Story, Scene, Setpiece: The Base Units of Narrative
Chaucer, it can be said, tended to write longer sentences.
Lately, I’ve been revisiting a lot of older fiction for work purposes – I’ve rediscovered some technical knowledge related to poetry I thought I knew, but I still need to work on that a bit before I dive into it – and I’m struck by the major differences between contemporary fiction and older fiction.
These differences are subtle in some places – certain older writers, like Nikolai Gogol (of all people), have a very contemporary style – but in other places the differences are very striking. In teaching my composition classes, I’ve discovered that many students never really noticed how long the average sentence is (about 25-30 words, in my experience, though google claims it’s even shorter than that) and there’s been a certain amount of discourse about the declining length of the English sentence.
As an aside – I refer to there being discourse because the two sources I’ve found, Refract Magazine and a Medium piece published by a group called The Acropolitan (whose website requires a proprietary firefox plugin to view and whose twitter presence made me suspicious, so...no, I’m not going to get closer to that one.) As I cannot verify the sources easily – Refract cites “Medium,” which I assume means the Acropolitan piece, so it’s all leading back there – I cannot say that this is true. Teaching research writing makes this all much more time consuming because I feel the urge to be more self-conscious, unlike that freelancer working for a conservative UK rag that cited Edgar’s piece on hobbies in a discussion of Depressive Hedonia and fed us a bunch of impressions for some reason.
However, the Refract magazine piece does provide excerpts, comparing five sentences from George Washington to five sentences from Barack Obama – they overlook, of course, that we don’t have any recordings of George Washington, and most likely he was not transcribed, so we do not have his actual words, we have his notes – and the difference is indeed striking (not just in that Washington has more material packed into those five sentences, but he has no paragraph breaks while Obama has two).
Of course Washington didn’t put in any paragraph breaks — he was too busy becoming a Roman deity to edit any of his speeches.
The way that people use language changes over time. There is a similar shortening and simplifying of Koine Greek in relation to Homeric Greek, for example, and we can trace an arc of Latin from its earlier roots through the more well-regarded Golden Age and the decadent, almost octapodal twisting of the Silver Age and into its final, simplified form of vulgar Latin.
But this is all simply an aside: I want to talk about story structure today, but I’ve become sidetracked by taking a descriptivist brick to to a prescriptivist plate-glass window that I was simply passing by (say what you will for me, at least I’m consistent).
I haven’t even gotten to the interesting thing that called me to discuss sentence length in the first place: the radical shortening of English sentences corresponds to a number of very interesting phenomena.
Ambrose of Milan was the first individual recorded to have read silently. It’s described as an uncanny, though not necessarily evil, thing. A modern equivalent might be someone who can appreciate how a song sounds by looking at the grooves on a record.
First, there is the widespread adoption of silent reading. Before the end of the 19th century, reading aloud was the principle form of collective entertainment: recorded media was a rarity, if it existed at all, and while people may have been more practiced conversationalists at the time, chances are that they weren’t all that much better than modern conversation-partners. So reading aloud occupied the same place, culturally, as family TV time might have in the pre-streaming age.
I think that this is connected to the second major shift: the advent of recorded and broadcast media. Around the time silent reading became the standard, recorded media became more widespread – and soon after that, radio and film became available. I have no direct evidence for these phenomena being connected to changes in either how English is used or how we construct stories, so I will not make the claim that these phenomena led to what I’m noting, but I intuit a connection and will draw this connection as if I am making the claim, in the hope that someone out there on the internet (A) finds this, and (B) knows the answer.
My intuition is this: there is a fundamental change in the way that we write fiction, engendered by the presence of recorded and broadcast media, that has changed not just language, but story structure.
I have not had a chance to read this yet, but know that I’m actively looking for a copy.
A book that I have been intending to track down a copy of for a long time (and I will not link this one on Bookshop, as I have not read it and cannot vouch for it) is Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War by Eric Bennet. This book proposes that the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and similar creative writing programs attempted to create a particular “American” style as part of the push to create a distinctive, dynamic, and liberal-democratic (read: capitalist) culture. If memory serves from interviews and discussions of this book I have heard, part of this is pushing, say Ernest Hemingway, as opposed to John Dos Passos, because Hemingway’s style of writing is more individualist and suited to the creation of a type of American myth.
Of course, while people may disagree with me on this, I think that Hemingway, Fitzgerald (I have to get a dig in at The Great Gatsby here, because, again, at least I’m consistent), and their lot have a certain proto-fascistic slant to them, with Hemingway’s fetishism of a kind of brassy masculinity and Fitzgerald’s latent antisemitism (“bussiness gonegtion”). This does not mean that they were not, for their time anti-fascist: Hemingway fought in the Spanish Civil War and spoke highly of the Thälmann Battalion, after all, though that group fell into a Stalinist mania of self-purification and were eventually wiped out. It was only after the second world war that he became anti-Communist, I believe.
