One of my writing books states:

"Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly. Master storytellers know how to squeeze life out of the least of things, while poor storytellers reduce the profound to the banal."

This is a screenwriting book but I'd be interested to hear the views of the novelists here; and, if you believe it to be true of film, do you believe it to be true of fiction, too?

Of course, anything badly told is to be avoided but can the trivial be raised up and made into art?

It's certainly true that weak telling doesn't do any subject any good, though I guess with 'high concept' stuff the telling only has to be competent.

But as to subject matter... One of the most important definitions of 'brilliantly told', surely, is that it digs the profound meanings and human significance out from inside apparently trivial subjects - and that may include making them funny. At which point they cease to be trivial, and become important. In lots of ways it's more of a challenge to a writer than the bread-and-butter subjects of love, sex and death.

I'd say there's no such thing as a trivial subject. If you can't make the trivial significant to the reader in some way, it's a failure of your writing skills, not your subject.

But too many writers on writing (and editors...) assume that the cure for doing something badly is not to do it, rather than to learn to do it better.

Emma

I can do no better than to refer you to Deric Longden (Wide Eyes & Legless; A Play On Words, etc) who makes an art out of turning daily trivia into brilliant storytelling.
He tells the anecdote of once being at a Q&A and booksigning along with two other writers, the other two being well known personalities from the world of politics, who snubbed him as they waited to go on.
Deric was there to share anecdotes about his mother, the other two writers were there to expound on the Politics of War sprinkled with personal anecdotes about meetings with Churchill, Rooseveldt and Stalin.
Deric was still signing his books a couple of hours after the Q&A session had ended, and long after the other two writers had retreated to the pub to drown their egos.


- NaomiM

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oops, wide eyed..

"Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly. Master storytellers know how to squeeze life out of the least of things, while poor storytellers reduce the profound to the banal."

I think this is very true and something many beginner writers could benefit taking heed of. I've read far too many beginner short stories that tackle 'big' themes such as child abuse, domestic violence, death, etc. but fail to say anything original. Yet if you take a much smaller focus and stick with 'trivial' incidents that can happen to most of us, there is much more scope for saying something original.

One of my favourite novelists is Anne Tyler - she's brilliant at taking ordinary, everyday lives and making them individual and fascinating.

Emma, I think you are broadly in agreement with the quote although you don't seem to think so!

The quote is from Robert McKee's 'Story'. You may not have heard of him but he is greatly respected as an authority on screenwriting and although 'Story' is primarily aimed at screenwriters, I would recommend that any writer keep a copy on their bookshelves.

I don't think the quote suggests that

the cure for doing something badly is not to do it, rather than to learn to do it better

Also, I don't quite know what you mean by 'high concept' stuff (sounds very pretentious!) and am surprised that you think that 'the telling only has to be competent' for any piece of writing. Surely that is when 'poor storytellers reduce the profound to the banal', as McKee says.

NaomiM

Yes, quite! McKee's everyday examples concern a woman enthralling her co-workers with the story of how she (eventually) got her kids on the schoolbus versus the guy who bores everyone to death with the cliched tale of how his mother died over the weekend.

daisy2004

I think that's exactly right, and why McKee included the comment that I pulled as a quote.

I really recommend this book for all writers, though, not just beginners and not just screenwriters.

Thanks for all your views.

I've just realised that my membership runs out tonight or tomorrow so I probably won't be able to post again.

Thanks again for your comments on both my threads, really interesting site which I will continue to visit as a non-member as I can't afford to join permanently.

Bye.

Sorry to hear you're not renewing, p-c.

I have heard of the Robert McKee book, though I've been put off it, perhaps unfairly, by two friends who went to one of his sessions, and told me what that was like... But scriptwriting and fiction are two very different forms, and though there's an overlap, I'd think twice before I imported an insight wholesale and unexamined from one to the other. I love the example of the two different stories!

I'm only disagreeing with him in the sense that I don't think the distinction between 'trivial' or 'serious' is particularly helpful, though I know the world persists in thinking in those terms so I guess he's right to tackle it. And my later comment was about writing in general, arguing from the particular to the general being a well-know intellectual process.

Emma

versus the guy who bores everyone to death with the cliched tale of how his mother died over the weekend.

Depends how she died, really.

I specialise in the trivial, the every-day and the domestic. Things that are very dull and ordinary - because to me every single person is going to get on a bus and go to work with a whole diferent set of thoughts in her head. An interesting character can make the narration of anything they do gripping.

I suppose it's too late to ask if there is any link between your user name (particularlycenturions), and the Robert McKee who played a Roman soldier in Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 classic The King of Kings.


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Or is that a trivial pursuit question?

Naomi, I think trivial pursuit questions are part of being a writer - you need a streak of nerdiness!

Emma

I've read far too many beginner short stories that tackle 'big' themes such as child abuse, domestic violence, death, etc. but fail to say anything original. Yet if you take a much smaller focus and stick with 'trivial' incidents that can happen to most of us, there is much more scope for saying something original.

I thought this was a really good point. One of the tricks I've noticed in a few really excellent novels I've read recently is that they start from the apparently trivial - something low-key which everyone can relate to but expects nothing much from - and build up a story from that & at a certain point the reader realises that a leap has been made from a seemingly trivial set of circumstances to a complex exploration of profound human issues. In the best of them it's not clear exactly when this occurred - one finishes the book with the feeling that the trivial was profound all along (if that makes any sense).

I read a novel by Hungarian writer Magda Szabo recently (The Door) which exemplified this technique. The novel started with a young writer employing an eccentric elderly housekeeper & it went along for fifty pages or so just describing her odd behaviour which to begin with merely seems annoying but without great significance. The author then shows events which gradually introduce layer on layer of background information about the housekeeper's past life, until the reader understands that a genuine human tragedy is unfolding. It's a brilliant book, in fact - I'd recommend it to anyone.

Very true, RJH. It's a bit like a battle scene between massed armies where you concentrate on just a small handful of individuals to get across the message that war is hell.

you concentrate on just a small handful of individuals to get across the message that war is hell.

It's very true - it's partly the camera-angles thing, isn't it, or rather the long-shot/close-up thing. Maybe it's because our human focus - the way we apprehend human experience - is inevitably tuned to individuals or small groups, that being our fundamental social organisation. To find the universal, we have to be shown it in the particular. Which is kind of what I was saying further up: that apparently 'trivial' subjects cease to be so if they're handled in certain ways, so that in way the trivial-serious distinction becomes irrelevant.

Emma

It is also about empathising with the characters. It is difficult for the reader to feel moved by hundreds of civilians blown up by a terrorist bomb - reduced to the term 'collateral damage' in the papers - but if you make the reader care about one person and then show the suffering through their eyes, it humanises it - which is why misery memoirs are such an effective medium for showing the sort of personal suffering that is happening on a wide scale. Mere statistics such as 800 million people will go to bed hungry again tonight barely registers in our conciousness.