Hey, guys!
So, in case you haven't noticed, it takes me
f o r e v e r
to actually make a video.
The real time sink is the drawing, as it can take me several hundred frames to make a ten minute video.
I'm getting faster, but I don't want to deprive you guys of my
*✧･ﾟ:* fabulous voice *:･ﾟ✧*
for potentially months at a time, so I finally set up something I can do quickly.
[Blue, offscreen] You're just stealing my format!
[Red, laughing awkwardly] How'd he get in here?
But yes, I am shamefully stealing the podcast format,
but because history is boring, I'm going to be talking about something near and dear to my heart:
clichés!
Well, tropes, clichés, recurring themes, et cetera--
all the building blocks of modern literature, and where they came from.
Frankly, I'm surprised I didn't do this sooner. This is kind of all I talk about.
So, with no further ado, welcome to Trope Talk!
[rushing towards viewer, then glass shatters]
So, as is only appropriate for a first episode, let's talk about beginnings.
How does a story generally start?
Well generally, something has to go wrong. Not always--but a lot of the time.
We call this an inciting incident. Although inciting incidents don't actually have to be bad,
they just have to be something.
Whatever it is, it launches our protagonist into the plot.
Now this isn't really a trope on its own, it's just a Thing. And it's not even a thing that always happens.
Try finding the inciting incident in Lord of the Rings.
Is it Frodo agreeing to carry the ring?
Is it Boromir going ballistic prompting Frodo to strike out on his own?
Is it Bilbo getting the ring way back in the Hobbit?
They're all turning points, but there's no single incident responsible for the story as a whole.
But sometimes there is. And when there is, you can generally tell immediately.
In a rom-com, the inciting incident is the meet-cute. In detective stories, it's the protagonist getting the case.
In YA dystopia, it's the heroes' living situation abruptly becoming even shittier.
Point is, something specific and easy to isolate tends to happen.
But why? Well, it seems like it should be obvious.
Most interesting stories are about characters coping, in some way, with a situation they're not totally familiar with.
You shove the character out of their comfort zone,
and then they react in ways that they wouldn't do otherwise.
You end up fleshing out the character by seeing them in abnormal situations.
Throw your farmboy into a space opera and watch how he reacts.
Reveal your barista's secret vampire lineage.
Throw a party on the moon. Who cares! As long as it's interesting.
Now one of the easier ways to make this happen is to crystallize the reason for the story into one crucial moment.
That lets you fling your character headfirst into the new situation and gives the most dramatic shift in story direction,
which in turn lets your character react in more intense ways.
There's a reason your vampire barista probably discovers her powers in a moment of crisis,
rather than gradually realizing that her stare can hypnotize the weak-willed.
It's an easy way to tell the story you want to tell without having to spend too much time on the setup.
Establish reality, tear it away. An easy one-two punch. But that's not how all stories work.
It's just how a lot of them start. A magical awakening, a disaster or crisis,
something that flips the protagonist's life on its head.
But even if you are dropping your hero into the unfamiliar and recording the results,
the drop doesn't have to be fast.
Again, let's look at Lord of the Rings.
Considering everything that happens, it actually starts off pretty slow.
Frodo inherits the ring and Gandalf recommends that he get it out of the shire.
So far, this is nothing more than a road trip with friends.
But then Aragorn enters the story bringing along a sense of depth,
of vast history and far-reaching consequences beyond our merry band.
But Aragorn enters the story slowly too--he's not a harbinger of plot twists,
he's just initially there to help them get where they're going.
Arguably, the story hasn't even started at this point.
But Frodo's journey--bringing the ring to Mordor--started the moment Bilbo passed it down to him.
And throughout the story, we don't really see Frodo coping with the situation he's been thrown into.
we see him gradually getting worn further and further down by a burden he chose to carry.
And a story like that doesn't lend itself well to a fast-paced introduction.
Tolkien was telling a story on the scale of an entire world.
It wouldn't make sense for the beginning event to have been built on a single character exiting their comfort zone,
even though that very event midway through the fellowship is the most important decision in the entire story.
Point is, in a lot of these cases, the pace of the beginning informs the pace of the rest of the story.
You start fast and dramatic and the audience will expect the rest of the story to be fast and dramatic,
or at the very least to have regular spikes in speed and drama level.
When you start with a given pacing, that's basically what the audience will expect for the rest of the story.
It's like your beginning is setting the time signature for the story--you can speed up or slow down,
but overall, you're gonna be expected to stick with the time signature you've established.
Go faster, and the audience will expect you to slow down again.
Slower, and they'll start anticipating drama or plot twists–anything to speed things up again.
Most YA dystopia, for example, is a mile a minute,
starting with some kind of nightmarish personal disaster and never really slowing down from there.
Noir detective stories start slow,
with an intro to a criminal case that's not fully understood or explained until at least the halfway point.
Those stories advance slowly, with time devoted to the detective process and false leads
as much as to the actual dramatic revelations.
The pacing is established right from the get-go.
In the more recent examples of the Young-Adult-Discovers-They-Have-Magical-Powers genre,
(is there a...snappier name for that? Whatever.)
the story nearly always begins abruptly.
Whether it's magic or bloodlines or genetic experimentation,
the reveal is what kicks off the story and it never slows down from there.
You might have noticed how many of those stories include some kind of
"Now that you know what you are, *they'll* be looking for you,"
situation thing. That's an easy way to keep the pacing up.
You now have an endless supply of bad guys to throw at our mysteriously empowered hero.
Throw in a similarly empowered ally character who already knows the ropes,
and you've got a perfect recipe for every Young-Adult-Discovers-They-Have-Magical-Powers story ever.
