Managing complexity: Critiquing Tim Grahl’s ‘No Doubt’ (Part 6)
Summary: Three strategies for managing story complexity are addition, subtraction, and integration.
“A relatively simple bit of computer code can produce surprisingly complex visual art. Conversely, Google’s complex network of servers and algorithms produces a simple search experience. Deeming something as complex or simple requires a frame of reference.”
— John Maeda (Maeda, Page 84)
Let’s imagine, just for a moment, that you’re an architect tasked with redesigning the passenger experience at a large but out-of-date regional airport. The current building is woefully out of style, a mishmash of dated interiors, winding corridors, and faded upholstery. It looks more like an office building than a public space.
Your mind probably goes in a thousand different directions. What will the new passenger experience be like? What colors and materials and aesthetic motifs should you employ? How can you make areas that are relaxing and enjoyable to waiting passengers?
Amidst all this, there is one overarching thing you must address. One thing which, if it fails, will make all the rest of the work pointless. That thing is navigation. How do travelers know where to go, and – especially when they’re in a hurry – how do they get to their destinations as efficiently as possible?
Before the carpets are installed or the duty free shops leased or the pianist hired, you must get the right plan in place. How will you take your current mess of corridors and rooms and modify it such that passengers can easily get from A to B? Everything else is downstream of that.
Recap
This is the sixth 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
- Clear: Managing 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 the last note, we introduced the idea of complexity:
- Complexity arises when your story requires many different elements to work together in order to succeed.
- It takes effort to understand something complex. More complex stories demand more effort.
- Tim’s story, “No Doubt,” has examples of both conceptual and logical complexity.
In this note, we’ll turn our attention to a discussion of how to manage complexity.
Three strategies for managing complexity
Your options for managing complexity in your stories are as boundless and varied as the stories that you can tell. There’s no “one size fits all.” But once you’ve identified that your story is saddled with complexity, you do have three general approaches you can try: addition, subtraction, and integration.
Let’s tackle them one by one.
Addition: breadcrumbs and yellow brick roads
In your airport redesign, the most basic thing you could do is take the existing, labyrinthine floor plan and simply introduce lots of what designers of physical spaces call “wayfinding.” Give people directory maps that show them where they are and where they need to go. Put signs at every intersection to tell them which way to turn.
In some real-world airports, designers have placed colored lines on the floors for people to follow. Even in the midst of a veritable minotaur maze, I can feel confident as long as all I need to do is follow a “golden path” prepared for me.
In storytelling, there’s an analog. Often, if your underlying story is complex, you need to add wayfinding – exposition and description and even new scenes and sequences – that serves to support and unfold that complexity.
If you have seventeen elements that your audience members must understand in order for the payoff to make sense, guess what? You’ll need space in your story to set up all seventeen of those elements.
As a story’s complexity increases, so – often – does the word count needed to bear it.
Identity and association in “No Doubt”
Let’s take an example of complexity that we previously found in Tim’s story. How about the naming problem, where Tim uses both “Gwen Stefani” and “No Doubt” to refer to the same underlying plot element? How might we use addition to manage this?
One way would be to explain the relationship when the two names first appear:
“His eyes peeled away from her face and floated down past the image of No Doubt’s lead singer, Gwen Stefani, striking a pose in a red dress to a red envelope.”
(Emphasized words added)
This doesn’t reduce the complexity any. (You still have both names.) But putting the relationship into the text makes it less effortful. You supply the information for audience members, rather than requiring them to put in the cognitive work to come up with it on their own.
Best yet, it’s a relatively small increase in word count. For a short story like “No Doubt,” Tim probably wouldn’t need to do this more than once at the beginning and, maybe again one more time right before Ethan’s central decision point.
Subtraction: tear down walls and restructure
“The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.”
— John Maeda (Maeda, Page 1)
Let’s go back to our airport redesign. What if we could invest a bit more in fixing the problem? Rather than putting signage in, we might instead start taking other things out: Break down walls and open up the core of the building. Move things around such that there are large open atria and concourses.
When you can easily see your destination, the experience of navigating a large, complicated space becomes much simpler. You don’t need extra wayfinding, because your way forward is already legible.
And this also is true of storytelling. The most authentic way to create the feeling of simplicity is to actually simplify. Reduce. “Slaughter your darling” corridors and rooms if they get in the way. Eliminate everything extra until only the essential remains.
We don’t need to know the dreams and ambitions of the pig brothers in the story of The Three Little Pigs. We don’t need a fox and a goose and some hens as supporting characters who help and hinder them on the way. We don’t even need to know the tortured backstory of the wolf. All we need to know is that there are some pigs and there’s a wolf . . . and he’s a villain.
Let’s look at a couple of different possible examples of subtraction in “No Doubt.”
Subtracting identities
For the first example, we’ll return to the problem of two names – Gwen Stefani and No Doubt.
Tim could easily simplify this by using a different artist. What if he instead chose someone Britney Spears or Celine Dion, an artist whose name and band identity are the same? In that case, there would only be one identity representing the underlying story element. Tim’s audience members would never even need to manage the relationship at all. A
Subtracting logic
For the second example, we’ll look at the logical complexity Tim has set up to motivate Ethan’s central decision in the story.
