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The First Rule of Storytelling is You Must Tell the Story |
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Written by Elizabeth Genco
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Monday, 09 May 2005 |
Readers can get lost in stories. That can be a good thing, or a really bad thing. Your job as a writer is to nip the possibility of the latter in the bud.
So there you are, settling into your comfy chair after an exhilarating trip to the comics shop. Your sizable stack of booty and a frosty beverage are close at hand. You put your feet up, grab the first book off the stack, and start reading.
You're drawn into the story immediately. It moves along at a good pace after a sweet opening, complete with plot complications and rising action. You're rooting for the good guys and cursing at the bad guys. You lose all track of time.
After a while, the right side of the comic is noticeably skinnier than the left. Only a few pages remain; it's time for all to be revealed. You hold your breath. The climax arrives!
You furrow your brow. What the heck just happened?
You furiously flip back through the pages, trying to figure out exactly what you missed. You re-read some crucial parts. You make some educated guesses, but you're really not sure. Meanwhile, you are now completely aware that the wayward spring in your decades-old chair is poking your butt.
After a few fruitless minutes of searching for answers, you give up. You finish the comic, but "the moment" has gone and you remain befuddled.
Or maybe you hit the confusing part somewhere closer to the middle than the end. Sometimes it's at the beginning, in which case I'll close the book right there. Why? Because my time on this earth is short. Which is precisely why the first scenario is so infuriating.
How many times has this happened to you? Be honest, now. Me, it happens way too often. Usually with comics, less so with novels. Sometimes with movies or TV shows. Every time, my internal dialogue goes something like this: "OK, I never, ever want to do that to someone."
As a writer, I have a lot of balls to keep in the air at the same time. I don't need to rehash them all with you, because you know what they are. The stack of storytelling demands is tall. But there's one that sits at the very top of the heap, and that's telling the story in such a way that people can follow it, understand it, and (hopefully!) get lost in it.
Put another way, a clear narrative is akin to "begin at the beginning". If I screw that up, I might as well not bother writing anything at all.
Yeah, I feel that strongly about this. Because there's very little that I hate more as a reader than the writer dropping that ball after I've invested a part of myself, however small, in their story.
Here's the thing: as a writer, telling a story is my job. Telling, as in, communicating it to someone else. If I've completely lost my readers, then I'm not telling the story, plain and simple. I'm not doing my job.
Yeah, I know, it's really hard to tell stories. Heavy demands, remember? Them's the breaks.
As you can see, I'm opinionated about this one. Narrative clarity falls into the realm of "non-negotiable", and, in my opinion, the reasons are obvious. Nonetheless, whenever I bring this up, someone inevitably makes the argument against "spoon-feed[ing]" readers.
"A writer shouldn't have to spell everything out," they say. "Readers should have to think a little." "Dumbing-down" is another phrase oft bandied about in these debates.
And I wholeheartedly agree. For one thing, readers are thinking if they're reading your story, whether you acknowledge it or not. And you shouldn't have to spell everything out. But -- I hate to break it to you -- you do have to spell out that story.
By all means, raise questions. Good writing will do just that. Leave me, as a reader, puzzled by the ramifications, or disturbed, or considering your story as I fall asleep that night. These are good things! But they are not substitutes for a clearly told story; indeed, they are the by-products of one.
Ah, but sometimes an ambiguous story is a delicious thing. There are those stories that could be read two ways, and those stories where the world is just not as it seems. Those are great, right?
Right. And yet, you may notice that such stories have the same requirements in their telling. "Deliberately ambiguous" is not the same as "unclear, muddied narrative".
Of course, if we're talking about narrative clarity with respect to comics, it goes without saying that the artist plays a tremendous role in how clear a story comes off. There's a lot that a writer can't control, but he or she isn't at a total loss. If you're self-publishing or just starting out (as most of us around here are), you have some, if not all, say in who's drawing your book. Once you've got the right artist on board, you can work with that person to guard against muddied storytelling. Well-chosen panel descriptions are a great way to start. Constant communication without being a nag is a fine follow-up (note: that includes taking their advice when they know more than you do).
The bottom line? A clear narrative begins with you, the writer. It's what your readers expect when they buy your work. If your work promises its readers a story, a clear narrative is the first thing that you owe them in exchange for their hard-earned cash.
As a person with stories to tell, it's what you owe yourself, too.
Now that the all-too-crucial blog redesign is out of the way, Elizabeth Genco is back to working on her first novel, writing a story every week, and revising KEYS, her first graphic novel miniseries (to be drawn by Leland Purvis).
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