The Well-Tempered Plot Device

[Pielorinho]

My housemate sent me a link to an article about writing crappy Science Fiction. It's a pretty snobby, insulting article -- but it's also pretty funny. And if you're willing to be branded a crappy DM by this fellow, he's got some useful advice on constructing plot devices:

http://www.ansible.co.uk/Ansible/plotdev.html

Daniel

[edit: changed link to top of article instead of bottom of article. Doh!]

[Psion]

Heh. That was pretty funny. Loaded with cynical deconstructionism, but funny.

I especially like the Staff of Plot thing, and anything that slams Donaldson's writing can't be all bad, right?

[Deadguy]

I must admit that I am left with the feeling that the author doesn't get SF&F. He seems incapable of seeing the story and setting from within itself. Everything is about the "author" arbitrarily setting conditions, as though exactly the same does not apply to all other literature. The more limited tapestry on which most fiction is worked, based in the modern day or in history, is nonetheless replete with equivalent arbitrary choices made by the author in order to tell a story!

So, no, I didn't find it funny. Just the standard hackwork of a snob that doesn't understand the appeal of the truly imaginative.

[Henry]

Originally posted by Psion
Heh. That was pretty funny. Loaded with cynical deconstructionism, but funny.

I especially like the Staff of Plot thing, and anything that slams Donaldson's writing can't be all bad, right?

I sall not go one about Nick Lowe's opinions (after all, the article is 16 years old), but Calling The One Ring from Tolkien one of the biggest "Plot Coupons" in SF History means that this Author has an unquestionably huge set of Brass You-Know-Whats. Male or female, Nick Lowe has 'em.

Gotta Admire him for that, though.

[Pielorinho]

Well, even though I mostly disagree with his thesis, I still thought he was funny. Calling Donaldson's work "so flatulent that you have to be careful not to squeeze it in a public place" makes me giggle.

And yeah, I think that he's criticizing standard SF with the wrong tools, sort of like a classical music critic blasting Nirvana for overreliance on a single melody without sophisticated development. Other critics of SF focus more on the mythological feel of SF, and they get things righter. After all, some of the better-known Plot Devices out there include the golden fleece, the holy grail, Excalibur, and ambrosia and nectar.

If I criticize a Charles Dickens novel for its lack of mythological resonance, I'd get laughed off the block. So should this guy be.

That said, though, I still think he's a hoot to read. And gettin past his silly condemnations of plot devices, he's got some useful tips for campaign structuring. I like how he divides plot devices into three categories:

1) Coupons to collect (get all of these, and save the world!)
2) Vouchers to redeem (get out of jail free!)
3) Deus ex machina (step into the campaign in disguise and get things moving!)

These can be useful tools for a DM, as long as they're used subtly and judiciously. And though I laugh at this guy's essay, and use his advice, I won't invite him to my game .

Daniel

[MaxKaladin]

Good lord, what an incredibly offensive person!

Ok, literary criticism is valid but this guy goes far beyond legitimate criticism when he starts insulting whole categories of writers and their readership:

Armed with this knowledge, you are now equipped to go out into the world and create science fiction stories worse than any that have gone before them. The earth will tremble; railway bookstalls will burst with the fruits of your typewriters; small-time hacks like the vermin who write for Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine *** will be swept away by the new torrent of drivel! From this moment on, the universe is yours. The only thing that could possibly stand in your way would be a united resistance from those contemptible snot-gobbed arthropods the readers themselves, crying out against cheapskate exploitation fiction and demanding stories that can hold the road without the author stepping in every five pages to crank the bloody things up. Small chance of that, eh?

The comics have always been a kind of elephant's graveyard of antiquated plot devices, because they've always existed under the three ideal conditions for the genesis of bad plotlines: serial format with regular publishing schedules, an audience of adolescent Americans (arguably the lowest form of intelligence in the galaxy), and truly terrible writers.

I suppose this is the kind of backlash you get from literary types when they realize that most people prefer coherent and entertaining books to the trash they praise.

