Off The Pink

at 6:13 PM

I just finished watching the anime The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi in the original broadcast order, which renders it the most non-linear TV show I've ever seen outside of Lost. Only two pairs of shows in the 14-episode series follow each other chronologically. And it works, not just on a narrative level, but thematically with the low-key but extremely surreal nature of the show.

It lead me to thinking about the nature of chronology in storytelling. It is something that beginning writers are often explicitly told not to screw around with. Everyone, I think, has been told by someone (usually they're trying to be helpful) to NEVER use a flashback. Of course, that's somewhat bogus information, akin to telling a three-year old to NEVER touch the stove. Right now they're only going to hurt themselves, but when they grow up, they'll have to cook themselves dinner.

So the whole array of frame stories, flashbacks, braided narratives can be filed under "advanced techniques, use with caution" along with dialect, second person POV, unreliable narrators, and unsympathetic protagonists. Nothing wrong with them, they're just easy to screw up.

However, both Lost and Suzumiya Haruhi show how to use the technique well. First thing, always ground your audience in space and time before commencing a narrative in a new time period. Lost does this both with a contrast in settings and a musical sting, Suzumiya Haruhi begins each episode with narration placing us in a specific time during the school year.

Another good practice, if you're flipping back and forth, is to carry narrative threads from one sequence to the next sequence that follows chronologically. In almost every Lost episode we see this happening, both the Island narrative and the Off-Island narrative move forward in time as the episode progresses, and it also spans episodes such as this year's storyline showing Jack's disintegration after he leaves the Island. With Suzumiya Haruhi the narrative (in the broadcast sequence) often jumps across an episode, where a cliffhanger will be picked up after an intervening episode that happens later or earlier, the nature of a cliffhanger helping maintain the momentum of the suspended storyline— much as US TV uses season finales to carry over a summer hiatus.

Most important, both use a non-linear chronology to build tension toward a climax. Both this season of Lost and Suzumiya Haruhi are narrative spirals, essentially circling around to a climactic event that happens, chronologically, in the middle of the narrative. This can be a very effective technique when used well, since the importance of the climax builds not only on our knowledge of what led to it, but our knowledge of its consequences.

at 6:09 PM

Because I am not going to post about "Super Tuesday" I've decided to celebrate the return of my favorite TV series. Lost has, IMO, managed to do just about everything right so far, and the premiere last Thursday seems to indicate that this won't change. As a fan since the pilot episode, I thought I'd delve into the series so far and highlight some of the storytelling elements within that are worth emulating:

Sell the little things and your audience will buy the big things: One of the things Lost does well is pay attention to detail. Even things that, at first, would seem like continuity errors are explained later on: The food supply in the hatch is a good example, it was clearly not enough food to last for years, but then later on, there was a food drop. The anachronistic washer/dryer set was actually a clue that there had been contact with the hatch later than the 1980s. The plane found in the first season with the faux priests actually formed part of the backstory of one of the major tail-section passengers. This attention to detail actually adds verisimilitude to the batshit crazy stuff that's yet to be explained. (Smoke Monster anyone?)

Suspense comes from foreknowledge: One of the major arcs of the last half of last season was about Desmond seeing visions of Charlie's death, something that was arguably foreshadowed in the first season. When Charlie goes down into the Looking Glass station, not only are we expecting him to die, he's expecting to die. Even though both us and the characters saw this coming miles away, it still makes for a powerful scene: even in retrospect, seeing the character's this season react to his sacrifice.

Complicated stories require predictable structures: Lost is a rat's nest of conspiracy, conflicting motivations, shifting relationships, and backstory, backstory, backstory. . . One of the only ways it keeps the whole from becoming completely unintelligible is by adhering to a very rigid structure. Not just the alternation of flashbacks and island time, but in the narrative uses of each. Up to now, with only two exceptions I can think of, the flashbacks were character studies, more or less narratively self-contained, and could cover an arbitrary amount of time. The island segments are explicitly linear, and are home to the major multi-episode narrative arcs of the Lost storyline. That's oversimplified (especially now we've seemed to have crossed a temporal Rubicon and are into flashforwards now) but the point is, after two or three episodes, the structure is apparent and provides a framework to keep the audience form becoming disoriented in the complex multi-character multi-era story.

The argument's more interesting when both sides are equally "right." John and Jack have been at odds throughout the whole series, and it stands only to get worse as things progress. What makes the conflict interesting is that neither man is completely in the right. While it's clear John Locke has some connection to the Island and may, in fact, be closer to the "truth" than Jack Shepherd, he is clearly not infallible and, in his way, is as arrogant as Jack is. Jack is clearly trying to do right, and is doing the logical and sensible thing, but some things he just don't get.

Plant your seeds early: One of the things that gives a narrative a sense of unity is how strongly later elements tie to earlier ones. in other words, what's happening now in a story isn't just a result of the last scene, but also develops out of events in the first few chapters/episodes, or helps to explain them. The last season actually involved fewer new mysteries, and spent much of its time explaining the older ones: Why Claire was kidnapped? WTF Polar Bears? What happened to the Dharma Initiative? Why's Ben such an asshole? I suspect, as we progress, the ratio of questions raised to questions answered should continue to reverse itself, and I suspect the nature of the Smoke Monster (the first big question) will be the last one answered.

Off The Pink

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Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Chronologically Incorrect Storytelling

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

5 Things LOST can teach us about storytelling

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