Didacticism
I did it, Stephen. I bought Robert McKee’s Story. In hardback, even! This shows how much I trust you.
So far I think it’s great. Even though the book’s about screenwriting, it applies marvelously well to fiction of all kinds. One of the sections I found particularly lucid and well-said was a short, three page examination of didacticism and why it ruins stories. Over the years on the AML-list and in other discussions between Mormon artists, I’ve engaged in lots of discussions of didacticism. But I feel like McKee gets to the heart of the matter exceptionally well, so I’ll be quiet now and let him talk. He says:
“A note of caution: In creating the dimensions of your story’s ‘argument,’ take great care to build the power of both sides. Compose the scenes and sequences that contradict your final statement with as much truth and energy as those that reinforce it. . . . If, in a morality tale, you were to write your antagonist as an ignorant fool who more or less destroys himself, are we persuaded that good will prevail? . . . [It is in a] balanced telling [that] your victory of good over evil now rings with validity.”
This is why “affirmation” fiction so often comes off as cheesy or unearned or dissatisfying. When the bad guy is unredeemably bad, he loses power, and then the story loses tension. Of course good will prevail! There’s no other logical option.
And speaking of the AML-list, today on the list Scott Parkin said something really smart (as he often does). He said, “affirmation exists on both poles of the conversation [in Mormon literature]–either affirmation that all is well in Zion, or affirmation that Zion is a pointless fool’s paradise. I find both flavors to be prone to the same limited and limiting presentations. A revolving door story is (quite often) just another polemic, whether it’s revolving in or out.”
Whether it’s revolving in or out! Yes, Scott. Excellent metaphor. McKee agrees with you. He says:
“When your premise is an idea you feel you must prove to the world, and you design your story as an undeniable certification of that idea, you set yourself on the road to didacticism. In your zeal to persuade, you will stifle the voice of the other side. Misusing and abusing art to preach, your [story] will become a thesis [piece], a thinly disguised sermon as you strive in a single stroke to convert the world. Didacticism results from the naive enthusiasm that fiction can be used like a scalpel to cut out the cancers of society.”
I think often, as Mormon writers, we assume the injunction above applies mainly to those who are trying to “convert” a reader to our standard Mormon conversion message: that the Church is true and that you’re happier with it than without it. But it applies just as readily to those Mormons with other theses, those who use “fiction as a scalpel to cut out the cancers of [Mormon] society.” Those writers with a bone to pick can fall victim to didacticism just as easily as those with the goal of proving the truthfulness of the gospel. Both narratives are, in essence, conversion narratives.
So how do we avoid didacticism? Must a writer have no point of view, no convictions? McKee again:
“Make no mistake, no one can achieve excellence as a writer without being something of a philosopher and holding strong convictions. The trick is not to be a slave to your ideas, but to immerse yourself in life. For the proof of your vision is not how well you can assert your Controlling Idea [your thesis, your theme], but its victory over the enormously powerful forces that you array against it. . . .As a story develops, you must willingly entertain opposite, even repugnant ideas. The finest writers have dialectical, flexible minds that easily shift point of view. They see the positive, the negative, and all shades of irony, seeking the truth of these views honestly and convincingly.”
It seems to me that for Mormon fiction to succeed, Mormon writers, both “conservative” and “liberal,” need the ability and willingness to grant their antagonists humanity and power. In one example, the antagonist might be an attractive female non-member tempting a Mormon boy not to go on his mission and, instead, come live with her. In another example, the antagonist might be a rigid and conservative Mormon mother who won’t accept her son’s homosexuality. But in both cases, these characters must be complex, their motivations must be understandable, they can’t be “all bad.” Because if they are, what choice does our protagonist have? If there isn’t something compelling or even good about these characters, what will our hero be giving up if he rejects them? Where is the tension in a story where any logical human being would run away, fast, from a person who’s so obviously bad for him?
One last McKee quote: “A great work is a living metaphor that says, ‘Life is like this.’ The classics, down through the ages, give us not solutions but lucidity, not answers but poetic candor; they make inescapably clear the problems all generations must solve to be human.”
Exactly. And I’m curious: what “classic works” of fiction, Mormon or otherwise, do you think do a good job of saying “Life is like this”? Heck, you can even throw in some movies if you’d like. (I’ve been reading Story, so I have movies on the brain.)
Thanks again, Stephen, for the recommendation.
