Broken Frontier

I firmly believe there are two kinds of storytelling: objective and subjective.

Objective stories rely solely on our observation of events. Watching an old blind woman jaywalk would make you gasp even if you didn’t know anything about her. This is an example of an objective scene. My response to it has very little to do with my knowledge of the old blind woman. I am merely an observer. This is the same kind of response we have to all those news stories about people in danger or tragedies of one kind or another. We feel for what has happened (or is happening) to them, but not in the same way we would if we actually knew them.

This is the principal difference between objective and subjective storytelling.

Let’s picture that old blind woman jaywalking again. Only this time, let’s say she’s your grandmother. Suddenly, your emotional involvement is through the roof, right? If she were hit and ended up in the hospital, people who didn’t know you would feel sorry for you when they saw the story on the news. But they could never understand what it means for it to actually happen to you.

Therefore, we can say that subjective stories rely on our emotional involvement with events. To achieve this, we need to know more about the characters. We need to understand who they are and what they want. We need to understand how the events that are happening to them will either help or prevent them from getting what they want.

I would say that most of the famous myths are objective tales. We read about the gods and their actions, and though we may be both awed and inspired, we can’t have much subjective involvement because the gods are so far above us, we could never understand what it means to be one of them.

Many comics, especially in the superhero genre, fall into this same category. Superman’s desire for justice may inspire us, but how many of us can really understand what it means to be a flying alien from another planet?

So although objective stories clearly can hold their place and power over us, I dare say that it’s the subjective stories that really stick with us.

An interesting example of this phenomenon took place around Batman: Death in the Family. Reviewer Hilary Goldstein actually dared to call the mini-series the most significant comic book moment for DC in the past 20 years. For those of you who don’t know, the comic came complete with a 900 number that readers could call to vote Robin dead or not. Readers voted him dead. So the Joker killed him. This is an extreme example of one way to achieve subjective involvement. If I’d paid $1.00 to vote for Robin to die, you can be darn sure I would have bought the next issue to see if I got what I wanted.

I don’t think the 900 number is the only reason Death in the Family qualifies as a subjective comic. Even this same reviewer, who doesn’t think it’s the best Batman story ever, notes that “the emotions dripping from the pages are raw and real and the death scene is worth the price of admission.”

Another way that objective stories can achieve a level of subjectivity is through the use of metaphor. I heard screenwriter Paul Schrader once offer this interesting bit of advice on how to come up with a good story: “Take your most pressing personal problem and come up with a metaphor for it.” He then gave us an example from a class he had taught on screenwriting. A young man was gay, but had yet to tell his family and friends. His screenplay, then, was about an undercover CIA agent who is anxious to get out of the business and needs to reveal his identity, in spite of the danger.

If you think about it, many of the more successful comics do just this. We feel more involved with the X-Men because we, too, feel different and misunderstood. Perhaps their status as mutants mirrors ours as social outsiders. Maybe we feel like we’re leading a double life, so Spiderman’s efforts to deal with his more extreme version of the same problem gets our emotions running.

As a first exercise, I suggest you take Schrader’s advice and figure out what is your most pressing personal problem. Then, see if you can decide which already existing superhero serves as the best metaphor for that problem. For example, if you can’t control your temper, maybe the Hulk is the kind of hero you would create. Then try and come up with something new and different.

As a second exercise, take our objective scene of the old blind woman jaywalking and see if you can figure out a way to ‘subjectify’ it. Come up with ways that you can heighten the reader’s emotional involvement. What does the blind woman want? Why is it important to her? Why does she need to cross that street at that moment? (The challenge, then, of course, is figuring out how to get us that other information in a dramatic fashion prior to the jaywalking scene.)

And don’t forget, as you read this week’s comics, see if you can pick out which moments are objective and which are more subjective.

Until next time, keep writing.