Anyway, read the post, it makes sense.

PS- Want to know my theory why Lost succeeded where all these other shows bomb?  It was a character drama first and foremost, all the mythology stuff was a layer on top of all these people’s stories.  Which is why it sort of makes sense that it ended how it did.

1. In writing a prolonged series, keep in mind how long your plot arc is: There is a world of difference between shows like Lost where each episode plays out as part of a larger plot arc, and a series like CSI or where the episode is a story unto itself. Many times if the writers shift gears and impose longer story-lines on a prior episodic series, it goes badly (cough—X-Files—cough), and when a stand-alone story is inserted into a show with multi-episode or multi-season arcs, that episode often feels unnecessary and pointless.
2. Related to above, keep in mind if the story arc is closed, or open-ended: Is there an end to all of this? If so, you should know where it is and write toward it. It doesn’t mean that an open-ended series can’t mess with the status quo, but the changes wrought in the universe simply establish a new status quo, rather than build toward a climax. Lost shifted gears every season, but each time we were moving toward something, which contrasts with the other J.J.Abrams show, Alias, which while it reinvented itself every season, didn’t develop toward any overarching plot until near the end.
3. Theme is a great way to unify a long series: One thing Lost did very well was to use various themes and motifs to connect a sprawling story over many different locations, characters and time periods. The themes of light vs. dark, faith vs. reason, paternal betrayal and or abandonment, all played out through every episode, culminating in the climax.
4. Mix the beginning into the ending: In a long series, when you reach the end, it can help with a sense of closure if you echo patterns from the beginning of the work, not simply answering questions raised at the start, but also mirroring themes or situations. Lost did this explicitly, the final shot of the series mirrored the initial scene.

I might share a job-title with the writers on Lost, but we are actually doing two very different things.

Me, I teared up during the episode, had a bit of a WTF when Christian opened up his mouth at the end, and spent a good long time afterward thinking that was so weak.  Originally, I was going to write a blog post about how I would have ended the whole thing better. . .  And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn’t giving the show and the writers enough credit.  This ending was telegraphed from the start.  After all, with the constant visitations by the dead, one of the commonest theories about the island the first few seasons was that it was some portal to the afterlife.  The sfnal trappings only really appeared in the middle seasons— the first season, like the last, was much more supernatural in feel.  It’s also obvious in the motifs they used; remember Locke staring down into the light in the first season?  As well as the faith vs. reason battle that began with Jack and Locke (which became more and more faith vs. nihilism) which was repeated throughout the series with Ben vs. Whitmore, Dharma vs. the Others, Jacob vs. Smokey, and ended with Jack and pseudo-Locke in mirrored roles.  The last season mirrored the first even by reversing the original fan theory by making the Island the “real world” and “flash-sideways” the afterlife.

Love or hate the ending, this is where Lost was going from the start.  And, while I may have some issues with how they ended, I don’t think I could do a better one.  Not without re-writing most of the whole last season.

And the more I think of it, the more I think they did a pretty good job with what might have been an impossible task.  (I mean, when some of the more strident complaints are “Sayid and Shannon?  You’re kidding me.  They ruined it.” methinks there’s not a lot of deep thinking going on.)  It probably would have been a first magnitude error to whip the curtain completely away, because whatever explicit reveal you did on the nature of the island would never have lived up to the mystery in everyone’s head.  In fact, if there was a fault, it was probably going into the light cave.  After thinking about it, the one change I might do now would be to rewrite things so that we never see exactly what’s going on down there.  Just have Desmond describe it when they pull him back up.

That, and I’d rewrite Christian’s speech.  I still think it was kind of lame.

Too bad we’ve been denied such comedic jems as this:

Via the wonder of the internet, I’ve caught up with both episodes of  Flashforward so far.  I can say that I’m enjoying it, and I hope it avoids the fate of another similarly time-twisting series ABC tried during Lost’s absence, the show Daybreak .  Like the prior effort, it has a contemporary setting using the tropes of the cop-show genre to tell a sfnal story, which is now a sub-genre unto itself.  After two episodes, I get the sense that Graeme McMillan, over at io9, doesn’t like it nearly as much as I do.  From the first review it seems that he was lost with the opening scene, pun sorta intended.

