Life, Writing, Weirdness

Before you go any further note that absolutely every opinion I give here is just that: an opinion. Those can change and your mileage may vary.

I spent a few years as a slush reader for a small genre fiction magazine. If my tracking is good, in most of those years I read around a million words worth of submitted stories. In among the great stories, I came across a lot of worn and played out tropes and devices, some of them often enough to start making a list in the background. Tropes can be messed with to subvert expectations. Literary devices, if they get too commonplace become boring. Devices that come across as weak storytelling or obvious shortcuts to clear planning and writing, get annoying. Some things may have always bothered me, but seeing them again and again honed my dislikes.

That’s where this series of blog posts comes from.

How long a series of posts this winds up being is a mystery at this point, and they won’t all be this long. It’s surprising how many of those things seem to come up not just in fiction, but in any medium that the objective is storytelling. TV, movies, audio drama, comics, and video games, to grab a few.

Today’s rant about unfortunate writing choices will list issues encountered when mucking about in the timestream. I’m not talking about time travel stories here, which are all about playing in the timestream, but about things that break the narrative timeline in what feel like bad ways to me.

1. Keep the tense consistent. Okay, that’s more a grammatical issue on the surface of things, but you’d be surprised how often this comes up.
2. Don’t open at a point of action and then rewind the clock to sometime well before that and spend a big chunk of the story catching up to where you started. If that’s necessary to make things seem more interesting or exciting, the story started in the wrong place.
3. Flashbacks should be short. Don’t interrupt a scene in the middle to show me something else entirely, even if it’s related, and expect me to care about it because it’s interrupting what I was in the middle of caring about. I might have a hard time caring about that present when the flashback ends.
4. And they should refer to something that happened earlier in the story. If a flashback from before the story began is absolutely necessary for me to make sense of what’s going on in the present, the story started in the wrong place. Important background information should be dropped in here and there as I need it, but if scene is needed to explain things, the story should have started there.
5. Foreshadowing. Drop hints that I can put together, don’t hit me over the head with it. “Little did he know….” “But it wasn’t…” “I would later learn…” Stuff like that isn’t foreshadowing, it’s spoiling. It’s also clumsy and it kills tension.
6. Along similar lines, don’t have a character tell me they’re relating events from a long time (or even a short time) later, speaking from memory. Tension = gone. Immediacy = gone. I have no reason to believe that the character is going to come out anything other than fine, so why should I read more?

I’m sure if I worked at it long enough, I could come up with something that I enjoyed that does any one of these, but I almost certainly wouldn’t be able to say that I enjoyed that part of it. More likely, I’d say something like, “Good story, but I wish the writer hadn’t done that thing.” To pull an easy example, the Star Trek: Discovery season 5 opener pulled number 2 above and then rewound to “Four Hours Earlier” to start the episode proper. It was an otherwise fun episode, but I swore out loud and I remember it taking several minutes to get over it before I could get properly back into the story. Fortunately, rewinding to see what I missed was easy.

If it’s just worth an eyeroll (“There it is again.”), I’ll usually stay with the story. But if the offense is egregious enough, I may put the story down or skip the episode. If it falls into this category, I might even be less likely to try something else out by the same creator.

Let’s end by keeping things honest, though, and repeat that everything you’ve just read is an opinion. Like what you like. We are not the same person.

Be well, everyone.