The Strongest Narrative Medium

A couple of posts ago, I talked about the stage-play being a limited and out-dated medium. One of the weakest story-telling mediums in my opinion. Now I'd like to talk about what I believe is, potentially, the strongest medium for telling stories. It is also one of the youngest: videogames.

I've been playing, and enjoying, videogames obsessively for 18 years now, so you may say I'm biased, or overly optimistic in declaring them a stronger medium than movies or novels, and, admittedly there is still a stigma and a raft of misconceptions surrounding videogames. There is also, more than many other mediums, a couple of barriers to entry: firstly the requirement of often expensive, specialist, hardware to experience them, and secondly the inherent challenges within a game which make it a game. A novel is inexpensive, and a film does not prevent your progression by testing your mastery of concepts presented within it.

I'll answer the problems, or weaknesses, of videogames first, before I explain why I think it is such a strong medium (hint: videogames essentially combine the best traits of many other mediums).

The first barrier to entry, that of the requirement for expensive hardware, is similar to my criticism of stage-plays, which can often have expensive ticket prices for relatively short experiences. However, while current consoles cost in the hundreds, and new games generally carry £40 to £50 price tags, many worthwhile games can be played for free, or for very little cost, on computers and devices which you already own.

Take Passage for example (http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/), a short but sweet game which comments on the nature of life and the passage of time without saying a word. Chances are you own a computer running either Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, and if you do, you can play the above game for free right now.

The primitive aesthetic of Jason Rohrer's 'Passage' belies its emotional impact. If you own a computer, you can experience it for yourself right now.

A visit to Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/) will reveal many great videogames for a range of prices from around £3.99 upwards you could play on the Mac or Windows computer you already own.

Also, consider this: a ticket for a professionally-produced stage-play might cost, on average, around £20. Say the play lasts roughly 2 hours, that £10 per hour of entertainment. A new DVD may cost upwards of £10, again for 2, or even 1.5 hours of entertainment, making it £5 per hour. The shortest full-price retail games will last more than 8 hours, depending on the genre, and many will last longer. At 8 hours' entertainment for £40, that's £5 per hour. I've bought £5 games before which have lasted me 50 hours. That's £0.10 per hour of entertainment (excluding the initial cost of the console).

I would argue therefore that the cost of entry is not as unreasonable as it first appears when traded off against the potential returns.

The second barrier to entry I raised is the challenge, or perceived challenge, of videogames. Some videogames are unapologetically challenging. This is part of their appeal. Many older videogames, particularly those made pre-c.1996* require dedication and high levels of skill to finish. However, whether a game is challenging or not is an individual design decision, not an inherent aspect of a videogame. The videogame I linked to above, Passage, is not challenging in the slightest, at least in so far as there is no fail-state: you cannot lose at the videogame, you can only experience it.

(Arguably therefore, with no win/lose-state, Passage is not a 'game' at all. For my purposes in this post, 'game' and 'videogame' are not the same thing. A 'game' I would define as a challenge for one of more players to reach one, or one of several, predefined, conclusion(s) by following a set of previously defined abstract rules. I say 'abstract' rules because there may be ways to 'cheat' the game by exploiting the physical properties of the game pieces or equipment outside of these rules. For example, in chess, one could physically move a bishop along a vertical or horizontal plane, but this would contravene the abstract rule that bishops can only move diagonally. An example of a 'game' would be chess or, more improvisationally, something as simple as a person with a rubber ball challenging themselves to bounce it off a wall and into a bucket. (The abstract rule "I must rebound the ball from the wall into the bucket to win" makes this a game).

A videogame I would define, firstly, as an interactive experience created through electronic means within which a series of predefined physical inputs from the user result in specific actions within the interactive experience (eg. pressing 'A' makes a character jump). So far this definition could apply to productivity software or an internet browser, so a further stipulation is required. I would add, secondly, that videogame, like a game, must also have either a win/lose state or, not necessarily like a game, seek specifically to evoke an emotional, critical, or philosophical, response from a player or, alternatively, to tell some sort of narrative (which is more or less the same thing as seeking to evoke a response).)
Many videogames now offer different levels of challenge to cater for a variety of player preferences. For example, you may have easy modes which give player-avatars increased resistance to damage, such as in Call of Duty; optional driving assists which make cars less likely to spin out, such as in Forza; instructional videos on how to complete challenges, such as in recent Mario and Zelda games; and even occasionally spectator modes, where the game will automatically complete sections of game if the player finds it too challenging (I believe one of the New Super Mario Bros. or possibly one of the Kirby titles had this feature).

The original 'Doom' has some memorable difficulty level names

So, as I previously mentioned, challenge is not inextricably linked with all videogames, but nor is it a bad thing. Designers, as much as they can judge how easy or difficult individual players will find a videogame, make a conscious decision whether their game will be considered challenging (as with Dark Souls) or accessible (as with Animal Crossing). This decision in turn colours the narrative of the videogame, in the same way that the use of long or short sentences, or obscure of common words, can alter the style and tone of a book. For example, the impression a difficult game may give is that life is full of challenges, but through challenge emerges reward, satisfaction, and achievement. That Dark Souls is so challenging adds a further dimension to its ambient narrative about a dying world in which just surviving is an achievement within itself. Bright and cheerful Animal Crossing on the other hand, which has no explicit goals or end-game, is all about social interaction, the sense of community, and creating, or helping to create, a visually-pleasing and harmonious house and town. Making this game challenging, having the player-character able to die or fail would not be appropriate.

