I've been watching, off and on, the Fox show 24 since it started. This year's episodes made me think about why what was a must-see four years ago is excruciating now-- and why starting with a message so often destroys a story.
I'm not going to worry too much about the 24 producers' politics. Yeah, this is Rupert Murdoch's network, and he's a bit of a rightwinger, but I doubt he's actually intervening a lot personally in any show. (Then again, we don't see a whole lot of nice liberal warm-and-fuzzy shows on Fox... but nice liberal probably doesn't sell well... so little conflict, huh?) And anyway, the number one political aim of most rich CEO types is... making more money, so if 24's politics antagonized a lot of viewers, I suspect the show would stop with the torture right quick.
Anyway, the first couple seasons were pretty entertaining, very fast-paced and novel. The operating premise was that all the action took place in the 24 hours of one day. Every season had a new day and a new dilemma. But somewhere along the line, this became a show about torture. Torture torture torture. Poor Jack Bauer kept having to torture people to find out where the nuclear bomb was, to find out who was going to set off the virus that would kill us all, or to decipher whatever the dilemma du jour is. The first time he resorted to torture, it was subversively thrilling-- we weren't used to the good guy doing something bad. And we couldn't escape the intriguing echo of what was actually happening in the real world-- journalists and whistleblowers revealing the US (considered the good guy at least by, uh, the US) was engaging in acts that used to be considered torture. Okay, that was provocative, timely, even groundbreaking.
But then... I don't know if the writers were just attempting to recapture that jerk of a thrill we had with that first act of torture, or if they were driven mad by 9/11, or if they wanted to support the president, or .... I think maybe that what happened is they got addicted to the torture "conflict" (I air-quote that because the story then constantly undercuts the conflict) and couldn't give it up. I know the feeling-- I went through a time when I couldn't figure out any way to end a book that didn't involve kidnapping the protagonist. And it apparently didn't hurt all that much, because 24 is still on the air, still requiring torture and superhuman effort from poor Jack Bauer, still enthralling rightwing radio hosts who seem to think that Jack is not only real, but also a great role model.
But I'm not going to evaluate the marketability of torture, rather the dangers of deciding on a theme (in the sense of a moral message) and then building the story to "prove" that.
Since "torture" became Jack's dominant mode of action, 24 seems to be designed to show that torture is not only necessary but moral, and that torturers are actually heroes. I don't want to debate this (I'm agin torture, btw :), only to use it as an example of letting the message be the medium. The story should generate the message, should create the theme. Whenever you let the theme generate the story, your story is likely to end up preachy and monochromatic.
So using 24 as an example (and I have found it intensely boring the last couple seasons, so I will probably mess up some of the details), here is my suggestion:
If you want to send a message, write a bumper sticker. Write a blog post. Write a rant. Just don't write a story. If you want to write a story, write a story. Aim for an interesting plot, intriguing characters, a credible voice. If you have something to say, it should come out in the story... without your forcing it.
Here's the danger of starting with the message:
You lose the story.
1) Instead of developing a journey or plot, you start inventing events to push the theme. In the extreme -- like 24-- the whole story becomes an excuse for the theme. This season (and last, IIRC, and I probably don't, because it was sooooo boring) theoretically has some overall story arc, but mostly the terrorist attacks are used to set up opportunities for Jack to torture someone.
2) Ideally, the theme is "one-note"-- it doesn't develop throughout as a theme should, so that only when you've finished reading the whole story do you fully get the theme. Any story where the theme is presented straight out in a scene (rather than accumulating) is going to be unsubtle. And any story where that theme is demonstrated the same way several times is going to be repetitive.
3) Why does that happen? I think it's because you can't plan to develop a theme. That is, you can plan a plot, and you can plan a character-- you can outline those. But you can't outline a theme, not effectively anyway, because it should arise out of the story as a whole-- and out of you as a writer and you as a person and your worldview and your values-- and that can't be just generated. Also, the readers matter too, in effectively developing a theme (sometimes they actually come up with their own understanding of what the theme is), and you can't plan your readers. So rather than trusting the story to generate a theme, you might try to push the theme in various places-- causing repetition rather than accumulation. For example, let's say you decide you're going to write a story with the theme (I'm getting basic here :) that cocaine is bad. When you start with that as your aim, when you think about the purpose of your story as being to prove that, you are going to be wary of showing, oh, that cocaine is fun. You might start out with someone using cocaine and stumbling out into the street and getting hit by a car. (Cocaine is bad.) And the cop who comes to investigate the accident sees the little baggie of white powder fall out of the victim's pocket, and steals it and snorts it later and gets caught by his captain. (Cocaine is bad.) The captain pockets the rest of the stash and his daughter later finds it, snorts it, becomes addicted, and ends up a stripper. (You laugh, but isn't this pretty much how Reefer Madness works? And while that is a joke now, it was meant to show kids how bad reefer is... over and over.... You were never confused about the message there. The only question was-- why would anybody use this terrible drug? Oh, right, we can't ever show that drugs can be fun, because that wouldn't prove the theme in chapter 2.)
