Are Stories Getting Flatter?

and a few other pet peeves

I’ve read a series of middling books recently, an unusual cluster of stories with thin plotlines, one-dimensional characters, and excessively detailed descriptions of mundane tasks that aim to replace psychological depth.

I wonder if it’s a trend influenced by mindless action movies.

A few days ago, I sat through one of those for forty minutes. I couldn’t make it to the end. It starts with a car chase, lots of cars involved, spectacularly demolished thanks to CGI. No indication of who the characters are and why the ones we’re supposed to root for are in that dire predicament. After a good twenty minutes of loud crushing and explosions, no dialogue worth a turn signal or a tap on the brakes (would have been inaudible anyway), a flashback pops up, as an attempt to inject some narrative. Alas, that too devolves into yet another jarring chase. And still we know nothing.

What makes for a fun, adrenaline-fueled video game because you are behind the wheel turns into a slog when you’re sitting in a chair watching. After the first wow-bang-ouch instinctive reactions, senses are dulled and eyes glaze over.

I couldn’t help thinking about the writers’ strike and wondered how much writing went into those forty minutes of car choreography. Does writing code for the computer qualify as screenwriting? I suspect AI was heavily involved in calculating the trajectories of all the flying engine and body parts.

Let’s hope this is not indicative of the future of storytelling.

Because I love complex plots.

Or a main story line with a couple of subplots, or a simple story but complex characters that make the tale quirky. Or the story may be hard to believe but the writing is amazing. Or …

As you can see there are lots of options that will not bore me to tears.

Or make me want to throw the book out of the window. Like in that hilarious scene from Silver Linings Playbook (Bradley Cooper’s reaction to the end of A Farewell to Arms – maybe a bit extreme). I can assure you that my literary distastes are a lot more pedestrian than Brad’s.

One particular peeve, that is not related to story line, is characters whose responses, emotional or otherwise, are all over the board. It drives me nuts. I’ll give you an example.

Thirtyish couple on vacation. The book says they’re in love. In one scene the woman goes (in the space of two sentences) from fawning over hubby to being enraged by him. No, they are not in bed doing it, and hitting a snag. They’re just walking down the street. She’s not a basket case on a short fuse either. Two more sentences and it’s all lovey-dovey again. Goes like this for pages. And the husband is spastic too. To compile my reader misery, the mood changes are conveyed through adverbs in dialogue tags. I needed a hot compress for whiplash treatment.

Another gripe is the step-by-step fighting sequence. You know the kind. The shoulder goes there, then the arm wraps this way, the heel pivots to the left, the knee lifts, the hips rotate, the middle finger stiffens … whatever. It’s exhausting, mind-boggling, and pointless. Give me a martial arts training manual instead, with illustrations please. At least in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes the slo-mo and numbered positions are played for laughs.

Contrary to the gossamer thin plot line, in this particular case, less is more.

But there is hope on the horizon… What I am reading now

The Promise of Plague Wolves by Coy Hall. Talking about complex plot lines and rich gothic writing. Hall is a professor of medieval history who writes horror and mysteries. It all comes together in luscious colors and velvet darkness. When the characters walk through mud, you want to go shake the muck off your boots.
17^th century Austria in the grasp of a double plague is made strikingly vivid. Brrrr…

I love it.

A new short story published

Footwork, a 1950s San Francisco noir, is free to read on Mystery Tribune.

Here’s an excerpt to tempt you…

She’d also made an impression on Tom. Even in death, her beauty jumped at you. A heart-shaped face, red hair, perky eyebrows. The eyes, closed in the photograph he showed to Gina, were forget-me-not blue. Tom had stared into them for the longest time, as she lay on her back in the grass. Tall, slender, tightly wrapped in a black sequined evening gown, she reminded him of a long-stemmed calla lily, felled by a storm. The dress was expensive and set off her bright hair; one out-of-place lock sliced across her smooth forehead. He’d stood by the body as the tendrils of vapor joined them in a light embrace, the other cops mercifully screened off, their meaningless chatter muffled by the mist.

News: The Short Story Collection is now Available as an Audiobook

Family and Other Ailments - See all the formats HERE

If you’ve read the collection, leave me a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. It doesn’t need to be long, a few lines help a lot. This is very important. Thank you.

And if you’re curious and want to know more, you can read an extensive review of the collection on the blog One Good Knot.