Playing Telephone (Caturday)

Big Cat, Little Cat: Playing Telephone

Playing Telephone: Mistakes and Fiction

This is one of the most interesting and thorny subjects. It’s hard to imagine a bigger difference between fiction and life than the issue of mistakes. In life, we make mistakes all the time. We act against our self-interest. And of course we just miss the ball, literally and figuratively. I think the difference is that, in fiction, a character’s trajectory depends on a very small moment. Life rarely provides such clarity.

It’s a small moment when Count Vronsky is racing his horse through the steeplechase and he misjudges his balance, causing her to fall. A fall from a horse, especially at such speeds, can be crippling, or fatal. So his fall sends Anna Arkadyevna Karenina into a paroxysm of fear and grief right there in the spectator-box. Which leads her to confess their affair to her husband. Which leads to… Well. 800 more pages of gorgeously written character study.

It’s much more prosaic when we make a dozen small mistakes every day. No-one, not even the person making the mistakes is the wiser. The idea that mistakes have meaning is, ironically, a comfort. It may be the chief comfort of fiction.

Mistakes and “Playing Telephone”

Miscommunication is another interesting aspect of fiction. You could hardly have a work of fiction without it. The very first or second work of fiction that survives in something like its original form, The Iliad, hinges on a moment of miscommunication. Before the start of the book, the Greeks fought a battle and Agamemnon took a woman as a trophy. He has become infatuated with her. But now he must return her, because her father is a powerful priest of Apollo.

Everyone knows he must return her. Agamemnon included. But he does not want to, because doing so would, he believes, communicate weakness to his army. So Achilles, a tributary king, presses Agamemnon, the supreme king, to take the right course. In doing so, Achilles communicates insubordination to Agamemnon, who responds by taking the woman Achilles took as his own prize from the last battle.

So Achilles, furious, withdraws from the fighting. And hundreds, nay thousands, of Greek lives are forfeit. Huh. Agamemnon takes a woman who does not belong to him and that brazen act sows the seeds of war. It’s almost like–and hear me out on this–they should have known better.

The Limits of Miscommunication

The issue with mistakes and miscommunications is that you can’t make them too obvious. Yes everyone knows that miscommunication is at the heart of a large amount of conflict. And thus at the heart of a large amount of literature. And yet there is something cheap about beginning a work of literature with two or more characters playing telephone. That is to say, there is something cheap about making the miscommunication too simple. If your whole novel rests on the idea that “A said this but B heard that” then the whole plot feels cheap. Or worse “A wanted to say this to B but didn’t know how and B heard insult in the silence.”

It’s hard. It’s hard to write something that works. And it isn’t always enough to just write something realistic. Because the same things don’t work in fiction as in reality. If they did, we’d all be traveling to our duels and secret government jobs and extramarital affairs in flying cars.

That’s why we make writing groups like the 2 Rules of Writing Community. Sometimes you just need to check in with someone and say: “Hey, does this work?” And they can say: “Yeah.” And that’s enough.

Description

Three panels sit side-by-side. In each panel, two cats sit together on a spacious blue cushion. The leftmost cat, a large orange with darker orange stripes, looks down at his companion, half amused, half content. His companion is a little grey with darker grey stripes. The grey does not return his friend’s gaze but looks off into the distance, as if angry at a songbird perched on too high a branch.

Panel 1

Big Cat: Human-Mom is bringing her new girlfriend to meet us!
Little Cat: We should hide.

Panel 2

Big Cat: What? Why?
Little Cat: I overheard human-mom talking on the phone.

Panel 3

Big Cat: Yeah? And?
Little Cat: And she said her new girlfriend is really good at eating cats.