4) Events that are going to create a particular message are likely to repeat conflict, rather than developing it-- conflict starting in the beginning of the story (or TV season :), then rising in intensity and complication in the middle, and resolving in the end. Now probably terrorism as a major conflict would get repetitive anyway, especially when we cannot seriously (in this country) discuss it as anything but the embodiment of Satan, much less actually explore the motivations behind it. It becomes conflict without the purpose of change. So we end up with a conflict without any cause... just sort of free-floating evil. The motivation is: They're evil. So they do evil. And they'll always be evil and do evil because, well, they're evil. Yeah. Talk about one-dimensional villainy. But see, they have to be evil, because otherwise, we might have some qualms about Jack torturing them. In earlier seasons, a couple times Jack actually aimed his pain at innocents-- the child of an evil guy, the wife of another evil guy. But I think that might have been too morally complicated (though kind of interesting, especially when he shot the guy's wife in the knee and the guy STILL didn't give over). Better just to torture evil guys. No moral complexity then. No questions, no .... hmm. No conflict.
24 example: So far, most of the "terrorists" have been non-white, non-western-- Mexican drug runners, Muslims jihadists, African revolutionaries or whatever the heck they are this season. Now the "secret master villain" is often white, and seems to be played by Jon Voight every season (but I could be mistaken :), but the minions who do most of the dirty work are non-white. This is the show, lest we forget, that had not one but two African-American presidents before Obama, and I wonder if maybe someone got uncomfortable with the notion that we only torture non-whites/non-Christians (though I bet that's pretty close to reality). So there's usually a scene where Jack tortures some white guy-- usually one of his colleagues or a presidential aide-- just to show (well, I'm sure there's some intra-story reason :) that Jack isn't a racist. And that torture can be (even if it's not right this minute) equal-opportunity.
5) Just as the villains must needs become one-dimensional, so too the protagonist. Since the protagonist's role is sort of prescribed by the theme-- he's the "good guy", on the right side of the theme-- so his actions are required to proceed in the "right" way. So character action derives from the intended message, and the character only grows then in ways that reinforce the theme. 24 sometimes flirts with complexity, where Jack, the hero, actually tortures unsuccessfully. Once he tortured his girlfriend's charming ex-husband (so sue me... I'm a sucker for men named Paul with a British accent :), and it turned out he was wrong! Amazing! The ex was NOT the bad guy! Okay, that's interesting... Jack makes a mistake. Now this could deepen his characterization. First, we might see him realizing that torture can make anyone confess to anything... and wondering whether the other victims of his torture weren't guilty of what they confessed to. Second, we might have him wondering if he tortures because he, you know, sort of likes it, or maybe it has something to do with his need for vengeance, for 9/11 or with ex-husbands. Third, he might wonder if this whole torture thing was, you know, corrupting him, making him jaded and callous.
But no. The ex and the girlfriend both forgive him, and that's the end of that. If there's a dark night of the soul, if Jack rethinks his need to inflict pain on others, if he even wonders whether maybe he tortured Paul for some personal reason, and if so, if his judgment about who should be tortured is reliable... well, it doesn't have much effect on his actions, though he does seem to be getting progressively grumpier.
6) Shorn of the need to change that is brought on by a more organic story, the protagonist tends also to become a victim or a symbol or a martyr or a saint or whatever is best going to push the message-- a role, not a character. He becomes a flat character because he can't change much or the message might not get through (the ability to change is what makes a character "round" in Frye's terms). In fact, in 24, making Jack a victim (of torture, of kidnap, of imprisonment, of disgrace... and it's never his fault :) becomes subtextually rather interesting as it becomes clearer that he's supposed to represent the United States. Perhaps the US is like that, insisting that it is the victim when it is holding the instruments of torture, as poor depressed Jack is the victim of these evildoers who, for reasons unexplored, force him to hurt them.
In a story, it is usually actions and reactions that are the criteria for judging a character or the plot-- for plausibility, for morality, for power. But when the message dominates, action and reaction lose their centrality to whatever event serves the plot. If a "terrorist" does it, or "a traitor," it's perforce bad. But the same sort of action by the protagonist is regarded in a different light. The terrorist's torturing is unmitigated evil, and is needed to be regarded so to allow the protagonist to fulfill the demands of the message. So when Jack shoots an innocent woman in the kneecap, that's regrettable but moral. But when a revolutionary threatens to cut out the eye of the president's daughter (he doesn't actually do it), that is proof that he's evil. That is, the upshot is that it's not the action but the perpetrator that determines the moral content. This seems to me a dangerous ethical presumption, but it's really damaging to the story (though the "essentialist vs. existentialist" dilemma can be profitably explored in fiction, as the Buffy show demonstrates). The reader is actually discouraged from using her own judgment and value system-- what's good and bad is preordained when these characters were born (and woe to him who is not born in the United States!) If the protagonist's actions don't matter to how the reader is supposed to judge him, then the story is very likely going to be static-- everyone maintains the moral status held in the beginning. Essence cannot change unless action matters.
So... this is a lesson to us all. Don't write a lesson. Write a story. Write about situations and conflicts and people which interest you, doing things that change the plot and the world of the story. Trust that the theme, your message, whatever you think is important, will arise out of the story. Don't force it, or the whole story will be forced.