I would also like to point out that, just as some games are challenging and others are not, some books are challenging. Take Finnegans Wake as an example. While you can physically flick through all the pages in any order you like (in contrast to a challenging videogame which may halt progress completely if you cannot overcome a specific barrier) following Joyce's idiolectic neologistic novel is considered one of the greatest literary challenges there is. While physically following the labyrinthine narrative of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a spatial challenge, as the reader is asked to flick back and forth between text, footnotes and appendices, or to rotate the book as words spiral around the page. These and, to a lesser extent, many other literary works, are challenging books, in the way that Harry Potter novels are not. Again, films can be challenging, such as the puzzle-boxes Christopher Nolan directs, or the philosophically searching works such as The Seventh Seal  and Paris, Texas, in the way that, for example, The Naked Gun trilogy is not.

The final 'problem' with videogames as a narrative medium are the pre- and mis-conceptions which surround it. This is due in large part to its relative youth as a story-telling device. It is true that the largest demographic for videogames is currently a male ages 18-34 audience. Older people are generally resistant to learning videogames, or have just not been exposed to them. Nintendo, particularly with the DS and DS XL series has made some great progress with getting videogames into the hands of older and female players, and not just with casual or gender-stereotyped videogames, but with story-driven titles such as Another Code, the Professor Layton series, and the Ace Attorney series among others. Gradually, the balance is shifting to encompass a wider audience, particularly as the people who grew up playing videogames start to make them, and there are now a few more high profile women in the videogames-industry, such as Amy Hennig (lead script-writer and director on the Uncharted series), but for now, males age 18-34 is the dominant demographic, and the most popular videogames reflect this.  

This is what males age 18-34 like

Because games aimed at this market, such as Call of Duty, Gears of War, Halo, Medal of Honor, and Battlefield, dominate the charts, there is a misconception that most, if not all, videogames are violent. Violence is a tool used extensively by many mediums, particularly novels and films, but it is disproportionately prevalent in videogames. The reason for this, aside from the apparent appetite in the target demographic for simulations of war and murder, is that, in order to be compelling, a narrative needs some sort of conflict, and violence is an easy way to create conflict with a clear win/lose state:

Conflict - this soldier is trying to kill you. Win state - you kill him. Lose state - he kills you.


Even games which don't feature blood and guns can often be violent. The family-friendly Super Mario games for example feature no other form of conflict resolution than stomping on antagonists' heads. Even cartoonish Angry Birds is full of cartoonish violence.

Yet there are vast swathes of games which are completely, or almost completely, non-violent. Almost all simulation games for a start: racing games, plane simulations, most sports, simulations of various jobs (eg. farming, truck-driving, videogame developing), then stuff like the Sims, SimCity, Spore, Civilization games (depending on player choices), Dear Esther, Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Portal and other puzzle videogames, and many Adventure videogames. While prevalent then, violence in videogames is not universal, as is sometimes believed to be the case. (And some of these games are even pretty popular: Minecraft recently overtook Modern Warfare 3 as the most played game on Xbox Live.)

Animal Crossing is a nice game for nice people

If I've now sufficiently answered the common issues which people level against videogames, now I would like to explain why I think videogames have the potential to be, if they're no already, the most versatile medium for telling meaningful narratives there is.

Primarily, aside from their unique attribute of interactivity, of their level of responsiveness to their players, which I'll come to in a minute, they can combine at will elements of almost all other mediums.

Firstly, videogames often borrow heavily from film. They are, unlike books or raido-plays, a visual medium. So they can use filmic techniques such as match scenes, quick cuts, visual cues, music soundtracks and ambient noises to create atmosphere etc. Anything a film can do, a videogame could theoretically do too, and videogames frequently ape films often to great effect, sometimes to lesser effect. Some videogames may be criticised for example for sacrificing interactivity to lengthy expositional cutscenes (eg. Hideo Kojima videogames). Other videogames, such as the earlier Silent Hill and Resident Evil games have been lauded for their use of mise-en-scene and carefully considered framing, creating the impression of acting out a horror film.

Resident Evil used fixed camera angles and carefully considered lighting to create a horror-film ambiance in its creepy mansion setting.

 Unlike film though, a videogame can also feature sections of text, sometimes the equivalent of several novels' worth. In the aforementioned Resident Evil games the player picks up notes and letters which expand the story and provide clues to solving puzzles. In the videogame I'm playing currently, Final Fantasy XIII, there is a 'Datalog' which summarises the story up to the current point, as well as providing further information on the characters, events, history of the fiction's world, and locations. All of this information is optional, and yet reading it expands the fiction in a way that a film never could. In a science fiction film, such as Blade Runner, the world beyond what is shown can only be hinted at. Books such as Lord of the Rings do a lot to develop the world in which the action is set, but this leads to long paragraphs of exposition and description. A game such as Final Fantasy XIII gets the best of both worlds: it can show you a fictional place, hinting at how this place came to be and what its significance is, and then, if and when the player feels like it, further information can be divulged about this place through text.

Bioshock is a similar example of how videogames can use audio, something equivalent to a radio-play, to expand the fiction. Through the contrivance that everyone in the world of Rapture recorded an audio diary and then left the cassettes scattered carelessly around, the player could listed to the thoughts and experiences of absent characters without breaking the first-person perspective of the protagonist. Although contrived in this game, the idea that information can come in multiple forms: as witnessed events, flashbacks, text, music, and spoken word, is closer to real life, but is not possible in many other mediums. Can you imagine a film which paused the action for several minutes while the whole audience read through a document several pages long? Or a book which asked you to stop reading at certain points and watch a short video showing certain events? Only videogames have the ability to mix these forms coherently, whether or not this ability is always implemented well.

Rapture citizen: "guess I'll just record my most intimate personal secrets on this tape player and then leave it lying around in a public area."

