Writers are horrible people. We burn down buildings, sink ocean liners, orphan children and take away loved ones, summon up burglars and barbaric armies and man-eating bears to wreak havoc on the lives of our characters. We giggle, or cry, nod in satisfaction, or (most often) agree with ourselves that the passage will do until something better can be made up, and move on, to start prosecuting another campaign as , without pity or sympathy for the imaginary lives we’re ruining. We have to be, in order to be effective, it’s in the nature of the trade.
Telling a good story means, among other things, engaging the audience’s attention, arousing their curiosity, encouraging their sympathy, and if possible, paying off and satisfying all of these before time runs out. And we are self-licensed to conjure up and press to the hilt any ungodly scenario we can think of in order to do these. If it works, we try to use it, and we often use it well, at the cost of our character’s happiness and our audience’s if need be.
What does it mean to satisfy attention? You hear something you think was worth listening to. Attention is most important to an author at two points:
1. The opening of a story, the first words and the first chapter, so to speak, and
2. The part that The Story Is About (usually this comes around the two-thirds point or later), when some change happens in the character or the struggle, and we see the lesson if we want to, and which is often the part of the story we remember best later.
At both these points in time, the question of satisfying attention is best understood, at least by me, by analogy with a phone call. You answer the phone, everybody announces and identifies themselves, and then, out of the form, comes the question: “So what’s up?”
Why are they calling you? What is happening that made it necessary for them to pick up the phone? We’ve all answered calls which we think are worthwhile, and ones we think weren’t really worth the time. (advertising calls notwithstanding). Tastes and standards vary, but “can you tell the important calls from those that are not” is a test I think most of us would be willing and able to pass.
The same manners that cause the “what’s up?” question even account for this somewhat; have you ever said or heard someone answer that question with “oh nothing just”? “Oh nothing, just wondering if you wanted to see a movie later.” “Not much, just wanted to say hi.” It’s never, “Oh, nothing, it’s just hospitalized by fire-ant bites on my scalp.” In all cases but the last, the “oh nothing” is sort of a brake pedal to say “this is not as urgent as some other calls, but hear me out,” in order to avoid making the other person feel like you’re calling them for no reason at all.
I guess nowadays this happens with texts more often than phone calls, and in that case custom generally dictates that you announce your business on the first salvo. So I’ll modify the test to ask: do you respond to the text right away, or not? If not, I submit that your attention was not satisfied.
So with stories. You yell a person’s name across a room and point at something; if it’s not clear what you’re pointing at, and it’s not obvious that it’s important enough to yell and point, and the person will give you an odd look and stop listening. You say “once upon a time there was” and follow that up with something not very interesting, same result.
Satisfy curiosity? This is easy: you, the audience, eventually find stuff out, preferably after a dramatic pause filled in with unrelated or apparently unrelated activity). The trick here is how to get the audience wondering in the first place, then make them wait for it.
But what does it mean to satisfy the audience’s sympathy? Usually I would say that it means that the character, or characters, that they’ve been rooting for get what they want. However, most good stories run something more like this:
A. Character wants something, the audience roots for them
B. Character either
1. Finds out the thing they want cannot ever be achieved for whatever reason, or
2. Gets that thing, and finds out that up close it’s not as good as they thought, or
3. Gets that thing, and finds out it’s not really what they wanted all along at all
3. Gets that thing, and finds out it’s not really what they wanted all along at all
C. Character learns from this what they really want
D. Character gets what they really want, audience happy, everybody goes home.
Either way, we feel that it was worth rooting for that character all along, because the character, in the end, got what they wanted.
This is sort of like the emotionally-charged equivalent of satisfying our attention above. Instead of feeling the reward we’d get from understanding why a person needed to pick up the phone, we feel rewarded because we feel the journey was worth taking with the character. Our time, in total, has been well spent, because we earned something along with the characters we were rooting for; either a bare sense of accomplishment by proxy, or an insight into how to deal with life's struggles, or the like. We feel the job was well done.
Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about how, in popular works at least, unhappy endings are uniformly out of fashion, in face they’re almost never allowed.
I’m not talking about endings that are merely bittersweet, in that maybe a beloved character doesn’t survive until the end, or the hero survives but doesn’t achieve everything they’d hoped to (but there’s a chance to try, in a future installment of the franchise perhaps). I’m talking about genuinely sad endings: the quest fails, the hero dies, the bad guys win. This kind of ending you almost never see anymore, unless you go looking for it. If you go to the movies nowadays, for instance, pick a film at random from a major studio, the odds are roughly 99% in your favor that things will work out for the heroes in then end.
Why?
I was thinking over this, and the best place to start looking for an answer is kid’s movies.
Continued in part 2
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