Revisions And "How I Met Your Mother": An Example Of How Writing Works For Non-Writers
So a lot of people hated the ending to “How I Met Your Mother.” And what I find fascinating about that is that in the abstract, the ending was a good one. It’s just that the storylines they’d been pushing that whole final season did not match up with the ending they wanted to sell – and so a lot of people, quite reasonably, rejected it wholesale.
Which is fascinating to me as a writer, because when writers talk about “the revision process,” they make it sound like you just cut out a scene or two, punch up some dialogue, and you’re done. (Certainly Stephen King makes it seem that way in On Writing, which is otherwise a stellar book on the craft.)
But the truth is that in revision, what you’re doing is making sure that the individual scenes add up to create the story you’re trying to tell. And How I Met Your Mother is an extremely great idea of this, because individually, the episodes of the final season are good, well-plotted, and heartwarming. They’re the writer’s worst curse: these are good scenes, dammit, I shouldn’t have to cut them.
A lot of the episodes in that final season sum up the maxim of “Kill your darlings”: they’re clever, they’re funny, they work in isolation, they’ll even be great in syndication when someone who doesn’t know the show tunes in, and they utterly work against the ending the writers were trying to go for. In a sane world, a lot of those episodes would have been jettisoned to devise something that actually did work, but…
…okay, this is your last chance to leave before I start kicking up How I Met Your Mother spoilers. Get out if you need to.
So if you’ve never watched How I Met Your Mother, the overall storyline is that Ted is telling his kids about how he met his mother. Ted is the worst kind of romantic douche – well-meaning, but so in love with love that he’d marry a lamppost if it looked at him sideways. The Big Twist in the opening episode is that Ted finds Robin, a strong-willed and career-driven newscaster, and falls in love, and then at the end of the episode when you think this is going to be all about Robin, Ted tells the kids that he was dating Aunt Robin, not their mother.
Setting up the big twist of “Who Is The Mother”?
That “Ted is going to meet the Mother any moment now” was dragged out through eight seasons, with all sorts of contrivances, but eventually he did meet the Mother in Season Nine – which was all about the wedding of show breakout star Barney and Robin, who had fallen in love.
Barney is an unapologetic womanizer, who had tried to date Robin before in a disaster, and he is infamously selfish and oblivious to others’ concerns. (Though because the writers are wise, he has just enough good qualities that you understand why the gang keeps him around – most notably, him saving Lily and Marshal’s relationship anonymously.) Robin and Barney were either, depending on how you look at it, either disastrously suited for each other (as Barney, who treated all relationships like a game he must win, frequently destroyed people), or really amazingly suited for each other (as frankly, if Barney and Robin were polyamorous, they would have been an amazing teamup, albeit a bit disturbing for mainstream America).
Ted meets the Mother at the wedding, and various flash-forwards show how well suited for each other they are. And they are highly compatible, which is a strength of the show; I was, actually, rooting for Ted and the Mother to get married.
The penultimate episode of the show has Barney and Robin getting married in a heartwarming ceremony, Ted meeting the mother we were so rooting for him to get together with, and all is happy.
Then in the finale, the mother gets terminally ill and dies, and Barney and Robin turn out to be just as terrible as you’d have suspected, and get a divorce a couple of years later. Ted grieves for the mother for the better part of six years, dating no one – until his kids tell him to go date Robin, and he shows up on her doorstep in a callback to the first episode. Roll credits.
And if you look at it, it’s actually a good plot, but the individual episodes kept pulling the punch. Because the producers of HIMYM didn’t ever want a downer ending, only bittersweet ones at best (and happy ones being the default), and so every episode was contorted to make it seem like Barney and Robin were going to make it. The Ninth Season was full of “Barney and Robin run into another dealbreaking issue” – which is good! if Barney and Robin aren’t going to make it, then that needs to be seeded so we’re not surprised! – and then kept backing off by having a big schmaltzy romance with Barney and/or Robin doing something romantic to show us how this wedding would be good for them.
