• Home
  • Blog
  • News
  • Events
  • About the Author
  • About the Book
  • Bookstore
  • Reviews
  • Press/Media
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Blog
  • News
  • Events
  • About the Author
  • About the Book
  • Bookstore
  • Reviews
  • Press/Media
  • Contact
D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

Slaying the Dreaded DEM

1/18/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
‘And hast thou slain the DEM?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.
                -with sincere apologies to Chuck Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll)
 
You know, even the ancient Greeks knew about it, to the point where it received a Latin name --- they didn’t use the Latin, of course; theirs was, unsurprisingly, in Greek, which is, frankly, a lot less pronounceable than Latin --- which is to say none of this is meant to be a disparagement of Greek intelligence, I hasten to add, merely an observation that it’s been around a very long time.
 
What is IT, you ask? Why, the dreaded Deus ex Machina (DEM), of course, more fearsome than a bad tempered, three-headed dog guarding the underworld… or, as writers say: faster than a speeding gerund… more powerful than a split infinitive… able to leap Oxford commas at a single bound!
 
In my last post, I discussed the problem --- or non-problem --- of cliché in writing. (I’d include a link to it, but seeing as how it’s right above this one… just scroll to it, fer cryin’ out loud.) I came to the conclusion that, while we might roll our eyes at cliché, there’s nothing particularly wrong with it in writing --- as long as we don’t use it like a 2x4 cudgel to hit the reader over the head. (Maybe a toothpick, instead. A blunt one.) Because, as I pointed out, for most of us pathetic mortals, life is just one long string of clichés i.e. the reason why clichés become clichés is because they happen so damned often to so damned many of us. People are not nearly as clever, creative, original, or funny as they think. (Trust me, I know --- boy, do I know: several eons ago, as a fresh-faced university student, I spent several summers working as a teenage Mountie in a historical park, and people’s comments as they came through the exhibit… not clever. Nope. Not creative. Definitely not creative. And after about the thousandth time hearing the same damned witticisms… not funny. I’m still scarred by the experience, lo, many decades later. Set me on the long road of disillusionment about the Common Man or Woman, it did. Oh, the humanity.)
 
However… cliché is not the same as DEM, not at all, at all. For the handful of you who’ve never heard of DEM --- the Latin phrase translates out as ‘machine of the gods,’ by the way --- it refers, at least as far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, to the plot device of resolving a play’s conflict by lowering an actor playing one of the gods from a machine suspended above the stage so he/she could dispense immediate judgement and quickly bring the play to a resolution --- in a highly artificial manner that left the audience muttering in their beards (and beer) about how damned unrealistic that would be in real life. It’s since become a phrase signifying creative bankruptcy on the part of a writer: What’s that? Painted your protagonist into a corner and now your significant other is calling you for dinner, and you can’t figure out a logical way to rescue the protagonist from the sticky situation you wrote? No problem! Throw some totally arbitrary, unrealistic person or circumstance into the mix and get ‘em out! Piece of cake!
 
Folks, when someone in your audience stands up and points the stern, Fickle Finger of Condemnation at your work, shouting out, “J’accuse! J’accuse you of DEM, you silly pig-dog! Merde!” (or words/thoughts to that effect), you’re in big trouble --- and it’s probably time to look discretely for a side exit, so as to make your getaway ahead of the outraged mob howling for blood. Why?
 
Well, look: as storytellers, we rely on a lovely little phrase I learned back in the Dawn Times, when I was just a wee young writer wannabe: the willing suspension of disbelief. (Ain’t that beautiful? Wish I could claim it as my own, but alas, I can’t. Its origin is lost in the mists of prehistory. Well, my prehistory, anyway.) Now, you can write all sorts of outlandish situations, settings, and characters… as long as you make them, and their actions, believable. You can write about mythical creatures, like dragons (or gryphons, in my case, he said disingenuously/shamelessly), unicorns and honest politicians ---- well, maybe not that last, let’s not get too carried away --- and, as long as you make the context you place them in logical and believable, your audience will accept them. SF writer Harlan Ellison coined the phrase for this whole concept interior logic, and that’s pretty bang-on the money.
 
When you engage in DEM, you violate the concept of interior logic. For example, when I was a kid, I watched this happen Every Single Week on the Batman TV series of the Dark Ages i.e. the 1960s. (And I’m still scarred from that, too. Fair riddled with neuroses, I am.) Every week, the writers set up some kind of mammoth cliff-hanger… you know, grisly, unavoidable death… no way out… curtains and all that. And then, the following week, when I breathlessly tuned in again (same Bat-time, same Bat-channel), those same writers found all kinds of ridiculous DEM to blithely whisk Batman and Robin out of their lethal predicament faster than a speeding… oops, wrong superhero mantra. Well, pretty damn fast, anyway. Never took longer than the teaser, so we could spend the entire episode building up to the next cliff-hanger, and so on. Even as an (admittedly precocious) child yet to reach my tenth birthday, it didn’t take me long to see the awful cheat in this.
 
Now, I know we’re not talking Tolstoy here, but… come on, guys. You can’t do this to your audience. I hereby designate DEM a Crime Against Literature.
 
If you get your protagonist into a spectacular crisis with no apparent way out… if you don’t want to just kill them off in the manner of George R.R. Martin… then you’ve got to construct reasonable, rational ways of extricating them from said crisis.
 
To do otherwise is… well, ‘tis a crime not to be borne.
 
Oy.
 
 

0 Comments

Is It All Cliche? And Does It Matter?

