Straying from the path. How far is too far?
In music, I like it when a song does something a bit outside of the norm. They throw in an unexpected key change, they use a scale that lands on the ear differently to the common pentatonic or mixolydian scale that we’re used to (even if we don’t know it)
Josh Homme’s entire guitar sound covers a lot of ground on this principle alone.
The Beatles were masters at it (and they get extra points because their version of it was so seamless that it still came out sounding like pop.)
But there is definitely a line where this approach loses its power. When you go too far from the norm, interesting becomes weird, weird becomes boring.
A lot of prog-rock steps into this territory. They’ll start with a good hook, a great chorus, launch into a guitar solo where you wouldn’t expect it, but then…it just goes on for a bit too long. You show it to a friend, they’re with you for the first few barrs, then you see the focus leave there eyes. Different doesn’t always equal interesting.
A good recent example of this is The Dripping Tap, by genre bending Australian band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. (Still a good song, but 18 minutes long good?)
Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music — an entire album of dissonant noise—takes this a step further. Call me narrow minded, but I honestly don’t know who this experimental style of music is for. If you’re the type of person who puts this album on during your commute to work, I don’t think you should be trusted around the young or the elderly.
So what’s my point here?
I think this principle follows into writing—and I’m steadily learning where that line is.
See, the chaotic process of writing a first novel inevitably takes you way off the path of ordinary—which makes it an exciting process in the beginning, and is perhaps why it becomes such an addictive pursuit.
The realization that “you’ve never read a story like this before,” is intoxicating and has the potential to send you on mental leaps as to what this might mean exactly. After all this discovery could feasibly be a sign that you’re sitting on something groundbreaking here, the ears of your ego prick up, but…it could equally be a sign that you’re walking into territory that those before you have had the good sense to avoid.
More often than not, if you take an honest look at the probability ratios—your brand new novel likely falls into the latter camp.
I’m not here to spout off a pessimist tirade here mind you, this is all just a question of skill development.
In the beginning, you’re not any good, but if you work on it, you’ll get better.
Which is in fact quite a hopeful realization
Knowing when to divert from the road map
As I’m sanding off the edges of my novel, I’m beginning to see these diversions more clearly and learning how to avoid them before I go down the wrong road.
This isn’t to say that these tangents should always be avoided, but it’s important to be capable of parsing out the instances where you’ve done it intentionally from the ones where it was simply a lack of awareness that landed you there.
Because that’s where you get into trouble.
When you’re still fresh behind the ears it’s very easy to write your way into the fiction equivalent of that nine minute guitar solo, and if you’ve got no point of reference, you may be inclined to look at it and think—hey this is something new!
But it’s not. At least not in the way that might make it good.
It wasn’t a choice, you simply ended up there by accident.
You ended up there because you haven’t mastered basic structure yet; and because you haven’t mastered basic structure yet, you’re not equipped to bring that boat back to shore and pay that diversion off.
An example where I’ve seen screenwriting fail to recognize this, is in the BBC series The Tourist.
The good part
This Jamie Dornan series begins as what seems like a very middle of the road mystery. A man is in a car crash in a foreign country, loses his memory and is forced to uncover his own identity in the face of hostile confrontations from his past.
Season one takes you on all the usual loops of false leads and revelations as you get to know and like this character, before concluding with a tragic but relatively predictable ending where you feel you’ve got a sense of this character.
But, then they do something a bit different. After all this work they’ve done to make this character likable, they throw in a twist—with absolutely no foreshadowing—that completely alienates the Jamie Dornan character for both the audience, and his new love interest. This injected revelation contains a plotline which is much darker than anything we’ve witnessed in this otherwise light series, and turns it into something that’s suddenly intriguing.
They broke the formula, by straying from what you’re “supposed to do,” and it paid off.
Where they went wrong….
Leading up to season two, I suspect the writers caught word that their point of difference really stood out to viewers as a selling point. So what did they do?
Subverted the norm at every turn.
They started off by trying to sell the audience on an unlikely relationship between Mr Fifty Shades of Grey and Mrs Dumpling, undermined about 70% of the backstory we’d learned in season one by changing our main characters’ “real” name for the second time, and threw in a dream sequence where there had never been one across two seasons.
All of it felt like an attempt to say, “look at what we did here. I bet this isn’t what you were expecting! Isn’t this mysterious and interesting?”
But in reality, it became hard to follow; the natural arc of events took far too long to wrap up and all of it felt very unsatisfying.
The Lesson?
I don’t think the answer to all of this is, “be conventional at all times”
But there is something to be said for honouring audience expectations. Little diversions from classic structure offer a satisfying wink to those who notice them, but unless your entire piece of writing is experimental from the outset, tangents that take you too far from the paved road are condemned to come across as bad judgement at best, bad writing at worst.
I’m not going to get into the weeds of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, but I guess that’s what I’m eluding to:
There are a finite number of stories that resonate with human beings. You can call that evolution, you can call it religious if you like, but if you look into the history of literature, it appears to be true. Every myth and story that you love is some version of a tale that’s been told for centuries.
So to think that little old you is capable of tearing down all of those deep set archetypes and replacing them with something you cooked up from scratch, is fairly arrogant if you ask me.