The second main reason videogames are a strong tool for conveying narratives is their interactivity. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you play Passage, which I linked to earlier in this post. That narrative would not work so elegantly in any other medium other than a videogame. It is a game about a life. You can choose how your avatar lives that life. If you hold right, you can walk the straight path through life, meet a wife, walk through life with her, growing old, and then she dies, and then you die. Or you can choose to avoid the girl and go through life alone. Or you can choose to not move, to stay in one place and let time pass you by. Or you can choose to explore, to go up or down and find chests containing gold coins. However, if you choose to have a wife, some of the chests may become inaccessible, as the opening to them are wide enough for only one person. You can interpret these metaphors however you like, but they could not have been presented with such clarity in a short story or a film, nor could you, as a player, have felt such agency or involvement in any other medium.

To expand upon this point, interactivity increases involvement and, often, empathy. You might get scared watching horror films, you might become infuriated with the protagonist who never turns round when the monster is behind them, but if you're playing a horror videogame, you become the protagonist, you are in control of when they turn round, whether they fight the monster or try to flee. Any threat requires your immediate action, not your passive observance. Similarly, if you've spent 40 hours building up a character from a lowly villager to a mighty warrior, specialising in weapons and skills of your choosing, you feel a level of involvement with that character you are unlikely to feel with a character in a film or television series (although I've heard a lot of people feel they can vicariously live through the characters of the series Friends).

This emotional involvement can be very powerful, and I've heard of people crying at Final Fantasy games before, particularly at that one moment in Final Fantasy VII (whose impact was much blunted for me by the fact that I knew it was coming and wasn't much enjoying the game anyway). The moment to which I'm referring of course being the unexpected death of one of the main characters, who the player as nurtured and seen develop throughout the previous 20 hours, at the hands of the story's main villain.

It may not look much now, but in 1997 this scene brought some people to tears.

Beyond empathy, interactivity also provides alternative and emergent narratives. The Silent Hill games, for example, though telling linear stories, have always featured alternative endings based on player behaviour. In Silent Hill 2, there is a female character called Maria who moves more slowly than the player's running speed. If the player chooses to wait for her and keep her in sight and to look out for her when there are monsters around, the game will end with the protagonist beginning a relationship with Maria. However, if the player chooses to move through the game as quickly as possible, leaving her behind, there will be a different, equally valid conclusion.

This is similar to the alternate ending feature you sometimes get with DVDs, but other games weave diverging narratives throughout their experience. In Dragon Age: Origins you can choose different reactions during conversations and this will affect how the characters present respond to you in later conversations. Many roleplaying games employ similar mechanics, while strategy/simulation games often present even more choices. Will Wright's SimCity and Sid Meier's Civilization series, for example, in each of their videogames offer all players the same starting tools, but no two play-sessions are alike, and all players will leave with different stories to tell, and yet you could not novelise either of these games.

Some people would argue that interactivity, the handing over of agency to the player, takes away the control of the author and makes it impossible for videogames to tell proper stories and, furthermore, impossible for videogames to be classed as art. This I would say emphatically is not the case. Any videogame world exists within what is known as a possibility space, a term which is more-or-less self-explanatory. A gameworld is a space in which some things are possible, and some things are not. Things which one game allows may not be allowed in another game, following conscious design decisions and an editing process, and this can have a profound effect on the narrative.

Take, for example, a hypothetical game in which you play as a law enforcer in a fictional city. The game might allow you to kill innocent civilians, or it might prevent your gun from firing when pointed at an innocent person. If the player is able to kill a civilian, this might play into part of a narrative about police brutality or negligence, which could further be coloured by whether killing a civilian has no consequences (the resulting narrative making a comment on accountability and who polices the police) or there is some punishment for doing so (this playing into a narrative about how people are free to make their own choices, but choices have repercussions). Alternatively, if the game prevented you from ever harming a civilian, this would enhance the portrayal of the protagonist as a heroic and morally righteous person who only harms bad guys.

Through design choices such as these, if considered carefully, the designers allow the player to discover a narrative for themselves within the intentions of the author. Thus, both authorial control and player agency are served and a narrative is conveyed.

The other benefit of interactivity, which perhaps I should have mentioned earlier when I was talking about letting players read further exposition as and when they wanted, is that players can choose, to an extent, how long to linger in certain places, or in what depth to study them. For example, in role-playing videogames especially, some players like only to follow the main story-line and then reach the conclusion, while others like to take their time and experience all the side stories/quests the gameworld has to offer. This is an option not present in films, books, or television series. Secondly it allows for virtual tourism of real, historical, and fantastical places.

The Assassin's Creed games, with their painstaking recreation of historical cities, are strong examples of this. You can read about 15th Century Florence, you can watch documentaries, or historical dramas set there, you can even visit the modern day city and imagine what it must have been like, but only Assassin's Creed II let's you see a facsimile of what it must actually have been like to explore the city's backstreets, to look out from the rooftops, to hear the ambient sounds and see the people going about their daily lives. And how much more captivating to experience it that way, than to look at illustrations in a dusty textbook?  

Renaissance Florence lives again!

Along the same lines, videogames, through interactivity, give a player the chance to experience something they would not normally get to experience. Forza or Gran Tourismo is as close as many of us will get to driving a Ferrari, a MacLaren, and a Lamborghini in the same evening. Similarly, something like Operation Flashpoint is as close as many of us would like to get to being a soldier.

