Sometimes in tales more than enough turns out to be just the right amount
Moderation — or Not
‘Moderation in all things,’ the wise man says, and all in all the word works well to rule our lives, our health, and our art. But sometimes this is not so. Sometimes excess makes a stronger imprint on the audience.
We the audience always want more of the parts we like, and less of the parts we don’t like. Until, that is, you give them to us. Then we find there’s too much of the good part, and the tale strikes us as bland or dull, without much interest.
We the audience are children. We know what we want but we don’t know what’s good for us.
The wise talesman takes risks with his audience. Sometimes that means going too far.
Scratch the Itch
Think of an itch you feel in the body — let it be an actual itch, or a thirst, or hunger, or sexual desire. This ‘itch’ annoys you. If you scratch the itch you will feel pleasure. The longer you wait to scratch the itch, the more the annoyance will grow. It will grow because you feel it through more hours. It will also grow (or seem to grow) in intensity. And when you scratch the itch after this delay, you feel more pleasure than you feel when you scratch the itch right away.
This is the nub of the ploy at hand.
In order to please the audience more, the talesman must pain them more, and longer.
We can carry the analogy further. If we want more relief when we scratch, we shall delay doing so, which extends the duration of the annoyance of the itch. We must suffer through more hours. But when we scratch, the pleasure comes at once. But the more we scratch, the less pleasure we take in it. So we find the long itch and short scratch will please us the most. This means more of what we don’t like, and less of what we do like — and it is the opposite of what children would expect.
Children gorge themselves on sweets when they are not yet even hungry.
In a tale, this means that what the audience needs is more of the parts they don’t like, then less of the parts they like.
Too Long
In the financial world, the laws of compound interest say that the longer you keep your wealth untouched in interest-yielding accounts, the more it will grow, and not in a straight line but an exponential curve. Something like that holds true in tales.
The longer we feel we live with a character, the greater the bond we feel to him. We feel more in tune with his goals, we feel a greater sense that he and we are one, we feel we know and like him more. And the longer we endure with him his struggle, the more we feel we need for him to come out on top, and the more deeply we feel his struggle matters to us, to him, and to his world. These feelings go beyond what any words can give us and come only from the time we spend in the tale with him.
An easy way out is trivial. It is worth nothing in a tale. But what is hard and long grows to an ‘epic scale’ and seems ‘larger than life itself.’
This means, for example, that when we follow a detective through a mystery for 2 hours in a movie, or 400 pages in a book, we will feel the mystery matters more, the crimes have greater urgency to be solved, and we will feel greater pleasure when the detective solves the riddles and the criminal gets justice, than if the movie ran only 1 hour, or the book but 150 pages.
This is true, even when much of the time or pages are filled with relatively trivial events.
Take the 2 hour movie and the 400 page book, and edit them down to 1 hour, or 150 pages. It will be the same detective, the same mysterious crime, the same suspects, the same solution. All the highlights will remain; only the relatively trivial events will be pruned back. By some views, the result will be tighter and more gripping. But we the audience will feel fewer thrills and less involvement in the ending. We will feel that a lesser crime has been solved, that the whole affair added up, somehow, to less.
This is so, because (in part) we have spent the added hour in the theater, and the added hours in our reading chair. In part, then, this effect grows on us as a result of how much real time we spend in following the tale.
Time and Tricks
It also grows as a result of the story-time the talesman tricks us into believing has gone by. This is one of the great tricks in the talesman’s toolbox: the means by which he fools us into feeling more time has passed than did pass by our clocks.
The time the audience spends in the theater or the reading chair can be measured by the clock. This is an objective measure. But the time we feel we spend is subjective, and the talesman can fool us into believing it lasts longer.
When we fall into a good tale, it casts a spell on us, and we drift into a kind of trance. Time stretches in that state. A year can pass in ten seconds, a second can pass in ten minutes.
In written tales, a short paragraph:
Two years passed. Two years, and we were no closer to our goal. All the sweat and pain of those two years seemed wasted, it went for nothing. The goal seemed as far off as it had at the onset.
Then, one day…
— will give the reader the impression of much of that story-time, without the need to dwell on all the details over 50 pages. This and other like tricks will never give us readers the full sense of pain or the full bond we would have felt, if we had gone through all those details — but almost. These tricks represent a sort of compromise between robbing the audience of too much of our time, and giving us the full treatment so that our pleasure at the end will be greatest.
Too Soon
Sometimes (and maybe all the time) the fact that scratching the itch feels better when it is brief, means that the ending of a tale’s struggle should come on us unawares. That it should come ‘too soon.’ That it should almost come as a surprise.
Pain, pain, pain, pain … relief! Ah!
The End.
Therefore the end of any conflict in a tale, be it a small skirmish along the way, or the great War that gives the tale its shape, should be swift, sudden, and short.
Too Much
Along with these thoughts on the immoderation of Art, we must add ‘too much.’ Small conflicts and neutral tones that differ little from one another, make for bland tales when the general audience sees them. (This is not true for all audiences. Tastes differ from one group to the next.)
Conflict comes from two forces who oppose each other. The stronger each force, and the more diametrically and directly they oppose each other, the stronger the conflict will be.
Earth tones are comforting and bland. They do not tempt us or repulse us. They do not fight much against one another, being all close to neutral. Primary colors are bright and they attract and repulse and clash with one another.
There are ‘earth tones’ in man’s urges and aims and feelings and in his world as well. There are primary colors there too.
Pulp tales and penny dreadfuls and pornography, comic books, and fairy tales, all deal in primary colors.
Refined palates eschew and disdain primary colors; they prefer the subtleties of earth tones and quiet inner wars. To these audiences primary colors are ‘too much’ and in clashing they create a conflict that is too strong or ‘melodramatic.’ These audiences include most of the critics of art who determine what tales are worthy of official praise and condemnation, and so such subtle tales are held up as the ‘best tales.’
But to the general audience, this ‘too much’ is just what they want — until it goes too far even for them, and becomes ‘maudlin, grotesque, melodramatic, comic-book.’
Whether they need it — and how much of these desires should be catered to — are matters each talesman must determine for himself.
(Composed with pen on paper Saturday, March 22, 2008)
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