Actually, Yes, You Can Overdo It

[rowyn]

Some time ago, jongibbs gave some examples of "bad writing advice": advice one has heard from professional or reputable sources which one has chosen not to take to heart. Writers love to write about writing, and the world is full of advice on how to do it. Some of that advice is not particularly good. As is Mr. Gibbs' won't, he solicited his readers for additional examples.

I didn't think of any at the time, but this morning's sythyry reminded me of one the tidbits of advice I don't care for.

For those not following sythyry, why not? Go read it now! Start at the beginning! Or start with today's, it's all good the last few entries had led some readers (or at least, me) to think Horrible Things would happen in this one, and the actual events were less dramatic and doomy than anticipated. I liked this! It was surprising, plausible, and sensible.

It was not an example that followed the writing advice I dislike. That advice goes about like this: "Imagine the worst thing that could possibly happen to your protagonists. Now make it worse! No, even worse than that! Worse still! There, now once you've made it twice as bad as that, it'll be acceptable to write."

I will concede that I, and many other fledgling writers, could benefit from following this advice to some degree. I know I'm too nice to my characters.

But this trope annoys me quite a bit, especially in film and TV shows. There, I'll see these long destructive spirals of "take his job/kill his wife/frame him for the murder/kidnap his daughter/imprison him in a death camp/torture him for months/cook his pet goldfish", etc. Then, when all seems hopeless, the protagonist miraculously rises up against the whole world which has turned against him, and somehow manages to win.

The problem for me is mostly in that "miraculously" and "somehow". Because after a scriptwriter has tormented his protagonist for an hour and a half, I'm not so much buying the miraculous victory any more. Instead, I'm thinking things like "Shouldn't he act, y'know, traumatized by all that trauma?" and "if he could manage to get out of the alligator-ringed acid pool deathtrap with sheets of fire shooting over it, why couldn't he manage not getting caught and thrown into it in the first place?"

When an author does this really well, then I'll be impressed by the cleverness of the protagonist in turning the situation around. But it's far more often that I am rolling my eyes at the massive levels of plot immunity, coincidence, and contrivance needed to get the protagonist into and out of this mess. Even when it's done brilliantly, that Daring Last Second Escape is still a trope of every single action movie ever. It was great the first time! Maybe the first ten or even a hundred times. But I'm on the thousandth iteration now, and I'm quite willing to give it a miss in favor of a Daring Escape from the Guards Before They Get Back to the Impregnable Death Fortress. No, really. You don't have to crank it up to 11. I can hear just fine at 3 or 4.

I don't want to be too hard on this trope, because I'm guilty of it too at times. But I do believe that it's oversold, and that you can craft a good story without constantly upping the amounts of torment and horror that you inflict upon your lead characters.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Fine line between drama and melodrama? };)

I think it was a different kind of surprise - but still a surprise - due to the building up of expectations of Doom!

[rowyn]

Exactly! Having an actual battle at that juncture wouldn't've been surprising; it's what's expected.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Implausibility can be a big problem for me in enjoying someone else's story. I try to be sensitive to it when contriving my own stories.

Perhaps, in movies, the most unlikely thing is non-superheroes who are beaten nearly to death and then immediately rebound as if being on a rack was just a warm-up stretching exercise for them, and concussions just helped them think. And shooting them just makes them mad, as everybody knows.

===|==============/ Level Head

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there have been several cases where I've watched some show and been shocked by what appeared to be REAL damage done to the hero - implications of some bones broken, maybe a fracture, certainly something that's going to leave a mark. But then, not all that long later, the hero is doing action-hero-y stuff again. That just kills it for me.

I mean, it's bad enough that, say, in Lost, everyone has an "off" switch: a good portion of the cast has been "knocked unconscious" with a convenient bludgeon to the back of the head, and - what's more - such attempts work every time (and nobody dies then and there from head trauma). I honestly don't know what all complications might arise from get whacked on the head hard enough to knock you unconscious, but it just can't be good ... but I can deal with it to a certain degree because it seems to be par for the course for action movies.