So you had the entire season going, “Hey, maybe you’re a little worried about Robin and Barney – don’t be! Feel good by the end credits! We don’t want you to leave this episode feeling bad!” And every scene (with a “scene” being an “episode” here) was actually actively misleading the audience as to what was happening. If you were rooting for Barney and Robin (and I was), then seeing them crumble in the last episode after so many sweet moments of them kissing was like getting slapped in the face.
And I know that’s the point: that some marriages, no matter how much you want them to work, don’t. And that’s realistic. But you don’t serve us well by showing us an entire season of them working out their issues and then having it all collapse in ten minutes of mostly off-screen ugliness.
HIMYM had to do the brave thing of raising the specter of “Is this marriage really going to be good?” and leave that hanging… but then they would have a couple of bad scenes (read: episodes that ended in ways that would have been unsatisfying as the ending of a sitcom episode), and they were fucking terrified of that. So instead, they inadvertently kept bait-and-switching their audience by making them feel faintly uneasy, and then reassuring them.
Then the “mother dies” aspect of the plot was poorly done as well. Because we were attached to the mother. We liked her. We wanted to love her. And just as we meet her, and savor the fruit of this long-delayed union, she dies. And again, because it’s an hour-long finale, she dies in fifteen minutes. Which is too much.
I heard a lot of people saying, “Oh, Ted learned nothing in the final episode! He was still a stupid, flighty romantic!” Which is patently untrue; Ted didn’t date anyone for years, he was so heartbroken by his wife, just concentrating on his kids and making sure they were all right.
But we didn’t see that.
And in truth, as an audience, we needed to see both halves of that – but again, those would have been fucking depressing episodes. We needed an episode where we got to see Ted and how he handled his wife’s disease, showing us as an audience how Ted had changed, how he wasn’t the dumb romantic, how he’d finally understood the difference between love and infatuation.
Then we needed – and I’ll defend this to the death – another episode where we see Ted grieving. Just a half an hour of Ted trying to make sense of his life, rejecting random attractions because they’re no longer satisfying to him, living his life without Robin, us seeing the space that Robin would fill – and fill well, now that she was divorced – but Ted missing it because he’s moved on and doesn’t understand that he and Robin could actually work together. We needed to feel that time the way that Ted did, not a single flash-cut but a long emotional journey that took us along the way from disbelief to grief to the wandering unsurety of “What do you do when you found your great love, and she’s gone?”
And again, that would not play well in syndication, and be hard as fuck to make full of snappy gags…
…but the point of this essay is that if you’re writing a story, all things have to serve the story. HIMYM had a mandate that every episode was mostly heartwarming or bittersweet, and what you needed to sell this plot was a couple of downer episodes where we got sold, and sold hard, on Ted’s Life After Mother.
No story is more important than a single scene. But HIMYM kept doing the bad revision error of prioritizing individual moments over cumulative impact, and as such wound up with a finale that was, largely, poorly reviewed…
…even though if they had done that work, and convinced us that Ted was a new guy now, and this wasn’t just a rekindling of the same annoying issues we’d loathed in Ted since the premiere, that ending with Robin would have worked and worked well. It didn’t work as it was shown, of course, because Robin and Barney were presented, repeatedly, as a Good Couple – but if you want to understand how writing works, you have to strip away the “What actually happened” and look at the bones underneath of how you could have shifted this story around to make Robin and Barney’s wedding not a culmination of happy love, but that uncomfortable moment where two friends you love dearly should not be saying their vows today, and you all have to stand stiffly and pretend it’s all right because you can’t convince them otherwise.
And yes, you could argue that the show needed an entirely different ending… but that’s not what I’m discussing here. If we’re talking about How To Revise A Story, then what we have is the ending we’re striving towards, and sometimes as a writer you realize you have a great ending, but the individual moments in the tale thus far don’t actually Voltron together to fit to make that ending work.
This ending could have worked. And worked well. (Not universally, of course, but that’s a danger in any show; the moment you say “These two people worked out, these people didn’t,” you’ll have rabid ‘shippers who would never be happy unless Ted and Barney got together in a gay romance and did high-fives over massive orgies.) And if you want to dig how writers think, it’s an interesting exercise to not go with “I hate this ending, I’ll rewrite it” and instead ask, “So let’s assume this ending is good, how could we rewrite the lead-up?” Because honestly, you do that a lot, too.
