Let’s talk about writing technique.
Okay, first, for those following, let’s cover the characters and concepts introduced in this chapter. There’s so much going on in every chapter that it has to be done. See, one of the problems here is that you can’t possibly know which pieces of this story are relevant and which are just crazy garbage tossed in for no fucking reason. It’s like, you know how there’s that playwright who talks about hiding the gun? In the first act of the play, someone hides a gun, and then you kind of build tension because you know it’s there the whole time, and you’re thinking, “Well, they hid a gun, so I guess it’s going to come into play eventually. It would be pretty weird if that gun never showed up again.”
Modelland is hiding guns all over the place. In terms of hiding guns, it’s like an 80’s action movie where every time Kurt Russell taps on a dresser or something a hidden drawer with a gun pops out. He’s taking a shit and a gun falls out from behind the toilet paper. He goes into the pantry to get a can of beans, and next to the other cans you’ve got a can that is suspiciously shaped exactly like a gun, as though it may not be a can of beans at all, but rather, a gun.
This is what Modelland is doing to me right now, and I’m almost positive most of these guns will remain hidden. But in the interest of not going back to say, “Oh, I forgot, in chapter 4…” I’ll just outline what I see happening.
Creamy de la Creme: Mom. Basically, evil stepmom from fairy tales. Image-obsessed. Crazed. Spends the family’s money on things they don’t need, like a brand new tea kettle when they already own several.
Dad: Dad. Lost eye in a circus accident, not yet covered. Also still wears circus outfit just as clothes, apparently. Calls his wife “woman”. Dad seems like a jerk, and he mostly just ignores Tookie somehow.
Ci~L: Not actually present, but discussed, and I think she comes back up later. She was a girl selected to go to Modelland, and now she’s missing. That’s her arc so far. And yes, that’s a tilde in her name. Which is not something that can be pronounced in speech. You could spell this name Ci]L or Ci%L and it would be, basically, the same.
Smize: In our world, it’s a short way of saying smile with your eyes, and Tyra is credited with inventing this term. In Modelland, it’s…I don’t know what the fuck it is. It comes out of the water taps, it’s like a bubble, then morphs into a film that I picture being like a Listerine strip, then it has a flag that pops out and displays scrolling text. It’s described about 8,000 different, contradictory ways. The point is, it’s an object that doesn’t make any sort of sense, and what you need to know is its purpose. It serves similarly to Willy Wonka’s golden ticket, except instead of a guaranteed passage it gives the finder a 91% chance of being selected to go to Modelland.
Of course, Tookie found a smize. She was filling a tea pot for her mother, and she saw some weird object fall from the tap, but she ignored it at first until all the characters sat around and talked about nothing, and also Tookie’s sister Myrracle busted in the front door and did a dance number for no apparent reason, a number which was well-received by the parents, although Creamy did point out that Myrracle should be focused on things that are more likely to help her provide for the family, namely hoping to get picked for Modelland.
This part where Tookie ignores the smize falling out of the tap is pretty damn stupid. The book can’t stop reminding us that EVERY PERSON is running the water constantly, fighting over sewer outlets, and waiting for a Smize to pop out of a tap. This is what every character is obsessed with. Tookie sees a weird amorphous object come out of the tap amidst all this craziness, and she goes ahead and ignores it for no reason. Until she decides to not ignore it, which is when we find out it’s a smize. Goddamn is this book dumb.
Also, her parents force Tookie to give the Smize to her sister, Myrracle, for no reason other than to prove that they are total dicks. Seriously, it doesn’t matter which daughter goes to Modelland, it’s somehow going to make them rich(?)
A thinking parent who strongly preferred Myrracle would say, “Hey, Myrracle has a great shot. Now Tookie has a 91% chance. I think we should go with two 91% chances over adding the 91% to a child that I think hung the moon and has a 91% already.” Basically, we’re turning in two 91% chances for a single 99%. But whatever. The point of this move wasn’t to be smart or realistically money-grubbing, the point was to remind us that everyone thinks Tookie sucks. Which she kind of does. How stupid can you be, you know? Everyone’s looking for a thing in the tap, you see a thing in the tap, you grab that shit. If her behavior so far is any indicator, I kind of don’t blame her parents. Tookie is so desperate to be noticed, but expresses her desperation by laying around in the hall at school, hoping to be noticed. She doesn’t have enough ambition to run away from Helltown to a Paradiseton about 2 miles away. And a smize falls in her lap, and she just ignores it because…again, no fucking reason.
Tookie kinda sucks.