But then, when a show seems to be trying to say, "Look! Our hero suffers REAL damage!" in a way that goes beyond the usual almost-cartoony violence ... and then the (non-supernatural, non-cybernetic, non-superheroic) hero just shrugs it off later when it's convenient to do so, it seems to work at cross-purposes. I was willing to overlook certain implausibilities because it was "par for the course." If the writers are basically going, "Look, we've changed the paradigm!" and then it's right back again, I'm no longer along for the ride.

[rowyn]

Yeah, the trope of "an action hero/villain can knock anyone out as easily and with as little chance of harm as a professional anesthesiologist in an operating room" is awfully silly, but at least it's internally consistent. The whole "Oh no he's losing horribly oh yay he's made a miraculous comeback" often isn't. :/

[rowyn]

Yes, that's one of the things that bugs me most. It's like the filmmakers decide that letting the hero get beaten up will give verisimilitude ("see, he's not invulnerable!") and then immediately undermine that by making the effects of the beating vanish in the next five minutes.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

That's how you tell if you're a hero -- if being beaten up and shot just makes you *angry*. If it makes you whimper and curl up in pain, then you're just a sidekick at best.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

For the record, I don't intentionally try to be mean to my characters very often. I usually just get seduced by 'oooh, it'd be neat if *this* happened!'

I do hate the twist endings where everything is magically made right again. Done right, you need:
(1) The twist to be plasuible.
(2) The twist to have been there all along.
(3) The twist to happen at a the climax, and not at the very end of the story.

In the action hero variant, the twist is usually something like 'the bad guys actually only have a finite number of men, and after you kill them the problem's over'.

You could always take the Dr. Horrible approach to it. The hero was actually driven insane by all the trauma, and the part of the movie where he beats up implausibly on all the bad guys and it magically makes everything all right is his deluded fantasy world.

[rowyn]

For the record, I don't intentionally try to be mean to my characters very often. I usually just get seduced by 'oooh, it'd be neat if *this* happened!'

I think it's different for you: you really enjoy seeing horrible things happen to characters. >:)

You could always take the Dr. Horrible approach to it. The hero was actually driven insane by all the trauma, and the part of the movie where he beats up implausibly on all the bad guys and it magically makes everything all right is his deluded fantasy world.

I wonder if that kind of insanity actually happens in the real world, or if it's purely the hallmark of fiction?

That's definitely the most logical view of the end to Dr. Horrible, though.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe just a wish-fulfilment fantasy and not a delusion, then.

[rowyn]

Insanity is way cooler as an explanation, though. >:)

[verminiusrex.livejournal.com]

The book Goal Motivation Conflict makes this point. You can use increasingly dramatic events to build tension and motivate the characters, but make them simple and reasonable so they remain believable.

[rowyn]

... I probably should read more books about writing, really.

[jongibbs.livejournal.com]

I love my characters, but if they'd be happy to see me in real life, then I'm not making them suffer enough :)

[rowyn]

Hee, that's one way to measure it. :)

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

[OOC -- glad I'm doing OK! -bb]

It wasn't a particularly good day, really. It hasn't been a particularly good vacation, for that matter. But the last bit could have gone a great deal worse.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Though I have been fretting that I have been too easy on Sythyry this arc: zir friends found out about where the embezzler had gone to pretty fast, the evil wizard who was pissed at Sythyry didn't actually want to fight zir, etc.

And I've been fretting that things I thought made sense (evil wizard not fighting) might come off as contrived or plot immunity to anyone else.

Also I have been fretting that I've been too hard on zir.

Getting both frets is probably a good sign, I suppose.

[rowyn]

I think having the evil wizards decide not to fight was brilliant. Nothing about them had really suggested they were spoiling for an ugly fight-to-the-death with Sythyry, so it made sense.

I did think Zascalle et al were a little easier to trace than I'd expected -- I figured she'd be swapping ships or some such -- but I didn't think it was that big a deal, and it made a better story than several entries of "no news, still searching" would've. :)