My final reason why videogames are such a strong medium is that they are not limited by time constraints in the way that just about any medium apart from literature is. Any film over three hours, however enjoyable, is an endurance test. People will not go to the cinema in droves to sit for 200+ minutes in one go. Same with stage-plays, and radio-plays. Television and radio serials fare slightly better in that these can run for hundreds of episodes (eg. Doctor Who, the X-Files, the Archers) but these are limited by needing to have segments of uniform length: usually 30-, 45-, or 60-minute blocks. This leads to episodes which begin to follow familiar formulas and beats in the plot, and leaves little room for experimentation.   

Only literature and videogames escape the formal length constraints which affect other mediums. Literature can, of course, be pretty much any length from around 6 words to well, theoretically any length, but in practice, not much more than 1,000,000 words. This can be broken down into different forms roughly as follows: 1-500 words - flash fiction, 500-20,000 words - short story, 20,000-40,000 words - novella, 40,000 words+ - novel (and possibly 200,000 words+ - epic novel). Similarly, videogames can be anything from the 5-minute long Passage, mentioned above, to 100 hours+ epics such as the Elder Scrolls games and World of Warcraft.

And that's pretty much my argument for why videogames are the strongest medium for conveying narratives we have yet conceived. To recap they (1) are able to handpick the best elements of other mediums for their own purposes, (2) are interactive, creating a range of potential alternative yet interrelated narratives which can occur within a single possibility space, and (3) they are not constrained by requirements to adhere to certain minimum or maximum lengths, expanding the range and breadth of stories they can tell.

As a young medium they may not yet always live up to this potential, and they still have some stereotypes and misconceptions to shake off, but I am optimistic that one day the great power of narratives told through videogames will be more widely recognised.    

*This is a fairly arbitrary cut-off point, but I'm basing it on the assumption that many of the games from the early '90s, particularly those on the NES (1986), Megadrive (1988) and SNES (1990), were influenced by, or even ported from, coin-hungry arcade cabinets which sought to keep play-sessions short and leave players hungry to improve their performance. I would say the advent of the Nintendo 64 in 1996 and particularly it's launch game, Super Mario 64, began a trend towards more accessible games, since the 3D world was more forgiving than its 2D forebears were just staying alive was a challenge. 

Eros and Thanatos

note: spoilers for Julian Barnes' Sense of an Ending follow.

I started reading Julian Barne's Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending last night, and finished it this morning. (I did sleep in between, by the way). I should have been writing instead of reading all morning, but oh well, I was intrigued. It was a compelling book, and well-written although, I felt, let down by the ending, which will be spoiled in this post, so if that concerns you, then stop reading now.

This post is going to be half review and half rambling. Well, it will probably be all rambling, but I'll shoehorn in some opinions of the novella as well. At first I really enjoyed the book, up until the last quarter really. In a much truncated form, Barnes almost invoked something of Proust in his musings on time and memory. The story is written intelligently and explores some interesting ideas about philosophy and such. There was a cleverness to the way that Barnes kept referring back to images and motifs he had introduced earlier, but there was something a little too mechanical to it too.

I liked the way he introduced high philosophical ideas, then undermined them with the occasional colloquial crassness or self-reproach of the narrator. Although, something which I've probably picked up on and now regurgitating from an article of the 'Great American Novelists' that I read in the New York Review last month, it seems like Barnes was trying to have his cake and eat it by having the narrator act melodramatic and philosophical one minute and then reproach himself for it the next. It means the other gets to posit a theory, or say something grandiose, then, as a contingency, head off any criticism by saying "what a silly thing to say." No, I can't be bothered to scan the book for examples, that's just the general impression I got (I don't think I'm cut out to be a book reviewer, at least not today).

Anyway, some of the turns of phrase were really good, and I certainly found the book intriguing on an intellectual level. Also, I found the male characters, particularly for such a short book, were well developed, at least the two central ones, Tony (the narrator) and Adrian. The female characters less so. Veronica particularly seemed to behave irrationally and more as a character serving a function in a plot would than as an actual human being. I did not find her believable at all. I think that was partly the point of her: that she was unknowable and the narrator could not her work out, but she was just disparaging and aloof the whole time, without anything to counter-balance this.

The plot is clearly very important to this book, and the psychological depth of the characters is really only a tool to serve this, not an end in itself. The twist at the end makes it the sort of book you can only really read once, but I did not like the ending. The point at which it went downhill for me was when Veronica demands Tony meet her in North London, then drives him in silence to a particular street, parks her car and tells him to look at a ragtag group of social misfits who are made comical by their odd mannerisms and dress sense.

Their sudden insertion into the story seemed random and the narrator's bafflement at their appearance only served to make them seem more incongruous. I'm finding it hard to put my finger on exactly why I find this sort of thing so objectionable. I think I have a strong dislike for any characters or plot elements which are, not exactly wacky, but sort of abnormal or out of place. I don't like stories which focus on absurdity or novelty. I don't like pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman, for example (including the Doctor Who episode he wrote last year).

To put it another way, Ian McEwan, as one of my writing tutors once pointed out, does the random very well. Enduring Love kicks off with a hot-air balloon crashing and several people running to help the boy trapped inside it. This kicks off the whole story, without being entirely relevant to it. It's unexpected, but it's plausible, and is merely a springboard for the plot. If a hot-air balloon crashed at a dramatically convenient part of a serious story, I wouldn't like that. Similarly, suddenly introducing these 'care-in-the-community' characters who argue over "shop or pub" and dress eccentrically, broke my suspension of disbelief.

The narrator then more or less stalks these characters for a while until the big reveal at the end, by which point we have had two suicides, two unwanted pregnancies, three cases of infidelity, at least one plot-convenient memory lapse, one deliberately destroyed diary, and one mysterious will. Looking at that list, it's not surprising that Mr Barnes also wrote crime fiction in the past.

