Enough with the stupid “Story arcs are bad” stuff, already
by Pete on September 5, 2009
Io9 published a story a week or so ago entitled “What’s the Matter With Story Arcs on Television?” It starts out:
Used to be, your television heroes explored the edges of the universe and confronted unimaginable nightmares. And then they’d end up back where they started. Now television gives us arcs, that continue from week to week. Is that really better?
It’s the classic trade-off: on the one hand, self-contained weekly episodes are newbie-friendly and easy to show in reruns, because it doesn’t matter what order you show them in. On the other hand, how deep can your characters and universe really get when nothing ever changes and the situations get fully resolved within 43 minutes?
While not specifically stated in the story, it is a general response to a curmudgeonly Guardian article published a few months ago complaining that “Torchwood has succumbed to the story arc craze.”
Then this week, io9 follows up with “Did Dune Ruin Science Fiction Novels?”:
Gone are the days of the 200 page book, which could be devoured in a couple of days. Instead, he [a poster on LibraryThing] says science fiction novels are less interested in telling interesting stories with novel ideas than in cramming in every detail until the book is better as a doorstop than a form of entertainment. Moreover, reading these tomes can take weeks, turning what should be a simple pleasure into an onerous commitment. The poster implores Herbert-loving science fiction writers to take their cue from William Faulkner (when rewriting, “kill your darlings”), and trim the fat from their books, leaving a trimmer, more engaging story behind.
While I suspect the articles in question are largely contrarian link-bait, I find it troubling that this “Complex storytelling is bad!” notion keeps cropping up.
Given the choice between a long, well-written book and a short, well-written book, I will pick the long one every time. There’s more space for character- and world-building, and frankly, a complex story is nearly always more interesting than a simple story. And let’s face it—it’s not always easy to find a good book. When I find a good read, the longer it lasts, the better.
As for TV shows, the complaint about story arcs is equally bogus. I’ve gone into this topic in more detail elsewhere, so I’m not going to spend much time on it here, but the “problem” with most sci-fi on television isn’t story arcs. The problem is bad writing.
In either case, I just don’t find it that surprising that viewers and readers enjoy long-form stories with well-developed characters and complex plots. The only real complaint seems to be that new viewers won’t know what’s going on, but that doesn’t hold much water in the era of Netflix and Hulu.
One comment
For what it’s worth, I think that making a distinction between story arcs and encapsulated episodes is a false one. Just about every TV show that I’ve ever watched falls somewhere between the extremes. Any time you bring back a character from a previous episode, you no longer have truly encapsulated episodes, and it starts to matter what order you air the episodes in (“Mudd’s Women” and “I, Mudd” from STOS, for example).
Babylon 5 is a good example of the other end of the range. While Babylon 5 had a very pervasive story arc, most episodes had encapsulated plot elements. You just can’t tell a coherent story in episodic form if the episodes aren’t at least somewhat self contained.
Now, with SF novels, I’m going to have to disagree, at least to some extent. When you have a 700-800 page novel, it can sometimes take you 100-200 pages just to tell if this is a good story. On the other hand, with a 200 page novel, I typically know within the first 10-15 pages if it’s any good. Personally, I hate getting hundreds of pages into a book only to conclude that it’s not worth the effort to finish.
While I do agree that I like a rich, complex story as well, I think there are authors who try too hard, and produce dry, hard to read novels as a result, where the same story could have been told in a fraction at a fraction of the length, and been an engaging page turner. I certainly wouldn’t argue against having some good, long novels out there, I also wouldn’t try to argue that those should be the only SF novels out there. One of my all time favorite SF novels is Pebble in the Sky, by Asimov, which is only about 200 pages long, and it’s plenty complex for the story that it’s trying to tell.
by GHW on September 5, 2009 at 12:23 pm. #