Epics, Break-Up Songs, & That Old Chestnut, âJust Because You Donât Like It Doesnât Make It Badâ
Letâs talk narrative structure.
So, itâs April and the internet is all abuzz over new upcoming material from two big franchises: the new Star Wars trailer, and the new Avengers movie. My investment in both is simple, uncomplicated, a touristâs interest, not a pilgrimâs. But I am very curious about them as a storyteller, because I think both use a narrative structure thatâs going to dominate the next few decades. Itâs gonna be one of those things when people say âremember all those movies and books from the naughts that did x and y?â and everyone who came of age in this time is going to nostalgically sigh and say âoh, man, they donât make movies like that anymoreâ and everyone who came of age a few decades before will hiss âthank GODâ and the generation who came of age a few decades before them will say âI donât know what youâre even talking about, theyâre just movies.â
The thing about trends is that they will be just movies to people who are first really paying to media now. They will be normal, and whatever comes next will be the New Thing.Â
A Note About Trends And The Dominant Damn Paradigm
Trends happen when a particular subject, shape, or storytelling tic becomes so normalized in the mainstream that it becomes invisible to the average viewer or reader. They donât see them as innovative, experimental, or even as stylization. It feels ârealâ and so therefore communicates emotion and information straight to the consumer with the same efficacy as real life events. Some of these invisible trends are so evergreen that they seem permanent: Three act structure, training montages, prologues that take place in a completely different timeline. None of these are actually inherent to telling a story (there are all kinds of historical stories that donât use them), but theyâre so commonly used that they feel that way to most people. Theyâre just there. Theyâre just story.Â
Other things that are even less inherent can also be so normalized that viewers begin to not notice their use as unusual: a happy ending, having a good-looking guy as our narrator/ hero, having a woman die to begin the heroâs arc, blue/ orange filters, onscreen murder, characters breaking into song, a two hour run time, a 350 page count, etc., etc.Â
Narrative structure can trend as easily as anything else, and thatâs what weâre looking at now. Weâre moving from the age of break-up songs to the age of epics, a transition made weirder by the break-up songs still playing in the background.
Possibly when you read on youâll immediately think of fourteen movies and books that donât match the pattern Iâm talking about. This is because Ppop culture doesnât eat stuff that doesnât fit in it â it just shades it with its huge, homogenous, trendy mass. Thereâs still stuff out there that is doing its own thing. Not everyone wore big shoulder pads and white pants in the â80s either, but we all know how we remember it.Â
Because as a professional storyteller, itâs my job to know what is invisible (and thus costs the reader nothing) versus what is now outside the norm (and thus costs the reader something to process). I donât mind asking the reader to work for things that are important to me, but I need to know when Iâm doing it in order to make sure I can keep their overall load light enough that they donât lose emotional investment and trade my novel for Netflix.Â
A Brief Pedagogical Interlude
I am often asked in my writing seminars to talk about how I handled point-of-view in the Raven Cycle, my four-book series that started in â12 and finished in â16 (although if that end date makes you sad, know that thereâs a spin off trilogy beginning this fall). Folks often donât even know what to call it. They call it third person. Third person close. Multiple third person. Omniscient.
Technically, itâs close third person broken occasionally by a few omniscient chapters used under certain conditions (for instance, on a group of psychics, on villains, on sentient forests).Â
Practically, hereâs what it is: influenced by film.
I donât think I meant for it to be. I think probably if youâd asked me at the time what I was doing, I would have said it was meant to be shaped like a dream. But practically, it is influenced by film, because Iâd watched enough film for that structure to become my normal. Invisible.Â
And what do sprawling contemporary fantasy films look like? Multiple narrators with occasional villain cams and the snatch here and there of omniscient establishing shots of the setting or people who donât carry a ton of the narrative but are tonally useful to eyeball for a second or two.
That is the Raven Cycle. Itâs a structure that feels natural because weâve seen it so often, but itâs actually a bit of a strange thing to translate it to written form. Thereâs a word for when a novel moves from protagonist to protagonist in short order, and itâs not a flattering one: head-hopping. Itâs considered poor form, and for good reason. Readers only have so much emotional investment to spend, so the wisdom goes, and wouldnât you rather they spent it all on your hero?
Or so the wisdom used to go.Â
The Break-Up Song Is Always In First Person
Do you guys remember Sleepless in Seattle? Garden State? House? For the longest time, pop culture was focused on the heroâs journey. There are books and books written on this subject but really all we need for purposes of this blog post is this: hero (1)(one)(I). One hero per customer, one hero per lane, one hero per story. The standard story followed one hero through a series of trials. In a happy story, he started out shit and became great. In a tragedy he started out great and went to shit. There were other characters, but they were supporting roles. The antagonist foiled our hero. The love interest acted as stake and prize and mirror. The comic relief let off some steam.Â
In novel form, this was even more pronounced, often focused through first person narration. You were sticking with this hero, dammit, to bitter end.
I remember a time in my twenties when we were up to our necks in the most intimate version of this. The shelves were chick lit, the screens were indie rock, the historical fiction followed one womanâs journey through one day of the plague in one small town in France as seen through her penned journal shared with no one.Â
We were living the prose version of the break-up song genre. Dude, it wasnât like we were going to hear a verse from the point of view of the person who broke the singerâs heart. This wasnât about them.Â
The Reaction to the Reaction
But writers are what they eat. Every writer writes stories that are responses to what theyâve taken in as consumers: a fond homage or an opposite reaction or a correction or a new angle.
