Phase 8

Events, Dear boy, Events.

The Soap Opera of Life

When asked what most influenced his running of the country the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan apparently never said “Events, Dear Boy.  Events.” But we all sometimes feel that we are autumn leaves blown along the pavements of destiny by the cold winds of events.

There are two ways I can tell a story.  Or rather there are two approaches, each one valid, each one lacking without the other.  One satisfies the questions “What?” “Who?”  Where?” “When?”  The other satisfies the “Why?” and “How?”.  The first belongs to the world of sensation and effect.  The second, occupies the more rarified air of intellectual conjecture.  If you and I travel the first route we come upon melodrama and soap opera.  Via the second, we arrive at a more thoughtful, character led drama.

If you and I travel the sensational way you are subjected to a series of events happening one after the other. Every time you, the reader or listener, look drowsy I shove in a volcanic eruption, or a car chase, or some other outside interruption to wake you up

Events do intertwine with the progression of a character but What I’m talking about here is the way “Sensational incident and violent appeals to the emotions” (That is the OEDs definition of Melodrama.) over rides the characters.  From my in depth researches on Wikipaedia I can see how the reward system of your brain and mine functions as a sort of feedback loop.  The more you associate pleasure from a certain stimulus, the more you crave it. Here in the twenty-first century we are all reward junkies, feeding off sensations that need to come thicker and faster.  Sensation becomes, like a drug, a reward in itself.  it’s all to do with dopamine and things.  But That’s as far as I could be bothered to read.  I’ll let you do the rest of that research for yourself.

The soap opera as you might think of it today, was deliberately invented for the actual purpose of selling soap powder on the radio; the whole aim of the drama being merely to pique the listeners interest and hold it for a few minutes until the next commercial break.  Soap operas had to be fast snappy and without any substance that required more than a moment’s thought.  The instruction given to writers was that there should be at least one incidence of violence per episode.  

In a soap opera there is a continuing conflict with others or with the world around. Characters’ motivations can be switched on and off to fuel the waterfall of events.  There can be no resolution for the characters because they must be on hand, ready to go again at a moment’s notice to undergo some other calamity or breakdown.  We just love to watch other people’s misery. Oh! the dopamine that engenders.

Soap opera, if you forgive me saying so, is a form of narrative pornography in which the writers must deliver climax after climax to the audience without any necessity of seeking a long term relationship.  As with many one night stands of situation comedies, there can be no resolution because the writers are always considering the next series and the next.

This rush for a rush in story telling is what goes on to drive conspiracy narratives (see later)  and propagagnda (which also see later).

This interaction with the stream of events is what constitutes a plot or what film makers like to call the “story arc”. It is a fundamental and integral part of any story. You could argue that the Victorian novelists including Dickens and Hardy wrote soap operas because they were writing weekly episodes which required some sort of abrupt ending to provoke the audience into buying the next instalment.  Witness the crowds gathering on the dockside in New York waiting for the next shipment of chapters from England yelling “Is Little Nell Dead?”  And don’t forget, the term ‘cliff hanger’ was reputedly invented for Thomas Hardy’s serial story A Pair of Blue Eyes where an episode ends with Henry Knight literally dangling over the edge of a cliff.

 But consider this.  You and I are characters in our own stories.  We have volition and most of what happens to us is of our own making.  Even in the midst of extreme events, our story arc depends on decisions we take. And when those big outside events occur, we absorb them, fighting them, being changed by them.

The story of ourself is written, not about volcanoes and car crashes, but how we react to them.  How we are changed and how we then progress until the next disaster.

Dickens and Hardy both could see beyond these events to the development of their protagonists. In the character based drama we see how events serve character development; how protagonists are affected by events and how they change accordingly.  In soap opera character is static or changing arbitrarily to fit a particular story line. The character based drama is dynamic, the characters always learning, adapting, growing.  If there is to be a resolution, it will be down to the new status or awareness of the characters we are following.  The characters must always be true to themselves whatever fantasy situation we writers choose to cook up for them.  In the end a character led sci-fi fantasy novel will tell us more about being human than a gritty police melodrama with a bloody murder every episode.

In a story I am following a character or group of characters through the vicissitudes of their lives. You follow with me because you want to see these characters grow and develop as I reveal more and more of them. Eventually we reach a point where they have reached some sort of resolution to their problems or have found a new truth about themselves. 

And here is another idea you might like to contemplate.  When I’m writing melodrama I’m inviting you to watch from a distance as I set off the firework display.  With a character drama I’m inviting you in to witness the display through someone else’s eyes. If you and I as story-teller and audient must walk together in empathy then the characters of the story must be allowed to walk along with us.

In fact when I’m writing a character based drama it is the characters themselves that are in control.  I have to follow whither they go and experience what they see, hear and understand and I am acting merely as an amanuensis.

What appeals to me – the reason I write, is to understand people and their motivations and hopes and disappointments in the wild as it were.  I am trying to be an observer, reacting to or divining what is an actual human response to the world.  Even in my sci-fi or fairy story fantasies I am trying to understand how our world and humanity works.  After we have learnt the “Who?” and “What?” and “Where?” and “When?” I am asking “How?”  and “Why?”