And so I am fascinated with stories.
I believe that somewhere in the midst of my voraciously book-devouring youth I developed a sort of subconscious sense for how stories play out. A few things are obvious, of course: the Hero wins the day in the end, the Villain either flees or expires, so on, so forth. No matter who is telling the story, certain patterns will always be present, and so I think I began to measure the worth of various authors by the skill with which they manipulate the series and sequences to seem other than what they are—or, more simply, by how long one author will let the reader believe certain outcomes will or will not occur, whether through infuriating delays or near-constant subversions, and by how well they make it appear as if they are not doing anything of the sort at all.
One of the best books I ever read kept me so wrapped up in the immediate events of the characters that I totally forgot about the existence of a bigger picture until literally one page-turn before he revealed it. Another author made the trip to the inevitable end so protracted and excruciating one began to wonder if it would ever be achieved, and yet the journey was entirely believable the whole way.
And yet I have found that there are many authors who can't pull this off. This 'shortcoming' is not exactly mediocrity, I don't think, because even average writers can pull off good suspense. I've seen it done, and been pleasantly surprised.
Rather, I see authors who are blatantly transparent in their motives, whether it be through impatience, incompetence, or simply fear. And I cannot abide it.
The first is arguably the easiest to spot. It's that moment when you're reading or watching a particular story, muse to yourself, Hmm, I wonder if this is what..., and lo and behold two seconds later it is, often with merely a token justification to save it from being pure magic. I think what most often causes this impatience is a deadline; an author on a time constraint is having problems getting from where they want to be clever and where they need to reveal it, can't (or won't) spend the time on it to figure out how to avoid just poofing it into existence, slap a quick patch of literary duct tape on it and hand it in.
There is no cure for impatience except patience. In order to overcome propensity to say "screw it" and have done, you need to be able to set aside the mounting feelings of frustration and urgency so you can look at the scene(s) with a clear head. Often, for me, this entails setting it down and coming back a day or two later, or at least after a good sleep, to give my brain time to refresh itself and to spin out new details or ideas that I hadn't considered or been aware of before.
The second, I feel, is the most depressing, but also the most excusable. Jumper is an excellent example, along with any movie recently produced by the Sci-Fi channel, half of the Young Adult section at your local library (including basically anything to do with vampires), and Raymond Benson's attempt at the James Bond novel series. The people who create these ... things ... fail to understand that storytelling is more than just arranging words on a piece of paper in order to turn a game of make-believe into the elusive Something More.
My old trombone professor had a similar rationalisation for looking at all music equally. "The definition of 'music' is 'the arrangement of sound and silence in time." This rationalisation has always seemed disturbingly Nihilistic to me, as it justifies anyone's half-assed attempt at making money off of crap, and does nothing to foster a sense of artistry and accomplishment.
Similarly, a good fiction story is more than simply shared make-believe. You can delve into the Romance section of any bookstore or library to see what I mean. And some people simply do not have the ability to create a story. You can't exactly fault someone for being talentless—for instance, if I tried to play football the results would be disastrous—but even so, it's hard not to feel a deep sense of loss when such concoctions are encountered.
The last, though, is to me the most inexcusable, and consistently infuriates me to no end. When I say 'fear', I mean fear of a particular unavoidable facet of storytelling, whether it is fear of change, fear of rejection, fear of ... well. Actually, those two pretty well cover the whole nine yards.
Fear of change can amount to any of several bits. An author might be afraid to try new techniques or to incorporate new material. They might be afraid of different subject matter or genres. Or they might just be afraid of recognising when something they're trying is totally worthless. So the person sticks with what they know and it never goes anywhere.
Fear of rejection is pretty simple. Try something new, you might get laughed at, or ignored, or canned. Try something different, you might lose your audience. Try to be clever, you risk your tactics going over your audience's head, and thus making them mad and leaving you alone. So the person sticks with what they know and it never goes anywhere.
The beef I have with this, and it is a huge beef, is that the only way to avoid rejection is to be as simple as possible. Never do anything except what you know will be popular, never take any risks.
Never be creative.
So you broadcast exactly what happens all the time. When I read stories like this, I never have any problem guessing not only the outcome, but the specifics of the outcome, and even the bloody chain of events that will lead to the outcome. It's boring and depressing because I feel like I could have put down the book halfway through and still known everything there was to know in the story, and that's not fair to the author at all.
On top of that, I hate being told what to think. I have read a couple of novels lately where I would be reading a particular scene and think to myself, "Hmm, seems like this character is feeling this way...", only to have the author say a paragraph later "LOLOL GAIZ SHE MIGHT BE FEELING THIS WAY MAYBE I WONDER OOOOOOOHHHHH DRAMA".
._.
Ass.
And then I wonder for a while if the author has even heard of the concept of allusion, which can be so powerful in literature if you don't telegraph to God and everything in Creation that hey you're alluding to something check it out man this is suspense.
News flash: It's. Not. Suspense. If I know about it beforehand, it's not suspense.
It's not even dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is something the audience knows beforehand via events of preceding scenes, but to which the character(s) in question is oblivious at the time, usually because they weren't involved in the scenes. Broadcasting tension by holding up a giant placard with TENSION scrawled on it in red crayon is not dramatic irony. It's annoying.
Any time I see authors revert to this stupid, stupid tactic, I always end up assuming that they were so afraid their audience would be unable to get the sense of uncertainty or foreboding they desired that they took the safe route and made up an excuse to make sure everyone knew that stuff was forbode.
Foreboded? Forboden? VERBOTEN
I wish it was verboten.
If you're an aspiring writer, don't be this person. Give your audience some credit for being intelligent. If they miss things, that's okay. It'll occur to them later, or they'll ask someone and have it explained and go OH I SEE WOW.
But if you baby them the whole time you only make yourself look like an incompetent, sweaty, bespectacled, be-acne'd fanboy scribbling out his passions down in some deep dark basement somewhere.
And that's just gross.
