Understanding complexity: Critiquing Tim Grahl’s ‘No Doubt’ (Part 5)
Summary: Complexity arises from the number of different elements that must integrate for something to work. Greater complexity requires greater effort.
Remember the feeling you had the first time you finished a rough draft? I do. I was so proud. I had written a science fiction novel. It was a story about artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, set in a tropical paradise teetering toward revolution, with questions about relationships at its heart. I was especially fond of how I'd woven together multiple subplots in the midst of the chaos. It was gnarly and dense and complicated. It made me feel smart.
I knew I needed feedback, so I contacted a freelance editor. We agreed on a price. I sent it off. Then I waited, eager but a little unsure of myself. What would the editor say? Was my story any good? How much work would I have to do before it was ready to publish?
She got back to with a lot of great advice, the kinds of things you might expect an editor to give a first-time novelist. The pacing and escalation were off, the world needed more fleshing out, she didn’t understand the payoff.
However, one note in particular struck me. It’s worth quoting at length:
I do have one that I’d encourage you to consider, and that is cutting the subplot with [villain].
I know that’s where you’re currently starting things, but it really seems like the only plot-related purpose it serves is to get [protagonist] to [location], and working with [character]. I think there are other ways you could do that [. . .] and that would get to the main plotline faster.
The other time [villain] shows up he contributes to ongoing peril or chaos, but he doesn’t really advance any of the story, and so I don’t think you need him, and losing that subplot could help tighten things up a lot.
Related to this, I think you could pull [minor villains], or repurpose them to another plotline.
Over the years, there have been a number times I’ve been forced to change how I view something I’ve created. But I don’t think it’s ever happened so sharply.
The editor was recommending that I remove one major subplot, but I realized that it was really just one example of a larger problem: My plot was too complex. Unnecessarily so. The density, which minutes before I had cherished as point of pride, suddenly revealed itself to be the story’s Achilles heel.
I made plans to simplify.
Recap
This is the fifth 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 evaluating 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?
- Intro
- Clear: orient your audience
- Clear: don’t pull your punches
- Clear: it’s gotta be on the page
- Clear: Understanding complexity ← 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 this note, we’ll continue our section on clarity with a bit of a meta discussion about complexity.
What is complexity?
People use the word “complexity” to mean a lot of different things. For our discussion, we’ll focus narrowly on this: Complexity arises from the number of different elements that must successfully integrate in order for something to work.
A simple one-speed bicycle, for example, has fewer than one hundred individual parts. An internal combustion engine in a modern car, on the other hand, has thousands. The modern motor is far more complex than the bicycle.
Like bicycles and motors, stories can be less or more complex. But instead of pedals and gears and pistons, the moving pieces are setups and payoffs, characters and events and backstories and revelations.
A simple story has relatively few moving pieces. The connection between setup and payoff is straightforward. In The Boy Who Cried Wolf, we have some sheep, a wolf, some villagers, and a kid with a bad habit that comes to bite him in the end.
In a complex story, more elements must fit together to deliver the experience. In Pride and Prejudice, we have five Bennet sisters, two Bingleys, two Darcys, a Collins, some Lucases, a scoundrel, an earl’s daughter and granddaughter, fancy houses, large personalities, stifling manners, entailments, elopements, and much, much more.
Complexity demands effort
A dear friend of mine has hearing problems. Her ears work fine, but she struggles to differentiate multiple sounds at once. If we’re in a crowded restaurant with music playing and many people talking, it’s hard for her to filter the noise and discern what I’m saying. She must focus very hard to decode and understand my words.
And this illustrates the first thing about complexity: Navigating complexity demands effort. All other things being equal, a more complex and chaotic environment will take more work to navigate successfully.
This is just as true for storytelling as it is for listening to conversations in crowded rooms. The more complex your story, the more effort it takes to understand.
The good news is, our audience members don’t have to be saddled with that effort. As storytellers, we can do the work ahead of time, arranging and trimming so that their experience is less effortful.
