Dance With Me (Devil in the Details, Pt. 3)

This is the third part of another three-part blog series regarding details. You can find part one here and part two here.

The complexity of detail is a beautiful thing. True art is when two persons can examine its complexities and walk away with distinctly differing impressions. Such brilliance is difficult to develop, let alone channel into something prolonged like a story. While a piece of artwork can be examined in mere minutes, the narrative of the story takes countless hours to develop and unfold. But the payoff is worth it for everyone involved. But for complexity to succeed, it needs its sister harmony.

While the definition of harmony typically involves musical notes and chords, a lesser-known definition has to do with writing. Harmony can mean an interweaving of accounts into a singular narrative, like the Gospels of the Bible detailing the life of Jesus. Are they all distinctly complex? Absolutely, but they contain a common thread that unites the stories even in their differences. Ultimately, the complexity of detail in aggregate must be unified in an artful fashion that makes a cohesive impression.

Harmony and complexity must dance together. To any casual observer, dancing is simultaneously chaotic and coordinated. Likewise, a writer must dance between enhancing the story with continued detail, but also moving it forward in a purposeful direction. Let me make myself clear: this is the hardest aspect of writing and separates the solid from the exceptional. Patrick Rothfuss is most definitely in the latter category, his books master strokes from a man with a full command of the English language:

The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.

– The Name of The Wind

Aaron Ehasz is another such writer of tremendous harmonious complexity. The lead writer for the first few seasons of Avatar The Last Airbender, he went about crafting some of the most beloved characters in the story in a detailed fashion (Toph in particular). What makes the story of Avatar stand out is its melding of the fantastical with the believable, primarily by deploying complex characters in complex circumstances. Interestingly enough, harmony is a primary theme in the world.

Aaron has moved on to his own fantasy show The Dragon Prince. The first two episodes serve as a launching pad for the enrapturing first season, centered around an impending Elvish assassination of a human king. In less than an hour of a detailed narrative, Aaron has fully developed an entire cast of believable characters operating in thrilling and understandable scenarios. None of the detail is forced or confusing in this time span, making it all the more stunning in execution.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic is a video game that essentially redefined the franchise for the current generation of fans, subverting the entire understanding of Sith and Jedi. While the controlled hero actively explores the world in an experiential fashion, the story has repeated cinematic flashbacks to prior events. Early on in the game, these narratives run parallel to each other.  Eventually, however, both of these threads collide in a shocking twist that spins the story like a twisting dancer.

The key for every writer seeking to harmoniously enhance their story with detail is for them to outline, outline some more, and then re-outline everything again. One cannot have harmony without planned order behind the scenes. Great vision is a natural part of this strategy, even if a writer has not fully developed that talent. My blog post Laying the Tracks from the Train dives into this issue:

If you are wondering what I mean by a great vision, I have a rather simple answer for you: it’s both grand and personal. I believe a writer must always know where they are ultimately headed. … It is important to reiterate that the grand vision of any writer’s story must be rooted in sound world building and characters that are three-dimensional. The rules of the world must be established and its lore never defied in the name of exciting idea creation.

So there you have it: subtlety, communication, and complexity. Every writer employs these three assets, but not are all equal in their execution. Likewise, every viewer comprehends at a different situational level, but they all appreciate these details whenever they are present. No one on either end of the fictional creation process should experience a deficiency in detail or have to suffer an overdose of poorly executed facts. Paying close attention should always be deeply rewarding!

Talk With Me (Devil in the Details, Pt. 2)

This is the second part of another three-part blog series regarding details. You can find part one here.

“Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” – Martin Scorsese

Believe it or not, but every director of a movie is talking to you. Okay, there might not actually be a director like Scorsese lecturing through the camera, but at the very least he’s having interplay with his audience. To put it another way, a movie’s showing you what the director wants you to see. While this is true for a literal frame-by-frame moment, it’s also valid for the greater narrative (which is just an accumulation of detail). Communication is the magical conduit that connects the medium to the brain.

Successful communication of detail is the backbone of successful fiction. While subtlety and complexity add details with eloquence, communication is the precursor. Facts are arranged neatly and transmitted in a comprehensive fashion, much like how a newspaper attempts to enlighten the reader before diving deeper into commentary. Only then can the viewer start to move with the greater narrative. All must crawl before they can run.

Scorsese is a master at cinematic narrative. While not technically a writer, he does take detailed complex scripts possessing subtlety and communicates them great precision. Both The Departed and Shutter Island feature large star-studded casts with colossal plot twists, a daunting combination for any ordinary director. A lesser director would have certainly fumbled the execution, but Scorsese visually keeps the audience in the know, quietly talking to them even when the characters aren’t communicating.

