Is American storytelling old-fashioned?

and is this... bad?

CRAFT is a reader-supported email newsletter about the nuts and bolts of fiction writing and the world of publishing

Forgive me in advance, because this might be all over the place.

Recently I found myself flip-flopping in terms of how I feel about a storytelling style that feels very “American” to me.

I consume a very large amount of horror movies, and have for years. If you have a significant appetite for horror, you inevitably start branching out to watching as much foreign horror as you can get your hands on, which sometimes is where I feel the most innovative stuff is happening. One of the things I love about good foreign horror movies is that they will do something I have never seen before. I will actually give a pretty mid horror movie a good rating if it only succeeds in doing things- showing me something I haven’t seen before. I really liked the 2022 Danish horror movie Speak No Evil, though it is not something I would broadly recommend because there are certain people who I think wouldn’t be able to stomach it. The movie spends most of its time putting its MCs—a Danish couple visiting another couple that they don’t know very well—in very uncomfortable situations where they won’t assert themselves because it would be rude. (For example, despite the guest wife having told the host husband that she’s a vegetarian—and him complimenting her on this when they first meet—he aggressively cajoles her into tasting a roast he made.) My understanding was that the original film was very much cultural commentary on the mannerisms of the Danish. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS another reason why I don’t recommend the movie to everyone is that not only is there some violence against children in this movie, but that violence against children is extremely bleak: the movie ends with extremely bad end for the couple’s daughter while the couple itself gets slowly stoned to death. At one point one of them cries, “why are you doing this?” and the bad guy says, “because you let me.” END SPOILERS

So I was annoyed when I found out that this movie was being remade for American audiences because I assumed they would do something stupid to the plot. The American Speak No Evil came out in 2024 and it was one of those “I will roll eyes, but give you my money” situations. But I have to admit I kind of enjoyed it—though this was solely because James McAvoy is totally going ham and having a great time playing the villain and not because the movie was particularly clever or interesting. But of course, the movie had to be rewritten to have AMERICAN sensibilities. Instead of “these people are making bad decisions, oh please god get out of there, oh wait now its too late, NOT THE DAUGHTER, oh no they’re dead” we get “Protags detected these people doing something weird, they make a plan to get out of there, long dragged out fight to the death to get out of there, they get out of there.” In particular the wife has more of an agentic role in saving everyone where she did not at all in the original version. This is not a movie about despair, or the weird traps that cultural mores can get you into, but one about fighting back. Because the good guys have to win.

Another case SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS for BRING HER BACK- it’s a recent Australian horror movie from the guys that brought us the breakout hit Talk to Me. This is a movie about grief, hence the title. Our main characters are a pair of step-siblings: a visually-impaired young girl (who has literally never acted before and is terrific) and her nearly 18-year-old brother, who is always protectively looking out for her. There is a lot to like about this movie—similar to Talk to Me it showed me things I haven’t seen before, not just plot points or scares, but also characters and how things were filmed. I listened to several reviews of this movie—all of which said this movie was well made, well casted, well acted—but the reviews either broke down into “I thought this was good” or “there was so much to like, but I can’t say this is a good movie because the ending made me sad.” The teenage boy is willing to fight tooth and nail to save his sister, but ultimately, he is struck by a car by another character on purpose, and when he doesn’t die, said character holds his head into a puddle of water until he drowns. The American in me was like, he’s going to get up at the last minute and go save his blind, vulnerable sister. Or this will happen off screen and he will come roaring back with wet hair, just in the nick of time to save her. Because being drowned in a puddle of water when you have noble intent just isn’t fair. This doesn’t happen. How desperately I wanted this well-intentioned character to walk away with his life intact. How can I recommend this movie, reviewers said, when it ends with a blind girl who just lost her entire family and is still reeling with the trauma of almost being murdered? Just a reminder—this movie is about grief. Perhaps its authors thought that this theme would reverberate by this being the ending. Maybe Australians are more bleak then Americans—I would be too if I had to deal with Australian-sized spiders. END SPOILERS

