The Traps of Trappings · 11:02pm Sep 8th, 2014
It occurred to me while I was writing that post on Alien Shipping Syndrome that Alien Shipping Syndrome is a small part of a greater error. There is a great beast of bad writing, a hydra of stale prose and plotting, and Alien Shipping Syndrome is but one of its heads.
This beast is called ‘trappings’ and it is the death of many stories. Its thousand familiar mouths whisper ‘success’ and deliver only forgettability and oblivion.
Trappings—the outward signs, features, or objects associated with a particular situation, role, or job—are exactly what they sound like. Take a genre like romance. A romance plays on certain emotions, like the need to be loved, the desire for security, the desire to be wanted, lust, love, and all that wonder. A good romance might show a couple in love, and in doing so play on these emotions. A poor romance will not. A poor romance will show the trappings—the outward signs of romance. I mentioned most of these ‘trappings’ in the Alien Shipping Syndrome post, but you know them already. Flowers and chocolates, stammering and blushing, ‘suddenly’ can’t stop thinking of your lover.
Every genre has trappings of some sort. Horror has skeletons and dribbly candles and necromancers in robes. Erotica has kisses that feel like fireworks taste and kaleidoscopic blowjobs. Fantasy has dying, ethereal elves, squat and cheerful dwarves, bearded wizards, and utterly depraved orc-things. Mystery has ‘grittiness’. Comedy has ‘wackiness’.
Let’s use comedy as an example. See this excerpt:
“Or the various nobles who came in demanding to be taxed less for the most ridiculous of reasons! One particularly stubborn noble had even tried to appeal to Twilight when Celestia had refused him, saying that unicorns should be taxed less simply based on the fact that they were unicorns! That stallion had soon found himself teleported right over the fountain in the castle courtyard. Celestia had jokingly mentioned that she may have to hold off on teaching Twilight the “banish to the moon” aspect of the Elements after that.”
Vacation Revelations isn’t even a bad comedy by FIMFiction standards, but this excerpt is typical of the fic and of mediocre comedy in general. The first thing of note is that the elements of humor are there. The buffoonish upper-class twit. Unthinking hypocrisy. The overworked, overtaxed One Sane Mare. Comic overreaction. Slapstick. In other words, this excerpt represents a swing and a miss, rather than throwing the bat into the crowd and taking a dump in a catcher’s mitt as many ‘comedies’ are wont to do.
So why isn’t this good comedy? Because the elements are all there is. The reader is expected to laugh at the upper-class buffoon not because of anything we see him do, but because he is an upper-class buffoon and therefore Comedy. The slapstick is not set up so that the downfall comes at an opportune moment, we are just told that it happens, and therefore Comedy.
Why are trappings bad, though?
Every story has its atoms, its component parts, and I don’t simply mean the words and sentences within it. An emotion is evoked, an image is created, a heartstring pulled, a laugh stolen, a fuzzy welled-up, all these little things are built into a story, and their presence and their power and their force in combination are essentially why we bother to read stories. Call them Threads, to misappropriate a term from computing.
A thread is the smallest possible unit of storytelling, measured in function, not length. One thread might be spread out over several pages, or one sentence may have a dozen threads skillfully woven in to it. In specific genres or for specific names the different types of ‘thread’ have different terms, ‘jokes’ (or simply amusement) for comedies, images and metaphor for descriptive prose, ‘feels’ for drama, ‘unfs’ for porn. ‘Thread’ is simply a convenient shorthand for any of these things.
A ‘trapping’ is not a thread. Trappings are simulacra, they are pale copies of the image you are describing or the emotion you are evoking or the joke you are crafting. They are something you have seen so many times in other stories that adding it to yours simply becomes ‘natural’—after all, what is fantasy without squat dwarves or horror without skeletons or a comedy fic without an unreadable Pinkie Pie monologue?
Trappings are bad because they are unnecessary. George Orwell, speaking of a communist pamphlet, said:
the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.