However, while some of the complaints I won’t argue with— the ones that happen to be matters of taste (lens flares arrgh!)— there are others I don’t think are merited. While I agree that this is trying to capture the magic of Lost— the same lightning in a different bottle— expecting it to treat its own background with the same sophistication in the first few episodes as Lost did in its penultimate season, is asking a bit much. How complicated was the plot of Lost in its first two hours? Plane crash, Island, ensemble, and two weird plot points.

The other point is I think many of his complaints come from looking at a show with a sfnal premise as if it is targeted at a sfnal audience.  Genre offers us more than a handy slot to categorize stuff, it also gives an author an arsenal of convenient shorthand, a body of assumed knowledge and a set of assumptions on how the audience will interpret what’s put in front of them.  This can be a blessing, and a curse.  While using these shortcuts can tighten your story, and give you a narrative both richer and denser, it’s transferring the effort to the audience.  The more you rely on the genre itself to support your work, the smaller the group of people is who are equipped to appreciate it.  (This isn’t only true for SF, if you look at a typical Regency romance you’ll see endless assumptions about the reader’s knowledge of the historical period and the social norms of the upper class, much of which drive the plot while being completely opaque to the noob.)  The less you rely on genre conventions to communicate, and the more explicit you are about your story, the more fans of the genre you end up alienating.  After all, is so damn obvious what you’re doing, just get on with it, do you think we’re stupid?

It’s a fine line.

]]> http://www.sandrewswann.com/blog/2009/10/flashing-forward-and-the-tyranny-of-genre.html/feed 0 http://www.sandrewswann.com/blog/2009/05/lost-again.html http://www.sandrewswann.com/blog/2009/05/lost-again.html#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 11:51:45 +0000 S Andrew Swann http://www.sandrewswann.com/?p=1542 The long weekend allowed me to finally catch up and watch the season finale of Lost. I thought it was impressive, not only in the elaborate head-trip they managed to pull, but in the way it provides, like the last two finales, not just a wrap-up of the prior season, but as a setup for the next. I also liked the way the ending had echoes of the last finale. Before I go on, I must warn: MEGA-EPIC SPOILERS AHEAD.

The ending made me think of the nature of surprise in narrative. I mean, I didn’t see the whole “John Locke is really dead” angle, even when I figured out they had a body in that container. But in retrospect, it makes so much sense. After all, dead folks have been showing up the entire series (along with one not-so-dead) and it’s been pretty clear that the dead people have not been quite what they appeared— in fact they’ve been tied to the smoke monster, and in large part seem to be the same spirit/creature/entity. Also the apparitions have been, at best, ambiguous. Combine that with Ben and Richard’s insistence that this had never happened before, and it seems obvious in retrospect that the Locke of this season is an epic fraud.

That’s the way to do surprise in fiction. By the time you get to the reveal, you have all the groundwork set as to why it all makes sense. There are so many movies that have this kind of turn (oh noes, my boss is in league with the villain) where is simply does not work because there’s no basis for the reveal. Many times, in fact, the reveal renders the character’s prior actions idiotic. (He was working fer the terrorists, so why’d he order the special agents into Tripoli, where his terrorist allies were stationed when he could have sent them to Dubai and the movie never happens?) In the case of Lost, it is clear that the nature of Locke in this season was known at the outset.

In fact, it was probably known beforehand. If you follow Lost at all, you might remember that they filmed a number of different endings for the big reveal at the end of last season, with different people in the coffin. How would that work? Well if the resurrectee was a fraud, it could— in terms of the arc of the big plot— have been anyone. If you look at how the series is structured, it has two levels. One is the character drama which can go all over the map, with storylines weaving in and out of the big picture at a whim. The second, is the big story of the island, and I believe that was mapped out from day one. The genius here is that they really can kill off anyone. They know how this is going to end. They just may not know precisely who will survive to get there.

No, Lost explained a multitude of things from the others slipping repeatedly through the barrier around the Dharma village to Ben’s Narnia-esque closet, simply by saying “we hid the bomb in the tunnels, but those idiots built a village on top of it.”   It also explains how smokey appears out of nowhere to drag people underground.

And, unlike BIG REVEALS in other TV shows, when Lost does it, even in this sort of laconic offhand way, it is very clear that the writers (at least some of them) had this in mind from square one.

It lead me to thinking about the nature of chronology in storytelling. It is something that beginning writers are often explicitly told not to screw around with. Everyone, I think, has been told by someone (usually they’re trying to be helpful) to NEVER use a flashback. Of course, that’s somewhat bogus information, akin to telling a three-year old to NEVER touch the stove. Right now they’re only going to hurt themselves, but when they grow up, they’ll have to cook themselves dinner.