It's not that The Sense of an Ending is a bad book, because it isn't, and I'm sure it's entirely worthy of the 2011 Booker prize, but I think, from how it began, I expected one sort of book, perhaps more A Portrait of the Artist, and it ended up, despite quite a few nice ideas, as something more like a thriller.

I guess that's my review of it. Can you tell I don't write a lot of book reviews? What's hard of course about reviewing any medium in which you work is that in criticising something, you make yourself open to the challenge of "let's see you write something better than." There were times, as a writer, I found parts of The Sense of an Ending dishearteningly good. I think that may be part of the reason I so rarely read contemporary fiction: I feel too much of a sense of competition. It's fine for James Joyce and Marcel Proust to be better than me because everyone accepts their works as classics: they are untouchable and dead. When I read living authors I realise what I have to compete with. 

Julian Barnes, though I hadn't heard of him before reading this, is evidently an author a long way into his career now at the peak of his form. I couldn't compete with this novel on its own terms or against its intentions. It is an assured and well-crafted story, aside from my earlier criticisms. It could not have been a first novel, certainly. However, it just doesn't do it for me.

I like stories about ordinary people, or at least people who do ordinary things and reflect on them. In short, yes, I like Modernist stories, stories about introspection and past experience. I don't mind death as an element within a story, but not as a central one, as it is in this story. It's not something I can relate to because it's not a part of ordinary life, it's an exceptional part of life. I find stories which focus on the exceptional, such as death or suicide or guns or violence generally uninteresting. (I think interesting things can be done with these themes, but I dislike them as plot devices, although perhaps I'm generalising too much, or not being clear enough... I said this post would ramble).

Okay, in her essay on Modern fiction, and I'm quoting from memory here, Virginia Woolf said "the moment of importance came not here, but there." It's not everyday that someone you know dies, that is extra-ordinary. But if someone does die, you might think about them nearly every day, which is ordinary. The latter I find more convincing in a story. For this reason, I dislike sudden occurrences and shock reveals. I like foreshadowing to an extent, but the absolute best sort of story for me, and the sort I generally strive to write, is the sort which cannot be spoiled by knowing the ending.

Here is how Ulysses ends: Molly Bloom, despite her infidelities, realises that she still loves her husband. Here is how To the Lighthouse ends: the children, now grown up, finally make their longed-for trip to the lighthouse. Here is how In Search of Lost Time ends: Marcel realises that his life has not been wasted, but will in fact form the content of a great novel, the novel the reader has just read. This is of no consequence to your enjoyment of these novels. These stories are about the journey, not the ending.

As a comparison, here is how The Sense of an Ending ends: Tony realises that his philosophical friend killed himself not as the conclusion to some great existential argument, but because he got Tony's ex-girlfriend's mother pregnant and couldn't handle the consequences. That more or less ruins the novel in the same way that knowing the ending of the Sixth Sense would ruin that film.  

A 'twist in the tail' might make for a good read, but it doesn't, in my opinion, make for great literature.

Anyway, as you might have guessed from the title, that wasn't what I originally intended this post to be about, but I think I may start again with another post.

"The stage-play is a limited and outdated medium"

Warhorse - A play

I was recently very kindly taken to see a stage performance of Warhorse in London. Warhorse, if you haven't seen or read it, is the story of a horse who is dragged into a human war with which he has nothing to do. It's also about the horse's owner, who goes looking for said horse. Before seeing the play I deliberately avoided reading the novella, watching the film, or looking up the Wikipedia page, so that I could enter without expectations or prior knowledge, an increasingly rare way to experience new stories when the internet and print media is awash with reviews, books have blurbs, films have trailers, and even television programmes, in the digital age, always have synopses.

All I knew going in was how great the puppetry was supposed to be and, to be fair, the horse did move and make noises in the way that a horse would. Yet it was far from verisimilitude. Personally, I could never entirely ignore the three puppeteers directing every movement of the mannequin (horsequin?). And that has always been an issue for me with plays: however much I can admire the technical skill of the performance on the stage, I can never forget that it is just that: a performance.

Perhaps I am too literal a person, although equally I would expect being a creative writer would make me more imaginative and more able to suspend my disbelief, but I very rarely have been sucked into the world of a play in the same way I have been for books, films, or videogames. I dub this the 'Brad Pitt effect'.

Brad Pitt is a fine actor, I recognise this, but if I never see another film with him in again, I won't feel a sense of loss. The trouble is, he's been in too many films and he's too well known, so that whenever I see him on screen, I no longer think "who's this new character?" I think "there's Brad Pitt." (To get a similar effect, next time you watch a Brad Pitt film, try mentally appending "said Brad Pitt" onto every line of dialogue he speaks.)

Brad Pitt - an actor

Even when I'm enjoying the story, and when I'd forgotten about the people operating the horse-machine, I was still aware of watching actors on a stage in a room full of other people watching actors on a stage. And I think this is an inherent problem with the medium of the stage-play, or one of them at least. But it is not the only one.

Ultimately, I think the stage-play* is a limited and outdated medium. Few people I have told this to seem to agree. The theatre is still held as a bastion of cultural refinement. But I shall elaborate upon my reasons for thinking this nonetheless:

Firstly, as I have said, there is the issue of suspension-of-disbelief, ie. the willingness to accept that what you are seeing is not an artificial performance, but a present, genuine event to which you are a voyeur. Even when you do begin to fall for the illusion, it can only take a very small thing to remind you that you are watching a play: a fumbled line, a cough in the audience, a poorly chosen set-piece, another character coming out from the side of the stage.