[Psion]

Originally posted by Henry
I sall not go one about Nick Lowe's opinions (after all, the article is 16 years old), but Calling The One Ring from Tolkien one of the biggest "Plot Coupons" in SF History means that this Author has an unquestionably huge set of Brass You-Know-Whats. Male or female, Nick Lowe has 'em.

Thing is that from an analytical standpoint, he's right.

Of course, the point of contention I have is that the denigrating tone that implies something is wrong with that. He drones on about the masses of SF readers that swallow this sort of thing, which has a rather familiar ring to it: how many of you are tired of hearing from elitist snobby gamers how the D&D players are the uneducated masses?

In the end, it is some very good analysis and in some cases I think he has a point; when tritely used as in The Dark is Rising, it does seem rather cheap. The analysis is good. The judgement that he hangs on it that using plot devices is necessarily hackwork is just good old fashioned cynical elitism rearing it's head.

[willpax]

For a fairly amusing demolition of award-winning "literary" postmodern fiction, check out this article from an older issue of _The Atlantic Monthly_:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/myers.htm

Not only are his examples hilarious, he actually engages in a coherent defense of so-called "genre" fiction.

[Pielorinho]

Willpax, thanks for the link! I've read about three quarters of it now, and I'll make a quick comment:

I like Cormac McCarthy. He's weird and disturbing and has great images, and his books pull me into them very strongly. So when this guy started trashing McCarthy, he lost this fanboy.

At any rate, three-quarters of a way through the essay, he mocks another writer by saying (supposedly in the writer's voice), "Now read on, and remember, the mood's the thing."

Well, yeah. Sometimes, the mood IS the thing. But this guy is judging mood-building books by bad standards: he's knocking them for being contradictory, or for using more words than they need to use to describe a scene, or for being implausible, or for not being translatable into simple language. None of these "problems," I think, are actually problems when you're trying to build a mood.

The article is interesting, and pretty well argued. I just don't necessarily agree with it, any more than I agree with the first article. I think they have similar problems, much as they'd hate to admit it.

Yanking this back on topic: can a good DM use Cormac McCarthy/Anne Proulx techniques to build a mood? If so, how?

Daniel

[Hobo]

I don't see what the big problem is. Sure, there are a lot of hacks in the business. What he says if mostly true. As someone else pointed out, the only real disagreement with him is the implied conclusion that plot devices are necessarily and irredeemably bad. At times, they are completely appropriate, and his examples of plot devices in The Lord of the Rings for instance, is not only appropriate but necessary for an author trying to recapture northern European mythological resonance, for example.

And I did like some of his little snippets of wisdom. I nearly laughed out loud at the comment about being careful to squeeze Donaldson in public it's so flatulent, or giving enemas to the Muse...

[FDP Mike]

Originally posted by Deadguy
So, no, I didn't find it funny. Just the standard hackwork of a snob that doesn't understand the appeal of the truly imaginative.

Hmm . . . I feel a need to defend the article. (Should I put on my flame suit? )

For one, the guy's not a hack. He obviously knows the SF & F field pretty well (at least as it stood in the mid-80s); he writes with a lot of zing, panache, and real insight; and, he has a good point in the end. (There's also a decent dose of irony in the piece, a bit of tongue-in-cheek playfulness.)

He's also not necessarily a snob. Look very closely at the examples that he actually quotes: they really are dreadful writing, such as those four related passages from Lin Carter's The Black Star. Just because someone takes a stand and criticizes something as lacking does not equate directly to snobbery.

Moreover, he's not focussing on the "truly imaginative"; instead, he's focussing on the very technical issue of how to judge what makes not just good SF & F, but good storytelling in general. Personally, I don't see why SF & F should be somehow exempt from such considerations. Even though the article is rather old, Lowe is still right.

Yep, I said it: Lowe is right.

I think that what lies at the heart of his contention is that SF & F has become formulaic. And he's right. It's become clichéd and predictable for the most part (which is not to say that good writers are not out there; sadly, they just don't form the majority) -- and readers in general feel comfortable with this predictability, and that comfort drives the market as a whole for SF & F (i.e., the publishing companies are doing their marketing surveys and ensuring that they make money with their releases).

