What My iPod Teaches Us About Storytelling

I'm entirely beat, so I've enlisted the help of a guest blogger--my 30 gig classic black iPod--to do tonight's entry on storytelling and narrative arc.

30 gig classic black iPod, take it away.

[iPod churns, smokes, threatens to crash]

How many protagonists should a novel have?


[iPod says: Though you'll occasionally see novels with what seem to be more than one protagonist, by and large a novel requires one set of eyes through which the reader sees the world and understands the story.]

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What Novelists Can (& Should) Learn from Poets

I used to say that short stories and poems have more in common than stories and novels, and to a certain degree I still believe this to be true. Both the story and the poem live and die by compression, by their ability to maximize meaning by finding precisely the right way of saying a thing so that extensions of meaning open up for a reader off the page, whereas novelists are wont to expand rather than compress, to put extensions of meaning right on the page, even to digress—-one of the defining features of the novel, after all, a gift from Mr. Gutenberg and his marvelous contraption.

But the reason I say used to say is that I wouldn’t want to encourage novelists to buy into the idea that their work is, or should be, any less focused or precise than the shorter form. I occasionally hear even writers I admire--who should know better--claim that novel-writing allows them to be less concerned with the word-by-word than stories because of the novel’s space to digress. Which sounds to me not just misguided but lazy; a novel’s digression must be as purposeful as anything else in the book, must have a reason to exist, must have an energy and forward movement and focus that propel the story and keep the reader’s attention, no matter how quiet or seemingly ancillary the moment to the overall arc of the book.

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Editing Novels: A Quick-ish Guide

March is National Novel Editing Month--NaNoEdMo, as the kids say--an excellent occasion for those writers who went through November's National Novel Writing Month to look back at their sprawl of pages and to make something of them, good novels being not so much written as rewritten, revised, re-envisioned, polished until your elbow gets tired, polished some more, then polished some more. And NaNoEdMo seems like an excellent idea to me...that's not just because of the work I've done as an editor but because I'm currently finishing my third--and final, knock knock--editorial pass through my novel The Strikeout Artist, from which I just gave a reading at Ohio's Heidelberg University, a sign I'm getting close. (Thanks for having me!)

If a writer spends months--optimistically--drafting a novel, she can spend whole years in the editing process: doing completely new drafts, trying out completely new approaches, voices, and structures, looking at and tweaking the pesky component parts until the components can't be separated from the whole, the macro editing giving way to the micro and the book finally, mercifully, appearing as a unified whole. It's an involved, trying process...a labor of love, certainly, but a labor nonetheless.

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Popping The Thought Balloon: What Comic Books Teach Us About Interiority

If you're of a certain age and inclination toward geekdom--as I am--then you probably remember the thought balloon, a comic book convention that has, for the most part, been phased out of superhero comics. These little bubbles used to play a pretty big part in any given issue...putting us directly into a hero's head in order to hear his poised, complete-sentenced, often summary-filled inner monologue. The big problem with this--the reason thought balloons have become rare--is that they're shortcuts to generating dramatic tension and character development, rather than developing these through subtler means. It's corner-cutting. Cheating.

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Ira Glass on Storytelling, Again

I know I've already done one post on This American Life's Ira Glass--which you'll find here--but these videos of Glass discussing storytelling and the creative process were too good not to pass along.

You'll find the videos after the jump.

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Red Dead Redemption: Once Upon A Time on my Xbox

Back in 2005 Roger Ebert made a simple remark in one of his Answer Man columns about how video games would never rise to the level of art, could not do the same thing, or be experienced the same way, as literature and film. He's been defending (and refining) the position ever since, in a number of thoughtful and well-argued posts--way too many to link to here; just do a search for Ebert video games--but the bulk of his argument comes down to this, from a November 2005 Answer Man column:

...I [do] indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

Ebert concedes that a video game "can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful" and "can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience," but the fact that the player is in charge of the experience, rather than an author guiding it, is what primarily differentiates it from literature and film. I say primarily because Ebert has since come up with a number of other deficiencies that keep gaming from the level of art, notably in his most recent serious stab at the question, the coyly-titled "Video Games Can Never Be Art." Among these deficiencies: the mindless activity and objective-oriented nature of games, which he says is more like playing a sport than having an aesthetic experience: the fact that video games touch upon primal emotion, like momentary shock and fear, rather than either more subtle or complex ones; and the fact that the narrative cut-scene component of most video games, the "storyline," tends to be, to put it generously, poorly written (he calls the cut-scenes in the game Braid "prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie").