The recently deceased Tom Wolfe is famed for his literary communication talents, conveying great imaginative detail in almost excessive flourishes. In the following paragraphs, he introduces one of the protagonists at the start of the story. An amazing amount of detail information is conveyed, both purely objective and subjective:

None of this distracted the only student who at this moment stood before the row of basins. His attention was riveted on what he saw in the mirror, which was his own fair white face. A gale was blowing in his head. He liked it. He bared his teeth. He had never seen them quite this way before. So even! So white! They vibrated from perfection.

… All at once he felt like he was a second person looking over his own shoulder. The first him was mesmerized by his own good looks. Seriously. But the second him studied the face in the mirror with detachment and objectivity before coming to the same conclusion, which was that he looked awesome.

– I Am Charlotte Simmons

Wolfe is both describing how the character looks and detailing his narcissistic stupor. The “gale” is a repeated motif for this protagonist, always signaling when his romanticized and arrogant idealism is about to reveal itself. Best of all, there is no confusion in the basic writing style here. The reader might reread this passage, but not because of literary overload or perplexion.

So how can any writer be as deft as Scorsese or Wolf in basic communication? It’s simple: clarity through exposition, repetition of details, and the interlinking of the two through the previously mentioned conversational style. Also, It is critically important that when a writer adds a subtle twist or a layer of complexity to the message that nothing is lost in the process.

As I stated in Necessary Evils, exposition in some form is always required to keep contextualizing events and retain the audience in the information loop. Likewise in Playing Catchup, repetition is largely done through recaps. Never compromise your work by assuming your audience is as obsessive and immersed in your fiction as you are, let alone possessing a strong memory. Every writer must simultaneously assume that their viewer is both intellectually capable and observationally infantile.

In the final part of this blog, we will be analyzing the complexity of detail. Pay attention, as things are rarely what they seem to be!

 

 

Look With Me (Devil in the Details, Pt. 1)

“No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.” – Sherlock Holmes by way of Arthur Conan Doyle

Every story is a composite of details, facts, and the inter-linking of the two. This multi-part blog series will parse out the sinew of storytelling, examining narrative on a granular level. At the same time, however, I will attempt to not lose the proverbial forest in the trees of details. No one walks out of an entertainment experience shouting “That story had such great facts!” (Interestingly enough though, those same people can deeply be touched by underlying narratives that strike the emotional cords of their heart.) Any fiction worth its salt has to translate the bland syllables of facts into the sublime melody of story. These three blogs will cover the aspects of subtlety, communication, and complexity.

Subtlety is such a difficult thing. No one likes to be pounded over the head with the explicit, but at the same time, they will get frustrated with the confusion in the implicit. To make matters even more difficult, everyone varies in their ability to comprehend subtlety. Crazier still, the methodology employed alone can make an extreme difference. Specific writing styles, camera shots, and game interactions can enlighten or frustrate the viewer, regardless of what they are actually trying to communicate. Last but not least, the creator of the fiction rarely has the ability to mass test their final product with the intended audience, so there’s no way to perfectly be prepared.

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So then, should a writer just make all their stories pathetically discernible and laughably comprehensible? Certainly not! We would lose out on the entire mystery genre. The character Sherlock Holmes and his stories, in particular, thrive in sophisticated subtlety of fact. Sherlock first debuted in 1887 in the novel A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. Ever since that seminal year, the enigmatic detective has appeared in a variety of mediums: television shows, movies, and even video games. What makes him a remarkable protagonist is his ability to discern the slightest of facts and accumulate them into a comprehensive picture for all.

The best Sherlock stories never hide anything from the viewer, instead skillfully sprinkling visual and verbal clues throughout the story that can easily be missed. Ideally, the clever viewer can piece together the entire mystery by the end of the tale (or at least have a good idea). Nonetheless, Sherlock’s better iterations always provide entertainment and exposition throughout the fact-filled narrative, making it an enjoyable experience for even a very distracted stay-at-home mom/dad. The Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, and Benedict Cumberbatch works tend to be the best at this. Sadly, the Robert Downey Jr. movies are very entertaining but lacking in the revelation of discernable facts.

After the Rain is a pure romantic drama that deploys all manner of subtle details in its environments and characters, demanding the audience’s rapt attention. While some romance seeks the bombastic bordering on melodrama, “Rain” tells an unusual story of an almost adult restaurant waitress falling in love with her manager. The general narrative is straightforward and highly repetitive, but it’s the detail that makes this series absolutely shine. Over the course of months, we see the bold female protagonist Akira grapple with her complex feelings toward the shy and reserved Mr. Kondo. Layer after narrative-layer is pulled back, revealing truly detailed characters that are deeply believable.

