MacGuffins and the art of storytelling

[truepenny]

So Charlie Stross made a post recently about Ron Moore's description of the writing process on Star Trek: The Next Generation. (It's a short post--go read it and come back. I'll wait.) Now, I disagree with almost all of Charlie's conclusions--which isn't surprising--and I even disagree with half of his premise. He objects to Moore's process because it's bad science fiction. While I agree entirely that Moore's process isn't very good (o.O, I said on reading it and also O.o), I don't think science fiction gets dibs on the outrage and injustice because, to me, what Moore is describing is bad storytelling.

Which leads me to the subject of MacGuffins. (The Wikipedia entry is here, if you're unfamiliar with the term.) A MacGuffin (or, to use Edward Gorey's term, which I also like, a Priceless Ritual Object) is the goal of a story. Its grail. It is, however, aside from that function, largely irrelevant to the story. So, in The Blues Brothers, saving the orphanage is the MacGuffin. It has nothing to do with the plot or the characters except to provide an excuse for Jake and Elwood to go careening about Illinois and interact with a variety of wacky characters, many of whom burst into song. The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a MacGuffin. It only gets one scene on stage, at which point it also serves as a deus ex machina to get rid of the bad guys. Very handy, that Ark. Andie MacDowell's character in Four Weddings and a Funeral serves as a MacGuffin, and I actually think it improves the movie (which I'm very fond of) if you think of her as such, instead of trying to make her into a three-dimensional person with motivations and interiority and all those other things she clearly doesn't have. She's a grail. A P.R.O. A MacGuffin.

MacGuffins are very important to their stories, but they aren't involved. They aren't, despite what the characters claim, what the story is about. So it doesn't matter if we don't know exactly what they are or how they work. That's not what they're there for.

And here's where we return to Moore. Because what Moore is describing is the application of MacGuffins to the internal workings of a story, where--as with the Ark of the Covenant above--they become dei ex machina. And the problem with dei ex machina is that, fundamentally and definitionally, they have no relationship to the story except to push the plot in a new and unsupported direction. (In this sense, the Ark isn't actually a deus ex machina because, in point of fact, what happens when you take the lid off is integral to what the Ark is. It's still intensely convenient, though.) In ancient Greek drama, which is where we get the term from, the deus ex machina was the god who descended from the heavens to sort everybody out. (N.b., this did not necessarily involve creating a happy ending out of a tragedy.) It was part of the point that the god was not involved in the story--a feature, rather than a bug. But in modern storytelling, where both god and machine are metaphorical, the deus ex machina is something that comes slamming into the story out of nowhere to save the heroes' bacon. Or, to "tech the tech."

My objection is not to the use of this shorthand in drafting a story. The novel I'm currently working on has [trade agreement] serving much the same purpose, and it's perfectly reasonable to do that sort of thing in the first pass, so you can get the story worked out; in the process, I have discovered, I frequently figure out what [trade agreement] should stand for because the shape of the other parts of the story explains it to me. Where this process dives off the rails is where responsibility for figuring out what "tech" means this time around is handed off to somebody else. (The resemblance to Mad Libs is also not a plus.) What Moore's description makes clear is that the "tech" is completely unimportant to what he thinks of as the story--which (I think) is where Charlie's objections come in.

I, though, don't think there's anything wrong with writing science fiction in which the "tech" is nothing but backdrop. (Possibly this is because I am mostly not a science fiction writer, and when I am, I am not even remotely a hard science fiction writer.) However, comma, my acceptance of this idea ends when the "tech" intrudes into the important questions of the story, like whether the heroes will live or die. If it's backdrop--if, for instance, you're writing a story about what it's like to live on a reduced-gravity space station in which your focus is on the social and physiological adaptations and nobody sits around having As You Know Bob conversations about how the partial gravity generators work--then "teching the tech" is not a cardinal sin. But if your story is about what happens when an asteroid slips through the defense perimeter and hits the station and takes the partial gravity generator out, and your hero is the plucky teenage geek who's the only person left who can repair it, your "tech" may be a MacGuffin (if your story is about her adventures navigating through the crippled station to get to the generators), but it cannot be a deus ex machina. How it works--and how she's going to repair it--have to be part of the story structure, part of what underlies everything else. You have to figure it out for yourself.

