Less Is More, Until It's Not...
by Kimberley Allen McNamara
A friend recently shared with me a youtube video about adding Drama to your quarantine day, he shared it with the tag: all your stories should be like this. (I’ve posted the video link below, hopefully it’ll open.)
The video shows a quiet little town in Belgium where someone installed, in the middle of the square, a post with a button that reads: “Push for Drama”. Town residents circle the post and its button, all seem wary of it. They look around themselves as if to see/catch someone watching them. They wonder what will happen, what is meant by this strange post, how tempting the red button is, should they push it? Finally, someone does push the button. What ensues is indeed Drama!
First an ambulance appears, a patient is loaded on a stretcher and wheeled to the back entrance of the vehicle BUT when they attempt to load the patient, they allow the patient to slip off onto the street. They toss the patient on the stretcher, they attempt to drive away but the patient falls out the doors of the vehicle… I won’t tell you everything because that would mean I’d be robbing you of your dose of drama but suffice to say: there’s a football team, a shoot out, a fist fight and a kidnapping. This is drama, albeit slapstick ridiculousness but dramatic events are happening.
THIS, is what my friend wanted me to realize: in novels we need drama and oftentimes we need an excessive amount of dramas. We might need to write impossible drama, over the top drama perhaps, to move the novel forward and keep the reader engaged AND then, we might need to scale it back. A comedy of errors, as in the video. keeps us wondering what is really happening. The main point of the drama on the video, is not the kidnapping of the patient that you almost miss, the main point of the red button is to advertise that TNT is now available on Telenet, the rest was all window dressing. Our novels need window dressing, they need red buttons, red herrings, dead ends, and sometimes they need a pie in the face.
This is especially true if you don’t have a strong enough crisis in the beginning. Scan your novel, is your opening crisis strong enough? Do you need something more, do you need to add a red button or several red buttons? What is the domino effect of your novel? Is there one? There should be. You should put your protagonist/MC in a difficult situation and when things start to be going their way it’s time to reverse course, have a storm brew - cue the locust, bring on the frogs.
Not convinced about the need for a domino effect of drama? Then consider:
(SPOILER - PLOT EXPLORED and revealing trailer below) In Jonathan Tropper’s This is Where I Leave You, (there are a great number of red buttons - the main character Judd is sucker punched by his wife having an affair, with his boss, and then his father dies and his father’s dying wish: that he and his siblings sit shiva (that’s seven days under one roof) and . Tropper doesn’t stop there in this novel, oh no, there are few more buttons in store for his MC Judd. And even though these buttons that Tropper sets out for his MC, may seem improbable or too coincidental, the ridiculousness actually works. It works because it is all there to distract from the underlying awfulness of an event that occurred between Judd and his older brother, Paul. Tropper does for his novel what the drama button does for the little town square in Belgium, he livens it up. He does this by adding a bunch of humor, caused by the various situations Judd encounters when he returns home to sit shiva. In the movie, (the screenplay also written by Tropper) there wasn’t time to give all the backstory drama of the novel that Judd has with Paul’s wife, or high school classmate , or even the devastating act of violence Judd and Paul sustain at a high school party many years ago , to play on the screen. But because Tropper has so much drama in the book, he eliminates or reduces some of it for the movie. If you’ve read the book then you may have issues with some of the backstory that was lost when it was moved to screen. The screenplay offers a better movie story. The dysfunction of the family is still felt and the humor is present and of course, the love is there too.
Your novel needs a strong crisis in the beginning to carry it to the end. If it is not strong enough then pile on the red buttons, even if it seems too much. Tropper could have left Judd with a cheating ex-wife and a dead father’s funeral, but having to sit shiva, and the other items he adds make the novel laugh-out-loud humorous, poignant and wonderfully weird. Remember, less is often more, until it’s not. You need MORE in your novel up front, you can always scale it back later. Bring on the buttons!
