Writers are the greatest of story tellers, if only for the fact that the tools they have at their disposal give them the ability to tell the greatest version of any story.
Especially when writing for a book, writers get use interplay between plot and story, the two main elements that advance a novel, and make it relevant to an audience.
David Simon, the man behind the books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner, along with television series’ The Wire, Generation Kill, and adaptation of The Corner, Simon has taken a long time to develop a craft revolving around the story, and is a master of explaining how elements of story affect, and influence the future plot.
It’s now several years later after his last television series, Treme. And while the series did not hold the attention of a viewing audience very well, there is a lot of hope, and a lot of lessons learned from the series for writers. This is why I write about it today; it offers a glimmer of hope to writers who want to be at their best.
Treme is a different kind of television series. Writers of all kinds who have seen it generally come away with a strong appreciation for the show. The reason for this can be summed up as follows: it’s not about characters going from one premise to an ultimate truth. It’s about characters existing in their world, after it’s been flipped upside down. It’s about the human condition, almost exclusively.
The show takes place in New Orleans, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It follows over a dozen characters who come from varying walks of life, and represent different parts of the cultural backbone of New Orleans; music, cuisine, venues, and dance. From traditional jazz musicians, to New Orleans Indians, to gourmet chefs, and everyone in between, the focus is on the people from the large art scene in New Orleans, as they rebuild their lives in a city set for major changes that ultimately interrupt their usual routines.
In a typical series, one would expect to see growing animosity between the protagonists and antagonists. One would expect to find a clear bad guy, and a clear good guy.
But what this series showed was that in real life, we have profound effects on one another, without being an antagonist at all. It should be noted that Simon did go out of his way to make banks, real estate investors, and law enforcement appear as incapable saboteurs, who’s only existence is designed to ruin the world. Removing this portion from the show, and we would have witnessed the purest form of real-life story ever told in any medium.
With that said, the characters go through challenges, as could be expected. They all have arcs in fact. But, whereas most shows would have a grand ending for the varying characters, Treme leaves the characters more or less where they were before, perhaps with more refined direction, some even with what would be considered large life changes, but all in all, they are not “forever changed” as is common practice in works of fiction. This is where Simon’s version of storytelling really went for something bold. Taking art and placing it ever so close to life, and then making us watch those lives unfold.
My educated guess is that ten or twenty years from now, we’ll discover that Treme was far enough ahead of it’s time that there will be a renaissance in its honor, leading to a half a dozen shows trying to capture this uber-real feel.
For writers, it’s a vision of hope to tell stories about “real” people going through “real” dilemmas, which may be out of reach for their audience (making them interesting!), but because traditional media leaves us expanding into fantasy, even in “real” settings, we as writers get pushed further and further from being able to tell story in reality. That is the unfortunate condition we live in, a constant pursuit of fantasy, at every turn.
While general viewing audiences may not be ready to experience this type of storytelling, what likely turned them off completely is an unfortunate sub-narrative that Simon likes to place within his work, and if you’ve heard him speak, you know where it comes from: his latent socialism.
This is why Simon is not a pure storyteller. He instead will try hard to push a political agenda into his stories, even at risk of killing his project. This is why The Wire died after five seasons, and why The Corner only got picked up for a brief six episode miniseries, rather than a larger multi-season telling. Try as Simon might, people generally don’t enjoy his political views as told through character’s story and experiences. Maybe he should option his work in Russia.
This is also why people involved in storytelling should avoid taking political views to one extreme or another. You ultimately alienate one half of your potential audience, and then don’t challenge the other half of the audience, leaving both tuning out your screams for whatever.
Simon would have you believe that New Orleans was a political story in post-Katrina life, but as we place distance between that event and the present, we find more and more that politics had less to do with the fall out of New Orleans, and more so to do with individuals and their views of New Orleans being a ‘post-apocalyptic world.’
For writers, the idea of telling a story that focuses on typical people trying to keep their lives together is romantic, if for nothing else, it allows writers to stop trying to re-invent the ‘kill or be killed’ concept of most storytelling.
It’s also a lesson about establishing and maintaining an audience – stay out of politics. Especially as writers of fiction, it’s not our place to tell people what to think about a given issue. If they are consuming fiction, they most likely are not looking for that. And even if they are, they probably need some story elements of fantasy involved, because a story about real people with real problems, over a backdrop of political ideology will undoubtedly wear out the audience.
Treme made that all too clear, despite its major triumphs.
Matthew Ballantyne 