Some of the above are not exclusive to plays of course. Any medium can be interrupted by external events, and a bad line of dialogue or turn of phrase in a film or book can be just as jarring as a glitch in a videogame, but plays, due to their complexity, are more susceptible than most to such interruptions. I think the reason for this is that a play is asking you to both watch and imagine at the same time.

With a book you have only the words and your imagination, nothing visual. You conjure the world around yourself. Conversely, with a film or a videogame**, you can literally see the world. With a play you are likely only to be shown a handful of objects, a chair and table to evoke a dining room, say, or a doorframe and fence to evoke a back garden. You have a few visual symbols to latch onto, but are asked to imagine the rest, never entirely seeing or entirely imagining the whole thing. It is always abstract.

The choice of props is so crucial in a play, and I think it is often overdone. Warhorse overreached itself in trying to represent the scale of the Great War. The more you see on a stage, the more you realise is missing. It's a sort of uncanny valley. Complexity is the enemy of a play. The best plays have few props and few characters. Where a play excels is dialogue, not action. So the characters need to be psychologically rich and compelling to watch.

For the characters to come to life, good actors are needed, and those actors need to be good every night of the performance, speaking each line as if for the first time. It is a great challenge.

To me, putting on a successful play, with all the work involved, is like building a life-size house from matchsticks. The dedication and technical accomplishment is to be applauded, but you might just as well have built a better house out of brick and mortar.

The medium of film is that better house, and films have superseded plays in almost every way. For one, a film, once made perfect, is always perfect, whether you watch it once, or a hundred times. I know some people like that thrill that something could go wrong in a play every time, that it is live and exciting, but why? No one really wants to see the play go wrong. And who really cares is the timing or the delivery are ever so slightly different from one night to the next? I'd rather watch a film where the best delivery has been chosen once and forever from multiple takes.

In another way, film offers a breadth of genre which plays never could. The medium of the stage-play could never contain 2001: A Space Odyssey, Koyaanisqatsi, Inception and the Bourne Identity, to pick but a few almost at random from my DVD collection. It lacks the cinematography. A play cannot jump between scenes, cannot show events from multiple angles, cannot blend together or transition between images, cannot move faster than life or in slow motion, cannot create epic images.

And yet films can do everything that plays can, only they can be enjoyed multiple times and have a lower cost of entry. They can do soliloquy, dialogue, and set pieces, and they can do so much more besides. In a play a character may be angry and you will be able to tell this from his body language and his voice. If you are close enough you see that his face is red, or he is sweating under the lights. In a film you could be shown a hundred things besides.

 The camera could focus on the glass he is gripping in his hand, or the way the hairs bristle on the back of his neck. Or the camera could focus on something else entirely, a child upstairs overhearing her parents argue, or even something more abstract like the boiling of a kettle or the serene lake outside. By not being limited to a single viewpoint, myriad new creative possibilities are opened up.

Plays are limited by length as well as location. Many of Sergio Leone's films, and some of Akira Kurosawa's too, are around three to four hours long, as is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Neither the actors nor the audience of a stage play would have the stamina for a play that long.

So to summarise, plays are limited visually by the lack of cinematography, in setting by the difficulty of changing scenes, in character numbers by the logistics of hiring more actors and fitting them on the stage, in length by the patience of audience and the stamina of actors, in audience reach by the relatively high cost of tickets, the non-repeatability, and by the costs and organisational requirements of putting on a single performance in a single place.

The only advantage I can see plays having is that aforementioned thrill of being live and tangibly present (provided you can sit close enough). And, frankly, that doesn't cut it for me. Perhaps greater artistry comes from the limitations of the medium, as surprisingly evocative images can come from a haiku, but I have rarely seen it, particularly in contemporary plays.

Yes, Shakespeare, widely considered one of our greatest literary minds, chose it as his sole medium, but the fact that the medium is still so absolutely enthralled by four-hundred-year-old scripts suggest that little of lasting value is produced today. The only thing most current plays seem to trade on is either their "it's just like watching the film" special effects or the famous name attached to them.

What do you think? Have films totally surpassed plays, or does the medium still have something to offer except a feeling of smug cultural superiority over the people queuing up at cineworld?

* To make it clearer, I am only discussing narrative stage-plays here. Although I'm not keen on the genre, I think stage musicals are still relevant in the cultural landscape, as do other forms of stage-entertainment like live music, opera, ballet, performance poetry and magic shows, among others.

** This is not entirely true of older videogames, whose objects tend to be more symbolic, but I think videogames have other strengths which compensate for this, and which I will discuss in a future post.

The New York Review of Books

I was recently told that if I want to be successful as a writer, and especially if I want to do an MA in Creative Writing, I needed to be more aware of contemporary fiction. Strange as it may sound, this had never really occurred to me. I had always figured that I wanted to write books which would last, so therefore I should read books which have lasted. It's rare that I read anything published after around 1970, and usually considerably earlier.

Where are the Oddysseys, the Ulysseses, the Tristram Shandies, the a la recherche du temps perdus of today? I lamented, both mentally and to my girlfriend.

Nevertheless, I set out to the Nottingham branch of Waterstones with the intention of educating myself on writers whose blood still runs warm. Among other things, I came upon the July 12th edition of the New York Review of Books. Bearing the below garish yellow cover, with its 'I-may-be-ugly-but-at-least-I'm-smart' graphic design.

While the article on the reassuringly familiar subject of James Joyce's final novel enticed, the 'new story' by a living writer, along with reviews of current books were the real clinchers. So I took my purchase up to the counter, along with this year's Man Booker Prize winner, last year's Man Booker runner-up, and an as-yet-unread copy of the London Review of the Books, clocked the copy of 'Fifty Shades of Earl Grey' proudly displayed there, and paid.

