What we want to hear
You can kill people in droves and it’s expected. But you won’t get away with underage sex or racial discrimination unless you write it strictly from the victim’s point of view. It’s easy to sell a story about a little person who takes on a big organisation. It’s a lot harder to do one in which the organisation turns out to be right and the little person wrong. Pictures from the famine camps should show us starving children, but not the ones who have already died. We don’t want it. We, the consumers, censor both what the story is and how it may be told.
Why shouldn’t we? Some thoughts can be truly dangerous if written down. Even where they aren’t, a bit of censorship can still be a good thing. It challenges our storytellers to use their wits, rather than just telling things the obvious but lazy way. And we do actually expect storytellers (in all their forms) to push a bit beyond what’s normal and accepted. It is their job to take our imaginations to places where it is not safe for our bodies to be. They let us think ourselves into dramatic situations without the risk of getting into them for real. We may even allow a writer who shocks us to be newsworthy, that is, to become a story themselves.
But storytellers have only a very little power. They have to appeal to things that are already in our minds. They can’t make us go where we don’t want to go. Whether they are peddling fact or fiction, they must massage our emotions in pleasing ways. We are ready to weep, so long as we can feel uplifted by the weeping. We want to imagine ourselves coming into power, gaining riches, lying in the arms of another human who is beautiful. We like the little-person-against-the-big-machine story because it lets us see ourselves triumphing against the world that keeps us down. And we love stories about people we all know and whom we can gossip about – celebrities whose success we can somehow share by reading about it, and whose failures and foibles we can spit upon as we pass them humiliated in the gutter. ‘You thought you were better than us, didn’t you?’
So I’m with those who say: you can blame the press, but don’t forget who was buying the newspapers. I’ll go further. Why is political debate so nauseatingly sterile? Because we like ‘pompous ass makes fool of self’ stories much more than we do ‘life is terribly complicated and if you want something to change you’ve got to accept the consequences’. So a politician in front of a microphone simply cannot afford to take risks. And if you ever get depressed about the number of books in which young heroine falls in love with beautiful monster who wants to suck her blood – well, you’ve just got to accept that some stories are stronger than others. They’re the ones that tell us what we want to hear.
July 18th, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Very true and elegantly expressed. Would enjoy discussing this over a drink some time.
July 19th, 2011 at 7:46 am
It’s a deal, Liz. Your place or mine?
July 20th, 2011 at 4:03 pm
But why do we like ‘pompous ass’ stories better than ‘life is complicated’ stories? I’ve never bought a tabloid newspaper, but I’d agree that the reasons people buy them is because the stories are strong. A strong story doesn’t always have to be simple, though. Surely a lot of people who WOULD buy the NOTW or the Sun are intelligent social beings who know perfectly well in their everyday lives that life is complicated and not black and white. They’re are stupid, but if some newspaper editors think they are, and give them lowest common denominator self-righteous dishonest crap all the time, that’s not going to do anyone’s intellect any good.
I don’t know what the answer is, but raising tabloid newspaper standards can’t hurt.
July 21st, 2011 at 8:54 am
Good question, Kath. What makes a story strong? Since ‘because it’s what we want to hear’ is too easy an answer.
I think it’s to do with the imagination and what it’s for - which is to try things out in our mind without having to try them out for real (eg: for most of the time our brains have been evolving it’s been really quite useful to be able to imagine what might happen if you were to lead the tribe in under those speckly-dappled woods, before you
actually did it.) The imagination needs to think about dramatic situations and social situations and it gets bored and dull if it doesn’t, like a dog that doesn’t get taken out for walks. That’s why we have stories. We don’t just like them. We need them. The strong stories are the ones that really let us play out our wants and fears and desires. Including hearing the satisfying thud of a pompous ass falling off his pedestal.
Why is the tabloid story so successful? Because, whatever else they are, they’re dam’ good storytellers, in the basic sense that they know how to catch your attention and they don’t try to keep it for too long. Big headlines, lots of pictures, situations that you can immediately think your way into and start empathising, and never mind the accuracy! It’s a very rare story that doesn’t need at least an element of fiction in it, just to lubricate the imaginative process. Sure, a morally-complex story can be a very good story in its own way, and better for helping us to understand what humans are really like. But it demands more effort of the audience and it makes one crucial part of the imaginative process - that’s the bit where we think ‘if I were in this situation I would…’ much harder.
I do like writing them though. You know that.