But this, too, is an aside.
The primary shift, it seems to me, is a kind of rebalancing of literature and storytelling away from exposition and toward scenes. The adjective “cinematic” is noted as a selling-point for stories, more so than “musical” or “architectural” or “sculptural” or “painterly,” because the ideal of storytelling is no longer the epic novel, but instead the film.
This shift isn’t just a slow move, though, it’s an ongoing vector of movement: because film and literature – as major narrative art forms – are tied together, a shift in one often has a knock-on-effect on the other.
As such, a lot of narratives these days have dropped the epic for the vaudeville. Once you move past the “scene” as the primary unit, you arrive at the “setpiece”: stories are now organized around a series of spectacles that the story exists to justify.
When I say setpiece, I mean something like the fight in an action movie (Hong Kong wuxia movies are great for this), the songs in a musical, or – I presume – the copulation in a pornographic film. Everything else is simply an armature to hang these setpiece sequences on, like clothes on a mannequin.
This reaches its final form (hopefully) in the shape of the modern blockbuster, which often has the major visual effects in place before the script is even finalized: the screenwriters often are tasked not with creating a coherent story, but trying to string together preexisting computer-generated spectacles in such a way that the audience feels it is suitably justified – something they are primed to do, because you go to a superhero movie to see the spectacle.
This is, I believe, part of what Martin Scorsese was talking about when he claimed that Marvel movies aren’t cinema. He explains himself fairly well in that opinion piece, I think, and he takes a more holistic view of film production than I am – as someone who loves the written word, I’m more of a narrative guy – but I think that these are relatively aligned.
Of course, this raises the question of what is to be done with this insight, should it prove to be true. Or true enough.
Because, frankly, it doesn’t seem to me that literature can follow, not completely, down the road of the setpiece centered narrative – it can, of course, generate narratives that translate well, and these narratives can be well received. The Lord of the Rings is a great example: both the books and films are good, but for extremely different reasons, and some of the best choices that the film made were those that allowed it to function better as a film, directly running counter to the structure of the story in the books. Intercutting the two divergent story lines in The Two Towers and Return of the King was an excellent choice on Jackson’s part, and if you look at the movies, you will note that it functions as a vehicle to carry you effectively and naturally from one setpiece to another, but it makes a number of choices that I can’t really see a contemporary movie making, including the relatively long (though still much-cut from the books) sequence at the beginning in the Shire, and the breather in Lothlorien, after Gandalf’s apparent death but before the final battle on the banks of the river, where Boromir dies.
These breathers are important, but they need to be conceived alongside the spectacle of the setpiece, or the whole story loses coherence. The only memorable lines from the Lord of the Rings movies that occur during setpiece moments are, if memory serves, “you shall not pass” (oh, hey, look, another Spanish Civil War reference, thanks Tolkien!) and “I am no man” (which, in a roundabout way is a reference to what Tolkien wishes MacBeth had done, so I’m counting it as a Shakespeare reference).
The rest of the movie is interesting because, while the characters might feel somewhat stiff and trope-laden (it’s adapting the story that invented many tropes referenced by other works, so of course it does), it is about the characters, and the set piece narrative is frankly bad at doing character. It’s an odd superhero movie that has relatable protagonists thinking about big and interesting questions that plague us all (that don’t ultimately end with them punching god in the face or something), or wuxia movie that has a character try to talk through their emotional problems, or pornographic film that accurately depicts social realities that we deal with every day. These things are conceivable, but only insofar as they are fodder for an absurd joke.
Part of why Young Adult fiction is ghettoized in the analysis of literature, I think, is that it often attempts – and sometimes valiantly and successfully – to do the setpiece structure. Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead, the last YA book I remember reading off the top of my head (reviewed by me here and Edgar here), didn’t do it so much, but it memory serves The Hunger Games did, and Hunger Games came out during the late-aughts YA boom and was very successful for a very long time after that.
An aside to this aside, added much later: Edgar reminded me that Iron Widow (reviewed by them here and me here) also qualifies as YA – and it is much more similar to the Hunger Games model of the setpiece-centered YA novel. At least, it is for the first two fifths or so, the portion that I’m less enamored by: in the latter, more interesting portions, I think Zhao backed off from the setpiece focus that was present in the earlier portions, which were used as more of an attention-grabber: the big setpiece battle jockeyed for space with the necessary exposition, and once it was out of the way, the exposition could finish and the more interesting work of the story and its central mystery could proceed.
However, I think that it is difficult to get a setpiece-structured novel to the status of a canonical work: it was only fairly recently that predominantly scene-based works rose to that level of prominence. Most “canonical” works of literature are heavy on exposition insisting that they be taken seriously in a very particular way, and you can see works that aspire to seriousness, if not canonicity, constructing themselves in a similar fashion.
