TRICKS OF THE TRADE

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

But I Digress...
March 22, 1991

Writers are manipulators. We create our own reality, stock it with whatever we need, and try to hornswoggle the audience into buying into these fantasies. There’s a phrase for it: “Willing suspension of disbelief” (not “suspension of belief,” as it’s occasionally incorrectly called.)

If you blow the suspension of disbelief– if any of the seams of stitching together that fabric of unreality begin to show– then you lose your audience. There are, however, certain tried-and-true stunts you can pull, devices you can utilize, so that your audience will willingly go along for the ride.

1) Audiences will forgive practically anything in order to have a happy ending: So there we were at the end of Back to the Future III and it looked like Doc Brown was going to be stuck back in the Old West. Although Doc would have been happy, would the audience have felt good about it? Especially after having invested a collective six hours of movie-going time?

Heck no! So the movie makers pulled a rabbit out of their hat, produced an ending that was– to put it politely– unlikely, and got away with it. Why? Because the audience was with them. The audience wanted it that way and left the theater happy.

I pulled a similar stunt at the end of Hulk #372. At the climax of that issue, Bruce Banner is pursuing (on foot) a train which his wife, Betty, has just boarded. He’s running down the track after it, trying to get its attention, but the train is picking up speed, turns a corner and is gone. Bruce sinks to his knees, sobbing and berating the fate that is his. The “camera” even starts to pull back on him.

The reader is now completely set up for a depressing Bruce-just-missed-her ending, extending a separation that’s already gone on for two years.

And on the very next page, Bruce suddenly looks up in shock. Betty has come back around the track, on foot, carrying her luggage, shouts Bruce’s name and leaps into his arms. Fade out.

I was asking a lot of the readers here. I was asking the reader to accept that Betty somehow sensed that something was wrong and, on the basis of a feeling, either leaped off a moving train (albeit still moving slowly) or forced it to come to a halt by pulling an emergency brake, then ran back to where her intuition was guiding her so that she could liplock the husband she thought was dead.

That’s a stretch, even for me. Yet the response to that ending was uniformly positive. Every letter was pretty much the same– “I was so afraid that it was going to be another clich

16 comments on “TRICKS OF THE TRADE”

  1. Interesting side note about the tag from Peter’s column, although I’m sure he’s aware of it –

    Trudeau actually DID that gag in a Doonesbury strip during the Gulf War… Duke is running a bar in Riyadh, and in the last panel a voice off-panel someone says “hey, everybody” and the whole bar shouts “NORM!”

    I still love that strip.

    JLK

  2. From the BID Trade Paperback, Peter commented:

    Several weeks after my column saw print, Garry Trudeau did that exact “Noooorrrrmm!” gag in Doonesbury, except he set it in Uncle Duke’s Club Scud. Fans asked if I thought he ripped it off from me. I tend to doubt it– although I wouldn’t mind trying to buy that particular strip if I ever have the opportunity.

    Last time I checked, he still didn’t have it.

  3. Pertend they are not in the medium.

    Young Justice conversation between Impulse, Superboy and The Ray about cancelled comics. Very nice

  4. I have a couple questions…

    While it’s swell to see any “BID” columns online, are there any plans to put up newer rather than older columns?

    Also, perhaps I’m not remembering this correctly, but I thought when this website started PAD said something about CBG putting “BID” online. Did that happen? (I saw a link maybe one time in their newsletter, and can’t find him on their difficult-to-navigate website.)

  6. Hmm. When this column first appeared, I wasn’t sure whether it was meant as good, solid writing advice or an ironic comment on bad writing. Reading it again, I’m still not sure.

    –Daniel

  8. “If you blow the suspension of disbelief– if any of the seams of stitching together that fabric of unreality begin to show– then you lose your audience.” -Peter David

    This is so true. I have almost all the Daredevil issues up to #300. Around that issue was a story where the Owl stuck his new claws into an automobile. The caption said something about the sound of metal screeching on metal. This was the end of my SOD. Why? Because the car was a Corvette. I could just never get into any of that author’s DD stories after that.

  9. While it’s swell to see any “BID” columns online, are there any plans to put up newer rather than older columns?

    The last few columns keep making reference to George Bush bombing Iraq. How much newer do you want?