Also, of course, those of us who write novels and short stories generally don't have creative consultants we can hand big chunks of our worldbuilding off to. Possibly Charlie and I are just telling you about how in our day, we had to walk to school, in six feet of snow, uphill both ways, in snowshoes we had to make ourselves out of tennis racquets, with nothing in our lunchboxes but stale Twinkies.

Possibly. But I doubt it.

Comments

[etrix.livejournal.com]

I think one of the things I'm taking away from these posts is that there should be a connection between the environment and the characters, or the story will fall flat. I have to agree with Moore; not a ST:NG fan, and his point about being able to transplant the stories to the high seas of the 18th century with no change in the characters is a valid one.

He comes at it by looking at the technology and seeing how it would affect the thinking/personalities of the people in the story, and you seem to come at it from characters first, but there is still an emphasis on the characters as unique individuals affected by, and affecting, their environment.

The other way is like Harlequin romances... with laser guns... or muskets; whichever. It makes no difference.

I forgot to say, I appreciate the point you make about the importance a MacGuffin can have in a story. Taken a step further, the MacGuffin may be a physical object (the Grail or the 'girl') but it can also be an idea or idealized goal (enlightenment or 'the truth'). Interesting.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

And those were damned sexy tennis rackets.

Nothing wrong with a good MacGuffin--I mean as you mention, it's the whole point of the Matter of Britain.

...but it helps if the MacGuffin at least pulls thematic weight.

You quit watching Criminal Minds before the final resolution of the grail plotline came around and bit them on the ass, didn't you?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I must have, yes.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Let's just say, you never get to hang on to the damned thing.

Ever.

[tkie.livejournal.com]

Delurking to snark that you know, I think Moore just explained why the technobabble in TNG is often so painful. When it sounds like it could be replaced with "watermelon, watermelon," apparently that's close to what the writers had in mind.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

To me, if tech is just a backdrop, it isn't science fiction at all. If the science doesn't actually matter except as set decoration, then you might as well write vampire romance novels, or steampunk.

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

There's basically two things wrong with his post, which are "Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it's background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast." Because that isn't the point of TNG (DS9 and Voyager I'm less familiar with, and Enterprise lives in its own little corner of fake canon). The statement might work for the other shows (haven't watched them), but the general purpose of ST is to do exactly what he says it doesn't (and what he seems to blame on [tech] rather than, as you said, bad storytelling): tell us anything interesting about the human condition under science fictional circumstances. Granted, I think for Roddenberry the "under science fictional circumstances" is more for the sake of freeing us of current societal problems in order to explore the human condition straight up, which is part of his complain, but overall that is the point of ST.

And while I will certainly admit that his complain may be valid for other shows (and indeed other iterations of ST--but even Enterprise sometimes remembers what tradition it belongs to), and that there are terrible episodes of TNG (and TOS!), as they hit their stride they really are doing exactly what he says they do, in which case the [tech] is, as you said, the MacGuffin. The audience (I mean aside from the tech geeks, who generally enjoy trying to figure out how fake!tech could ever be possible) doesn't really care how the [tech] works, because that's not what the story's about. I would be interested to read his stuff and see if the story is about the tech, or the human condition. Because if it's the latter, his objection falls through.

Anyway, yes to what you said. And thanks for the Four Weddings and a Funeral idea; thinking about it, that really DOES make the movie work better. I always disliked how two-dimensional she was, and never quite understood why Hugh Grant kept going after her when Fiona was being all maybe-not-perfect-but-at-least-has-something-of-a-personality next to her. Well, I did, but it wasn't satisfactory (unlike in, say, Notting Hill, where you feel bad for the friend that likes the little sister, but understand why she picks the Welshman).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I have watched a fair amount of various ST franchises (TNG, DS9, Voyager), and, yeah. The problem isn't that they're bad science fiction. It's that they're bad storytelling. And, equally, yes, they aren't ALWAYS bad storytelling (although Voyager came pretty damn close). And when they're not bad storytelling, I would argue they aren't bad science fiction, either. But then, I tend more to Ursula K. Le Guin's theory of What Science Fiction Is About.

