Image: hiddenunseen.blogspot.com
What is it that takes an average occurrence or interaction and turns it into emotional drama?
Let’s think about it.
Is it a Twilight Zone twist?
Is it a one step to the left, one to the rear change of viewpoint?
If we pay close attention, we can see that the average conversation is too full of “uhs” and “ums” to get an idea across that would be both informative and entertaining. We notice that our language is filled with shorthand, spiced with emphasis via facial tic and expression, defined by long-held cultural context, and more. We can see that our daily lives, except for moments of panic, elation or depression, live up to the term mundane, and are for the most part severely lacking in drama.
One of the most plaintive cries of the new writer when faced with the blandness of a scene is, “…but that’s how it really happened!” It is so easy to think that every-day life is the stuff people want to read about. But no… what they want is escape from the mundane. What our readers want is a transport to a new world.
New world? Does that mean space ships and aliens? It can, but for the most part it just means drama. It means excitement, mystery, the shared wonder of a breathtaking nature scene, the sudden realization of meaning where meaning had hidden moments before. It means growth, newly discovered purpose, magic, completion. It means reward for all the hard work. It means the wonder of love at first sight.
Our duty as writers is not to tell the truth, or rather not exactly. The truth doesn’t have zombies and vampires. It doesn’t have sexy women with guns who recruit you into a world of mystery and danger.
Image: ourelectricgeneration.com
When Stephen King says “tell the truth” he means do not hedge on your language. Do not hide from boldness. Do not shy away from the different, the fantastic, the mysterious.
Drama is when you take an every day situation and add an edge to it. It is when you put your hero’s ass in a sling, and then get it out. Drama pulls no punches. It isn’t civilized. It doesn’t worry about offending people.
Your readers don’t want a safe world. Your readers want to be picked up bodily and transported to a dangerous place where a miss-step could be fatal. Your readers want to be afraid for your characters, and by extension afraid for themselves, for if you do it right, your reader is a character in your story.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio... and isn't it time you experienced some of them?
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Well written post, with a good message. It made me wonder how, as a writer, I can both strive for this drama in my writing, and at the same time life that mundane existence within the world, without over-dramatizing it. We really have to be ‘two people’, and live both inside and outside of ‘the box’. But I’d rather strive to be an ever better writer, than to fit into ‘society’s – box’. Thanks for this Richard.
There is writing fiction “as it happened” and there is writing fiction as it happened but with an eye for those details that make it pop. A story doesnt have to be loaded with extremes to make it good, although pushing the envelope is never a bad thing.
Jodi
I agree that a good story doesn’t have to be full of twists and turns out among the rings of Saturn. Clearly a large percentage of literary fiction does not require such leaps. That said, we still need to look for the emotional tie in every concept. There always needs to be a hook that attaches the reader to the story, or the reader goes away.
I agree there has to be a twist here and there in a story, keeps it interesting to the end-and lo and behold there is even a twist at the end !!!
Thanks for the comment, Penny. Nice to see you here.
While it is true that it is an onerous task to write a riveting novel about the mundane, it is much easier to write short stories about moments in time. For instance, authors sometimes “explode a moment” by taking a moment in time when a single, strong emotion is felt. Great writing, though!
This is very true. In fact, one way of writing an engaging novel is to do it by stringing linked short-stories together.
Science Fiction writer has a quote (I won’t go into the full of it here, because part of it does not further the topic, in in essence he regards the constant writing of short stories the quickest way to excellence (professionalism) in writing.
How true.