Shortly before beginning this text, I woke up from a dream, pondered the dream contents in a state of half-sleep, and, as I often do, had an urge to write something about the dream. The problem? The specific idea from the dream of which I wanted to write seemed too trivial and unoriginal to be worth a text. However, as I made myself an early morning cup of coffee, a potential angle occurred to me.
To begin with the dream (and please bear with me for the bigger picture and pardon the oddities of dreams):
I was talking to someone about a woman who had the type of dysfunctional personality often seen on screen in (in particular female?) law enforcers and other crime fighters. (The exact details escape me, but consider someone who insists on working alone, lives for the job, has an alcohol problem, or similar.)
The explanation given by the other party was that her erstwhile boyfriend had joined the police—which told me next to nothing of relevance.
I immediately objected that the story needed another piece, say, that she came from a gangster family (potentially, creating a conflict of interest or a Romeo-and-Juliet situation), that she had followed him into service “to be with him” and then found him in the arms of another woman (an event of great disappointment/disillusionment after a big sacrifice), or that he had been killed the first day on the job (a great personal tragedy).
Here a secondary question is whether the woman at hand was a crime fighter of some sort. I wish to recall her as an outright police woman, which might play well with the latter two scenarios. However, the first scenario speaks against the possibility, which raises questions like whether my memory of her status had been blurred, as details of dreams tend to rapidly be, or whether the first scenario reflects the type of inconsistency of which dreams tend to be filled.
Chances are that neither of the three scenarios would have brought a great story (but the quality of a story is often less based on the underlying ideas and more on the execution), but the point is valid—that someone’s boyfriend joins the police is not much of a story and there are often two (or more!) components needed to make a great story. Consider “Romeo and Juliet”: That two teenagers fall in love, in and by it self, is a bit of a dead end. There might or might not be material for a novel targeting an adolescent girl, but hardly more, and the topic has been done to death. The conflict between two families is more promising grounds, but not truly a killer plot. Combine the two and we might be on to something.
A case in point for quality is “All about Eve”: Years before my first watching, I read the Wikipedia page, found the story sounding extremely weak and uninteresting, and was highly skeptical to the apparent renown of the film. Once I finally saw it, I was convinced by the implementation.
Shakespeare, including with “Romeo and Juliet”, is another case in point, as he usually used an existing story and simply made a version of that story that outshone all other versions.
From another angle, the same idea of a missing piece of the puzzle can apply in real life. If, for the sake of argument, the same exchange had taken place in real life, the other party might have assumed that I already knew that the women had a gangster family. If so, it was already part of the puzzle of the (metaphorical) story—just something that was missing from my own puzzle of knowledge. Such situations can be common (in more realistic exchanges) and are a cause of many misunderstandings. They might indeed be common in fiction too, e.g. because the author assumes a certain cultural knowledge, or (especially, with TV series) because information from previous installments might be important to the understanding. In some cases, a work of fiction can be deliberately obscure and only reveal puzzle pieces needed for a complete understanding by and by—or, even, deliberately mislead in the short term. (This includes more important pieces than just, say, a missing knowledge of someone’s family and can include the ultimate goals of a work, major aspects that are yet to be revealed, major plot twists, and similar.)
Shakespeare is, of course, a common trap in terms of e.g. cultural knowledge, view of society, meaning of words, and similar. With “Romeo and Juliet” we might have issues like how love was viewed in Shakespearean England, the possibility that someone could truly be “star crossed” (cf. below), and, in a more personal example, the idea of “Tybalt, prince of cats”: I originally misconstrued the epithet as a sign of admiration or a mark of excellence of some sort, possibly, to imply that Tybalt was unusually athletic or, fitting with other parts, unusually good and/or catlike with his rapier, which made him seem a more daunting figure. As I learned over time, it was actually a mockery, a play on his name and a literal and literary cat from the “Reynard the Fox” stories—possibly, as if a modern boy named Elvis would have been jokingly equated with “Elvis, king of rock”.
(In a twist, I actually encountered several such stories as a young child, in a book with various fables and fairy tales, but the details of these were already forgotten by the time that I encountered Shakespeare’s Tybalt.)
To return to “Romeo and Juliet”, the love between the two teenagers and the hostility between their families are the two core components—but they are not the only components. What if the duel between Mercutio and Tybalt had not taken place, Romeo had not slain Tybalt in vengeful anger, and had not been banished? What if the friar had not tried to resolve the situation through faking Juliet’s death? Etc. These not only play in as causalities (cf. below) but also bring value and opportunities on their own. Or consider the poetry and the great amounts of humor—not just love and tragedy. (I almost added “action” before the em-dash, but this is strongly dependent on implementation choices and a stage version might fall well short of e.g. Zeffirelli’s movie version. Going with “violence” might be truer to the paper version, but whether violence is a good thing, even in a play, can be disputed.) Or consider the contrasting takes on the conflict of, say, Tybalt and Lord Capulet, and what that might tell us about youth and age or individual variation. Etc.
Indeed, even far more trivial cases of two protagonists falling in love need something more than just that in order to be more than an unimportant side-story (like the romance between two protagonists thrown together to, say, prevent Dennis Hopper from blowing up a bus and its busload of innocent civilians). Consider “Grease”: In the story-as-is, two summer fling-ers unexpectedly find themselves at the same high school, botch their reunion, see the opportunity of continued romance unnecessarily missed, with various complications, longing, and whatnot, until an end-of-school-year reconciliation. In the story-as-it-might-have-been, the two are aware that they will go to school together from early on and plan for it, or are unaware but do not botch the reunion. Now, the story-as-is might not be a Shakespearean masterpiece, but contrast it with the limited options from the alternative and how different the results would have been.
