Cheating
Working with my friend the artist Melody Lu on Not-So-Seekret Project has been a fascinating lesson in the ways different storytellers cheat. Most often I’m the one caught out, with exchanges like:
Mel: How many bandits are there in this camp?
Max: Some?
Mel: Can we get any more precise than that? A hundred? Twelve?
Max: More than zero?
Different details are important in different media–which allows different artists to cheat differently.
Prose tends to follow characters, with a few exceptions, like the barn scene in Of Mice and Men. Anything that doesn’t directly affect a character can be fudged. How many people are there in Union Square in Manhattan? A writer doesn’t need to know, most of the time–since most of the time she wants to evoke her protagonist’s sense of the crowd, or of empty space. A visual artist has to know exactly, because she has to create every one. (Unless she wants to blur them in the background, another kind of cheat…) But the artist doesn’t need to know how Union Square sounds, or smells, or what the air tastes like, while a writer who tries to convey the scene without that information will find her creation sterile.
The artist can help herself by thinking about smells and tastes, of course, just like it can help if the writer knows precisely how many courtiers are in the throne room when the King and Ambassador meet for the first time. The more you know, the more freedom that knowledge gives you to play–if you want to play good jazz, you should probably learn about harmonics and cycles of fifths. And some artists spend their lives trying to evoke a taste with paint and pencil, so there’s that.
Cheating also invites a kind of freedom, though, by opening avenues of surprise within a work for the artist herself. When I say the writer has cheated, I really mean there are some decisions she hasn’t made yet–decisions that can be made later, or even better, decisions that make themselves. Oh! There was another guard, hidden behind the tapestry! Or maybe the engineer is actually infected with a nano-virus. What if the king’s bedroom was actually connected to the duchess’s, only nobody knew? Decisions not yet made are opportunities to expand the world of the story.
At the moment I’m only thinking of prose and visual art, because those two media happen to hover at the top of my mind. But I wonder if and how cheating happens in other forms of creativity–what decisions are left unmade, either accidentally, or out of a need to leave room for expansion? Does this kind of thing happen even in massive (and carefully planned) projects, like building an application or shooting a movie? What would it even look like (sound like) in music?
