This is an important storytelling move we might call âritual banality avoidance.â If we deny ourselves the crappo version of our story, a better version will (we aspirationally assume) present itself. To refuse to do the crappo thing is to strike a de facto blow for quality. (If nothing else, at least we havenât done that.)
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If you know where a story is going, donât hoard it. Make the story go there, now. But then what? What will you do next? Youâve surrendered your big reveal. Exactly. Often, in our doubt that we have a real story to tell, we hold something back, fearing that we donât have anything else. And this can be a form of trickery. Surrendering that thing is a leap of faith that forces the story to attention, saying to it, in effect, âYou have to do better than that, and now that Iâve denied you your trick, your first-order solution, I know that you will.
As weâve been saying, the story form is ruthlessly efficient. Everything in a story should be to purpose. Our working assumption is that nothing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function. Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the storyâs purpose.
When a writer subjects us to a non-normative eventâa physical implausibility, the use of markedly elevated language (or markedly vernacular language), or a series of lengthy digressions in a Russian pub in which the people keep freezing in midaction for several pages so that each can be described at length, in turnâhe pays a price: our reading energy drops. (We get suspicious and resistant.) But if it doesnât drop fatally, and if, later, we see that this was all part of the planâif what seemed a failure of craft turns out to be integral to the storyâs meaning (that is, it seems that he âmeant to do thatâ)âthen all is forgiven and we might even understand the profitable exploitation of that apparent excess as a form of virtuosity.
Iâd say thereâs a general thesis in here somewhere: any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another writerâs work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story.
But the story, in declining to answer (in obscuring the place where it might have answered), feels like itâs not avoiding the question but irradiating it with increased intensity.