He's right about most all of these: video games tend to provoke only momentary, primal shock or fear, as when the zombie dogs in the first Resident Evil showed up and I almost pooped myself. Games do tend to be mindless, goal-oriented hoop-jumping...the best of them simply make the hoops enjoyable. And the writing in cut-scene storytelling tends to blunt IQ points. Video games, after all, are the genre which gave us the chilling intergalactic threat,"All your base are belong to us."

The only thing Ebert really has wrong is art's 100% authorial nature; readers participate when they read, help co-create the world in the given work, even if theirs is a passive co-creation. They can't change the meaning or basic experience of a text, but they can interpret description, just to give an example, in personal and particular ways...my Middle Earth looks slightly different from Tolkien's or Peter Jackson's or yours. A reader is a participant, but not in charge. (Film is a little more dictatorial, but that's another topic altogether.)

Likewise, a gamer is never really in charge of a game, which is a point Ebert misses; there's only the illusion of being in charge when you're performing simple tasks, so that the storyline kicks back in and you advance, and what you hope for is a storyline that's worthy of the trouble...that feels like it's the point of the game rather than the tasks. That's not the case with most games, granted, where the storytelling exists to interrupt the monotony of pushing buttons. And the interruptions tend to consist of lame dialogue, lack of character development, insipid storytelling which has the gamer pushing X just to get back to pushing X.

But then you come across something like Red Dead Redemption.

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Ira Glass: Sympathy's Role in Storytelling

I know you already listen to This American Life--so there's no need to introduce it here--but you might've missed this recent interview on Slate.com with the show's producer/host Ira Glass. (I almost missed it, too; thank you to Jessica for sending it on.)

The interview covers a whole, whole lot of ground--the creative process, Roland Barthes, "wrongness" as a source of conflict, psychotherapy and storytelling, and so on--but the thing that really jumped out at me, and the thing This American Life does so well, comes early in the interview, with Glass talking about sympathy as a requirement for engaging with a character (and, thus, a story as a whole).

Of course, that your character must be sympathetic is well-known, perhaps overused advice...almost but not quite up there with the terrible two of Write What You Know and Show Don't Tell, both of which can get a writer into real trouble if taken too literally. And yet as a teacher and editor I've seen more than my share of stories in which the protagonist is completely unsympathetic and unrelatable...most often because of how bad the character is (psychopath, sociopath, sadist, Satan, whatever), but the same problem exists with characters who are far too good, when they're the embodiment of virtue and heroism and courage. I'm neither end of the spectrum--most days it's a sliding scale--and when I encounter a character like that in a story, I have no way to relate to him, and thus little interest or investment in what happens.

A sympathetic character doesn't mean that what the character is going through is anything we've ever gone through personally, or ever would, not does it mean we condone, necessarily, the character's actions or motives. But it does mean that we're able to see something of ourselves in the character's predicament, and it's this level of sympathy that allows us to feel something about, and care something about, what a character goes through, care about the story and its outcome. Even if that story is set in a world or time or situation or culture that looks nothing like our own.

Glass puts it this way:

Well, if the story works, you become the character, right? You agree with their early point of view, and then when it gets shattered, you are shattered with it. So in the storytelling, you want to manipulate the evidence and the feelings so that the audience is right there agreeing with the person who's about to be proven wrong. When that happens, if it's done right, you as the audience get flipped upside down.

"Agree with" is maybe a bit strong--you can feel sympathetic toward some aspect of a character's plight without agreeing with it, lucky for the reader who spends any time with Nabokov--but the basic point is well made: that when we feel some measure of sympathy toward a charcater, and the character fails or makes a wrong turn, the loss that the character experiences crushes us, too.

Thankfully, the opposite outcome is just as true...when a character we feel sympathetic toward and have real hope for triumphs, we feel relief, elation, even an emotional or spiritual lift as if the risk and the reward were just as much ours.

For proof, take a listen here to the "Gamester of Ireland is Fine" segment (the first story, at 4:48) from the "Quiz Show" episode of This American Life...a story which won a prize at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. (The rest of the episode is excellent, too, but it's this segment that's really stayed with me.)

Keep a hanky nearby.

PS: My usual audio player is acting up tonight. Pardon the low-tech solution.
PPS: I have given up trying to embed the sucker.