American fiction is often extremely predictable to me because it has very expected beats. This is why I find myself drawn to things that are foreign, weird, structured strange, unconventional in their means of storytelling— because I don’t know what is going to happen. We know that an action movie will end by the good guys winning, or, worst case scenario, the good guys sacrificing themselves to save everyone else. The romance will end with HEA or HFA. Choices are obvious, characters often predictable. (Recently one of my friends asked if I wanted to see The Materialist with her- I said yes even though I don’t like rom coms but I happen to really like Pedro Pascal and Dakota Johnson. I said I would go even though it was extremely obvious which guy—Pedro Pascal or Chris Evans—she would pick based on the preview. My friend was shocked and didn’t think it was obvious at all. [I was right btw.]) Americans do not like things that deviate from expected story beats.

Before you get angry and cry BUT IM NOT LIKE THAT IM NOT LIKE THE OTHER GIRLS, dear American reader, you are not representative of all Americans, you are reading a three thousand word essay on craft written by an obscure mystery writer.

Does Toni Morrison’s Beloved have a lower rating than Song of Solomon on Goodreads because the latter has a happier ending?? Katie Kitamura’s Audition and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind are both exceptionally well written novels with interesting ideas and critical acclaim but the former is rated 3.37 and the latter 3.15, which I think is criminally low. I don’t know if I can say that I liked Audition, but I would say that I deeply admired it for doing something weird and out there and ambiguous. Kitamura said her inspiration for the book was overhearing someone telling a story wherein a man—a stranger—walked up to a woman and said, “you’re my mother” and the woman didn’t know who he was. In half the book we are looking at the characters living in one kind of world. In the other half they are the same characters but the world is different (and I don’t mean this in a science fiction kind of way). The author doesn’t tell you which world is real, or how to interpret her writing. There is no explication of this splitting of structure: you are left to ponder that on your own. Similarly, when the world is ending in Leave the World Behind, Alam doesn’t tell you exactly how or why the world is ending. That isn’t the point of the book. The book is about the characters and the world being in the position to start thinking about the end of the world. You can ponder why or how on your own. But those Goodreads ratings seem to suggest that the average reader doesn’t like pondering. This is disappointing because on the one hand, I want weird shit that leaves me feeling unsettled…

But on the other… I just had a conversation with an editor who asked what type of writer I am, and writers I admire, and I said I think of myself as an old-fashioned storyteller, like Stephen King. I think he has rather old-fashioned sensibilities: his stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Battles that are set up happen. Characters have arcs. It’s not that the good guys won’t die, but they will die a death that makes sense or is even honorable. It does make things expected or predictable in some sense: if we’ve spent 7 books with Roland attempting to get to the Dark Tower, he’s going to get to the Dark Tower—it’s more a question of how, and at what cost, and what will it actually be when he gets there. Pet Semetary is a book that King thought was so bleak that he tried to get out of his contract after he submitted it to his publisher. I think it is actually one of his best books, because at its heart, horror is about the terror of confronting mortality. The book absolutely sets up what will happen: Louis is told about a pet cemetery where if you bury your dead pet there, it will come back. He’s sort of responsible for the family cat being killed and doesn’t want his daughter to be upset, so he buries the cat there. It comes back evil. He’s also somewhat responsible for his toddler son being killed (hit by a truck on the road- absolutely not a road any reasonable person with kids would buy a house next to). He knows what he is going to do is stupid, but he does it anyway: he buries his dead son there. It goes very, very badly. The deranged undead son ends up killing his wife. The great tragedy of this book is that it both 100% doesn’t make sense that the would then bury his wife there but it 100% also makes sense. Grief has made him turn into that definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Recently MAX (HBO- but produced by MAX) put out The Pitt, a medical drama that ended up becoming a surprise hit. In a sea of medical dramas, why this one? The watch statistics would imply that exactly what happened with me happened with thousands of other people: they heard “hey this is surprisingly good” and those people watched, then told their friends. The Pitt has ER’s Noah Wylie returning to the role of a doctor in an ER with half a dozen or so students under him. There is some conceit—the entire season takes place over the course of a single 15 hours shift of an ER, but I don’t think its the premise that drew people to the show. Some TV producers have been leaning hard on making “second screen” shows— shows that are mildly interesting but that you can watch while scrolling on your phone or laptop. This has led to a bunch of bland shows with writing that centers not confusing an audience that is half paying attention. This show doesn’t feel like that—it feels like how watching ER felt in the 90s. Speaking of The Pitt on one of the Ringer’s recap shows, one of the hosts said that the show felt like TV used to feel like, and viewers are clearly responding to this. Just good old fashioned story telling.

