Modern Fiction Isn't Just Political, It's Incompetent
in which I break down some of the most underlying flaws in modern storytelling
I’ve ranted before about the malignant narcissism, as well as the gross politicization present in the vast majority of modern commercial fiction, but there’s something else lurking under the surface, making current stories an insufferable drag, and that is the small fact that nobody actually knows how to tell a story anymore.
I don’t mean, necessarily, that the creators of contemporary fiction (particularly film) can’t come up with an interesting situation or unique characters (though this is debatable); what I mean is that they don’t know how to make these story elements function together as a cohesive mechanism. Instead, they use cheap tactics like flashy, heightened action (often unearned), or lots and lots of sex to distract you from the fact that nothing much is happening. Who needs complex, intricate scenes that layer plot, character, and world development in a seamless and entertaining blend of mechanical efficiency when you can just bang your action figures together—in one way or another? And pacing? Don’t make me laugh.
To offer an example of the sort of general incompetency I’m talking about, observe this scene comparison between Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and Amazon’s Rings of Power. This isn’t merely an issue of Current Thing Politics oozing into every committee-produced piece of fiction like black sludge from the abyss; it’s a matter of an incredible, almost shocking deficiency of basic storytelling talent. There’s no reason we should have to press pause on one story element to focus on another. Regardless of political or social themes, we shouldn’t have to set aside character in order to have an action scene, and we shouldn’t have to put up with flat exposition or stilted and contrived interactions to generate plot momentum or provide insight into the characters. One of the most fundamental aspects of good writing is learning how to make a scene (or a paragraph or a sentence) do more than one thing at a time. Either these people are stupid, or they think you are.
This has been called the Marvelfication of story: the notion that you can squeak by on fireballs and CGI spectacle to compensate for your inability to keep more than one ball in the air—which, by the way, is your job as a storyteller—and your audience won’t notice. However, even Marvel is beginning to suffer from this, as Phase 4 has seen characters lose their humanity and plots become convoluted, making each new release feel like some AI-generated pile of everything that came before. It’s all mangled and weird, and I’m sorry, but at some point, it becomes impossible to smooth over the lack of story using the same, tired shock-value tactics your audience has seen a thousand times before.
Let us contrast this incompetent sludge with a story that demonstrates stunning and near-flawless efficiency: The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Every scene juggles plot, character, action, and setting in a tight and invisible dance that keeps the story clipping along at a brisk pace and progresses the characters along their arcs, all while maintaining the highly specific mood that makes the Pirates films so unique and memorable. This impeccable precision is a mark of true storytelling genius, and it appears to be all-but lost by our contemporaries.
Even the better examples among recent releases display these faults. For example, Amazon’s Fallout, while solidly in the “decent” and “watchable” category, falls short of being really great due to an apparent inability to balance multiple characters and storylines. While Lucy and The Ghoul were both fairly well-rounded and showed reasonable depth of character, Maximus felt flat with a piecemealed backstory by comparison—even though he was obviously meant to be a character with equal prominence in the narrative. Likewise, the ball was dropped on the Brotherhood plotline in favor of developing the Vault plotline, when, clearly, both were intended to carry narrative weight.
The question, of course, is—what has caused this epidemic of incompetency in storytelling? Is it the fact that so many of these stories are produced by a board rather than an individual with creative veto-power? Too many cooks in the kitchen? Perhaps. Is it a matter of the people behind the production of these stories being such zealous harpies that they’re simply too blinded by their woke politics to see obvious plot holes? Maybe. Or perhaps they’re just lazy. But I think that, underneath these possible contributors is another factor, and that is a lack of appreciation for the functional art of the past—to say nothing of the culture and tradition that produced such art. There is no desire to study and learn the craft from authors and stories of the past—no desire to interrogate them for the reasons for their functionality; instead, the modern mind wishes to become fully “unburdened by what has been,” apparently inventing “what could be” out of whole cloth. Unfortunately, this has left many of our stories unburdened by humanity, talent, and even basic logic.
I've been noticing this lack of quality story telling myself, and that its not solely endemic to the WOKE crowd, either, unfortunately. I have often of late downloaded the sample chapters of books on Amazon, both indie published or press published, wanting a good story written by something without an agenda, or to support an indie author that I knew was not WOKE. But I rarely can make it through the first chapter. The stories are stilted, boring, the dialogue unbelievable, the plot filled with holes right in the first chapter, and either way too much description or way too little of it.
One particular book I can think of I truly, truly wanted to like because the author is a conservative "based" writer and colleague of my husband on Discord. I forced myself through the book, hoping it would get better, but that hope was in vain. It was filled with way too much description - every character was introduced with at least a paragraph of description, every new building, room, and scene with over a page of it. And worse yet, the story was terribly weak under all that description and dialogue. Characters going to places that had no bearing on the story, reader expectations never realized, getting to the end and seeing that the whole journey that the hero was put through was really pointless with no explanation.
And as I look at other books on Amazon, both of authors in the indie communities I attend or even just searching for new books to read, book after book after book has the same problems.
I actually hardly read much at all anymore because of it, and that's a shame! I've gone back and re-read Tolkien, Louis L'Amour and other writers of the past to see if perhaps I was just being nostalgic and overly critical, but the truth is, modern writers are not even close to being in league with even the pulp dime novel writers of the past.
I do wonder why new authors can't seem to write engaging, well crafted stories anymore. So much fiction today reads like fan fiction, but perhaps that is the key to the problem. The great authors of the past did not have TV to go by; they read. todays authors are heavily influenced by TV and movies and short fiction. Many do start out writing fan fiction, trying to match their favorite TV shows or movies, and this carries over to their handling of longer fiction too.
Maybe, anyway. I still try, however, to find a story written well enough that I can get through it even if its written on a fan fiction level. I can enjoy fan fiction well enough; its just that when I pay good money for a book, I want something more than just fan fiction, you know?
The problem I see in film is people not caring about story, first. What story are you telling? "A Star Wars story" isn't what I mean. I mean, what thing aspect of life drove you to tell this story? And can you broadly make a good story around it? Then you need to refine, refine, refine.
The single biggest aspect that the best films is that people work on the script for a long time. Nolan worked on Inception for nearly a decade, Edgar Wright worked on Baby Driver for 20 years. Pixar will start working on idea, and then park it and pick it up again. They don't just knock this out and they don't pick up a camera until they're ready.
Most films have bad writing because for various reasons, they go into production without a great script, often without even any reason for the film to exist beyond *franchise*. Then someone thinks it can all be fixed with reshoots, and that works as well as trying to fix a cake that isn't made properly once its out of the oven.
We also have a lot of people who know little but other TV and movies. They haven't gone to war, or had another career first, they don't read history, philosophy, science, classic literature. We used to have a lot more writers whose life experiences of war, law enforcement, or whatever else was fused in with their writing. Ian Fleming worked for Naval Intelligence, Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton operative, Tolkein was steeped in English literature but also served in WW1.