Melodrama & Violence

25} I’LL SAVE YOU, NELL:
MELODRAMA (NOT) TO THE RESCUE

Convenient choices are prone not only to cliché, but to melodrama.

We call a story or a scene melodramatic when its protagonists are too obviously heroes or victims, while its antagonists are obviously villains. Another acid test for melodrama is the tendency to resort to violence, either emotional (catatonic seizures, gasps, screams, floods of tears, verbal confrontations) or physical (fisticuffs, or worse, depending on the caliber of melodrama and available firearms).

Most television shows, especially courtroom, police, and medical dramas, tend to be melodramatic. But what works in front of a camera usually fails on the page, where nuance has to be supplied by the reader.

But for all their technical bravado and talent, television and movies are hard-pressed to deliver what fiction delivers so well: a character’s thoughts, feelings, and perceptions—i.e., subjective content. A close-up of an actor’s eyes may suggest a lot, but it can only suggest; it can’t put us directly in a character’s mind. Only fiction can do that.

And good fiction does it extremely well.

Given this ability to inhabit our characters, to experience their subjective responses as our own, a little drama goes a long way, while too much careens into melodrama.

Gratuitous violence is synonymous with melodrama. So is the gratuitous gesture, as when a character who has just come into a fortune tosses fistfuls of greenbacks like confetti into the air—a cliché that probably has never once happened in real life. (When it does happen, I want to be there.)

Any over-the-top action results in melodrama.

A male lover, freshly dumped by his girl, throws himself into the nearest river. Melodrama. Or, being told by the same girl that she loves him, he boards a crowded subway and kisses everyone in sight, including a blind man and the conductor. Melodrama. The specific circumstances might explain such behavior (and casting a young Jimmy Stewart would help). But the likelihood is slim.

26}FISTICUFFS AND SHIPWRECKS

Melodrama is to authentic drama what crab sticks are to the real thing: an inferior substitute.

When people punch each other out in stories, suspect imitation. In real life people seldom use their fists. It’s dangerous, and illegal. A solid fist to the bridge of a nose could result in death, and appropriate charges.

In one story, an estranged father and son meet in a bar after a long separation. Chad, the son, still enraged by his father’s abandonment, swoops over the table and punches him in the face. The author didn’t share with us the genuine drama, Chad’s pent-up rage that hides a deep longing for his father.

The scene would be more convincing, and more moving, if the son’s urge to strike his father were felt but not acted upon: if it remained, like a U-boat, lurking somewhere below the surface of the scene.

Sometimes the mere piling on of sensational events results in melodrama. In a story set during the renaissance, a young girl disguised as a boy stows away aboard a merchant sailing ship. The plot is clearly designed to appeal to the young. (One key to writing successful YA—Young Adult—fiction is never to condescend to your audience. Write for yourself, for the younger person in you.)¹⁰

In this story, not only does the heroine succeed against all odds with her outrageous plan, she ends up surviving a shipwreck— all in four pages. The result feels melodramatically absurd, like a movie played on fast-forward.

Another result of cramming too much drama into too few pages is a paucity of authenticating detail,¹¹ the sort of small, precise, carefully chosen and calibrated descriptions that help suspend a reader’s disbelief and make it possible for her to enjoy a story no matter how unlikely or outrageous.

I find such sketched-in action cartoonish: The story calls to mind a cartoon ship caught in a cardboard tempest, with little Isabella clinging to her generic floating hatch door or barrel. Had the author taken more time, there would be four pages for the storm alone, and a dozen more to develop authentic relationships between the stowaway and the crew members. When the reader gets stranded with them on the cartoon desert island, he’d at least have some authentic characters to cling to.

By slowing down and taking the time and trouble to imbue our stories with authentic, rich, specific moments and details, we achieve real drama and avoid its floozy cousins, sentimentality and melodrama.

27}SOAP & HISTRIONICS:
DRAMA VS. MELODRAMA

Melodrama results partly from an author’s unwillingness to find the true emotional resolution of a story’s conflict. It’s the narrative equivalent of all-out war, as opposed to seeking a diplomatic solution.

In real life people do throw water in their spouses’ faces, and shout accusations at each other; they even commit murder out of passion or for vengeance. Such things can happen in your fiction, too. But when violent confrontations become the story, when they are the rule and not the exception, then violence usurps drama.

The result is melodrama, what soap operas are made of. And soap operas are not dramatic; they are intrinsically nondramatic, since their perpetuity depends on nothing ever being dramatically resolved. The characters never change.¹²

In soap operas we get wish fulfillment and negative fantasy in place of real resolutions: Husband finds gardener in bed with wife; abused son catches drill-sergeant father cross-dressing; set-upon secretary slaps her chauvinist-pig boss in the face. Do these scenarios sound familiar? They are the stuff of melodrama.

In a soap opera, the rivalry between brother and sister is evoked through bald confrontations and accusations, or equally bald confessions and apologies. When a relationship is “dramatized,” nearly all of the dialogue is head-on and histrionic, vomiting up plot and backstory. Accusations and apologies are served up along with great gobs of personal history.

A more dramatic, less histrionic approach would convey the status quo between brother and sister up front, through exposition, leaving subsequent scenes free to explore behavior and character. What the protagonist and antagonist do when they’re together, how they treat each other, how they say things and which things don’t get said—these things reveal their personalities and relationships. We read the story to see how these siblings will cope (or not) with each other under specific circumstances (e.g., they have to pick a coffin for their mother’s funeral).

When authors explode drama rather than describe it, their material deteriorates into soap opera and blows up in everyone’s face.