squid314: Stuff

"World War II" on the History channel is a groan-inducing, badly written, host of cliches:

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

Screenwriting Tips... You Hack, Guest Post Week: Tip #7

But, why else would you be writing about vampires?

Guest Post Week: Tip #7

Don’t have your vampire carry his lost love’s portrait in an antique locket. And in the name of all that’s holy please don’t have that portrait exactly match the female lead of your story.

-tip by Paul

Reading Genre and How Not to Write a Review

I realize that blogs are for dashing off quick thoughts and first impressions, but too often this leads to really weak arguments, unexplained assumptions, and random leaps (I'm sure I'm guilty of all three most of the time).

For example, this blog post features a book review of the horror novel The Ruins by Scott Smith, a book that I haven't read but which has a high enough profile to have been reviewed in the Times. So one would assume that this is on the quality end of the genre spectrum. People should love it, right?

No such luck, as the blog review fails to engage in the actual story or themes of the book and instead complains about the missed opportunity to do something really cool with man-eating plants and Mayans. He concludes:

The only acknowlegdement of the strangeness of this fact comes when one of the characters suggests that maybe it isn't a plant at all. But what else could it be? An alien? A weird Mayan god? No one speculates. Furthermore, no one considers bum-rushing the Mayans who are keeping them on this hill, even when it becomes gruesomely obvious that they will quickly die there unless they get off. No one considers suicide until it's way too late. And the end is such a stunning horror movie cliche that I'm surprised Smith found the fortitude to write it at all. Was he truly that unfamiliar with genre tropes (unlikely, I think), or was he so focused on the movie deal with his buddy Ben Stiller that he thought he'd save the screenwriters some time and just tack on Generic Ending A right at the outset?

The book starts out with promise, but devolves into a cartoonish morass of illogic and cliche a little less than halfway through.

There are two problems with this.

One is the fanboy obsession with teh cool, the need to be able to imagine all situations as though they were action figures in a playset, avatars in a video game, in which the goal of any situation is to battle to the end and advance to the next level. Why not bum rush the Mayans? That's what we'd do if this was Halo. The purpose of a story, on the other hand, is to lock people in a situation and see how they fail to behave in the ways we would expect them to, or they would expect themselves to.

The second problem is the fanboy anxiety with regard to cliche; the fear that it has all been done and said before, because it has been done and said before (except for bloggers who are all tremendously original and gifted). The idea of a "genre cliche" is in itself redundant because all genres are cliched. You can't fix it by calling it a trope either. A trope is just a cliche dressed up for prom.

So to say that the ending is a "stunning horror movie cliche" is essentially meaningless. There is no information contained in that statement. We never learn what the cliche is, why it is unoriginal, why its worse than other similar cliches, or how the ending should have been different. The whole attack is designed to highlight the blogger's superiority to everyone reading the post as well as the poor published novelist.

Moreover, if it is the novelist's purpose to write a horror story, then he or she must make use of horror tropes and cliches, it is required that they do so, otherwise (by definition) it is not a horror story. In other words, at a very basic level, the purpose of a horror story is to be a horror story; genre is an end in itself. To say that someone ought to be more familiar with a vaguely defined list of genre tropes and then assiduously avoid them (except for the man-eating plants!) is just confusing.

There seems to be some unspoken assumption that each writer must re-invent the wheel, rework the cliches from the ground up, invert them, reverse them, make them familiar but not too familiar. But how would one do that without disappointing the audience? And who decides which cliches are cool and which aren't. Is there a Gawker for horror writers so we can keep track of what's Hot this week? Is there a Pitchfork for horror snobs?

I'm guessing that if the book is as bad as asserted it has nothing to do with the reasons mentioned in the review. Most stories fail for the same reasons: poorly drawn characters, lack of an empathetic main character, absence of an impact or obstacle character, no relationship story, incomplete plotting, etc.

But here's the Times reviewer:

One of the creepy pleasures of “The Ruins” is the way it combines genre clichés with the verisimilitude that is Smith’s great gift. Transylvanian law apparently requires every horror tale to have a “You vant to go to the castle of COUNT DRACULA?!” scene, complete with terrified driver, howling wolves and rearing horses. Smith’s version is characteristically convincing: the local truck driver who takes the six explorers to the end of the road warns Amy not to go, but grows disgusted when she insists and suddenly says: “Go, then. I tell you no good, but still you go. . . . Go, go, go.” He drives off, leaving her confused; the rest of the party doesn’t even know the conversation took place. Things then fall apart with appalling suddenness, but the characters’ brains keep on ticking like cheap clocks. It’s the contrast between the familiar and the unspeakable that makes this book so harrowing.

In this reading the cliche is not only identified (Dracula) but contextualized and dramatized to show how it enriches the project, reveals character, and advances the psychological aspects of the story. The cliche connects the story to the tradition of the horror story while placing it in an unfamiliar and wholly new situation. It's not just good writing, but good reading. And reading well, making meaning out of the visual and textual fragments that make a story, is the most difficult art to master.

Cliches and Conventions

I was thinking about the differences between cliches and conventions in genre fiction. When is something familiar enough to set the right tone, but not so familiar that the reader says, "oh, no, not this again!" Through the magic of the tubes, I found this blog post at Storytellers Unplugged, where they take on the topic this way:

My point is that it's all cliche, to a significant degree. In mysteries and certain kinds of horror, the killer's either going to be a man or a woman, as is the victim. You go to a ghost story for, well, a ghost. Same with vampires, werewolves, etc. If you want to approach plot and character from a point of view of irony, with emotional distance and intellectual curiosity, then I suppose you'll want post-modern with its own unique way of doing and saying things. But like New Wave, splatterpunk, experimental fiction in general, you pretty much know what you're going to get. There's an expectation of predictability in the fiction readers seek out. We want gore. Or atmosphere. Or footnotes.

The whole post is worth reading as are the comments. As one commenter notes, the French word cliche is meant to imply a stereotype, something that has been stamped over and over until it has lost its freshness.

So these question arise: when is a story convention just another cliche? When is an archetype just a stereotype? And when is prescribed way of doing things just too conventional?

Since I tend to think about writing in terms of hardcore structuralist expectations and mythical archetypes, this can cause problems. For instance, using Dramatica as my guide, I tend to approach stories holistically. So if I have this main character in this situation, depending on how I start the story, my ending is almost dictated for me. If that means if a part of it seems predictable or stale, then really the whole thing is predictable and stale and I either need to accept it or start over. Otherwise, if I change gears in midstream just to upset expectations, I end up with two halves of two stories that don't make a coherent whole. It's craziness for its own sake.

Where does one go from here? I think the best way (for me) to approach the problem of cliche and convention is to go back to my little pet theory of culture (emergence, refinement, parody, and revision). Conventions represent that refinement stage where meaning is inscribed and codified. Cliches on the other hand are the later parody stage where overuse and repetition robs the convention of its meaning, making it look foolish or just plain dumb.

The answer then, is to always revise. Attack the cliches head-on and reinvigorate them with our own perspective, our own "take". After all, that perspective (our own), is the only thing new that we can ever bring to our writing anyway.