Anyway. It ended. The ending worked for some people, and for those people, I think they felt that journey of Ted from douche to mature guy and got the implications without having to see it. But again, that’s what revision is for; you give it to your beta readers, they tell you “I don’t see why Ted’s any different,” and you realize Oh shit, I need a big long post-death scene here to show Ted, without Robin, focusing on the mother he lost. And you scrap some other scene and shim that one in. And then more people get what you were going for, although as noted you’re not gonna please everyone.
But yeah. I maintain the ending, as plotted, could have been a fine ending. They just needed to build to that ending – which, given the complaints, they didn’t.
Comme ci, comme ca.
"But If One Person Rejects Me, I'll Die Alone And Unloved!"
Yesterday, I wrote about the game of “Cruel or Incompetent,” where I said that for certain core needs of your personality, it doesn’t really matter if someone meant to transgress those rules or not. If someone needs to be told “By the way, buying a blowjob from a sex worker counts as cheating in our monogamous relationship,” then chances are really good that they’re full of other hurtful behaviors they’ll need to have explicitly programmed – and are most likely not a good fit for you.
To which I got some concern from people about how bad this was for people with Asperger’s, who often need to have the rules told to them. The folks with Asperger’s people can’t read emotions, goes the worry, and sometimes they need to be told things. So if everyone took my advice and abandoned these poor Asperger’s people when it turns out the aspies did not inherently grok their needs, people with Asperger’s everywhere will die alone and unloved and abandoned.
I have good news!
Nope.
I’m not recanting on my idea that there are some basic considerations in a relationship that you shouldn’t have to explain. But the people concerned that “You should consider leaving someone if they don’t instinctively get these core values” are missing one vital fact:
Everyone has different core values.
For some people, buying a hummer at the massage parlor doesn’t count as cheating! And that’s the glory of people: there’s fucking billions of squishy humans, each of them totally different in every way. If you don’t get the core values of someone you’re dating, well, sucks that you don’t get to stay with that person, but that doesn’t mean that you’re condemned to a lifetime of isolated anguish.
It means you have to find someone whose needs are more in line with your instincts.
Yeah, your aspie friends may have to date more people to find who they’re looking for… but just because one person would find it stressful and harmful to have to explain their fundamentals (and all the ramifications thereof, as I’ll explain in a bit), that doesn’t equate to “There’s nobody out there for them.” Because everyone has slightly different fundamentals. Including your aspie friends, who doubtlessly have their own rules they need to feel safe and beloved – and you wouldn’t tell them, “Well, stay with this woman who doesn’t understand what makes you happy because, well, it’d be rude to her to reject her for that!”
Plenty of Asperger’s people date, and find love. That’s because the truth is, there aren’t that many core fundamentals that need explaining. Someone commented, “Well, you had to educate Gini on your core fundamentals,” and the answer is that I really didn’t. We both agreed that people in love who make reasonable complaints to each other should be listened to, and loved. What we disagreed on was the definition “What is a reasonable complaint?” and that’s a debate that, fifteen years later, we’re still having.
But the minute the other partner becomes convinced the complaint is reasonable, no matter how mad they are, we drop everything to fix it. That’s why we’ve survived. And that’s something, thankfully, that we’ve never had to explain, we just agreed on it. Hell, it took me a moment to actually pinpoint what this fundamental was, because in a decade and a half of almost-constant analysis, we have never once argued about that.
The thing about fundamentals is that they seem like one fact, but actually they unpack all sorts of other vital information about you that are also necessary to your functioning. There are some people for whom really trivial stuff is a core fundamental to them – “You have to call if you’re going to come home late.” For most people that’s a nice-to-have as opposed to an I’m-leaving-if-you-don’t-do-that-without-asking, so it seems silly to just contemplate walking out if someone forgets to call a time or two.
But wrapped in that single fact are all sorts of other assumptions that people who want to be with you intimately should probably get – “I worry about things,” “I’m big on protocol,” “Unknowns will drive me crazier than any known fact,” “I drift towards worst-case scenarios.”
