Writing Right with Dmitri: Less Plot, More Meaning

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Writing Right with Dmitri: Less Plot, More Meaning

Editor at work.

Back several decades ago, I remember reading a book called something like 'The Nitpicker's Guide to the Tardis', or some such. It was long before the current Doctor Who revival, and only concerned with the old series, which I knew pretty well. I was amused by the authors' common complaint about that series: 'Too much running about in corridors.' I knew what they meant.

Corridors were easy to construct on low-budget BBC productions. Just stick up some painted flats and keep moving them around. Unfortunately, a story which should have taken about four episodes was often stretched to six. Characters ran about in corridors to take messages. Then they ran back the way they came. Then everybody went to the other set, and back again. There is a word for this kind of storytelling: tedious.

Oh, but the 21st Century is so much better, right? We have CGI and everything. We're so aware

Last night, I watched about episode 18 of something called Heroes. (It's a quarantine, and I'm getting desperate.) I'd hung in through 17 episodes of this stuff, hoping to find out what happened to the cute little Japanese guy. I did this even after George Takei showed up as both his father and a bad guy. But the 'plot twists' were starting to get to me. They'd already been across the continental US two-and-a-half times, if you count time travel. No quest was uncomplicated. It always changed direction at the last minute.

Every time the 'action' flagged for two seconds, the writers popped up with a new character. With some random new supernatural ability. At this point, the Japanese 'heroes' were attempting to steal a samurai sword from the vault of a superrich (presumed) villain in a Las Vegas hotel. All of a sudden, the showrunner got bored and threw in 1) a new character who could mimic all the other characters, and 2) Malcolm McDowell. I threw in the towel.

I spent the rest of the evening watching a relatively sane documentary about a man trying to get an archaeology permit to dig up the lost set of Cecil B DeMille's silent Ten Commandments. It's buried in sand dunes near Santa Barbara, California. As I followed his heartbreaking 30-year struggle with bureaucracy and trowels, I found the pace strangely restful. When he finally unearthed the face of a sphinx last seen in 1923, I experienced great satisfaction. I also learned things.

Children: when a home-made documentary about a schlock sandal epic is more interesting than what you can come up with using modern technology and an army of actors, just…give it up.

Don't:

  • Make action your god. Readers don't want to spend all their time trying to keep up with your characters. Use the action to create a story arc. Give it space to breathe.
  • Throw in so many characters the reader needs to take notes. There is a reason you never finished War and Peace. Chances are good that reason is related to Russian patronymics.
  • Keep shifting your moral ground. You want to surprise your reader with the revelation that Ms X, who looked like a thorough baddie, was really working undercover all the time? Great. The second time you do it, it loses force. Do it three times, and the reader feels you're just messing with him.
  • Create arbitrary 'magic'. Even 'magic' needs a logic greater than 'evolution, man, Science with a capital 'S', everybody gets a superpower, it's all fun with DNA'.
  • Try to dignify your running-about-in-corridors mess by adding pompous voiceover narratives like this:
    We all imagine ourselves the agents of our destiny, capable of determining our own fate. But have we truly any choice in when we rise? Or when we fall? Or does a force larger than ourselves bid us our direction? Is it evolution that takes us by the hand? Does science point our way? Or is it God who intervenes, keeping us safe?


    Gag me with a spoon. I call this kind of writing 'Robert E Howard [bleep]' for obvious reasons. Don't do it. There may be an afterlife.

Plot is a good thing. In moderation. The reader doesn't want your breathless recital of 'and then they did this, and then they did that, and then…' This is boring. Also, it wastes our time. What we want to know is, 'What was this like? What truths were revealed on this journey? What decisions were made? What does the outcome reveal about the human condition?' We want to go someplace outside ourselves, where there's room to speculate about things.

'They finally got the big sword, but then Hiro's dad turned out to be the one that gave the baby cheerleader to his minion to raise, and now Zachary Quinto's still beheading people and Malcolm McDowell is in the kitchen making pot pies…' is not that place.

Slow down. Stop and smell the roses. Even if they're radioactive.

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Dmitri Gheorgheni

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