Please stop talking

lol the irony that this is my longest post

This started as a rant mostly about Stranger Things, particularly the later seasons. It has now evolved to also be a celebration of Heated Rivalry, and will also be touching on a scene from Welcome to Derry. There will be no detailed spoilers (except for one that I have clearly labeled), but you may get some hints and the general vibe of what happens in these shows, so if that would bother you, scroll on down to the “My work in the wild” section. 

I want this newsletter to be for writers and non-writers a lot, but that means I need to provide a little background info (my fellow fiction writers can feel free to skip this paragraph). If you’re a novelist, a tool you get to use that people who write for film and TV don’t get to use very much is interiority. There are a lot of essays and similar on what interiority is (and they don’t always entirely agree with each other) but, in basic terms, it’s the text that tells you what the point-of-view (POV) character is thinking, feeling, and generally how they perceive the world. (To get a bit more into the weeds, some books are written from the POV of an all-knowing [omniscient] narrator.) It’s important to note that interiority does NOT equal objective truth. POV characters, especially, but even narrators can be missing information, lack self-awareness, deliberately lie to the reader, and otherwise be unreliable. And that’s your 5-sentence lesson on what interiority is.

Interiority, in many ways, is what makes a novel a novel – the interplay between how characters perceive the world internally versus how they act externally. Visual storytelling media, meaning TV and movies, don’t get to explicitly show us all those internal workings. Sure, sometimes there’s a narrator – the film The Shawshank Redemption is a notable example (and one that’s based, not coincidentally, on an excellent novella) – but even then, that’s an occasional device to bridge a few gaps, not a constant commentary on every, or even one, character’s innermost secrets. Instead, directors use things like props, camera angles and distance, and lighting and filter choices to convey information that isn’t in the dialogue. On top of that, actors use, well, acting – facial expression, physicality, the way they say their lines. I’ve been reading a lot about different actors’ processes lately, and because they think a lot about their characters’ interior lives – what motivates them to do the things they do – I think character-driven novelists like myself have a lot in common with actors, maybe more than they do screenwriters. Either way, in a good film or TV show, all the things that visual narratives can do presents you with enough information so you can glean what that interiority is without being explicitly told.

Which leads us to Stranger Things, at least the later seasons. First of all, the final season was fine. They had a theme they mostly stuck to, they tied up most of the character and plot arcs they started. It could have been a lot worse. But, holy hell, no one talks like these characters talk! I’m not even talking about the long exposition speeches where they use weird metaphors (“Holly is this Tiffany album and Max is Kate Bush!”) to explain every convoluted plot point. I’m talking about how they explicitly process all their emotions and backstory via dialogue.

I first noticed it while rewatching the final episode of Season 4, when Vecna spends, I dunno, like 5 minutes explaining stuff to Eleven. His plan, why it’s his plan, what happened to him that made it his plan, and so on and on. I don’t even really know, because my attention wandered pretty soon into it. And Eleven doesn’t have anything to do during this very long explanation of all of his traumatic backstory and diabolical plotting except sort of look afraid and worried as best she can. This happens a lot in season 5 – people just talk and talk AT each other, but never have a conversation. The only people who seem to actually talk TO the other characters are Steve and sometimes Robin. I’m exaggerating, of course, but the point is – conversations are interesting to watch (and read) when there is tension. When you don’t know how the other character is going to react, when they don’t give you the reaction you want them to or assumed they would, and when the audience knows there are certain things NOT being said. Instead, what we got from Eleven and the gang is just exchanges of direct information.

It’s not just a Stranger Things issue, either. Welcome to Derry, which overall had solid writing, ruins what should have been a subtle, emotional moment late in the season by having a character give a very, very long speech at an incredibly implausible time. It’s implausible that he’d have time to give this speech, that he’d be focused enough to say these things given what’s happening around him, that the other character can even hear what he’s saying given the situation they’re in. The worst bit is that it wasn’t even necessary – it didn’t add to the plot, or the emotional arc of either character. What it did do was take me from being near tears (and I cry real easy at fictional stories) to dry-eyed and distracted after 3+ minutes of monologue-ing a boring replay of earlier scenes that didn’t tell me anything new.