If you were to put all the elements in Pride and Prejudice into a blender, the result would be incoherent. But through skill and talent and hard work, Miss Austen has constructed the story such that it tracks beautifully.
She has put in the effort so you and I don’t have to.
Two examples of complexity in “No Doubt”
Theory is fine, but it helps to have practical examples. Let’s look at two instances of complexity in Tim Grahl’s “No Doubt.”
What’s in a name?
Tim’s protagonist, Ethan, has a crush on a girl named Meg. Meg loves the singer Gwen Stefani. In the story’s central turning point, Ethan decides to leave his parents’ grocery store, where he’s supposed to be working, and go get Meg a signed CD.
The problem is Tim’s choice of artist. You see, Gwen Stefani is lead signer, but the band isn’t named the “Gwen Stefani Band.” It’s named “No Doubt.” So Tim’s audience must cognitively manage two different identifiers and understand their relationship:
Gwen Stefani = No Doubt
Let’s call this an example of conceptual complexity; in this case, using multiple identities to represent the same underlying story element.
I’m guessing that this cultural reference makes perfect sense to Tim’s generation (kids who were Ethan’s age in the US in the 1990’s). For Tim, the relationship between Gwen Stefani and the band is probably obvious. I mean, the band name is even the title of the story for goodness sake!
But of course, that level of automatic recognition only works for cultural insiders, people who already have the link between Stefani and her band well-established in their minds. For everyone else, the difference introduces an additional mental load. Every time Tim switches back and forth between Gwen Stefani and No Doubt, his audience members must remember that latent association. A
Many streams flowing to a sea
The second instance of complexity in “No Doubt” is one of logical complexity. Tim requires his audience members to understand a multiple streams of information that must flow together in the right way to support a payoff.
In a previous note, we talked about how Ethan’s decision to leave his parents’ store relies on a sort of “three-legged stool” of different threads. To illustrate this chain of reasoning, let’s frame it as a formal resolution in parliamentary procedure. The language is a bit archaic, but it helps us see the structure more clearly:
Whereas Ethan wants to go to Meg’s performance in spite of conflicting obligations:
- Ethan has a crush on Meg.
- Meg invites Ethan to see her performance, and he promises her he’ll go.
- But Ethan is supposed to be working at his parents’ store that night.
And whereas Meg loves Gwen Stefani:
- Meg is introduced wearing clothes with Gwen Stefani on them.
And whereas Ethan wants to vindicate Meg’s regard for him by doing something nice for her:
- When she invites him, Meg tells Ethan she’s gotten him a gift. She’ll give it to him when they meet up after the performance.
- Ethan’s surprised Meg is giving him attention, and he wants to live up to her unexpected regard.
- He realizes he can get her a gift as a way to reciprocate, but he doesn’t know what to get her.
- He learns that Gwen Stefani has signed CDs at a local record store. Because of her love for Stefani, a signed CD would be a perfect gift for Meg. It would be a kind, thoughtful way for Ethan to reciprocate.
Be it therefore resolved, he decides to leave his parents’ store, buy the CD, go to Meg’s performance, and give her the CD when they meet afterward.
All those whereas-es and be it resolved-s show us just how complex this setup is. Tim is asking us to track something more analogous to the internal combustion engine, rather than the bicycle.
The first step is admitting . . .
In my own writing, complexity has a bit of a trickster personality. It wedges itself into the machinery of my stories and causes things to get all jammed up. I’ll get excited about a particular worldbuilding idea, character backstory, or action set piece; but in order to make it work, I’ll need to pile on more story elements.
Often, that ends up making the story much more difficult in revision. The parts of the story that I keep coming back to and rewriting and shuffling around over and over – the ones that I just can’t seem to wrangle – those are almost always that way due to some underlying complexity that I allowed to sneak in.
If you find yourself stuck on a part of your story that’s difficult to revise, it’s worth checking to see if complexity is the culprit. How many different elements need to line up perfectly in order to make your plot work? Does it look like a Rube Goldberg machine?
The good news is, there are solid strategies for addressing complexity. In the next note, we’ll begin to explore some of them.
Onward.
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