The thing that differentials these core fundamentals from a one-time lesson is that explaining them to people often means all the cascading lessons that stem from that core value don’t get learned. If you have someone who goes, “Oh, right. Okay, I’ll call,” and marks that off, there’s a really good chance they haven’t understood the other things that will drive you nuts – like how you worry, like how you require a certain politeness in your lovers, like how leaving you in the dark will drive you batshit – and because they don’t comprehend all the ramifications they will accidentally step on your worst fears time and time again. You may be in for months of your lover stepping on your nuts with stiletto heels and going, “Oh, crap, kinda forgot you had those.”
Whereas it’s not a guarantee – nothing is – but if one of your core values is “Call when you’re running late,” and the guy calls without being told to, you’ve got a far better chance of having someone who’s synced with you on a really critical level.
And yeah. It’s totally fucking tough to figure out what your core values are, as opposed to just a thing that can be hammered out in discussion. Because these dealbreakers vary for everyone. It’s all fine and well to say “If you’re dating me, you have to realize my kids come first,” but there’s plenty of parents for whom that doesn’t apply at all. It’s all fine and well to assume that core value of “If we’re monogamous, you have to be faithful to me,” but for many people that actually reads as “You have to not get caught.” (Heck, there’s plenty of people for whom fidelity and their children aren’t core values at all.)
Unfortunately, that means you have to date around enough to understand which aspects of partner-ignorance can be worked out with a little education, and which things are the sign that whoah, this means we’re not really suited for each other.
And to repeat: if someone rejects you, that means you’re not suited for that one person. Which sucks, it really does. But there are thousands of other people in your city, each with different personalities, and with luck you’ll find someone for whom your natural instincts don’t clash with their fundamental needs… and their instincts line up with yours.
Being ill-suited for one person does not mean that humanity is a mass of cookie-cutter ideals and to be bad for one of us means you will be cast out from the herd. People with Aspergers find love. Depressive neurotics like me find love. People with all sorts of really unusual crooks in their psyche find love, and that’s because we should all thank God that no two people are perfectly alike. You’ll rejected by one person. Almost certainly several.
But in time, if you work at gaining understanding of who you are and how you interact with other people, you’ll find the partner that works for you.
Or maybe you’ll just stumble accidentally into love. That happens a lot, too. Because wow, are there a lot of us, and luck happens.
Cruel or Incompetent?
A lot of relationship problems can be solved by determining the motivation of today’s fuckery: Did they mean to do that? Yes, they eviscerated me and fed my liver to the pigeons, but was that an intentional surgery?
Yet there’s a relationship game show that just isn’t worth playing, and that show is:
Cruel Or Incompetent?
Which is to say that in any long-term relationship, there are certain things your partner should know about you. These are your baseline values: I’m not talking about the little niggly stuff like, “I want a call if you’re going to be out late,” but rather the core stuff like, “If you lie to me, I’m leaving.”
If you’re a full-time mother, you shouldn’t have to hold a Powerpoint presentation going, “My kids are going to come first.” If you’re in a monogamous relationship, you shouldn’t have to hold a class that outlines bulletpoints like, “Our monogamous relationship precludes getting hummers from strangers at truck stops.”
These aren’t universal laws. But they are the core aspects that people dating you should, on some level, fundamentally understand. If you value harmonious friendships, then anyone dating you shouldn’t have to be debriefed on the reasons why insulting your buddies at parties is Right Out. If you’re someone who needs up-front communication to be happy, then dating someone who goes “it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission” will lead to disaster.
And when those earth-shattering transgressions come, and they go, “Well, I didn’t know!” then you have one of two situations:
1) They’re lying scumbags who did know what you needed, and willingly chose to hurt you.
2) They’re people so oblivious to your inner workings that they’ll waltz past the most mission-critical aspects of your psyche unless you take the time to program them like a computer.
And the answer in either case is that you should get the fuck out now. If they’re liars, then hit the eject button.
And if they’re genuinely that clueless about the quintessence of who you are, then their innocence is not a mitigating factor. They may not be evil people, but if they can’t pass that exam of Youness 101 without a tutor to guide them, then chances are good that there are other really vital parts of you they’re not going to get.