I know this is partly Netflix’s (and other studios’) fault, as they tell their show runners that you need to over-explain things because everyone is scrolling on their phones. The problem is – it’s the wrong solution. When dialogue becomes filled with redundant explanations and unnecessary information on a character’s emotional states, it makes me more likely to tune out and pick up my phone, waiting for it to be over. It’s kinda like kids – if you constantly baby them and do everything for them, they’ll act like babies. If, on the other hand, you give them some reasonable responsibility like get your own cheese sticks from the fridge, they often step up pretty quickly (and your cheese stick budget skyrockets). Even as someone with a scrolling problem, I feel like asking people to put down their phones counts as “reasonable responsibility” for most viewers.

Not even Stranger Things was always like this, back when it was a scrappy little show that wasn’t guaranteed an audience. (SPOILER FOR SEASON 1) Remember Benny the diner guy? The sweet man who first found Eleven and took care of her? I think he lasted 2 episodes before his brutal death, and wow you felt that death. Not because he sat Eleven down and told her his whole life story and all the things he’s sad about over a milkshake, but because he showed you the kind of person he was by taking care of her, and it’s sad when someone like that gets killed before their time. So much more emotional, and also more entertaining to watch!

Even better, compare the monologue trend of the big budget streaming shows to my current obsession, Heated Rivalry (and no, this is not about the many, many sex scenes. This is about yearning.) When the characters talk, there is give and take. You feel like each character is reacting to the last bit of dialogue vs. simply waiting their turn to speak. Further, if you don’t focus and watch the TV, you miss a lot – the cinematography choices, the actors’ physicality and facial expressions all say so much that isn’t verbally expressed. (Pluribus is another recent example of a TV show that uses visuals and silence super effectively but this post is long enough.) 

And listen, monologues have their place in TV and movies when used correctly. One of the most moving scenes in Heated Rivalry is one lead, Ilya, speaking to the other, Shane, in Russian without interruption for several minutes. Except Shane doesn’t understand Russian, and that adds a metric ton of dramatic tension to a speech that might have been sad but not nearly as emotionally devastating if its recipient could understand it. There are many other examples of brilliant speeches in TV and movies – The St. Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V is a fantastic one. Another example is in the Japanese movie, Drive My Car. There is a very long scene where one character tells another a story in the back seat of a moving car, and if I could tell you why that scene works so well I would, but whew, it sure does. What’s in common with all these speeches, though, is that they’re not used over and over, but instead are one of many dramatic techniques used, and they’re done with a specific purpose beyond relaying information. 

So, please, TV writers, I am begging you. Ignore what the corporate overlords want, let your actors act, let your directors direct and cinematographers do whatever it is they do. Let viewers be a tiny bit challenged. Let people miss out when they watch their phones so they learn to put them down. In other words, leave the interiority to novelists – it was ours first! 

My work in the wild!

I have a new short story in the latest issue of Kaleidotrope that you can read for free here! This is one of the only things I’ve written that has essentially no humor in it, but I was driven to write by exploring the idea of a protagonist who has little to no control over her situation. It’s also an exploration of what it’s worth sacrificing to have a peaceful society — something I think is an important question to ask these days. (Content notes include an abusive parent-child relationship, profanity, and vomiting.)

What I’m reading/watching/listening to:

Uh, Heated Rivalry, along with the rest of the world. But let me give a shout out to something else – the author Dan Chaon. I never see anyone talk about him, but I really love his work. I read Await Your Reply literally decades ago and don’t remember much about it other than I liked it so much I kept it on my shelf. But I have also read his two most recent novels, Sleepwalk and One of Us. Sleepwalk is a near future story about a hit man who doesn’t quite have a heart of gold, but isn’t a terrible person, either. There is a very weird chimpanzee in it. I gave it to my kid to read and mostly all he’s done is wreck my paperback copy toting it around. One of Us is a circus horror story that takes place in the early 1900’s and is creepy and deeply sad. 

I’m teaching a class!

For the writers out there, I’m teaching a virtual class on February 28, hosted by Metrowest Writers’ Guild. The class is appropriate for beginners and intermediate writers, and is about how to make writing advice enhance your creativity instead of restricting it. You can sign up here!

For next time:

I am not going to do a funny newsletter extra this time because this post is already very long, and my (not really) traumatic childhood Sesame Street experience deserves space to breathe. 

Thank you for reading! You can always find links to my work here on my website. If you have any questions/thoughts on what I’m writing/reading/watching or there are topics you’d like to see me cover, leave a comment or drop me a line here!

💕 Katie