One thing The New York Review of Books is is dense. The review of Slavoj Zizek's latest philosophical work was pretty much the most difficult thing I've read since I grappled with ontological layers in post-modern fiction for my BA dissertation. With lines like

"The Hegel that emerges in Zizek's writings thus bears little resemblance to the idealist philosopher who features in standard histories of thought. Hegel is commonly associated with the idea that history has an inherent logic in which ideas are embodied in practice and then left behind in a dialectical process in which they are transcended by their opposites."

And yet it is immensely satisfying to read, simply because of how well written it is, and how it avoids both pandering to the reader while also remaining a lot less dry than books of critical theory tend to be. I've found myself reading articles in it on subjects which would otherwise be of no interest to me, such as on American politics.

My girlfriend asked me how I can read reviews of books I have not read, and yet I'm finding them immensely useful. It feels like the sort of thing, as someone who is serious about writing, that I should be reading. Aside from the satisfaction I'm getting from slowly working my way through it (and I have been going slowly: after two-and-a-half weeks, I'm only just past the halfway point) I'm picking up some ideas I feel may be useful.

Here are three of the passages I've underlined so far, which may be useful for future reference:

From Christopher Benfey's review of Toni Morrison's 'Home': "Rhythmic urgency drives individual sentences in Home as well. As Frank makes his escape from the hospital, "maniac moonlight doing the work of absent stars matched his desperate frenzy." At some subliminal level we recognize that "maniac" goes more rightly with Frank Money, the "bare-foot escapee from the nuthouse," than with the moonlight, but the displaced pairing feels like syncopation, words struck slightly off the beat. A similar effect occurs a few pages later when Frank falls asleep and dreams "a dream dappled with body parts" before awaking "in militant sunlight." Again "militant" seems to belong with the body parts while the sunlight should be doing the dappling."

(Syncopation: Music . a shifting of the normal accent, usually by stressing the normally unaccented beats. - dictionary.com)

This use of this poetry-like technique in a prose novel, as flagged by Benfey, is something worth remembering.

From Michael Dirda's review of Richard Ford's 'Canada': "The two main actions of Canada are announced in its opening lines: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." Such sensational words, even presented with matter-of-fact understatement, will grab anyone's attention. But on the surface, they would also seem to be revealing too much, arguably wrecking the novel's plot. Yet Ford is nothing if not sensitive to his sentences, emphasizing in many interviews the great care he takes over the subtleties of sound and sense. Nobody, he says, looks longer at his words than he does or calculates more precisely their effects.
"So readers should also look again. Note the pronoun "our" instead of "my" - this is, in some way, going to be a story about siblings. Notice, too, that Ford's narrator dances over whether the robbery is successful or not. Finally, he carefully avoids saying who is murdered and by whom. Ford's real interest doesn't lie in the robbery or the murders per so so much as in the events leading up to the crimes and to their aftereffects on those siblings. We know that the robbery and the murders will take place. But when? And how? And what will happen subsequently? So we attend, we observe, we prepare for the inevitable. Readers may recall that Gabriel Garcia Marquez strikingly employed just this technique in his novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold."

These opening lines recall for me the opening of To Kill a Mockingbird: "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow," only Ford appears to be showing far more with fewer words. A striking gambit for the opening lines, as Dirda points out.

Finally, from Charles Simic's review of Steven Millhauser's 'We Others: New and Selected Stories': "[Short stories'] most admirable quality is associated with what Steven Millhauser calls "artful exclusions." Like poems, good stories never overexplain. They only hint that a second, slower and more careful reading will deepen our understanding."

This is a point I think I would do well to remember, as I think my short stories often tend to be a bit on the long side, and would probably benefit from harsher editing, which I may reattempt on my latest short story as I'm still not happy with it.

If I see any more choice passages in the NYRB or the London Review of Books I shall post them here.

Fifty Shades of Money-Making

Yesterday I had a brain wave: an idea which would practically be a license to print money. In just a few months I could make billions. Unfortunately, as a writer, I'm not interested in money; I'm more interested in spending long hours slaving away over books which may never get published, so perhaps someone else wants to run with this idea?

Now, perhaps you've heard of a little book called 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. Perhaps you're aware that this book started out as fan-fiction based on a moderately popular series of books known as the 'Twilight Saga'. You might not be aware (unless you've checked the Wikipedia articles) that the Fifty Shades Trilogy is now the fastest-selling paperback of all time, rather eclipsing (pun most torturously intended) the book series which spawned it.

The lesson to be learned here? Fan-fiction makes more money than original fiction.

Click to enlarge

It's so simple and brilliant, that I can't believe no one has thought of it sooner. (Admittedly, what sparked this idea was a book prominently displayed during a recent visit to Waterstone's entitled 'Fifty Shades of Earl Grey', but that was a parody, rather than fan-fiction, so differs from what I am proposing). Clearly the key to success is piggy-backing off the success of other works through derivative writing.

Therefore here is my five-stage plan to literary dominance:

1. Fifty Shades of Gay

Fan-fiction of Fifty Shades of Grey re-imagined for the gay market. Also takes inspiration from the popular film, and subsequent novel of the film, Brokeback Mountain. Features just enough description of rippling male torsos and light bondage, while steering clearer of more graphic descriptions of anal penetration, to keep the over-thirties heterosexual house-wife demographic interested. While the occasional switches between first- and third-person narration may initially appear as the narrative inconsistencies typical of an amateur writer, critics would soon realise that they are in fact a clever implementation of the free, indirect style employed by Modernist writers of the 1930s, such as Virginia Woolf, and serves to create a multi-layered, multi-faceted portrait of a relationship which develops between a wealthy businessman (who may or may not be a vampire) and a young, closet homosexual.