For instance, behind Lowe's criticisms is this sense that SF & F has lost a sense of "craft" and innovation. Mind you, when you start talking about more recent authors such as Dan Simmons (the Hyperion series) or George R.R. Martin, you can see that some authors do practice "craft"; such authors have not fallen prey to the easy road of cliché and predictability. Simmons and Martin aside, though, SF & F really is home to a lot of . . . well, bad writing and bad plotting.

Lowe makes reference to Aristotle's comments on plot. Aristotle suggests that the plot should unfold naturally from the characters' actions and desires; if a plot seems overly constructed, then it's a poor plot that can't achieve its end purpose (which Aristotle calls catharsis, at least with regard to tragedy). Maybe that was written centuries and centuries ago, but it's still very sound criticism. Much of the history of literary criticism has been concerned in some way with Aristotle's notions on plot as a basis for judging works of literature. Again, I don't see why SF & F should be exempt.

I kind of see Lowe's article in this light: his real goal, ultimately, is to make SF & F better. Here's where the irony is working in his piece. If we can develop a language to say what's bad in SF & F books, then by a kind of default we'll get on to what's really, really good. He's taking his pot shots, true, and even Tolkien comes under fire, but perhaps Lowe is doing so because he cares about SF & F. It bugs me, too, that so much . . . junk gets published -- though I suppose all the junk only makes the truly fabulous stuff stand out all the more.

Lowe made me laugh, out loud even. It's a fun article, and it's on target for the most part.

Think, then, of D&D and how a campaign might run. When do the players feel more involved: if the actions and decisions of their characters are driving the story, or if they're constantly yanked along on the DM's tether (i.e., "railroaded")? Players can get frustrated pretty quickly once they realize that the DM has made everything fit his or her plan. On the other hand, a campaign can be a ringing success if its events appear to arise primarily from what the PCs do.

There, see, I got this post on topic in the end!

[Pielorinho]

Interesting, Mike! My main beef with the guy, actually, was that he seems to consider coupons, vouchers, and writer-interference to be inequivocally bad things. I think they're actually staples of myth and legend -- IIRC, Joseph Campbell talks a lot about grail-quests and wise older figures.

His rants about predictability, however, were spot-on. And when coupons vouchers and writer-interference are used to the exclusion of character initiative, then I agree that there's a problem.

My favorite recent fantasy series, in fact -- His Dark Materials -- makes great use of vouchers and a bit of use of writer-interference. They provide a wonderful element to the story, I think, and I hardly think the books are predictable.

Daniel

[FDP Mike]

Originally posted by Pielorinho
Interesting, Mike! My main beef with the guy, actually, was that he seems to consider coupons, vouchers, and writer-interference to be inequivocally bad things. I think they're actually staples of myth and legend -- IIRC, Joseph Campbell talks a lot about grail-quests and wise older figures.

Yeah, on that score you do have a point. One could see Lowe as pressing the issue nearly to becoming absurd . . . but he stops short of going over the edge, I think.

The key is that if these "plot devices" are employed obviously, without reason other than perhaps a lack of imagination and skill -- i.e., if they're employed like following the steps of a formula instead of seeming to be natural elements of the story.

You're spot on in terms of Joseph Campbell and myth! It is truly fascinating to see how similar stories can be across cultures and the sweep of human history. Then again, myths are of a slightly different order than SF & F novels (though the "mythological" is also what makes LotR and even Star Wars so successful): they are attempting to explain the unexplainable in some ways, so they need to work in structures and a language that we can understand and access easily.

Every writer (and DM?) at some point uses plot devices, I guess. The difference is in the execution, ultimately.

[Pielorinho]

Originally posted by FDP Mike

The key is that if these "plot devices" are employed obviously, without reason other than perhaps a lack of imagination and skill -- i.e., if they're employed like following the steps of a formula instead of seeming to be natural elements of the story.

In our games, we call it the Zelda Syndrome (okay, we don't really, but I think of it that way). If there's a plot device that's a little too obviously a plot device, then whoever's playing the PC that gets the device will pantomime being Link when he gets a section of the heart: they'll face upward, lift their hands as if they're raising something above their heads, and hum three rising notes. "I've got: the Amulet!" they'll say.

It keeps us DMs in line.

Daniel