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April 1st, 2009 at 10:28 am
Don’t tell Pol Pot.
April 1st, 2009 at 11:13 am
Good stuff, Angela.
I don’t know that I can ever say “Life is like this” about a novel. But there are moments in “The Conversion of Jeff Williams” by Douglas Thayer that seemed about as real as faithful realism gets. And I’d say the same for Jonathan Langford’s yet-to-be-published novel.
One thing that this approach doesn’t really account for, though, is satire, irony, allegory, parable, parody, etc.
April 1st, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I see your point, Clark, but we’re talking about fiction. Just because something happens in real life doesn’t mean it’ll work in a well-crafted story. And isn’t it interesting that Mormons believe Satan himself was “a son of the morning?” The antagonist to beat all antagonists is complicated and powerful and his lure makes sense to all sorts of people. So while, yes, Satan is technically “unredeemingly bad,” there are elements of his character that are obviously attractive to lots and lots of people.
William, you can’t *ever* say “Life is like this” about a novel? Is this because you’re always aware it’s a construct? I suppose I can buy this. But that’s one of the reasons I read–so I can have those moments of recognition. Right now I’m in the middle of _Olive Kitteridge_, a novel in stories by Elizabeth Strout, and I’m loving it because story after story strikes that chord of familiarity.
And you’re right that what I’m talking about works best with realistic fiction. Although even parables often acknowledge human complexity. The Prodigal Son, for example, is a very popular and resonant parable among Christians because both brothers are complex (or we’re able to extrapolate that complexity from a very short tale). Even in a parable like the Good Samaritan, many of us can “understand” why the priest and the Levite would pass by the beaten man (even if we don’t condone it).
I think it’s applicable to satire, too, because with effective satire there’s the voice of the protagonist (who probably sees things in black and white), but then there’s the voice of the narrator rising above the voice of the protagonist, winking at us, and we’re in on the “joke”–that things are more complex and multifaceted than this narrator understands. Satire is a particularly tricky balancing act because it, too, can become didactic and/or overly meanspirited, turning people off, if the humanity of everybody involved isn’t acknowledged at least a little. I know this isn’t a literary example, really, but one of the reasons the blog Seriously So Blessed is so good is because that blog’s writer does the satire dance very well. Although she’s making fun of a certain type of Mormon blog, there’s also a weird charity to her satire–it doesn’t come off as vicious, at least not to me.
Stephen used to write for the Sugar Beet. I’d be interested to hear if he thinks McKee’s ideas are applicable in that genre as well.
April 1st, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Angela, it seems to me in stories there are three main types here. The first is the traditional heroic story where the bad guy is defeated regardless of how bad he is. That’s just inherent to the type of story. The second is the more nihilistic one where of course the bad guy isn’t defeated because the stories about our hopelessness in the face of evil. Once again that’s just inherent to that type of story. There’s then the more nuanced one where sometimes bad guys get away but things are complex.
But I don’t think this has anything to do with believability. Just the genre one is writing to. One could write a well crafted story in any of these genres.
April 1st, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Yes, Clark, you’re right. I guess the issue is whether or not you’re writing a story about a hero who needs to overcome physical obstacles (say, a James Bond type movie where the bad guys “must be stopped”) or a hero who needs to overcome emotional/spiritual obstacles.
In a James Bond movie, there wouldn’t be any any narrative tension if the bad guy wasn’t powerful in his own sphere. Even though we *know* Bond will win in the end, we have to wonder how he’ll pull it off. So the people who write Bond scripts know that the antagonist needs to be strong or rich or intelligent or politically powerful (or all four) in order to keep the viewers guessing.
My point is that if you’re writing a story where the obstacles to overcome are emotional or spiritual, then the antagonist also needs to be powerful emotionally and/or spiritually in some way. There has to be a reason the protagonist just might not triumph. If the antagonist is one dimensional, flat, unremittingly mean or manipulative, etc., then we’ve pitted our hero against a weak foe and the story won’t be compelling or realistic. So yes, genre does have a lot to do with it, but creating a “strong” opposition is important no matter the genre. W
April 1st, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Angela:
I think it’s more that I wouldn’t characterize the chords of familiarity (which is a term I like) I experience with “Life is like that.”