Once the above has been outsold Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight combined, which I expect to happen two to three months after publication, stage two will be ready to launch:

2. Fifty Grades of Gay

Fan-fiction of the above fan-fiction fan-fiction (written by the same author, of course, but under a different pseudonym). Again this book appeals to an ever-expanding gay audience (the ubiquitousness of Fifty Shades of Gay, with its descriptions of well-oiled muscles and glamorisation of light bondage, is likely to have turned at least some staunchly heterosexual males bisexual), as well as to the over-thirties house-wives. This time the plot would be centred around the owner of British steel engineering firm as it struggles to cope with the decline of domestic manufacturing and the economic recession of the 1980s, and the seduction of a young worker in one of his factories. The plot would resonate strongly with audiences affected by the current world financial situation, as well as evoking nostalgia for those who grew up in the 1980s. The cast of characters within the engineering firm would also be reminiscent of the popular television series Madmen, providing an easy entry point to the written word for people who prefer to get their entertainment from a screen.

You'll really be raking in the money by this point, but it's no time to stop: it's on to stage 3:

3. Fifty Blades of Gay

Set in 1870s Japan, this novel deals with a rag-tag collective of Samurai who, with skills made largely redundant by the abolition of feudalism, as well as with a growing disillusionment at the loss of traditional values following the industrialisation of Japan, turn to mass homosexual orgies, described in sumptuous, though largely euphemistic detail. As before, the novel avoids graphic description of sexual acts, instead treading a thin line between gasping and excitement and socially acceptable erotic deviancy. While at first sticking comfortably to the conventions established in the original Twilight-fan-fiction-fan-fiction, Fifty Shades of Gay, and the subsequent Twilight-fan-fiction-fan-fiction-fan-fiction, Fifty Grades of Gay, the book features an almost incongruously surprising second half concerning the mass uprising of a horde of vampires which the gay samurai must put down, thus earning them a place in the new Japan as it heads into the twentieth century.

As a bonus stage 3 is also ripe for a manga-style comic book adaptation, thus roping in the audience who found Twilight just a bit too wordy. This comic would in turn attract the hitherto untapped under-thirties male demographic. In addition, for its treatment of universal human themes such as dealing with change and obsolescence, as well as its treatment of an historical period, the novel may well be nominated for, and go on to win, several literary prizes. The Man Booker prize, for instance, legitimising its existence and spurring it on to greater popularity.

4. Seven Blades of Gay

Furthering the series' cultural legitimacy along with its popularity and, of course, money-printing potential, Seven Blades of Gay would not only be fan-fiction of Fifty Blades of Gay, itself fan-fiction of fan-fiction of fan-fiction of fan-fiction of Twilight, but also a fan-fiction retelling of Akira Kurosawa's acclaimed film Seven Samurai. The action this time would have moved to feudal Japan, following the popular reception of the samurai element in Fifty Blades of Gay, and would this time focus more deeply on a smaller cast of seven protagonists as they each struggle to find their sexually deviant niche. In a nod to Disney's popular adaptation of Snow White, and to avoid the difficulty Westerner's might have in remembering foreign names, each of the samurai would be referred to by a nickname taken from his particular kink: whippy, baby, cutty, bestiality, wanky, spanky and clampy. Despite the criticisms of misrepresentation from the proponents of the various fringe sex acts, the vast majority of the readers, which would by now amount to 70-80% of the population of most developed countries, would lap up the neutered descriptions of previously distasteful subjects, finding it perfectly acceptable to read on the train to work such lines as “the bull's hot breath on his neck only made his erection grow stronger.”

The increasingly derivative nature of these novels, despite being supposedly written by different authors, is what gives them their real power, the revenues increasing exponentially with each new release, but the final stroke of genius comes in stage 5:

5. The Seven Magnificent Guns of Gay

This is more-or-less a rewrite of Seven Blades of Gay, under a new pseudonym, but transposed to an alternate history, steam-punk flavoured, version of the ever-popular American Wild West. As well as the standard Western themes of wilderness, masculinity, survival, frontierism and attacks by steam-punk robot vampire Native Americans¹, the plot also deals with the seduction and betrayal of several young gunslingers by the wealthy owner of a railway company. This book is specifically designed to appeal to just about everyone, young or old, straight or gay, and is likely to far outlast the lifetime of the author or the author's children. It achieves the impossible by pleasing everyone all of the time, and is likely to be bought by 99% of the entire population of the planet.

Once you have put my plan into action, and reached stage 5, the only danger, due to all the money you will have earned, is of completely destabilising, and ultimately destroying, the world economy by holding too much of its money. It will be important at this point to invest large amounts of money in new development projects, as well as to shower your initially innocent young concubines with ever more elaborate gifts.

Also, you can send me some of the proceeds to fund my own writing.

1 Adjectives, as we all know, infinitely increase the value of any product, whether it's book or sandwiches: that's why you can charge for more for a 'Davidstow creameries oak-aged mature cheddar and organic sun-kissed vine-ripened tomato sandwich on olive oil-infused focaccia bread than you can for plain old cheese-and-tomato

Statement of Intent

This blog is going to be a place for my notes and opinions about writing, a mixture of short and longer posts, mostly for my personal reference, but if they're interesting to other people then that's a bonus.

I'll also post some writing done for my own personal amusement here, but probably none of my fiction. I used to post a lot of my short stories to my old website, but that's meant that a lot of my old work is now not eligible for publication or entry into competitions. I'm more interested in getting my fiction properly published now.

The title of this blog is in reference to Jean Ricardou's Nouveau Roman masterpiece Place Names: A Guide to Travels in the Book.