Here, what is true for prose is true for stories as a whole. An old joke, a bad metaphor, narmy drama—these things should be cut from your story. If a story has good elements within, these extra bits of fluff will only hurt it. If there are no good elements, you should scrap it and start again.
Finally, how do you avoid trappings?
1) Be conscious of what you're saying and what the words actually mean. To quote an amazing mustache:
"Use the right word, not its second cousin"
2) Understand the importance of prose in conveying a story element. In comedy and romance, trappings usually show up because people summarize and blur the edges of what they enjoyed in other, better stories.
No. Do not blur. Think about why the words in the original were important, and what they evoked. Then, without pulling a TS and stealing, think about how to create a similar effect.
In short, be instrumental. Have a reason behind your words. And then do them for that reason.
Good blog post! I enjoyed reading it and learned a new way to describe something I previously tried to spend paragraphs explaining.
One thing. Trappings, at least the dialog trappings, can also serve a purpose to show a romance that's failing, or a comedian that's struggling, or a villain that's trying comedically too hard and hitting the cliches without really understanding why.
They have a purpose and I believe they can be useful--but only in certain situations where a contrast between the dialog and what the character is feeling is important to show that something else is happening. You're absolutely right in a story that is not trying to show something fake, a simulacra has no place being where actual, well thought out dialog or narrative should be.
Ex:
It's terrible... but I didn't want to spend more than a few minutes thinking about a throwaway example. Preferably there would be more than just this... but I don't think Big Mac would need to 'dredge' up a tone of voice if he really felt something. He's trying too hard.
Perfect. Bravo. Onward to the next pathological illness that is virulent within this fandom! What'll you do next?
So... If I understand correctly, then the comedy excerpt would have been far better had the given scene been written as a flashback and fully shown, rather than just saying that's what happened. Am I right, or did I miss the point?
Hmm. I don't think I do much of this in my writing, but I'm definitely going to give my stories a once-over, make sure they're not trapped. Of course, that I acknowledge the possibility probably lowers the odds of the mistake being made. Still, good idea to look. Thank you for some grade-A thinking material, Chuck.
This is why I love you Chuck. This is why I've laughed more at a single one of your stories more than I have at all the other so-called comedies I've read on this site, combined. You have a great sense of humor, and even better, you know exactly how to put it into writing.
Speaking of which, I still don't think you should lose the pissy meatloaf joke in BD. (I don't even approve of rewriting it at all, but) That one was fucking funny. The timing, the joke, my goddess.
Le sigh, I wish I could write comedy that well. Granted, I have some good jokes here and there, but I feel like I fail to deliver comedy when I'm aiming for it. Oh well.
You know, I should really quit stroking your colossal swollen ego, and light a fire under your ass to finish writing my favorite story!
You have this profound power to make me nod and utterly agree with something you've said about something I'd never particularly thought of strongly either way.
Sometimes you have to remember that tropes are tools though, neither good nor bad, but a tool. Just having trappings in your stories doesn't inherently make them bad, but can just key them in to their genre. Some can even be almost unavoidable.
It's when you use them poorly or incessantly or even against context that the problems truly emerge.
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That may have helped it, but it wasn't the root cause of the issue. Think of it like having a friend tell you a story about something that someone else did. They might say "Oh you should have been there at the bar last night, Jim was telling stories about a priest, rabbi, and an indian chief." and in their mind they'll be remembering all of the little nuances and inflections that made the situation funny, but all they're telling you are the "trappings", the big notes of the piece without the flow that actually made it funny.
It also may help to think of it like having the pieces of a christmas tree, but not knowing how to put it all together. If you saw a pine tree stood on its top with tinsel still in the package perched on top, and a bunch of ornaments all hanging off 1 branch, you'd know they were trying to make a festive christmas tree, but you certainly couldn't call the end result one. All of the pieces are there, but without the proper knowledge of how to present them then all you have are pieces rather than the greater whole.
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Ahh, now I see. Thank you for elucidating.
That's a very clear explanation of why so many fanfic comedies are bad. It's a much better diagnosis of the problem than I've ever seen, I think.