(That really needs a shorter name.)
But that's not the only way to throw your character into a world of magic.
For a subversion, let's look at what should be the ur-example of a
young adult discovering they have magical powers story: Harry Potter.
Sure, Harry learns he's a wizard in a dramatic and memorable moment,
but then...well...then he goes to school.
Sure, wacky stuff happens at school, but apart from the whole Voldemort thing at the end,
book one is a pretty chill story in terms of pacing.
Rather than throwing Harry into a world he doesn't understand because there's no time to explain,
the whole point of the book is to explain.
He learns about the Wizarding World just like we, the audience, do.
And the beginning informs that, too.
Well before Harry officially learns he's a wizard,
there was a solid week of clearly magical mail telling us pretty much exactly that.
Even before that, there were explicit incidents where Harry used magic without knowing it.
Hell, the prologue straight-up tells us that Harry's a wizard.
The story doesn't surprise us with the whole "Yer a wizard, Harry!" thing.
It's just there to momentarily throw him off balance while we properly segway into the magical world.
And for a classic example, the Illiad's first line is a masterful bit of foreshadowing
for both the tone and the pacing of the rest of the epic.
The very first word translates to wrath.
In between all the special effects and the crazy amounts of dying,
this is a book about the wrath of Achilles and the destruction he caused the Achæans.
The storyteller basically warns us that what we're about to see are consequences.
The intro is slow and portentious, and the story likewise is slow and tragic,
laced with foreshadowing that Achilles's quote-unquote "best friend" Patroclus
is going to face consequences for Achilles treating a war like a playground squabble.
It's a perfect example of a story leading with an example of the pacing it will be treating as the baseline for the rest of the story.
But here's the thing...
I'm wrong.
This universal rule has been subverted like crazy in the past decade or so,
and now nearly every story has some dramatic hook in the beginning of chapter 1,
whether the book is a fast paced adventure story or an essay on the benefits of
~coming into your own as a Woman~
So, why the hell is that?
Well, speaking as an internet content creator,
it's because the number one lesson we're all taught these days is to
GRAB YOUR AUDIENCE BY THE EYEBALLS AND DON'T LET GO!!!
Good GOD man, do you WANT to fade into obscurity?!!
Ahem.
Everyone's taught that art is an arms race,
and if your elevator pitch isn't the most eye-catching thing in the room,
your audience will drop you like the British pound.
The fact of the matter is, writers are taught not to trust their audience
to have the attention span to get past page one, unless somehow convinced
that the quality of the entire book can be accurately represented by the prologue.
In general, to guarantee a decent sized audience,
you do need to provide your reader with things you hope they find interesting,
but as assumed attention spans have shrunk,
the space you're told to fit those things into has gotten smaller and smaller.
Lord of the Rings attracts your attention, not with anything dramatic,
but with a finely crafted sense of peaceful ambience and the faintest hint that something is rotten there.
You want to explore the beautiful world Tolkien creates,
but you're also curious about the hinted darkness: the ring, and the not entirely good effect
it's been having on resident old guy Bilbo.
Well before we get elves and dark lords and reforged swords and stuff,
we get a pleasant and peaceful environment, and the faintest hint of future plot twists.
Picking up the pace a little with Harry Potter, the prologue has two wizards drop an orphan on a doorstep
and tell us that big things are waiting in his future and dark things lurk in his past.
We know the bad stuff just happened, but we're not entirely clear on what,
and we know that just by existing, this kid is doing something cool.
But as the amount of entertainment has exploded,
(thanks to the internet; love you, boo)
there's been a sense that the competition for the audience's attention has gotten a lot more intense,
which is weird because, frankly, there's no universal audience. Audiences construct themselves.
If you write a book, not everyone's gonna want to read it.
Doesn't matter how good you make it, it's only gonna be up a few people's alleys.
Not to go meta or anything, but when I started this channel,
I wasn't trying to scoop up as much audience as I could.
I wanted to make something useful and interesting and funny
for the small percentage of the population that'd find it useful and interesting and funny.
If I wanted high sub counts I'd be making Let's Plays or AMVs or something,
but that's not the point. It's NEVER the point.
When you want to make something, you recognize that you're making it for an audience.
You're not in competition with the other artists making stuff for that audience,
you're all working together to provide a space of entertainment.
That was a bit of a digression, but anyway, the point is, the idea that your book has to win is weird.
But there's been this arms race in shrinking the size of your story's hook,
from the first few chapters, to the first chapter, to the first page, to the first line.
It's a bid to grab an audience that might otherwise close the book and move on before you get to the good stuff.
And I get it, but in a sense, it's...draining the meaning out of the beginning of the story.
It's like now prologues serve the same purpose as the book jackets: a blurb to get you invested.
I read the book jacket. I'm already invested!
But the other side of this arms race is that the audience is taught to make snap judgments on entire books,
and frankly, that attitude is not backwards compatible.
It's why people get bored with the classics and frankly, it's why I do all of this.
Once you know the story is interesting, you're willing to read it, because you know there's good stuff in there,
but the guy who wrote down "Journey to the West" 500 years ago didn't sit down with his ink set and think,
"How do I make this opening line snappy enough
to get that younger demographic invested in this allegory for enlightenment?"
We're taught to read like we're window-shopping--
that if we'd enjoy reading it, the book will just let us know right out of the gate.
But if you look at the classics,
there's a ton of really good stuff buried under very slow introductions.
The sheer volume of entertainment we have access to these days is staggering,
but the explosion in content and accessibility has kind of created a pressure
that makes it harder to enjoy a lot of that content.
[sarcastically] Thanks a lot, internet.
[sincerely] No, but really, thanks.