[Perry] Listen to Your Story

Note: The following post/comments may contain spoilers to the finale for How I Met Your Mother

If you don’t know, How I Met Your Mother is a sitcom about a group of friends in New York, their wacky relationship adventures, tied with the framing device of the ‘future’ version of Ted telling his children the long, lengthy (and at times, vaguely disturbing) story of how he met their mother.

The show is rated pretty highly, and is often amusing, sometimes touching, but all in all? Is fairly standard TV fare.

It was interesting enough to keep me going during its 8-9 year run.

Then it ended.

And it ended in a way that sort of invalidated everything the show was trying to do for its entire run.

And in a way, I kind of understand what they did.

The clues lie in the scenes filmed with the children.

Throughout the run of the show, there are various flash forwards to the dad (Ted), talking to his two children as they sit on the couch.

Throughout the entire run of the show? The children don’t age. They don’t mature. They look exactly the same and are wearing the same clothes from the first episode, right to the last one.

This is a clue.

It says that the writers of the show had all of the scenes with the children set up, right from the start.

It says that they had this ending in mind when they started the show.

But here’s why that ending is bullshit.

As a writer, I can respect the fact that you have a plan. That you have a map, and directions that take you from point A to point B. I can respect the fact that you want the story to end a certain way…

But what if the story is screaming at you to do something different?

Every damned turn this story took during its run was screaming out that it should have ended differently.

Barney and Robin finally getting together? That was fine. And more than that, the way they split up after that? Also fine.

Why? Because that’s just life. Life happens, and not everything goes according to plan, no matter how badly you want it to.

What bothered me was how they dealt with Ted’s wife.

Really? Kill her off-screen so that Ted can magically get back with Robin and try again at the end?

Despite 9 seasons of story talking about how he finally managed to let her go?

This is a good example of what happens when you don’t listen to your story, and more evidence of this can be seen in the troubled reactions of many long-time fans when the finale aired.

There are even people who have gone as far as recutting the final few episodes to work around the problem.

While the writers may have started out with this ending in mind, their show was really straining at the bit, trying to push in a direction where Ted and Robin don’t end up together.

An ending where Ted finally learns to let her go…for good. And then finds happiness with someone else, his “the one.”

And instead?

By pushing an ending that the show itself was fighting against, it comes off feeling like we’ve been cheated.

So listen.

When you’re writing, no matter how badly you want a character to turn out a certain way, or no matter how badly you want the story to end a certain way…

If your characters and your story are screaming at you to do something else by the time you start to write that ending? You really owe it to yourself to at least consider the possibility that they know better than you.

Stories are organic things. And, indeed, the best stories are ones that feel like they’ve been grown, that you’re looking through a window into the events of another world instead of forcing the characters to keep their arms and legs inside the vehicle as it trundles down a track.

Listen to your story.

Listen to your characters.

They may surprise you.

 

Related posts:

[Perry] How the Ending Can Ruin the Tone of the Story
[Perry] Music That Tells A Story
My Rough Story Outline Blueprint