1/4/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings: how some have been depos’d, some slain in war, some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d, all murthered.”
                -Will (of course), writing in Richard II (Act III, Scene ii)
 
See? There ‘tis! he crowed triumphantly. Even in Will’s day, they knew all about cliché and stereotype. Thus it hast ever been, thus ‘twill ever be. Selah! Selah!
 
Ah, right. Anyway… cliché… something on my mind since watching Netflix’s enormously popular The Queen’s Gambit (TQG). That’s not quite the putdown it might initially seem. Let me start by briefly recounting the Sad Tale, complete with spoilers.
 
Poor Beth, a 1950s girl orphaned young. Her mentally ill mother commits suicide --- evidently tries infanticide, too --- by veering their car into oncoming traffic. Miraculously, Beth survives. (There’s a father around, but he wants nothing to do with Beth, so, hence, the orphan tag.)
 
Beth winds up in a state-run orphanage. It’s not exactly Dickensian, but definitely on the scale, with the kind of institutionalized grimness we’re accustomed to from countless novels. Beth is a solemn, introverted sort --- today we’d likely say she’s on the autism spectrum --- who, quite early at the orphanage, discovers chess, learning it from the janitor… and takes to it like the proverbial duck to water. She is, quite simply, a natural. A whiz. A prodigy. A savant. She displays an astounding ability to play and mentally map out whole sequences of upcoming complex moves --- hers and her opponent’s. Unfortunately, at least partially, this ability is augmented by tranquilizers the orphanage daily dispenses like candy to inmates (hey, it is the ‘60s), sowing the seed for a very unhealthy dependency.
 
Beth is ultimately adopted by an alliterative married couple, Allston and Alma. It quickly becomes evident Allston wants nothing to do with her, that the adoption was Alma’s idea, who also, BTW, has an unhealthy relationship with pills (and alcohol) --- though, to be fair, much less was understood about their harmful effects, 60 years ago.
 
Allston, callous bastard extraordinaire, has an affair and abandons Alma and Beth. Fortunately, Alma is shrewd enough to realize Beth’s chess abilities can prove lucrative if she wins tournament prize money, and so becomes Beth’s unofficial manager/agent as they criss-cross the USA, playing in competitions where Beth steamrolls over a host of fragile/misogynistic male egos. (In the ‘60s, competitive chess was almost exclusively a male domain, and to have a girl --- ooh, ick, cooties! --- be so much better than guys was… well, inconceivable.) In fact, the world chess championship doesn’t look out of reach.
 
Of course, this heady scenario must suffer unfortunate complications. Alma’s alcoholism (which she exports to Beth) and prescription drug abuse eventually catches up to her, and she dies --- in Mexico, in the middle of a tourney. Oops. Teenage Beth has to cope with all the grisly machinations involved with such an event, complicated shortly thereafter by a severe crisis of confidence frequently afflicting supremely confident people who discover, to their stunned, dismayed surprise (gasp!) they aren’t infallible --- and have feet of clay, to boot.
 
Additionally, Beth’s own very unhealthy relationship with alcohol and prescription drugs catches up with her, too, and she crashes (metaphorically) in heavily dramatic fashion. She retreats to her home, going on a spectacular bender that threatens to undo all she’s accomplished thus far in her young life --- including the upcoming world championship in the USSR.
 
Fortunately, she’s rescued by friends (including former competitors) who convince her to pull it all together. They patch her up and send her off to Moscow, complete with CIA handler, where she both charms the repressed populace and manages, in a final, climactic battle, to defeat the Soviet champion, thereby winning the world title. Yay, Beth! You go, girl.
 
(That wasn’t very brief, you note disapprovingly. Shut up, I explain. It certainly was, given we’re discussing a seven-hour tale. And I left a lot out... except a spoiler or six. Oops again.)
 
So… a plethora of characters and situations, many of which fairly smack of cliché. You know: po’ little strange orphan child makes good, tearing down a lotta stereotypical barriers and people along the way, etcetera, etcetera. Beth’s kinda like The Little Engine That Could of chess.
 
But before rushing to the conclusion I hated TQG, let me disabuse you of that right now --- and thereby hangs the tale, as Will might say. Or at least the point of today’s little epistle.
 
Sure, there’s a grab bag of clichés in TQG, and I recognized this early on, but (here’s the punch line) … It Didn’t Matter. Why? Well, a couple of reasons.
 
First, the story was extremely well told. The characters and narrative were absorbing. I’ve sat here a while trying to generate a pithy aphorism concerning how you can tell when a storyline involves riveting cliché, and when the cliché simply makes you want to puke because it’s so grindingly bad… and I’ve come up empty. All I can say is that, like true love, you know it when you see it. TQG was a story (about chess, for crying out loud, not an activity usually associated with acute visual/auditory spectator stimulation) that more than held my interest over those sevenish hours. (Yep, I play chess. The set I inherited from my grandfather is in the photograph, incidentally.)
 
Second, when you get right down to it… life is, for most of us plebes, one long string of clichés. People are not nearly as clever or original as they like to think. Clichés happen so often, to so many of us. That’s why they become clichés. We may get tired of them, but they keep on happening. And, you know… long before a fellow named Christopher Booker wrote a book about it, people recognized --- or at least maintained --- there are, really, only about seven story plots in all literature. So… like haters gonna hate, clichés gonna happen.
 
Does it matter? No, as long as writers aren’t rubbing our collective noses in it. We try to write unexpected situations and plot twists, but I begin to wonder whether that’s possible anymore.
 
But it’s not as important to me as it once was. 

0 Comments

    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

    Archives

    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly