There’s a style of writing I loathe. Well, it’s not really a whole style, it’s more like a scene or a theme. Sometimes you see it in novels, but I think it’s more common in film and theatre. It usually takes the form of a hocus-pocus stoner revelation. It’s meant to be a quiet moment, but it screams “clunky emotional climax,” and it almost always has a cheap payoff later on.
I’m not explaining myself very well. Gimme a sec….
Well, I’ve just spent a quarter of an hour looking for a good example of the crap I’m talking about, but of course I can’t find one, so I’m gonna have to make one up. It goes something like this:
SENSITIVE ROMANTIC TYPE: (In a darkened study overlooking Central Park) On the news the other day, I saw where explorers in the Arctic discovered a pocket of bacteria growing under the ice shelf. It’s all new ones–new kinds of organisms no one knew about. A huge colony, too, about the size of Canada…. Miles and miles of these tiny little creatures living under the ice. We don’t know about them, and they don’t know about us. We drink the same water, breathe the same oxygen, get energy from the same sun, but we have no idea the other exists…. Spaniards and Aztecs, all over again.
or
GANGLY SOCIAL OUTCAST: (Sitting, legs splayed across the hood of a rusty Dodge Dart as prom music wafts over from the dimly lit gymnasium) For Mrs. Bergen’s class I did this report on wildlife in Australia…. Did you know that in the Outback, the Australian desert, there are these riverbeds? They’re totally dry. They get rain maybe once every ten years or so. And when they do, when they get rain, they fill up for about a week, and you know what’s weird? They’re full of stuff. Right after it rains, you can find, like, fish and frogs and all. The sand is full of eggs, eggs that can last for years and years, until one day they get water, and poof! Then they live their whole lives in a week: seven days to be born, find a mate, lay more eggs, and die. Ten years later, the whole thing repeats, but with new fish and frogs…. My mom proofread it and thought the whole thing sounded depressing and kinda pointless. But me, I like it. I like the thought of having just a week to do everything you need to do. At least there’s a sense of urgency and importance. I mean, in a life like that, if you’re a frog and you’re lazy and you don’t mate, a decade later, there’s not going to be any frog babies…. It shouldn’t matter if you live a week or 99 years, as long as there’s something there to wake you up.
or
CRIMINAL WITH A HEART OF GOLD: (Beside a campfire, beneath a canopy of stars) You know when them computers track your fingerprints and stuff? When the FBI or the police or whoever scans their files for a match? Well, what they’re looking for is this pattern…. Look at your thumb: you see all them little lines? How some of ’em split in two and some of ’em dead-end? Well, the computer makes a mark every time they do, and that’s what they’re looking for. They ain’t interested in the whole shape, the just wanna see those points, those marks, and the shape they make. They connect all those little dots, and then they have this shape, and that’s your shape and no one else’s. It’s like a little constellation on each of your fingertips and each of your toes. Twenty knots of stars in one body…times the six billion people in the world–that’s 120 billion galaxies right here on Earth.
Sloppy and lazy, that’s what it is. It’s the kind of writing that shouts, “I’m deep, and I read Scientific American.” So totally fired.
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