Every writer needs to strategically deploy details, never over-encumbering the viewer with unnecessary information that can distract from the thrust of the story. Instead, they should subtly scatter critical details in a “highly visible” fashion at every turn in all fashions. “Show, don’t tell” is a decent rule, but I believe it comes second to “easy to learn, hard to master.” Go to all lengths to make the audience learn your details, but don’t immediately give them all facts to draw a sudden masterful conclusion. Everyone needs to mentally grapple with the facts, joyfully building a puzzle that a writer gives them piece by piece.

Next week I will outline the art of detail communication, which the writer uses to help their audience transition from plot point to plot point. Pay close attention!

The Terror (All Things Must Die, Pt. 3)

All Things Must Die (Abridged) by Jeff Williams

Day by day it’s nearer
Step by step you grow
Closer to your ruin
Soon your time to go

Life is just a journey
Yours is near its end
Bloody evolution
This world transcend

Black out the sky
All things must die…

The lyrics of Jeff Williams’ song just keep getting more and more unnerving through every verse. But that’s the point. All Things Must Die plays at the climax of volume 5 of RWBY, during the signature battle of the season. The lyrics are meant to fill any reasonable person with terror as the characters (both good and evil) struggle for survival. It’s a well-crafted piece that’s as uncomfortable as it is memorable. Likewise, every writer needs to have terror in their survivor’s story and it has to match the intensity of the protagonist and the cost they pay.

Terror can take on a variety of forms. It can be the harshness of the environment, the calculated cruelty of man, or the body’s acknowledgment that can’t live forever. Whatever the case, the power of terror fuels the believability of the sense of desperation present and hooks the viewer like nothing else. You can’t take your eyes off of an intense moment; there’s simply too much drama unfolding and lives are at stake. Terror has a way of seizing us by the throat and not letting us go until it departs as quickly as it came. In its wake are residual fear and the dread of its return at any moment.

The Tomb Raider video game franchise launched in 1996, featuring a busty British explorer by the name of Lara Croft. Essentially, the game was a twist on the popular Indiana Jones adventure franchise. Lara wandered ancient ruins around in short shorts and carried a pistol on each curvaceous hip. Naturally, the video game was a huge success with mostly male gamers. Two movies starring Angelina Jolie were based on this character, the actress displaying the same sexy confidence as her polygonal counterpart. Eventually, however, the franchise started to fail as gamers grew up and the sequels started to get sillier. Perhaps most importantly, the terror in adventuring simply wasn’t there.

Everything changed in 2013 when Crystal Dynamics rebooted the franchise. Tomb Raider restarted with what is called the “survivor’s timeline,” featuring a younger and more realistic looking Lara Croft who had yet to prove herself. The 2013 game featured Lara experiencing a disastrous shipwreck and ending up on a mysterious Pacific island full of danger. Terror was around every corner, whether it was the environment, the cruelty of man, or the unexplainable supernatural entities. All was threatening to kill Lara in a believable fashion, which helped make the game a tremendous success. (A 2018 movie starring Alicia Vikander was based on the game’s great story.)

Terror, of course, doesn’t have to be battling the supernatural on mountain tops. No Country for Old Men is one of the most terror-filled movies of all time, featuring only the rugged deserts and plains of West Texas as its backdrop. The story follows a drug deal gone wrong, leaving a briefcase full of cash in a dying man’s hands. Javier Bardem plays the taciturn antagonist hitman, soullessly hunting down the lost money and killing everyone in his way. A convenience store scene is the most terrorizing in the entire movie, featuring a hapless clerk determining his fate on a random coin toss in front of Bardem (he gets lucky and lives). The actor won an Oscar for his sinister and captivating performance.

No matter what the terror is, the writer must fit it into the very marrow of the survivor story. Dull moments need to be tense moments and fear must be around every corner. A pervasive sense of dread must hang over the entire backdrop as the protagonist fights for survival. Make no mistake, terror should not exist just for the sake of terror. There has to be logical reasoning behind it, which in turn provokes logical emotional responses from all it impacts. I would recommend that any writer trying to forge such a story should reference the dramatic real-life accounts of historical survivors. At no point should the viewership ever feel fatigued or bored with the terror at hand.

So there you have it: the survivor, the cost, and the terror. All three elements must work hand-in-hand to create a deeply memorable and provoking story that captivates the audience every step of the way. Thanks for reading this multipart blog!