Alright, that’s all the content you need to know. Let’s talk about the technique in this chapter.
This chapter feels like Tyra went to one writing workshop and someone said the famous phrase, “Show, don’t tell.”
People take this as a face-value, gospel rule in writing. And it’s fucking stupid.
For one, that’s not possible. In a book, it just doens’t work that way. If you write a full-length novel, there will be things you tell, or things characters tell each other. This is how it works.
Second, people take that rule, and they think they can sort of get by on a technicality. As long as you go the route of showing instead of telling, you’re writing something good, and they think any way to convert information into SHOWN information is better than telling.
I’ll give you an example. You know how in a lot of horror movies, somoene’s being haunted by a ghost because that’s the best way the ghost can figure how to ask for something? I want to be put to rest and have my body taken out of a well, so I’ll communicate that by…making a tree turn into an evil monster. That should get the message across.
Okay, that happens, and then what the character does is go to the library, look through some microfiche, and find a story that says, “Here’s exactly what the fuck happened.” Or, in a more modern movie, they type “ghost” into some site called something like “Doogle” and then a video pops up and starts in with, “Ghosts often terrorize people because they want something specific, usually water-well-related.”
That’s showing by technicality. Yes, we’re seeing it. But we’re seeing something TELL that story. Also, that doesn’t happen.
Let’s take this to a logical limit for a second.
If the person goes to the library and reads the newspaper about the ghost, if that’s showing, then it’s also showing to have the newspaper blow around in some wind and hit the person in the face. Or to have the character turn on the TV and the news segment is “Tonight, in our series where we just pick some shit out of an old newspaper, a story about a grisly murder where a girl was thrown down a well.”
This is what happens in Modelland, by the way. Ci~L is missing, and it’s in the newspaper, and Creamy reads the story out loud for no reason other than the reader needing to know that this is important. The newspaper text reads an awful lot like the book’s narration, by the way, but we don’t need to get into voice differentiation. Not yet.
Technically, you’re showing me something. But it’s just not good writing. It’s not good storytelling. Having Tookie write in her journal, excuse me, in her T-Mail Jail, is showing, sort of, but still a very stupid version of it. It still doesn’t really work. Having dialog in the kitchen where the mom says, “I hate when anyone reads the newspaper before me. I’m very particular about things. You know that. We’ve discussed it a hundred times” is showing. But…wouldn’t it be better to have the mom say some shit that sounds real?
It’s also a really common trap with dialogue. Dialogue, in a story, isn’t going to be your best expository tool, the reason being you have to have someone who is basically Encino Man so you can explain absolutely everything. “Now we are at the school, where we attend the 11th grade, or junior year, and we are currently occupying one of the lower social strata, but with you, caveman friend, we have aspirations to rise up to higher levels and create a new peer circle within this, our school place!”
And sure, you could show us all that shit separately. Show the bullies picking on the other kids, show someone being made fun of by the popular girl. But goddamn, that takes forever, and it’s not how to tell a story.
Think about it. I’m sitting across from you. I’m telling you a story about the time in high school when I found a caveman buried in ice, and I revived him and that rocketed me to popularity somehow. The exciting parts of that story are the caveman and the rocketing. Establish you weren’t popular, but hurry it the hell up already. Just tell me, “Look, you have to understand, I was not popular in school. To the level that girls would ask me out as a joke. To where my mom had to tell me that I didn’t fit in the kind of undewear with characters on it anymore and that’s why she got me the plain kind at the beginning of the school year, and that was kind of a big deal.”
Here’s the deal, aspiring writers. Show me when there’s something to show me. When you can show me something instead of telling me something, do it. But don’t become so married to that rule that you have ridiculous dialogue, unrealistic situations that only make sense when I realize that you’re being expository, and for fuck’s sake, stop using the newspaper as a cheat to showing me shit.
That’s chapter 4 of Modelland. Tune in next time. We’ve got one hell of a great chapter coming up.
As a side note, the plan, as of right now, is to get a few chapters under the ol’ belt, then do a massive post of the entire review so far for your readthrough pleasure. We’ll also do a podcast of the chapters when we get there as well. I THINK the book is divided into book 1, book 2, and so on, so when we hit one of those, we’ll get to that, and when we get to the end of each book we’ll do another massive post.
For those of you who backed the Kickstarter, we’ll be doing your perks very soon. Well, relatively soon. I kinda wanted to wait until we at least got to goddamn Modelland, but that’s taking a long-ass time.
Thanks for reading. And for whoever was in charge of editing and greenlighting Modelland, you suck.