Don’t pull your punches: Critiquing Tim Grahl’s ‘No Doubt’ (Part 3)
Summary: Tim’s character introduction lacks key details. This results in confusion later on. I suggest alternatives.
Recap
This is the third note in a series analyzing Tim Grahl’s short story, “No Doubt”.
In the first note, we established our agenda for this project. We’re analyzing Tim’s story in terms of five fundamentals of storytelling: clarity, believability, engagingness, affect, and meaningfulness.
Now, we’re exploring clarity. What does Tim’s story do well and poorly when it comes to making it easy to understand what’s happening and why?
Here’s the series so far:
- Intro
- Clear: orient your audience
- Clear: don’t pull your punches ← Where we are currently
- Believable
- Engaging
- Affecting
- Meaningful
As a reminder, clarity is about intent. Does your audience receive your story in the way you intended?
In the previous note, we talked about that definition and then looked at a positive example in which Tim does a fantastic job of ramping up the tension as his protagonist, Ethan, faces the story’s central dilemma.
Now, we turn our attention to some things that could be better.
You see, while Tim does a great job of orienting us with tight, subjective moments, there are a handful of places in “No Doubt” where the information flow falters. These come down to Tim either witholding information for too long or not providing the information at all.
In this note, we’ll look at the first of two examples.
Playing coy with dad’s identity
In “No Doubt,” Ethan’s dad starts off as an antagonist. He owns the grocery store where Ethan must work on the night Ethan wants to see Meg, and it’s his lack of understanding that gets in the way of Ethan’s goal. That misunderstanding is also at the heart of a relationship story between the two of them.
So, Ethan’s dad is one of the most significant characters in the story.
But when Tim introduces him in the second scene, everything arrives obliquely.
We begin with Ethan alone in an unidentified alleyway. A man appears, but he’s not introduced as Ethan’s father. Through their discussion, we infer that this is someone who seems to be a boss of some kind:
The steel door near the dumpster slammed open and a large man in a red bib apron appeared. His denim shirt sleeves were rolled up past the elbow and his red face was topped by a slicked back stack of black hair.
“Ethan! What the hell?”
“What?” Ethan shot back, his eyes still on the two remaining stickers his shaking hand struggled to retrieve.
“What do you mean what? The crates aren’t going to stock themselves. Come on.”
It’s not until twenty-six paragraphs into the scene (admittedly, some of them only one line) that Tim explains this is Ethan’s dad, who owns the store.
Even then, we get it only indirectly:
“Where’s your father?” a woman’s voice appeared behind him.
“Office,” he responded without turning.
Ethan cocked his head to the side at the sound of her bustling away.
“Mom?”
She paused and turned . . .
Tim is being frustratingly coy. And it negatively impacts clarity.
As I was reading through the scene, my brain gradually constructed an image of what was going on. Any missing details I supplied from my own brain. This included the identity of the man in the alleyway. Then, when Tim finally gave me enough details to understand that Ethan worked at the grocery store and these were his parents, I had to go back and revise what I’d previously thought.
It’s a bit like being at a crossroads and starting down one direction only to discover you must stop and backtrack and go the other way. It’s not fatal. But it’s unnecessary friction. An annoyance. It makes the trip longer for no purpose.
This is not to say that you should never hold back key details. That’s a classic construction for a big story revelation. In that case, you actually want your audience to experience this cognitive switch, going back and revising a previous impression.
But you do that when the switch is the point, when it delivers some kind of meaningful flash of insight. In “No Doubt,” I can’t see that delaying the revelation of the family relationships does anything purposeful. It only introduces confusion. A
Possible fix 1: add exposition directly into the scene
The simplest, most minimal change Tim could make would be to provide the details without fanfare at the earliest moments possible in the scene. This would orient us and avoid the mental backtracking. And, it would require only the addition of a few words of description:
Ethan slung his bag onto the wooden crates stacked against one of the sagging, rusted blue dumpsters that lined the narrow alley behind his parent’s grocery store . . .
(Emphasis mine.)
Then later, when Ethan’s dad appears:
The steel door near the dumpster slammed open and Ethan’s father appeared. He was a large man in a red bib apron
appeared. His denim shirt sleeves were rolled up past the elbow and his red face was topped by a slicked back stack of black hair.(Emphasis mine.)
These are inelegant fixes, of course. But they they avoid major rewrites, which is nice.
Sometimes I worry about adding too much exposition early in a story. It can bore audience members, negatively impacting the engagingess of the story. But in this case, the extra word-count and information density is so minimal that I think it’s not an issue.
Possible fix 2: push forward to first scene
While adding a quick description would solve the problem, in this case I think I’d do even more. I’d pull the exposition forward, right into the opening scene.
This gives us a striking benefit: it introduces the dilemma earlier. As written, we don’t know that there’s any conflict with Meg’s invitation until part way through the second scene. If instead we talk about Ethan’s responsibilities right in the first scene, we’ll know from the start that he’s headed for a difficult decision.
We’ll talk more about the benefits of this when we talk about engagingness, but for now it’s enough to say that, for the story’s clarity, this does a similar thing to Possible fix 1 above, just a bit earlier in the story.
Possible fix 3: change scene location
There’s one last, much more radical change, which Tim could make to clarify this setup: He could place the first scene at the grocery store, rather than the school.
As written, the opening scene is one that’s familiar to the point of being almost cliché. Ethan is at school. he’s unpopular. He gets picked on. He’s hiding by the lockers when Meg finds him.
This setup is fine. It gets the job done. It establishes Ethan’s status in the school social hierarchy, which is important for the main story disaster. But it’s also rather plain.
Instead, Tim could preserve all of those same story elements but open the story at the grocery store. Maybe Ethan is working after school. He sees the bullies walk by outside. Meg comes and gives him the invitation.
This would give us almost everyting we have from the opening at the school, but it could also set up Ethan’s responsibilities at the store, his relationship to his dad, and the coming conflict. Best of all, it would happen in a way that’s specific to this story, rather than being what looks like a generic opening to a generic school drama.
Sometimes in your stories, going with something specific can make things more clear.
In the next note, we’ll continue our discussion on clarity by looking at how Tim sets up Ethan’s defining decision moment.
Onward!
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