    Seriously, we’re putting them up as columns are available and as time (mine, not Peter’s) permits. I tend to make sure that a few go up while Peter’s on deadline hëll. Also, we’ve got another decade’s worth of columns to work through before we get to even a year lag.

    Of course, since Peter looks like he’ll be offline for a while, I’ll probably get another bunch up for the next few days…

  10. Hmm. When this column first appeared, I wasn’t sure whether it was meant as good, solid writing advice or an ironic comment on bad writing. Reading it again, I’m still not sure.

    I’d say serious, especially considering I’ve seen PAD use all of those techniques any number of times, always to great effect. Sometimes all on the same page, especially in the Apropos series.

  11. While I enjoyed most of this column (and did the first time around, too) I do have to disagree with Peter’s assessment of the end of “Watchmen.” (I’m the Doug Atkinson who wrote/compiled “The Annotated Watchmen,” so I’ve spent a lot of time going over the series with a fine-toothed comb…)

    Two points: 1) If you read carefully, Moore sets up the fake “alien invasion” in such a way that it wouldn’t be questioned. Why? Because a) he set up the events leading to the “invasion” so they would seem plausible in retrospect (it occurred at the dimensional research institute where they were trying to break the dimensional barrier; I suspect a lot of people ignored that because it was background noise in the sequence where Dan and Laurie are trying to have sex) and b) he used the brain of a telepath to beam images of the “alien’s” thoughts directly into peoples’ heads. Anyone who had an “alien’s” thoughts burned into their skulls isn’t likely to spend a lot of time questioning it.

    2) The U.S. and U.S.S.R. wouldn’t go to war over this because, if you watch Nixon carefully, he desperately didn’t want to be at the brink of war. He’d overplayed his hand in Afghanistan thinking he had Dr. Manhattan to back him up, and with Dr. Manhattan gone both he and the Soviets were eager for a way to back out without losing faith. The “alien invasion” provided that, while not leaving an obvious target on Earth to redirect their hostility towards.

    It’s okay if, despite all this, the ending didn’t work for you. However, there is a lot more supporting the direction the ending took than immediately meets the eye, and it deserves to be taken into account.

  12. Hmm. When this column first appeared, I wasn’t sure whether it was meant as good, solid writing advice or an ironic comment on bad writing. Reading it again, I’m still not sure.

    I’d say serious, especially considering I’ve seen PAD use all of those techniques any number of times, always to great effect. Sometimes all on the same page, especially in the Apropos series.

    I’m pretty sure you’re right, but I was hoping otherwise, because last week, PAD wrote:

    Downsides: Certain tropes of the series are becoming so cliche that the characters have come to expect them. Willow’s trouble-making observation that Xander is a demon magnet back in season 4 continues to hold true. The problem is that making fun of a cliche doesn’t make it less of a cliche.

    –Daniel

  13. I also disagree that Veidt wouldn’t have killed Rorschach, operating under the assumption that Rorschach is too nuts to be believed. Well, yeah, he is…until you get to *know* him. Then his intelligence and oddly pure integrity have a way of winning out. I think Veidt knew this and recognized that Rorschach was indeed a serious threat to his new world order.

    Hëll, the ending implies that just the *journal* is likely to undo the whole master plan. (Although maybe the journal doesn’t smell as badly as the man himself, so maybe PAD has a point anyway.)

  14. Where’s the Watchmen blog?

    It’s important to look at 1) who killed Rorschach (R) and 2) how. 1) Dr Manhattan (Doc) makes the decision. 2) Doc blew him up good.

    I find answer 2 very odd considering that Doc could have just scattered R’s molecules any which way but loose; Doc instead makes a bloody mess outside of Veidt’s winter getaway estate. It seems to me that Doc’s decision was actually against Veidt–by destroying R he gives R’s journal more credibility than if R were alive and out and about spewing nonsense and noise that none would believe.

  15. Oh yeah–duh. I had a brain hiccup. Of course Manhattan did the killing.

    But I believe Veidt would have eventually killed Rorshach if Manhanttan hadn’t. He didn’t do so right then and there because he was trying to put on his “good guy” hat to everyone else. Interesting theory about Manhattan trying to make a martyr out of Rorsharch–not sure I buy it, but I hadn’t thought about that angle before.

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