Are writers becoming too cute?
Some people might think I’m talking about body attributes here or plastic surgery. Heaven forbid! (Or hell, for that matter.) I am a little envious of David Baldacci, for example, but it’s not because he’s a chick magnet. It’s because he’s able to produce two or three bestsellers each year and has been doing so since Absolute Power. I can’t keep up with the guy. I am also envious of J. K. Rowling, but it’s not because she’s the quintessential English female that almost, but not quite, drives me to like the British. (Of course, even if she weren’t cute and mysterious, she’s wealthy enough to buy Angelina Jolie’s body parts for a complete makeover.) My problem with Ms. Rowling is that she was able to write a successful fantasy series and I can’t even write fantasy.
You see, I’m talking about cute writing. Familiarity breeds contempt. In the days of the now defunct website Edit Red, I saw many examples of experimental writing, which is fine. I suppose MFA’s even teach students to write that way. Writing in the second person singular, stream-of-consciousness writing, writing without caps or punctuation, writing without dialogue, writing only dialogue, and so forth—you name it, writers have tried it. It’s fine when it works, I suppose. At the risk of being labeled an opinionated old curmudgeon, though, my take is that all this cute stuff gets in the way of spinning a good yarn. To me the story is everything, even when I’m waxing philosophical in dark dystopia. For example, Ms. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, a singularly pagan and altogether unscientific look at dystopia, doesn’t waste time on cutesy plot devices. The story always moves forward, always leading the reader to ask, “What’s going to happen now?”
An example from TV can cross that bridge between the universe of readers and writers and the universe between soap opera addicts and followers of reality shows, which have nothing to do with reality. Like millions of others, I managed to adapt to Lost’s irregular schedule and was there for the finish. Like millions of others, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. The whole show was a screenwriters’ experiment, an exercise in pseudo-intellectual masturbation, but the ending, filled with gnarly fake religious symbolism, left us, the series’ followers, wondering why we had degenerated into such masochists. I still hear people asking what it all meant, which might have been the goal of the screenwriters.
Moreover, Lost had other elements that drove me up the wall. Many writers overuse flashbacks—the series’ screenwriters were overachievers, though. Nothing subtle either. A good writer mixes background elements into dialogue, a hiatus in the action, a pensive moment of a protagonist, and so forth, while minimizing flashbacks. The Lost screenwriters are not good writers. They would dedicate a whole episode to a flashback, committing the sin of stopping the forward motion of the series. Even worse were the flash-forwards. Their immediate effect on the viewers? We became just as lost as the shipwrecked protagonists. In addition, many subplot issues were never resolved. Do you know who the Others were? Do you know why Penny’s father was an SOB? Maybe I just missed something, but, even so, that’s because the screenwriters were just too cute for their own good.
Let me consider another example where it’s not even clear whether we’re talking TV or books. Last night I caught another episode of ABC’s Castle. I used to like the show, although its late hour tends to interfere with early morning pursuits that, like most people, plague our existence, even if we’re retired. (Of course, I don’t really consider myself required—I’m just well into my third career, writing.) For those not into pop culture, Richard Castle, mystery and suspense writer (I suspect he’s modeled after David Baldacci, but many women think David’s cuter) is the protagonist, along with Kate Beckett, the NYPD detective that Castle follows around (she looks a little like J. K. Rowling on a good hair day). Castle’s excuse is to develop background for his novels since he killed off his main protagonist, Derrick Storm, but his real reason is that he likes the prim and proper Beckett, even though she can take the bad guys down and shoots like 007.
However, I’m now ambivalent about the show. Let me explain why. You guessed it—the writers are getting too cute for their own good. At first, a mystery series about a mystery writer seemed fresh and exciting (but readers my age will remember Murder She Wrote, where Angela Lansbury did a bang-up job impersonating Agatha Christie and I had fun practicing my Holmesian skills of deduction). There were several scenes where James Patterson, Stephen Cannell, and a couple of others play poker with Castle. I liked these scenes—a little cuteness is OK. Neverthess, I suspect I ruined things over the holidays by reading Heat Wave by Richard Castle. This novel figures prominently in TV’s Castle. Last night’s episode featured the actress who will play Castle’s protagonist, NYPD detective Nikki Heat, in the new movie based on Heat Wave. Yes, I would have been completely lost if I hadn’t read that novel.
Is this bad screen writing or clever book marketing? The answer doesn’t matter. The TV show about the mystery writer now has books that you can buy on the market by that writer. If you don’t watch the show, you might even conclude that the books are rather good (a sequel, Naked Heat, is now out). If you watch the TV show, you’d probably conclude that the books follow the show too closely. Jameson Rook is Richard Castle; Nikki Heat is Kate Beckett. The rook/castle combination makes it all too obvious. That Jameson is my favorite brand of Irish whiskey makes it a low blow. Someone is really getting cute here, namely the person or persons creating Castle/Rook and Beckett/Heat. I’m beginning to get annoyed.
I suppose the sane thing to do is to not wait up for ABC’s Castle and just read Castle. It would serve the writers right. I suspect that Patterson and possibly others are writing the books. They are good. They’re even better than Patterson’s books. He tends to be terse on description and often flip-flops between first and third person (less confusing than writing in second person singular, though), whereas Heat Wave is more linearly written with action that always moves forward. Moreover, the sexual tension between Rook and Heat sizzles, where it’s more pedestrian between TV’s Castle and Beckett (when is ABC going to catch up with cable networks?—oh, sorry, Disney doesn’t want to go up against the SBC again!).
Somehow, I think the sponsors of Castle would rather have me watch Castle than read Castle. If Richard Castle is just a pseudonym for James Patterson et al (is it Patterson and who’s the et al?), the TV show is a cute but annoying marketing scheme (shall we call it an infomercial?) for books that won’t benefit those TV sponsors at all. If the TV-show-plus-books is a multimedia experiment scaming the unsuspecting public, shame on the writers, whoever they may be.
By now, you should have concluded that I’m not into cute. Writers make a mistake when they equate “cute” or “experimental” with “fresh” and “original.” Leave the experiments for students of MFA programs, or, at least, don’t make me read them. I want a good yarn. As a reviewer, if you give me a good story, I’m liable to forgive many other things. I can even forgive some cuteness. What makes Oryx and Crake an interesting book is not cuteness—it’s an interesting story. I may have problems with Atwood’s turns-of-phrase, her character descriptions, and her lack of real science, but the tale is still an interesting one. It’s unfair to compare Heat Wave to Oryx and Crake, of course, but they are both good stories standing alone. That’s what writing is all about, even for TV. Screenwriters take note.