I felt similarly about Netflix’s Department Q, which is a limited series based on the adaption of a Danish crime novel series. In this adaptation, we’re in Scotland instead (the writer is, incidentally, American). Matthew Goode is for once not playing a dapper handsome British guy, but is instead a handsome British asshole relegated to a cold case department solely for the purpose of getting rid of him and banishing him to the basement. Here a trope we have seen again and again: the asshole detective haunted by his past. But Matthew Goode is so goode here—sometimes he’s sympathetic, sometimes you think he’s gone too far, and you know that there is something driving this behavior, and you know it predates him being shot in the head before the show starts. He ends up, sort of against his will because he’s a misanthrope, forming a team with a chipper detective with PTSD, and a taciturn Syrian refugee who isn’t technically a detective but is highly, highly competent at being one for mysterious reasons. Ah—! the “we’re getting a team together!” trope! I’ve been here before, it’s often something expected, but why am I finding it so satisfying? (more than satisfying- I think the show is excellent and am praying it gets another season.) I think this is a combination of very good writing, very good casting, and very good acting. It feels familiar, but not soulless because of how well it is executed. “asshole detective who is flawed” is an archtype not a full character, but the character here is fully drawn out.

A reason I am thinking about these issues is that working writers are having a lot of conversations about how much wiggle room there is to do something weird right now. Publishing is constantly ringing some alarm bell, “oh no, a recession!” “oh no, an election!” “oh no, a trade war” and yet people have never stopped reading books. Things have NEVER BEEN MORE DIRE IN PUBLISHING , yet Barnes and Noble is opening 60 more stores this year, and in my wee city of DC, we are getting 2 more indies and one B&N in a city that already has several bookstores. Yet I think the general consensus of working writers is that publishers want what-is-expected from them more so than what-would-be-new. I feel a strong pressure to write a book that is similar to my first book. Many, many authors I know have more or less explicitly been told by their publishers “hey write something exactly like your first book except different.” The most honest people in the industry will say this is because they can see what sold before so it makes it easy for them to both predict how this will sell and to also sell it. (The more dishonest response is that you are establishing your brand and you don’t want to “confuse” readers. I don’t think anyone who has read both my books or would have read the third I pulled back from submission would have been “confused.” I think they might have realized they are three different types of books with a similar, underlying sensibility.) The “write exactly what you did before” thing has been going on for years, but I think lately this has been a bit extra. Publishers seem more risk averse. Katie Kitamura can write Audition because she is Katie Kitamura, but I highly doubt someone who was a nobody could have queried and sold that book as a debut. I am deeply grateful that Never Saw Me Coming ended up being my debut and not the first book I actually queried with. Not because that book wasn’t good, but because it was weird—it was too hard to categorize, too hard to say “who would this be next to on the shelf?” Marketers would have absolutely said not “this isn’t good” but “I don’t know how to market this as a debut.”

I’m afraid I don’t have a happy ending here. Um, at least no one is shoving your face into a puddle? I think if you can execute an old fashioned type of story very very well, with good writing and good characters and interesting takes on tropes, you will have an easier time than if you are 100% coming out of left field for a debut. (the jury is still out about that about a non-debut, as I am currently in that situation myself.)

Some foreign horror movie recs: The Ugly Stepsister (body horror); MadS (zombie movie ostensibly shot in one shot); Raw; When Evil Lurks

Photo by specphotops on Unsplash