Even Derren Brown Is At It

Following on from Open and Closed Stories, yesterday evening I got round to watching last week's Derren Brown programme. For those who don't know, according to his website, "Derren Brown is a performer who combines magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship in order to seemingly predict and control human behaviour, as well as performing mind-bending feats of mentalism."

The programme hoped to demonstrate how crowds, when they think they're anonymous, behave much worse than they would if they were individualised. The set up was a fake gameshow. The audience believed they were there as audience, rather than the subject of the experiment. The gameshow featured hidden cameras watching a ordinary member of the public in a bar. All the other characters were either friends in on the set up or actors.

The audience were offered 2 scenarios: one positive (=A), one negative (=B), and asked to vote on which scenario they wanted to happen next. Invariably the majority of the audience chose the negative option, which was then carried out, all watched by hidden cameras. This, according to Derren, showed mob behaviour in action. However, as a writer I disagree. These were the options.

1st Choice - X in bar:

A: have a pretty girl flirt with X

B: have girl accuse X of touching her bottom and call over her angry boyfriend.

2nd Choice - still in bar:

A: Angry boyfriend apologises and buys X a drink

B: Barman accuses X of not paying his bill and demanding money, or he'll be thrown out.

3rd Choice - X leaves bar and goes to a shop.

A: He's the shop's 5,000th customer and gets bag of goodies

B: He's accused of shoplifting; the police are called.

4th Choice - Police arrive, look at CCTV footage (offstage):

A: X is let off, there's nothing on the film

B: The film points to X's guilt - he's arrested.

5th Choice - phone call from work colleague, she tells him:

A: She's won a TV, and is going to give it to him

B: He's going to be made redundant on Monday

6th Choice - dropped off back at home by police

A: He gets £10,000 for taking part

B: He's kidnapped by masked thugs.

All the A choices were Closed choices. The story either ended at that point, or would continue in a predictable manner. All the B choices were Open choices, in that you didn't know where the story would go or that it was adding more drama not closure. All the B choices also involved conflict.

So, instead of demonstrating mob rule and a natural propensity to cruelty, I would argue that the programme showed people want excitement and conflict and on-going situations. Good story telling, in other words.

Open and Closed Stories

Recently I had an interesting exchange on Twitter about Jane Austen, and how she wrote exclusively about the run up to marriage, rather than marriage itself. In 140 characters it's hard to explain yourself as well as you'd like, so I thought I'd have a go at doing it here.

The run up to commitment story has, in my opinion, more possibilities for story development than a post-commitment story. Character A might choose X or Y or Z - or none of them. Or A might choose one of them, only for them to refuse. As a writer, there are more places to take the story telling, more possible twists and turns.

If A is married to B, then essentially the story can only go in one of two directions: by the end, A stays with B, or A leaves. What happens en route will vary, but essentially these are the only 2 choices. If A leaves B at the very beginning of the story, there are still two options: the story ends with A emotionally leaving B, or getting back together.

If A leaves B at the beginning of the story and has a high old time choosing who they're going to go with next out of X, Y or Z then we're back into the run up to commitment story, not the commitment story.

Basically, the options for a run up to commitment story are Open, when the options for the commitment story are Closed.

I've written two commitment stories and three run-up to commitment stories (with a fourth on the way), and the run-up stories are frankly much more interesting for me to write. You can go anywhere! Your characters can do anything - and anyone. Whereas, once your character is married, if they want out there is a known legal process to follow. Even if the character simply walks out, as in Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler, the story is still at heart about whether the marriage holds or fails at the end.

That's not to say that stories with Closed options are essentially less interesting than stories with Open options. But because the reader knows where a Closed option is leading to, I think the writer has to work much harder in keeping the reader's interest going.