Broken Frontier

I hope if you haven't already read Artistotle's Poetics, you will go and do so post-haste. I know some of you will find Poetics very difficult to understand, but trust me, it's worth trying. Maybe you have heard that Poetics is only about writing for the theatre, but did you know that screenwriters have been using its wisdom for a long time? (Just a few years ago, in fact, author Michael Tierno published a book called Artistotle's Poetics for Screenwriters, in which he outlines the basic principles of Poetics and how to use them to write a great screenplay. It's another book I highly recommend.)

But why should screenwriters have all the fun? There are plenty of parts of Poetics that apply to any kind of fiction writing. And that includes comic books.

This week, I want to take a look at what I call the Jenga Effect. You know the game Jenga? (If you've never played Jenga, hop over to http://www.hasbro.com/jenga/ where you can play a virtual version, then come back and keep reading.) It was invented in the 1970s by a Brit named Leslie Scott. She had lived for a time in Africa and the word "Jenga" is derived from the Swahili word meaning "to build."

I want to focus on only one half of the game: the removal of the blocks. I'm using this, you see, because it's a great metaphor for what we should all do in our writing. Aristotle would agree. That's because, in Poetics, Aristotle instructs us to keep our plots so tightly constructed that if any single event is shifted to another place or removed, the whole is loosened and dislocated.

In other words, Aristotle is arguing that we must take out everything that is unnecessary for the story until we are left with only those things that we cannot take out or the story will stop making sense.

I have often worked as a Hollywood script reader and I cannot tell you how many times I have read scripts with unnecessary scenes in them. Think about how many movies you see with unnecessary scenes in them. What about books and TV shows and comic books? Everything these days seems filled with filler. What happens to us as audience members, of course, is that we spend our time waiting for the next story event to happen. That's bad. We don't want the audience waiting around. We want to keep ahead of them at every opportunity.

In his excellent book, On Directing Film, playwright and filmmaker David Mamet (whose credits include Sexual Perversity in Chicago and House of Games) explains that the human mind has a natural tendency towards order and thus, when presented with a series of questions, will naturally start trying to work out the answers.

If we, as audience members, work out the answers before the story gives them to us, we tell our friends and neighbors that we were "so far ahead of the story," or that we "could really see that coming."

This is bad news for storytellers. Something we don't want to happen. We'd rather tell people, "you'll never guess how it ends!"

One of the most important ways we can achieve this effect is by removing everything that isn't necessary. How important is that scene where our hero drives across town and we get a tour of the city along the way? How important is the scene where our villain introduces each member of his gang and explains their favorite method for rendering death? Wouldn't it be better if the hero burst in on the villain, surprising even us? Wouldn't it be better if the villain's gang simply attacked our hero and each tried to kill him in their own favorite way?

I think there are two reasons writers include unnecessary things.

The first reason has to do with a little thing called ego. That is, the filmmakers or authors are so attached to their beautiful shots or wonderful strings of poetic narration that they don't want to cut it out. I've been guilty of this on plenty of occasions. I worked so hard to achieve a particular shot that I didn't want to cut any of it. I can see clearly now that the film was hurt by this self-indulgence.

The second reason has to do with space. That is, it's easy to fill all those blank pages when your characters say things such as, "Hello," "Nice to meet you," "Likewise, I'm sure," and "Until next time." I've often written something I thought was complete, only to go back through it and take out what wasn't needed. I discovered I really only had half a story. That's a hard thing to accept. But in the long run, it will help you win an audience. What would you rather have—a short story spread out over a novel or a novel that moved so fast you couldn't guess what was coming?

As with everything I say, these rules can, will, and should be broken—in the right place and for the right purpose. But that's the key, then, isn't it? If the scene serves a purpose, then it stays.

I think Ernest Hemingway, author of such classics as The Killers and For Whom the Bell Tolls, put it best when he said simply "Kill your darlings." When you think about it, he even did it when he wrote those three words, didn't he? He cut out all the unnecessary words and still managed to capture the emotional and intellectual essence of what he was trying to say. That's why Hemingway wasn't just a good writer—he was one of the greats. We'd do well to take his advice.