reading – Tony Ballantyne

Rush for Insight

My favourite sketch on the recent series of SNL UK was the British Pork Sketch. I thought it was funny and absurd as I watched it, but what lifted it to genius level was the final reveal when everything suddenly made sense…

I love this sort of writing.

You can hear it in the song The Day Before You Came by ABBA.

It was all the way through the first series of Mad Men.

Robert McKee calls it the rush for insight. It comes at the turning point of a story, when new information is revealed and suddenly the audience is hurled back through all that has gone before and everything suddenly makes sense, or even better, a new kind of sense.

Robert McKee often quotes the moment in The Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader reveals he is Luke’s father. At the point the audience looks back through two films and three years, and odd events that happened in Luke’s past suddenly make sense. We realise why Yoda wanted to train him, why Ben Kenobi didn’t like to mention his father, why he kept having those lucky escapes from the Empire.

Now, before you read on, there are spoilers in the next section. I didn’t put this warning earlier as I can’t believe anyone reading this blog hasn’t seen The Empire Strikes Back. If you haven’t, it’s time to reconsider your life choices.

Listen to the Day Before You Came. This is one of my favourite songs, and, unusually, not for the music. Listen as the singer recounts a series of routine events that take on sudden poignancy when you realise how her life is about to change. That insight comes in the last line of each section: it’s also the title of the song.

I’m watching Mad Men for the umpteenth time with my daughter. Mad Men is a masterclass in writing, not least for the way it deals only in the edges of ideas. But the first series is also masterclass in turning points and rushes for insight.

In the first episode Don Draper’s behaviour is cast into harsh relief when he goes home to a family we weren’t previously aware existed. As the first series unfolds more revelations about his and other characters send the audience constantly rushing back through the previous episodes to look at events with new understanding. Watching the show a second time, you pick up on clues and subtleties you were previously unaware of. Rushes for insight make something worth looking at again.

This is a favourite technique in SF. I use it a lot in my Fair Exchange series of short stories. The crew of the Eva Rye make a trade using Fair Exchange software, but it appears as if they have been cheated. The fun comes at the turning point when everything turns out to have been fair all along.

But here’s a little secret. There are big twists still to come in the series. I’ve just been bringing it to a close this week and I can’t help but smile at what’s to come… You’ll get the first hint of these twists in the next story.

The Queen’s Gambit

Mitchell and Webb once did a Medical Drama sketch, where two fictional screenwriters explained that the emphasis in their new series was on drama and not medicine, as “you can get bogged down too much on the so called research.”

This resulted in a show with doctors shouting such things as “This patient is poorly! Bring me the medicine! No, you fool, that’s the wrong medicine!”

I was reminded of this sketch whilst watching The Queen’s Gambit recently. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a series about a female chess prodigy who goes on to become World Champion in the 1960’s. Apparently the matches played on screen were meticulously researched, and reflected real games played back then.

But that doesn’t matter. I don’t think most people watching would follow the play – I certainly couldn’t – but that doesn’t matter because what made the show so watchable was the way the drama of the games was communicated.

I was gripped by the ebb and flow of the matches, by the pace of the game: the way players would make a series of moves quickly and then spend ages pondering the next one. There was drama in the expression on their faces, even in the way they moved the pieces…

But that was just the games themselves. Painstakingly recreated they might have been, but they weren’t the story.

David Hepworth, the music writer, gave this advice – Don’t write about the music, write about all the things around it.

I think that’s true of all writing.

Would the Queen’s Gambit have been as good if it had been about draughts or backgammon? I don’t think so. Maybe you could have made the tournament scenes themselves as exciting, but the drama was heightened through the 60s setting, the Cold War tension and the single minded devotion of the characters in studying past games. The story wasn’t about the chess.

It’s often said that the essence of drama is conflict. Many beginner writers misunderstand what this means. A fight doesn’t make a story exciting. Why the people are fighting, that’s what’s interesting.

On a separate note, I saw Hamnet last night. That was two hours of my life I’ll never get back. The only bit I enjoyed was the last ten minutes, and that was because it was a scene from Hamlet.

But there was a bit where Shakespeare was sharpening his quills whilst awaiting for inspiration to strike. I felt happy when I saw that. That was the Elizabethan equivalent of me messing around with my emacs config file on my computer rather than getting down to work.

Finally, it’s getting harder and harder to share these posts. The algorithms on social media sites favour internal content, not external blogs like this. If you’ve been relying on say Facebook to send you to this site then you’ve probably not being seeing many posts recently.

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