, if rules are set in stone and never skirted, even the least clever bookworm will be able to piece together the clues and foreshadowing created by the author. Creative writing and story-telling would be shunted, limiting the writer’s ability to tell a compelling story, ultimately lessening the experience of the reader and viewer.
I watched The Disaster Artist a few years ago. A movie about the making of one of the worst movies ever produced: The Room. Then I had to watch The Room itself, to see if it was really as bad as they made it out to be. It was. Maybe worse. One scene among so many horrible ones stuck with me. A mother informed her daughter, almost as an afterthought, “I got the results of the test back. I definitely have breast cancer.” For the remainder of the film I was waiting for that line to circle back and play even the slightest role in the plot (I use plot loosely here). Turns out, the line was utterly meaningless to the rest of the story (again, loose definition). But it kept me hooked throughout. The ultimate result was confusion peppered with rage, but a strong negative reaction is more memorable than none whatsoever. The Room is memorable years later, but I can’t tell you specifics about any Hallmark movie from last week.
Crime and Mystery genres use red herrings to intentionally deceive. Imagine a whodunit where everything pertains directly to the murderer without the faintest attempt to mislead. Gone would be the Crime and Mystery whodunit, replaced instead with a how-to murder documentary. It all comes down to an unwritten agreement between the author and reader, or director and viewer. Deception gets a stamp of approval so long as the story culminates in a surprising yet inevitable ending. A clever twist that wasn’t pinpointed in the moment, but in retrospect becomes obvious and inevitable.
When everything is directly relevant to the story at large, readers are done a disservice. Editors in the publishing world precipitate this with the common rule of thumb that once you have a solid draft of a manuscript, it should be cut by 10% to really tighten it up. David Foster Wallace sure didn’t edit for length in his 1,000+ page novel, Infinite Jest. [It’s my favorite novel; please post a Comment with your favorite book, author, or genre.]
In these short arguments, I’d be silly to use a third of my 1,000 words to argue the irrelevant reason for why music should always be played in public restrooms as a method of drowning out straining grunts, farts, splash-downs, courtesy flushes, etc. Especially if the week’s topic is, “So you think Hitler was the worst human being in history?” But when Wallace uses 500,000+ words to pen his epic, it’d be nearly impossible for him not to go off on a meandering tangent every now and again. Even with only 1,000 words, I occasionally explore a science tangent quite unnecessarily. But I stand by all of them.
So, you still think formulaic writing is mandatory in literature and movies? If I found an audience that would purchase anything I wrote as long as it stuck to a general formula they’d grown accustomed to, you can bet your ass I’d recycle ideas until I could purchase a mansion high in the Hollywood hills. Hell, this argument gets me to the quarter century mark—each one formulated just like the last. That consistency has yet to garner me more than a dozen or so loyal readers (and I’m giving these away for free). But I’m too stubborn to change now. So, I guess, yeah, come to think of it . . . You’re Probably Right.
[Please remember to post a Comment with your favorite book, author, or genre.]
[025] December 30, 2020