And while the break-up song genre was happening, other films and books kept on being made. Thrillers and mysteries continued on even as pop culture had its moment with the intimate, character driven story of a single mother who died and haunted an olive oil decanter on a strange familyâs shelf for a decade, and they began to rub off on each other.Â
Even as the trend of intimate stories passed, the character-driven nature of them left its mark. Readers and viewers no longer believed in the straightforward heroâs journey. No one was that simple. Batman got rebooted, James Bond got some consequences. Heroes got more and more morally gray. The world was getting more and more morally gray, too, after all, and narrative kept up. What was the price of privilege? What was the price of winning? Was this really a happy ending?
Narrative answered the question by glancing at the situation from other points of view, and those glances got longer and longer and longer. One POV became two. Became three. Became four.Â
Ok, Back To the Marvel and Star Wars Thing
Became Marvel and Star Wars. Now weâre fully into Trend: Epic. We humans have done this trend before, where everyoneâs larger than life and the stakes are sky high and your backyard is full of giants and whatnot. But now this trend is being informed by coming on the heels of the break-up song. Readers and viewers developed a taste for deep character development in our emo phase and now want it at the same time that they now hunger for huge casts.Â
Previously, itâs a conundrum that wouldâve been resolved by narrowing down the focus onto one person within that cast, digging down deep into their journey, and reducing everyone else to a secondary or tertiary character. Villain, love interest, comic relief.*
But that doesnât satisfy the current trend of epic, of nuance, of a vast cast explored as deeply as possible. Viewers donât want Poe to be simply a walk-on. They want villainous Loki to have as much of a character arc as heroic Thor. If a character is interesting, they want them handed a camera for as long as possible. And the more noble a hero seems, the more they want to see the skeletons in his closet, because no one believes in empty closets these days. Â
*interestingly, I just saw Venom last week, a film everyone had been telling me was âold-fashioned,â and what it gave me was precisely that old model.
You can see the difference in the way narrative point of view is handled if you compare the original Star Wars trilogy with the current. The two are close cousins, intentionally so, which makes for easy comparison. It doesnât take long to see how the original trilogy focused quite tightly on the trio of Luke, Leia, and Han, and pretty tightly on Luke even within that, versus the new film, which follows the trend of spreading the character development as thick and deep as possible amongst a large cast who shares story as equitably as possible.
You can also track it in the length of commercial films. You need a ton of room to develop character, and you can watch block busters get longer and longer as they eek minutes here and there for a touching flashback or a crushing personal revelation or final hand clasp.Â
Thereâs a lot of pros to stories like this: thereâs feels everywhere, as the internet says. Weâre asked to engage emotionally with every storyline rather than intellectually. Weâre given lots of characters to love. Empathy is pumped to all time high across the board.Â
But thereâs cons too: if a character arc doesnât get enough time (and they canât all, because there are so many going), the emotional beats can feel unearned and forced. We might feel like weâre going through the motions, landing on beats that we know ought to be there, and beats that we want to be there, but feeling dissatisfied with how we got there.Â
It means that when it works, it works on an epic, massive, life shifting scale, everything snapping together with neat, agonizing emotion at the end.
It means that when it doesnât work, we end up with empty spectacle that leaves us feeling disconnected and confused by why we didnât love a thing that gave us everything we thought we wanted.
Oh God Weâve All Been Exposed!
I can feel it changing my narrative, too. At one point as I was working on Call Down the Hawk, the trilogy opener I mentioned up top, I realized that Iâd spread my story too thin across characters. I was burning pages by the dozen as I tried to make sure they were all arcing in complicated, satisfying ways. When I shaved things down for pacing, I found myself with a skeletal, shallow plot outline. What the hell, I thought. You know better. Head-hopping is to be kept to a minimum.Â
But not in 2019. You are what you eat, and Iâd been eating a lot of media that sat right smack in the middle of this epic narrative structure. I had to sit back and ask myself: what is the story you actually want to tell? Pick your cameras and trust them. And then I cut my important arcs to two and pushed everyone else back to secondary and tertiary.
Because hereâs the thing: I donât actually care for the multi-cam break-up song epic thing weâve got going on right now. The worldâs making a lot of movies that arenât really for me these days. Iâm not too fussed about it because I know the reaction to the reaction to the reaction that comes around on the other side will probably swing it back my way, but for now, I leave the cinema with a shrug more often than not, and I put down a lot of novels.
But hereâs the other thing:
Just Because You Donât Like a Thing Doesnât Mean Itâs Bad
Sometimes it just means itâs not for you.Â
At the beginning of all this I noted that the current story shape is going to feel like the default story shape to people coming of age now. Whatever was popular when you were coming of age is one of your default story shapes.Â
The key to being an interesting and dynamic human is making sure that youâre curious and flexible enough to be willing to accept other shapes. You donât have to like everything, but if you donât want to become obsolete, you gotta at least give it a shot. We all know the person who only listens to the music from their childhood, who says âthey donât write books like they used to.â Donât be that person. Before you shake your stick at the kids on your lawn and say âthat sucksâ maybe ask if itâs just not for you.Â
And then wait a decade. âCause itâll come back around from the break up song to the epic to something totally different again and maybe to something thatâs precisely your jam.
If not, no oneâs stopping you from writing something that is.
ETA:Â Also probably worth noting that this narrative shift is probably inspired by fanfic and vice versa (since fanficâs stakes are often purely emotional), but I canât speak cohesively to that since I donât read fanfic, I just HEAR a lot about it.
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