I don’t think that it is good for the form of the novel to aspire to being a collection of setpieces, though. This is not, however, a moral judgment (or not only one): it is a practical one. Quite simply, while language can be spectacular, I feel that it is difficult for language to produce spectacle in the same way that the visual arts can.
And here we return to sentence length.
If you go down either road, I think that there is generally a certain utility to shorter paragraphs and shorter sentences. This is not, however, due to a dumbing-down of the population, as many of the sources I’ve seen on the topic argue. Instead, it is because – regardless of the reader’s intelligence and attention span – shorter passages tend to be more memorable.
Whenever I talk about time on this blog, this is what I feel like I sound like.
Another big part of this is that – in attempting to spectacalize literature – we are abandoning what makes literature unique. There are things that prose can do that film cannot: notably, it can compress and expand time in what I tend to think of as a kairotic fashion, while film and television are limited to the purely chronological.
A long, sprawling paragraph congeals the perception of time’s passage in a way that slow-motion cannot in film: it makes every detail pop out and take center stage as the author drags the center of the reader’s attention across the scene that they are drawing, either in a roving search pattern or in a circular, repetitious pattern that creates a new and unique perspective. You can easily see such things in the more poetic works that draw on scriptural techniques, because they harken back to an earlier orality, mimicking the sprawling constructions of older literature in a moment of purposeful metachrony.
On the other hand, a short, flipbook sentence, set aside and treated as its own paragraph, offers a slice that sticks in the memory.
But both require contrast. You need the shorter sentences – shorter paragraphs – to make the longer ones actually seem long. You need the longer ones to make the shorter ones stick. The one without the other falls flat and fails: this is why reading Dickens or Dostoevsky or Joyce feels like a slog to a modern reader, I feel: it’s because at the level of the sentence, they are using the language differently.
Beyond that, they are structuring their stories differently: I don’t attach a moral judgment to either of these, but it bothers me that people expect Ulysses or Notes from Underground to hit like whatever the latest Star Wars property is and judge them harshly for not being that. Not because nothing should be like Star Wars or more things should be like Ulysses – I’ve bounced off that novel several times, and will have to try again at some point in the near future, I admit – but because a healthy culture has variety, and expecting all stories to be exciting is the same as expecting all food to be sweet. I have a tendency to add honey or mirin to my stir fries when I’m cooking, but you need salt and sour and bitter and savory to get the full experience of your meal.
These things are difficult, and their value doesn’t come from them being difficult but from them being part of a balanced mental diet, and I have met plenty of staid professors of literature that I would encourage to pick up a hard-boiled detective novel or sappy romance novel or mind-bending science fiction or fantasy novel, but they’re hardly the majority of the population, are they?
This piece gets off into the weeds more than I expected – but at least I’m consistent, you have to give me that. I have two points I want to finish on.
First, what setpieces are good for:
Setpieces are good for media that leans into spectacle, but beyond that, it’s great for things that act upon the viewer as a physical being. Action wants to make the pulse pound. Horror wants to safely activate the fight-or-flight reflex. Musicals want to play games with your mirror neurons. Comedy wants to make you laugh. Pornography...well, I’ll leave that to you.
It is a great technique for this, and we cannot forget that the audience is made up of people with physical bodies who experience the world as physical beings. This doesn’t mean that it cannot be cerebral, or engage the audience’s “higher faculties” or whatever, but it’s a utilization, not the use, of these techniques. A piece of media that centers on setpieces needs to think about the physical effect that it wants to engender and focus on that.
Here’s my second point, what I want those of you who write fiction to take away from this:
You’re not going to be able to get the setpiece you have in your mind to come across perfectly in fiction. That’s fine. Lean into what fiction can do – it’s much better at drawing characters and giving us the voice for the character. This is because it works on your reader as a thinking being. Even the most sentimental, maudlin piece of writing comes to the reader through language and needs to be decoded by the conscious mind before it can have any kind of other effect. You need to write with this in mind, because it can actually be the greatest strength.
We’ve talked about translation and adaptation before on this website, and it’s the same thing: if you’re writing something that centers on a “setpiece”, you need to write it for your reader’s mind to translate it into a physical effect, instead of thinking about the physical effect first and foremost.
If you do this, if you enlist your reader as an accomplice in your activity, you’ll be much more effective – but you’re going to have to approach the problem differently from a visual artist, a director, or a game designer. This means leaving aside the tools you see employed in comics, film, games, and music, and figuring out how you want to inspire your reader to imagine what you’re describing in such a way that it has the desired effect, instead of focusing on getting them to envision things in a blow-by-blow fashion.
Your medium is language. Use it.
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