And how much time do you want to spend training someone who doesn’t get you on an instinctive level? I mean, I’ve heard of people who’ve trained cats to fetch their morning paper. It can be done. But one suspects it takes way more effort and frustration, and there are many cats who just won’t do it. And while there’s nothing wrong with getting a cat, if “fetching papers” is your goal you’d probably be better off getting a dog.
But there is something potentially harmful about finding someone who has no real concept of who you are, and spending the next few years trying to instill them with instincts that they probably should have come preinstalled with.
So either they’re a liar – always a possibility – or they require so much work to get them to comprehend Relationships With You 101 that they’re probably not worth the time.
In that case, either one would be enough of a sin to say goodbye. Yes, in one case someone’s acting maliciously, and the other they’re acting innocently. But a hurricane doesn’t need motivation in order to destroy your life. And you can walk away.
What Yoda Should Have Done In The Prequels
It was kind of cool when, in Attack of the Clones, Yoda whipped out his lightsaber and showed us all what a badass he was by destroying Count Dooku.
It was also totally fucking out of character.
The great thing about the original Star Wars films is that, as Saladin Ahmed noted today, characters drew strength from giving up power. Obi-Wan sacrificing himself to help Luke escape. Luke refusing to fight his father, setting blood lust aside to remember who he was.
Yoda was the emblem of all of that. A little green dude. Harmless. “Wars make not one great.” “Your weapons. You will not need them.” He was not a being of power, but of wisdom, and he scorned all this violence for better solutions. He was Obi-Wan-plus in that he didn’t need to fight; he wasn’t concerned with who could beat up who, but rather with who was doing right.
Then the prequels threw all that aside. “Sure, wars don’t make one great,” they said. “But that’s because Yoda is the greatest fighter of them all! He doesn’t have to care!” Which sends the fucked-up message that wars actually do make one great, you just have to be so good at them that you don’t worry about them at all.
Why couldn’t Yoda simply not be a fighting master?
Why, instead of having to face down Count Dooku and save his students from certain dismemberment, could he not have had his students hold back while Dooku approached him, saber in hand? And simply said to Dooku, with sadness, “Lost your way you have.” Talked to Dooku. Had Dooku rage, as he would. And when Dooku threatened to kill him, Yoda would simply say quietly, “All you will have demonstrated by slaughtering me is that kill an old man, you can. Impressed no one will be. And one day someone stronger will kill you to take your power. This is the path of the Dark Side. But… there are better ways.”
And Dooku would, torn between his ambition and Yoda’s words, threaten him. Lightsaber to the throat. Yoda’s neck sizzling. Yoda, closing his eyes, would take the burn and say: “Any man can kill. Only a few can acknowledge their errors. Only the great can rise past them.”
And Anakin, stupidly sensing a threat that his own master did not care about, leaps in and forces a duel to the death. Robbing them of a potential ally. Losing the information they could have gotten from Dooku. Learning the wrong lesson: that Yoda would have sacrificed himself stupidly for nothing.
That would have been a fight worthy of a Star Wars. Instead, we got a leaping frog, a flash of blades, and the lesson that martial victory is really what counts.
Alas.
No, I Will Not Be In San Francisco This Weekend
I was supposed to do a signing for my upcoming urban fantasy novel Flex, wherein I would have flown to San Francisco and signed my book for you and almost certainly gone out for drinks with anyone hanging around afterwards.
Alas, my publisher moved the release date, so as opposed to my book being out, say, last Tuesday, it will now be out in April of 2015.
The good news is that I’ll still be doing a signing at Borderlands Books (which is, I assure you, a truly kick-ass shop) – and the better news is that I’ll probably be doing a small West Coast book tour, when I can manage it. We just don’t know the exact dates yet.
So.
* Not in San Francisco this weekend, though I’d love to be.
* My urban fantasy novel Flex (about crazy videogamemancers and bureaucromancers and perhaps too many musings on donuts) will be out in April of next year.
* I will visit San Francisco and hug as many of you as possible, sometime next April.
We clear? We clear.