Neil Hopcroft

Some time ago I tried to write about what I thought was wrong with fiction. Reading the The Science of Storytelling has given me some more insight into that, so I’m going to try again, with a little more knowledge.

There are a few parts to it, mostly I think it comes down to there being too much fiction in the fiction. Long form fiction tends to suffer more, a television show or book series that keeps going beyond its logical conclusion, where they have to keep introducing changes of allegiance to keep the drama going. They keep trying to surprise you by making people who previously hated each other have to work together.

It is okay for characters, and their interactions with each other, to change over the course of a story, indeed, without that there probably isn’t much of a story. Most people don’t change dramatically, even when going through some of the traumas they get subjected to by writers, its more likely existing traits crystallise. They may encounter internal conflict, a cognitive dissonance, when their existing characteristics do not serve them well, but changing is a long game, not something for a page or two.

The things that can change are how people see other people, but this often requires somebody to be hiding a significant trauma that made them what they are when we meet them in the story, only to reveal that secret at an opportune moment to move the story along.

Shorter stories, those of only film or book length, still feel they have to have a crescendo to the action, and a lot of them jump through unbelievable narrative hoops to get to that climax, as if they were trying to find a way to get to that important scene. Like the scene came first in the writing and they worked backwards from there.

So it seems to me that most fiction is created upside down, driven by working back from the conclusion and filling in the signposts on the way, rather than actually being made of a story in need of telling.

I have long felt that films are too long, I would much prefer to watch a film of 70 minutes that was full of story than one of 140 minutes where that story had been stretched to fill the time.

There are some types of stories that lend themselves to being told, especially detective stories, because they can be built around an asymmetry of information, our minds like to see the asymmetry resolved and will hold on to otherwise terrible stories to get that resolution. There are many more murders in fiction than in reality (or, at least, I hope there are), leading to a warped perception of the safety of certain areas.

Time travel stories are another genre that allow creative freedom from the shackles of reality – though a good, temporally accurate, story can be told with travel through time as asides or memories, without a need to strain the laws of physics.

Non-fiction books rarely fall into these traps as they are recounting real events happening to real people. This is where books about travel really hit the mark for me, there is action and the change over time of the character, typically the writer, but without the artificial narrative arc that forces the desired conclusion.

Of course, I’m no writer, nor critic, so I’m not well placed to discuss these things, I have little to add to what has already been said by those better able to say it. I am understanding these things for my own personal enlightenment, to help me find more of the stories I like, and to understand why I dislike those I dislike.