So the whole array of frame stories, flashbacks, braided narratives can be filed under “advanced techniques, use with caution” along with dialect, second person POV, unreliable narrators, and unsympathetic protagonists. Nothing wrong with them, they’re just easy to screw up.

However, both Lost and Suzumiya Haruhi show how to use the technique well. First thing, always ground your audience in space and time before commencing a narrative in a new time period. Lost does this both with a contrast in settings and a musical sting, Suzumiya Haruhi begins each episode with narration placing us in a specific time during the school year.

Another good practice, if you’re flipping back and forth, is to carry narrative threads from one sequence to the next sequence that follows chronologically. In almost every Lost episode we see this happening, both the Island narrative and the Off-Island narrative move forward in time as the episode progresses, and it also spans episodes such as this year’s storyline showing Jack’s disintegration after he leaves the Island. With Suzumiya Haruhi the narrative (in the broadcast sequence) often jumps across an episode, where a cliffhanger will be picked up after an intervening episode that happens later or earlier, the nature of a cliffhanger helping maintain the momentum of the suspended storyline— much as US TV uses season finales to carry over a summer hiatus.

Most important, both use a non-linear chronology to build tension toward a climax. Both this season of Lost and Suzumiya Haruhi are narrative spirals, essentially circling around to a climactic event that happens, chronologically, in the middle of the narrative. This can be a very effective technique when used well, since the importance of the climax builds not only on our knowledge of what led to it, but our knowledge of its consequences.

1. Sell the little things and your audience will buy the big things: One of the things Lost does well is pay attention to detail. Even things that, at first, would seem like continuity errors are explained later on: The food supply in the hatch is a good example, it was clearly not enough food to last for years, but then later on, there was a food drop. The anachronistic washer/dryer set was actually a clue that there had been contact with the hatch later than the 1980s. The plane found in the first season with the faux priests actually formed part of the backstory of one of the major tail-section passengers. This attention to detail actually adds verisimilitude to the batshit crazy stuff that’s yet to be explained. (Smoke Monster anyone?)
2. Suspense comes from foreknowledge: One of the major arcs of the last half of last season was about Desmond seeing visions of Charlie’s death, something that was arguably foreshadowed in the first season. When Charlie goes down into the Looking Glass station, not only are we expecting him to die, he’s expecting to die. Even though both us and the characters saw this coming miles away, it still makes for a powerful scene: even in retrospect, seeing the character’s this season react to his sacrifice.
3. Complicated stories require predictable structures: Lost is a rat’s nest of conspiracy, conflicting motivations, shifting relationships, and backstory, backstory, backstory. . . One of the only ways it keeps the whole from becoming completely unintelligible is by adhering to a very rigid structure. Not just the alternation of flashbacks and island time, but in the narrative uses of each. Up to now, with only two exceptions I can think of, the flashbacks were character studies, more or less narratively self-contained, and could cover an arbitrary amount of time. The island segments are explicitly linear, and are home to the major multi-episode narrative arcs of the Lost storyline. That’s oversimplified (especially now we’ve seemed to have crossed a temporal Rubicon and are into flashforwards now) but the point is, after two or three episodes, the structure is apparent and provides a framework to keep the audience form becoming disoriented in the complex multi-character multi-era story.
4. The argument’s more interesting when both sides are equally “right.” John and Jack have been at odds throughout the whole series, and it stands only to get worse as things progress. What makes the conflict interesting is that neither man is completely in the right. While it’s clear John Locke has some connection to the Island and may, in fact, be closer to the “truth” than Jack Shepherd, he is clearly not infallible and, in his way, is as arrogant as Jack is. Jack is clearly trying to do right, and is doing the logical and sensible thing, but some things he just don’t get.
5. Plant your seeds early: One of the things that gives a narrative a sense of unity is how strongly later elements tie to earlier ones. in other words, what’s happening now in a story isn’t just a result of the last scene, but also develops out of events in the first few chapters/episodes, or helps to explain them. The last season actually involved fewer new mysteries, and spent much of its time explaining the older ones: Why Claire was kidnapped? WTF Polar Bears? What happened to the Dharma Initiative? Why’s Ben such an asshole? I suspect, as we progress, the ratio of questions raised to questions answered should continue to reverse itself, and I suspect the nature of the Smoke Monster (the first big question) will be the last one answered.