Reality Has a Lousy Plot and a Slovenly Editor

There was no thunder and lightning the day my mother fell and injured herself, which, as a writer, I found anticlimactic and disappointing. We writers are always taught that we need appropriate foreshadowing before a big plot event, but life isn’t so obliging. My mother’s injury—a frustrating reversal of all the progress she’s made in a year of physical therapy—wasn’t heralded by meaningful story elements. It just happened.

It was Easter Sunday, April 9th, 2023. She was headed to church, where her daughter, my sister, was scheduled to play with the bell choir; my sister’s music has made her a small-time local celebrity. Mom stepped out of the truck, something that would’ve been impossible for her a year ago as her joints were becoming increasingly brittle, but which she’s been handling with grace and ease, supported by only a telescoping trekking pole.

There was no pavement crack to trip over, no surging crowd pushing her back. Nothing in the plot to justify her falling backwards. She simply lost her balance and fell against the truck’s bumper with sufficient force to break three ribs, one pretty severely. Lying on the emergency room gurney later, she wracked her brain for explanations why she fell so suddenly, but explanations weren’t forthcoming. It just happened.

In writing, as in other mass-media arts—filmmaking, game design—storytellers need justifications for life-altering events. If somebody falls, shattering bones and becoming paralyzed, we need somebody to first portentously say, “Y’all better fix that sidewalk before someone gets hurt.” Because in storytelling, we recognize the existence of a storyteller. There’s a genuine person present, making decisions, and those decisions need support.

Roland Barthes called this tendency to value the author’s choices “theological.” Centering the storyteller’s choices too closely resembled looking for God’s mission in life, and like many mid-20th Century French academics, Barthes pooh-poohed the idea of a personal God. But Barthes replaced the storyteller’s choices for those of the audience. He disparaged theology, while arrogating theological power to the reader. This, to him, seemed a reasonable trade.

Roland Barthes

Thus, even as the literary world has moved away from its belief in a just and ordered universe, it nevertheless persists in believing in human agency. Whether we believe that God ordained universal values, or humans make values where we find them, we still look for an orderly world, because we recognize that there’s a storyteller and an audience, and both of them make choices.

Early novelists believed that, because they were making choices in writing, they needed to have a moral thrust. Before the Twentieth Century, the novel’s denouement needed to reward the virtuous and punish the culpable. Moving into the modern era, novelists increasingly recognized that the universe is seldom so just, and made their stories reflect this change. But they often followed the opposite extreme, visiting sadistic cruelty on the innocent.

Modern audiences have become savvy to these authorial choices. We recognize that authors are either moralistically pious, or nihilistically savage, and instead of traveling where the storyteller takes us, we often start the book, movie, or game by looking for clues. We don’t want to undertake a journey, we want to “beat the game,” anticipating whatever twist or convoluted conspiracy we assume the author has buried in the story.

Then we act surprised when some people seek those same clues in the outside world. QAnon cultists and Flat Earthers look for fiddling, insignificant signs of an organized universe in frivolous word choices or inconsistencies in flight plans. They’re engaged in a pattern Barthes would disparage as “theological,” looking for concealed truths of an underlying storyteller making choices. And their behavior is every bit as silly.

As Christian as I am, I can’t help laughing at people looking for God (or a God analogue) in worldly clues. It’s about as nonsensical as making offerings to Babylonian water spirits to propitiate the rain and create a bountiful harvest. Even if you believe that God exists, faith doesn’t exist to ballyhoo evidence in the past; that’s arrogant and self-justifying. Faith doesn’t justify the past, it helps you make the next right choice in the present.

My mother’s injury is a frustrating, disappointing setback and loss of progress. But it wasn’t foreshadowed, because reality isn’t a story. Maybe there’s a God, but that doesn’t mean every life event represents a choice. Sometimes things happen because they happen, and humanity’s vainglorious tendency to look for purpose is ultimately disappointing. For us writers, that’s a very bitter pill to swallow.