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Watching Heroes the other night, I realized I was suffering from plot whiplash.

Heroes is just one more nail in the coffin of the implied compact between storytellers and their audience. Maybe it all began back with Twin Peaks. It has certainly flowered in Lost. But some time, somewhere, smart script writers figured out how to manipulate the plot system — kind of like the financiers who figured out how to manipulate derivatives to make obscene, and essentially unearned,  fortunes, right before they crashed the entire financial system.

Dramatic and surprising turns in plots have always reliably created an audience reaction. A character suddenly does or reveals something drastically at odds with everything we’ve known about him or her, or a hugely unexpected, unlikely or puzzling event occurs, and the reader/viewer is reliably brought to the edge of his/her seat. The excitement isn’t created by the unexpected twist alone, but because there is a built-in trust that the twist means something, that subsequent events will demonstrate how the anomaly fits convincingly into the larger reality — that in the end, it will all make sense. The bigger the anomaly, the reader/viewer reasonably supposes, the more spectacular and satisfying the revelation that will eventually explain everything.

These junk bond dealers of the literary world are shamelessly abusing that trust. They rack up the profits from bizarre and outrageous  turns in character and plot without any intention of ever repaying the emotional investment. In their stories, absolutely anything can happen, because they know they will never have to explain it all. They’ll just create another distraction downstream, and then another.

All that weird stuff happening on the island, analyzed and parsed by fans ad nausea? Well, the real revelation is, it doesn’t mean a damn thing. The writers are just making it up as they go along.

Anyone who regularly watched Battlestar Galactica knows how expertly the show’s brain trust kept viewers on the edge of their seat. Each twist was a kind of commitment, an IOU for a satisfying explanation. But as the twists accumulated, the indebtedness grew ever larger, and I began to suspect that I was being taken. This whole show was a pyramid scheme. These people had no idea where any of this was going. They had no plan to repay their investors.

And when the margin was called, when the show finally couldn’t defer explanations to another episode or another season, it all crashed down, the proverbial house of cards.  The final episodes were hideous, desperate little things. Far-fetched didn’t cover it. The gaps in logic could only be measured in light years. The show’s fans could only have felt like fools holding fists full of worthless paper.

Trust me on this.

Story Surgeons has been up for about six months now. It’s been a great experience for me so far. I hope my clients have felt the same way. If you’ve used my editing services, I invite you to leave a comment here.

Just had a weird experience with a book editor on a book project I was helping a writer with. To keep it anonymous, I’ll have to relate the story in parable form. Imagine it was a wonderful book about a cat who wanted to have an adventure in the world, then encountered a big, mean, scary dog and, panicked, ran up a tree. Of course, once the cat got in the high branches, he was too scared to come down. The rest of the book is about how the community rallied to find a way to get the cat out of the tree.

The editor receives the manuscript then two months later sends a note, which says: “Looks good, but I’m thinking you should change the cat character into a horse.”

True fable.

An every-day expression offers a fabulous glimpse into how a mindless decision to shorten something turned it from brilliant to drivel. The expression is, “happy as a clam.” There is nothing whatsoever happy about a clam, and yet the phrase has insinuated itself into the language. It’s a mystery, and like all good mysteries, if you solve it, you have a wonderful revelation. The original expression was “happy as a clam at high tide,” which is wonderfully wry and clever. It invites the reader to become a party to the joke, deducing that a clam must indeed be thrilled at high tide. Well, as thrilled as a creature who lives in muck and filters dirty water for a living can be. By comparison, anyway. Because at low tide, as everyone knows, oysters are exposed to humans, who delight in plucking them from the muck, frying them up and slurping them down. Some editor somewhere in the pre-history of editing thought he could save a few words by cutting the “at high tide” from the statement. That editor was stupid as a clam.

When I was editing magazines, everyone always wanted to know, Who is your target demographic? And I always thought: people with lively minds. It seemed to me that any general interest publication’s most crucial audience was people who cared for, were curious about and interested in the world around them. What became very clear over 25 years was that this group cut across any traditional idea of a discrete segment: It could as easily be a janitor as a hedge fund manager, a 13-year-old or an octogenarian, a recent immigrant or a D.A.R. blue blood. More than IQ level, membership only really required an open mind and an outward focus. These people were receptive to new information, even if it ran counter to their expectations. They thought critically, but were willing to be persuaded by facts and reason. They felt things, and delighted in the mysteries of the world. They are people who are truly alive, as opposed to merely living.

And yet, because they don’t fit into an easy slot, they are invisible to many in the media, who in any case wouldn’t know what to do with them. Just as they are difficult to categorize, so is the content which appeals to them. The one thing for certain is: you can’t do it with a formula. What you need to do is present materially which is original, honest, and authentically interesting, created for its own sake, rather than as a tool to manipulate an audience.

So you can see why the janitor-hedge fund manager demographic hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves. It’s just so damn hard to exploit.