April 1st, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Referring back to Clark’s mention of Pol Pot. I think I’m missing something. First, let me admit that the little I know of this Cambodian dictator came from reading a wonderful memoir _First They Killed My Father_ and listening to the author lecture. But it doesn’t seem to me to be accurate to categorize Pol Pot in his own life’s story, his plot if you will, as unredeemably evil. Oh, he was. If God hadn’t created a hell, once he met Pol Pot, He would’ve. But as Pot’s story unfolded, he was, in fact, cast on the world stage as a “good guy.” The proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, and many of his own countrymen embraced him…before he starved them. My point is, historical figures repeatedly prove the validity of the quotation that Clark excerpted. Hitler would save Germany. and so on. Name a tyrant and the chances are that his/her rise is the stuff of strong fiction–as is their fall.
But I think Clark may have just been having some fun w. his comment, so my apologies if I read too much into it.
As to didactism, heaven knows I’ve been guilty of it myself. My first credits were with Church magazines. And egad, just yesterday I reread a story of mine that Irreantum had published many moons ago, the first time I’d read it since it was published, and I wanted to crawl under a rock. The thing had originally been sold to the New Era, but the correlation committee squelched it. Too controversial. It never did lose its New Era didacticism. And yet I also know that, while it wasn’t good fiction, it meant something to some who read it because I was so told. Maybe that’s enough. I’ve never been one who would condemn all didacticism. (Though I want you to shoot me if I ever pop out something like that again.)
What I’m getting at is that didactic does not, in itself, remove tension. Flat characters do. Predictable characters do. Characters who don’t evolve. And while most didactice fiction feels tensionless, it doesn’t all. Whatever we think of the _Work and the Glory_ series, it did have sufficient tension to pull characters along.
April 1st, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Ah, I meant to say, “to pull readers along.”
April 1st, 2009 at 8:53 pm
I love Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, with its truths about relationships.
And (I’ll say this, even if it sounds like sucking up) Bound on Earth.
April 1st, 2009 at 9:55 pm
William,
I think I love you. In a totally fraternal, non-gay, wow-you-just-complimented-my-book sort of way. It’ll probably even last–right up to the point where you tell me all the things I need to fix…
Sometimes genre can undercut realism. Writing my master’s thesis about Tolkien, I realized that because of the genre, readers don’t take seriously just how much doubt Gandalf is in about the course he advises everyone to pursue. He’s the Wise Old Man–of *course* he knows everything will turn out okay. As a result, readers undervalue the act of incredible moral courage it takes for Gandalf to allow an utterly unqualified hobbit to take the most dangerous weapon in the world right into the stronghold of the enemy who could use it to destroy them all.
April 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 am
Lisa, my first published story actually made it into the New Era, and it’s pretty didactic (I cringe!). But I also realize that different genres have different requirements, and a story for adolescents in a religious magazine is a different animal than a story for adults in a literary magazine. But I still cringe.
And Jonathan, I think you’re right that the best genre fiction still requires complexity and ambiguity, and a character like Gandalf is a great example of this.
And thanks, Kerri! (Promise I wasn’t fishing
.
April 2nd, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Angela, I don’t cringe about anything I had in church magazines because, hey, I did what a writer needs to do: I gave an audience what they wanted. Plus the stuff they took was a little radical for church standards. I often say the thing I’m most proud of as a writer is that I got a story about incest into the New Era. (The editors weren’t radicals. I just happened to submit it right after the church president asked the church magazines to publish stuff about domestic abuse. Luck.) I simply wanted to clarify that “didacticism” isn’t a catch-all term for the ills discussed here. (But I am embarrassed about the story I passed off as lit fic that remained New Era didactic.)
I looked at buying the McKee book last week, but even used it was still more than I wanted to pay. I guess I need to slap down the money.
Or you could just keep posting about it…
April 9th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Thanks for the pointer, I’ve wish listed it at Amazon and will pick it up when I have more money.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Angela Halstrom said:
“If the antagonist is one dimensional, flat, unremittingly mean or manipulative, etc., then we’ve pitted our hero against a weak foe and the story won’t be compelling or realistic.”
I think I disagree, because in real life, a good person confronted with a bad person still has to struggle not to retaliate in the same way as the bad person. The question becomes: how do I deal with this, how do I cope, how do I defend myself without resorting to the same evil tactics that will make me as evil has he is? There is room for a compelling and realistic struggle even with a evil flat character.
March 14th, 2010 at 11:15 am
Great posting and great style, is this a normal template?