Ideally, of course, a science fiction story has both. Both the exploration of the human condition and the exploration of the scientific/technological idea. Much hard SF leans too far one way for my taste--that is to say, it's more interested in the science/technology than it is in the characters--but if the story is saying something I find compelling about the characters (i.e., the human condition in Charlie's argument, but I actually don't like that abstraction, either. I want stories about people, not about The Human Condition, which is why I'm talking about characters instead), I don't care if the author has scale drawings and a tech manual of the MacGuffin or not. When I dislike Star Trek (which, I admit, I frequently do), it's because the characters have devolved into cardboard cut-outs, and the writers have "teched the tech" of their actual relationships to each other. And because I find Roddenberry's notion of the "human condition" frankly boring.

[edited to unpack a couple tightly crammed ideas]

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Is it wrong that I love you because you know the proper way to turn deus ex machina into a plural?

Seriously. I'm glad to see you back writing some more lj posts. I've missed you.

MKK

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Mary Kay!

[pitselly.livejournal.com]

Andie MacDowell's character in Four Weddings and a Funeral serves as a MacGuffin, and I actually think it improves the movie (which I'm very fond of) if you think of her as such, instead of trying to make her into a three-dimensional person with motivations and interiority and all those other things she clearly doesn't have.

I would have to disagree. Turning a female character into an emotionless prize to be won, an object, a princess to be rescued, a non-person, should never make a movie better. If anything, it's a sign of bad storytelling. I understand liking a movie (or a book, or a show, etc etc) in spite of its flaws, but not brushing them off, especially in such a way as this.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I misspoke. You're perfectly correct: what would improve the movie would be if the character were as three-dimensional and engaging as the other female characters. That, however, is past praying for, as this particular movie is finished and has been for fifteen years. The idea that Carrie is a MacGuffin makes sense of what is otherwise a senseless lapse in characterization and therefore, for me, improves the experience of watching the movie--and also improves the experience of thinking about the movie, not because it excuses this failure (it does not, and I did not mean to imply that it did), but because it provides a way of conceptualizing what went wrong.

[libris-leonis.livejournal.com]

Heh. I suspect that there is something of the "Yorkshire Competition" sketch to the gripe, but it's not the sole thing - there is an issue when you're farming out bits of script like that. On the other hand there's an important difference in that novel-writing isn't a collaborative process in the first place whereas scriptwriting tends to be collaborative from the start...

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Novel-writing can be a collaborative process. I point you to the novel I wrote with matociquala: A Companion to Wolves (http://www.amazon.com/Companion-Wolves-Sarah-Monette/dp/076535778X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255650546&sr=1-1).

[libris-leonis.livejournal.com]

Ah, true; given the number of times I've read it, it was foolish of me to forget that one.

However, it's rarer to find a collaborative novel than to find a collaborative script, and the number of collaborators on scripts - consultants, writers, producers, et cetera et cetera et cetera - tends to be significantly higher...

[clhollandwriter]

I'd argue that he's never actually watched B5 from that post. Unlike Star Trek teching the tech is not the whole point of the script, and there are a lot of MacGuffin's that are set up as potential dei ex machina that aren't used in that way.

My main problem with Star Trek, in any incarnation, is the Reset Button at the end of the episode, which ensures that any trauma and lessons learnt through the course of it are conveniently forgotten about by next week. There are a couple of exceptions (Picard's encounter with the Borg and Tom Paris' transformation from irreverant playboy to Responsible Family Man, for example) but even these are forgotten about until it's convenient for an episode to recall them.