“Romeo and Juliet” also gives two further illustrations of interesting ideas:
Firstly, components do not necessarily or exclusively relate to the main story. The main point of Mercutio was certainly that he should die and enable the main story to progress, but that could have been achieved by introducing him as a dear friend of Romeo’s in the scene leading up to the duel. Instead, he has a great amount of “screen time”, a great number of lines, the fabulous “Queen Mab” speech, whatnot, and truly makes an immense difference to the play. Reduce him to a dear friend who is first introduced and then killed and we have a far lesser play. Keep him in and have another friend be killed and the result up to that point might have been pretty much the same, except that the perception of loss for the spectator/reader would have been lesser (potentially, far lesser).
However, I have some doubts as to the rest of the play, as Mercutio might have taken too much lime light away from the two lovers, to the detriment of the play, had he lived and not otherwise been reduced in presence. (A workable story might have sent Mercutio into exile, as the winner against Tybalt, but that raises the question of how to progress the tragedy. Chances are that the result would have been a very different play.)
Here, the topic of quality resurfaces, as a lesser author might have made the wrong choices or implemented other details in a lesser manner. For instance, in most cases, I favor cutting down on what brings little to the main story, and, apart from his death, Mercutio does not bring much to the main story relative his “screen time” (and the “Queen Mab” speech might bring nothing). The execution of the character is marvellous, however, and there are other types of value to be found than just furthering the main story. (And a problem with many other authors is that many characters, events, whatnot, that do not contribute to the main story, seem to be more filler than independent value bringers. Romances in action movies are a case in point: Sometimes, they bring a little extra color for the good of the movie; sometimes, they are just an annoying distraction.)
Secondly, that any given non-trivial event is likely to have many contributing causes (including in real life). Some of these might be more important than others, as with the deaths of Romeo and Juliet and the two main components of two teenagers who fall in love and the hostility between their families, but there were a great many twists and turns where things could have gone down a different road—including two great strokes of bad luck (or the influence of the stars, as case might have it) at the late stages of events, when the missive of Juliet’s fake death does not reach Romeo in exile (but news assuming her true death does) and he arrives at her body and kills himself very shortly before she wakes from that fake death.
To return to my dream: First, at this point of writing, I find myself a bit annoyed, because the above actually works reasonably well stand-alone, which, to some degree, ruins the point that I came up with while making my coffee—maybe, I should have drunk and waited for it to take effect before beginning to write. Second, however, this point is a meta angle of combining two or more components, notably, my sometimes fascination with dreams (see e.g. [1], [2]) and an older text on multiple ideas vs. focused texts, where I e.g. note that “[t]he texts that I really have a drive to write, that are the most fun to write, that develop my own thoughts the most, ..., tend to be the ones combining two or more ideas”. By and large, this remains true—notwithstanding that I, in the specific case of this text, went down that road more to look for an excuse to put down some words about my dream. Of course, what remains of the dream is minimal, and this text is not what I had intended—be it because I began to write before the coffee kicked in or because I failed to write down enough of the dream before making the cup, causing too much to pass from memory. (This, however, is acceptable to me: as might be suspected from the quote, much of my writings are written for my own benefit—not the benefit of others.) Still, the current text is a very good example of a text that has more ideas of different types than it does focus.
Now, given that I was looking for an excuse, the combination of dreams and multiple ideas is a natural choice, but it is by no means the only choice. Consider some components of this page that are mentioned and could have been expanded further, making a potentially worthwhile text of a different type, e.g. (immediately above) that I write mostly for my own benefit, or (in the first paragraph alone), (a) that I often have an urge to write about dreams, (b) that even something trivial and unoriginal can be made worthwhile, (c) that a relaxed state, as when making a cup of coffee, can bring new thoughts even when deliberate attempts might fail (and various other coffee related ideas, including, as above, that my brain usually works much better after the first cup of coffee in the morning than before it). Indeed, in hindsight, the fact that texts often end up somewhere else than I had originally intended could make a good coupling, with some room for related side-topics, e.g. whether I would be better or worse off doing more planning before beginning writing, in a trade-off between, on the one hand, being more target-oriented and writing more focused texts and, on the other, having more fun and seeing a greater self-educational value.
To the telling of dreams: I remember several occasions from my childhood when my mother began to (as I perceived it) prattle about some dream or other, which was not only hard to understand but seemed pointless to retell, and I wondered why she bothered the rest of us with that nonsense. As an adult, I find myself poorly positioned to throw the first stone. Moreover, over time, I have formed the impression that many have a weird need to tell their dreams—with the twist that their dreams usually seem uninteresting to me, no matter how much my own dreams interest me.
(An interesting thought is whether someone like Freud might have been more successful because he was willing to listen intently to dreams, complaints, and whatnots, of others, and less because of anything he could say about them.)
Whether, per (b), the trivial and unoriginal point of the dream has been turned into something worthwhile to the reader, I leave unstated. However, the writing was worthwhile to me (per the idea that I write mostly for my own benefit), and others certainly have turned the trivial and unoriginal into something worthwhile from time to time.
Finally, a note on the three works of “Romeo and Juliet”, “Grease”, and “Speed”. While being very different in character, they actually have some commonalities. A compare-and-contrast is left as an exercise for the reader.
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