On Storytelling

First of all, some shameless self-promotion: if you haven't already, you should like this blog on Facebook! There's no real benefit or special content aside from the occasional snarky status update, but it gives me a vague idea of how many people read my blog. And hey, if I have enough readers, maybe I'll get off my ass and update more often.

Maybe once a week! Maybe more. Imagine the possibilities.

Anyway, on to my barely coherent ramblings:

A couple months ago, I heard about this new series from Image Comics called Morning Glories. It seemed to be receiving good reviews, and its description as "Runaways meets Lost" intrigued me enough to pick up the trade paperback on a whim. The basic concept, as described by Wikipedia, is as follows: "the series focuses on six 'brilliant but troubled' new recruits at Morning Glory Academy, a prestigious prep school hiding 'sinister and deadly' secrets."

The result was... underwhelming. To be honest, I should have read the Wikipedia summary first, because the wording they use retroactively sets off a few cynicism alarms in my head. Add in the art (which took a scenic detour through Uncanny Valley and decided that it was a marvelous place to live and so it stayed there forever) and it's just not a particularly great first impression. I wouldn't go so far as to call the series bad (after all, the trade paperback only collects the first few issues), but I do have several major problems with the way the story is told.

So! I give you a primer on how not to write a story, as made evident by Morning Glories:

First of all, a good writer knows what pacing is--i.e. letting plot points accumulate over time in order to build toward an effective climax, instead of allowing everything to happen at once. This series, however, suffers from a severe case of what one might call "premature accumulation." This occurs when an overeager writer blurts out a number of plot points before the audience is ready for it, often leaving readers confused and wholly unsatisfied. Morning Glories treats readers to a number of revelations that come way too soon in the story to be effective in any way. In the first twelve pages (before we even meet the main characters), we see a classroom explosion, a double escape attempt, a fight with guards, a mysteeeeeeeerious spinning cylinder, a ghost-thing that kills people by putting its hand through their brains, and a sinister but appropriately vague discussion between two teachers about the "grand plan."

Charlie's Inner Monologue: Okay, that's a bit much, but there's nothing wrong with a dynamic prologue to catch the audience's attention. It'll calm down soon enough.

But it really doesn't. Once the main characters arrive on the premises, all of this happens within twenty-four hours: the students notice that their parents don't acknowledge their existence anymore, they all get put in detention (two for fighting with a homicidal roommate, two for discovering a robed secret society in the basement, one after finding out that the school had murdered her parents [and then she was repeatedly tazed], and the last for attempting to escape and being held at gunpoint by his doppelgänger), and then the evil teacher floods the detention room until the blonde girl who got tazed answers a science question.

Charlie's Inner Monologue: Oh, for fuck's sake.

As far as narrative subtlety goes, that's somewhat akin to beating someone in the face with a blunt object labeled "THE MARVELOUS CRICKET BAT OF CONCUSSIONS AND EXPOSITION"--which will probably actually happen at some point in the series (this is Image Comics, after all). I'm sorry, Nick Spencer, but that's not good writing. I don't care if you've got the entire series plotted out and all this random bullshit will make sense eventually; Morning Glories has no sense of pacing and that undermines any sort of dramatic tension that you might have been aiming for.

And that brings me to my next point: having a complex story is not the same as good storytelling. Morning Glories has all of these bells and whistles in the form of reveals and MacGuffins, but hasn't bothered to give the main characters much personality beyond basic character types. There's the strong-willed leader girl, the slutty boy-chaser, the emo/goth (gemo?) girl who writes shitty poetry, the cute-nerdy quiet boy, the smug rich douche, and the Asian. Spencer gives each of the six characters about two pages of introduction to establish their respective gimmicks before they arrive at the school, and from that point onward, everyone acts more or less predictably. They feel less like humans and more like wind-up toys with backstories, and that's a rather large problem--because when it comes down to it, Morning Glories seems to be more about the bells and whistles and brain-gouging wraiths than about the characters at the heart of the story. Spencer is so focused on his brilliant mystery that he misses the forest for the secret tree society that is part of the GRAND PLAN.

See, complexity isn't bad in and of itself--for example, just look at George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. The books have multiple narrators, dozens of important characters, and countless schemes and power struggles going on at any given time, but the story works because the foundations are so fucking solid. The characters are believable because they're so undeniably human (for the most part), prone to hubris, anger, lust, scheming, and damn near everything else under the sun. If Game of Thrones didn't have compelling characters, it would just be another flat, useless fantasy novel--in other words, anything from the Wheel of Time series. (Blah blah nihil nisi bonum de mortuis blah blah whatever. I don't care; Robert Jordan was a hack. There, I said it.)

The point is, no one is going to have any emotional investment in your mind-bending mystery if you can't write believable characters. Embrace simplicity until you can tell a good story, and then start playing with monolithic spinning cylinders. If you're lucky, maybe someone will care.

But hey, the joke's on me, because Morning Glories is still pretty damn successful. Oh well. This is coming from the same company that gave us Spawn and Witchblade, so I suppose an evil boarding school is practically A la recherche du temps perdu.

Thank god for lowered expectations.