In his commentary on “No Doubt,” Tim explains that he’s writing in the “Hallmark Movie” genre of stories. In these stories, you get “one miracle.” (Grahl) Gwen Stefani signing the CDs at the record store is his miracle.
Ethan discovers he can buy one of the signed CDs for Meg, and Tim uses this as the catalyst that prompts Ethan to abandon his parents’ store and go see Meg.
But what if we could eliminate the whole gift-giving subplot? What if we go more direct? What if Gwen Stefani herself comes into the grocery store?
Then rather than Ethan overhearing a random girl talking, it’s Stefani he overhears. Imagine she’s wearing sunshades or somehow otherwise incognito. Perhaps she’s on the phone. Ethan doesn’t recognize her at first. He has a vague sense that this person is somehow different but no clue yet about the truth.
Yet her words become his catalyst to action. She says something about avoiding missed opportunities or not forgetting people who are important to you – something that hooks into the theme of the story and can be reinterpreted when Ethan and his dad later connect.
While all this is happening, Ethan is ringing her up. She pays. Then, right before she leaves, she glances at him over the top of her sunglasses. Her eyes lock on his, and he recognizes her. His jaw goes slack. But she doesn’t pause. In a moment, she’s gathered her things and walked out.
Then the words he overheard her saying sink in. Don’t let go of an opportunity you’ll later regret. It’s a sign. He grabs his things. Heads out into the night . . . not to catch a celebrity, but to go see about a girl.
In this reconstruction, we preserve some key elements – the “Hallmark miracle,” Stefani being the catalyst, Ethan overhearing a conversation and deciding to leave the store. But we’re able to subtract the whole gift giving subplot. The story becomes more streamlined. B
Integration: many voices singing together
When I was in university, a friend of mine was pursuing a music degree. He invited me to one of his choral performances. I remember choosing a seat and sitting down in the mostly empty auditorium. The lights dimmed. A group of around twenty-five students shuffled onto the stage and assembled themselves.
Then they began to sing. Sometimes they all sang, sometimes only a few. Sometimes they sang the same melody, other times they sang different parts. Harmonies. Together, as the voices rose and fell, they were stunning, unexpectedly sublime.
Each distinct part contributed perfectly to create a larger, richer whole.
And this is one of the most surprising truths about complexity: It’s not about one voice versus many. It’s whether the voices – however many or few – are singing together.
Rather than simply removing or adding elements to manage complexity in your stories, there exists a third, more ambitious approach. You can integrate. Align all the elements such that each individual element contributes to the same, larger whole.
Harmonies in Jane Austen
I’m not clever enough to identify ways for Tim to further integrate “No Doubt.” So instead, let’s go a bit further afield and look at how it’s done successfully in Jane Austen’s 1813 classic, Pride and Prejudice.
In the novel, protagonist Elizabeth Bennett is on a quest to marry someone she can respect. Over the course of the novel, she interacts with three potential suitors, each of whom has merits and demerits.
She first meets Mr. Darcy. He’s rich, and, because of Elizabeth’s family circumstances, this is a strong draw. But Darcy appears cold and aloof. Elizabeth rejects him early in the story, avowing herself never to even dance with him.
Next, Elizabeth meets Mr. Wickham. He’s a poor soldier, but he’s charming and winsome and warm. Elizabeth develops an affection for him. Unfortunately, Wickham turns out to be a scoundrel. He chases women for their money and ends up eloping with Elizabeth’s youngest sister and blackmailing the family into subsidizing his living.
But before Wickham’s skulduggery comes to light, Elizabeth meets the third potential suitor: Mr. Collins. Collins is comfortably situated financially, neither poor like Wickham nor rich like Darcy. But he’s a buffoon. Marrying Collins would be intellectual suicide for Elizabeth. She rejects him.
Then, late in the novel and at great cost to himself, Darcy secretly steps in to resolve the situation with Wickham and repair Elizabeth’s family honor. Elizabeth discovers his selfless action. This proves his character, and when he asks her to marry him, she says yes.
So. There are a lot of moving pieces here. The novel is complex by many definitions. How does Austen use integration to manage the complexity?
There are two strategies to which I’d like to call attention.
The first is that Austen uses comparison across Elizabeth’s potential suitors. She sets up Darcy, Wickham, and Collins as a set of three. Each one has merits and demerits. Grouping them like this – and keeping it to just three potential suitors not more or less – makes them, structurally, like a single element in the story. It’s not something you think about as you’re reading the novel, of course, but it does subtly make it easier for your mind to track.
The second strategy that Austen uses is repurposing. Wickham is a villain. So Austen uses him as a foil in the set of three potential suitors. But she also reuses him in the subplot with Elizabeth’s sister and the elopement. It is he who precipitates the story’s central crisis. Best yet, Austen uses that crisis as the method to show Elizabeth who Darcy truly is. The same disaster exposes Wickham as a devil and Darcy as a saint. This is remarkably efficient storytelling, each element playing multiple roles and interacting with the others.
I can’t tell you how to perfectly use integration in your stories. But we can certainly learn from Austen and attempt something similar. Look for ways to repurpose elements that you already have in play. Align them. Let them flow into one another.
In that way, you might end up with unexpected harmonies: many voices signing together.
Your new airport can be rich, varied, interesting, and yet –
Simple.
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