Are Stories Getting Flatter?

I’ve read a series of middling books recently, an unusual cluster of stories with thin plotlines, one-dimensional characters, and excessively detailed descriptions of mundane tasks that aim to replace psychological depth.

I wonder if it’s a trend influenced by mindless action movies.

A few days ago, I sat through one of those for forty minutes. I couldn’t make it to the end. It starts with a car chase, lots of cars involved, spectacularly demolished thanks to CGI. No indication of who the characters are and why the ones we’re supposed to root for are in that dire predicament. After a good twenty minutes of loud crushing and explosions, no dialogue worth a turn signal or a tap on the brakes (would have been inaudible anyway), a flashback pops up, as an attempt to inject some narrative. Alas, that too devolves into yet another jarring chase. And still we know nothing.

What makes for a fun, adrenaline-fueled video game because you are behind the wheel turns into a slog when you’re sitting in a chair watching. After the first wow-bang-ouch instinctive reactions, senses are dulled and eyes glaze over.

I couldn’t help thinking about the writers’ strike and wondered how much writing went into those forty minutes of car choreography. Does writing code for the computer qualify as screenwriting? I suspect AI was heavily involved in calculating the trajectories of all the flying engine and body parts.

Let’s hope this is not indicative of the future of storytelling.

Because I love complex plots.

Or a main story line with a couple of subplots, or a simple story but complex characters that make the tale quirky. Or the story may be hard to believe but the writing is amazing. Or …

As you can see there are lots of options that will not bore me to tears.

Or make me want to throw the book out of the window. Like in that hilarious scene from Silver Linings Playbook (Bradley Cooper’s reaction to the end of A Farewell to Arms – maybe a bit extreme). I can assure you that my literary distastes are a lot more pedestrian than Brad’s.

One particular peeve, that is not related to story line, is characters whose responses, emotional or otherwise, are all over the board. It drives me nuts. I’ll give you an example.

Thirtyish couple on vacation. The book says they’re in love. In one scene the woman goes (in the space of two sentences) from fawning over hubby to being enraged by him. No, they are not in bed doing it, and hitting a snag. They’re just walking down the street. She’s not a basket case on a short fuse either. Two more sentences and it’s all lovey-dovey again. Goes like this for pages. And the husband is spastic too. To compile my reader misery, the mood changes are conveyed through adverbs in dialogue tags. I needed a hot compress for whiplash treatment.

Another gripe is the step-by-step fighting sequence. You know the kind. The shoulder goes there, then the arm wraps this way, the heel pivots to the left, the knee lifts, the hips rotate, the middle finger stiffens … whatever. It’s exhausting, mind-boggling, and pointless. Give me a martial arts training manual instead, with illustrations please. At least in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes the slo-mo and numbered positions are played for laughs.

Contrary to the gossamer thin plot line, in this particular case, less is more.