A Sense of Meaning

Meaningful conflict is the soul of drama. - From the Darkness Induced Audience Apathy tropes page.

All authors want their audiences to care about their stories, but it isn't easy to get readers invested in a world they know nothing about. Readers can give a new story a try, but this grace period only lasts a while before they put the book down. An author wants to hook the audience before that happens, and to do that they need the world and events of the story to mean something to the reader.

So, how do you give your work a sense of meaning? What is it in a story that makes the audience think the events depicted therein really mean something?

I'd like to start a conversation on this topic because I don't think many people understand this to the extent that they should- including me- given how crucial it is.

I'd also like to gather input from thread participants. What are your experiences with this problem, and how have you decided to treat the issue in your own works? Also feel free to list as many examples from other works as you please, either of it being handled particularly well or particularly poorly.

What I'm receiving from this is... 1.) If you want meaning in stories to be easy for readers to invest in, then write literary or contemporary or historical fiction instead of speculative fiction. Then the reader can be sure to know what a table is, and continue to read about a table. 2.) There exists a "grace period" or timer countdown that measures how much text every reader can consume about a table.

On the contrary, not all fiction is beloved because it makes overt a worldview that the reader has been unable to articulate, or wants to feel supported in believing, or even because it states the obvious. Some fiction is beloved because of (not despite) its unfamiliarity, its new ideas that it introduces as a point of interest.

Also, there is no grace period. There is only the skill of writing a sentence that ushers the reader to the next sentence, or a paragraph that ushers a reader to the next paragraph.

By "skill" I could be referring to the writing style, maybe more like aesthetic poetry but in prose form. Or the skill could refer to the portrayal of something I like to call the Plot-Character Continuum, the skill of suggesting a structure.

If you want instead a specific discussion about how to concretize the abstract philosophical and thematic Meanings because it's Important and Crucial beyond mere entertainment] then that's a different discussion than developing one's own voice, character development, streamlining plot, or finding an audience.

Words already do mean things.

Since you wanted a list of works:

• The Other Side of Silence by Andre Brink, got me through to the end on style alone. I hated everything else about it.
• Songs of the Metamythos by C.F. Cooper also largely on style, although it had meanings, as in speaking-to-human-condition-mysteries-of-nature cosmic scale of Meaningfulness...it didn't toot its own horn about it.
• Uglies by Scott Westerfeld had a stilted and choppy style but his characters had flying surfboards. Sci-fi flying surfboards gave me vicarious thrills. It opens with some pubescent insecurity about getting attached to a special friend that has grown apart, or making new friends with the wrong people. Is that closer to the sort of meaningfulness that you're looking for?

edited 21st Jul '15 8:14:48 AM by Faemonic

First of all, what do you... well... mean by "meaning"? Are you talking about having some deeper message to convey, or are you simply talking about reader investment—the reader wanting to see what happens next, or caring about the fates of the characters?

(The trope page that you've quoted is talking, I believe, about having conflict in which the outcome has an effect that the reader cares about—if there's little real difference between side A winning and side B winning, then the reader might not care which of them succeeds. It's warning against a situation in which all sides are so alike in being unpleasant that none of them are at all attractive options, if I'm not much mistaken.)

As to hooks, they can be a number of things, I imagine, and their effectiveness likely varies from reader to reader: some might be attracted to books that start with something intriguing, or something impressive; some might be drawn in by an interesting character sketch, or dramatic dialogue; others might love to start with a brief exploration of a new world; and I imagine that there are other hooks besides.

This is one aspect of writing where thinking about the readers won't work. Don't write to an audience, write to yourself.

If the story is meaningful to you, then it will have meaning to the readers. It might not be the same meaning, but it will have a meaning.

If the story is not meaningful to you, then it will have a much harder time. I don't hate works which are badly written nearly so much as works which are written by numbers and have absolutely no soul.

I hate films like The Hangover, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Big Bang Theory, NBC's Constantine—because I can't bring myself to give a shit about them! And they are not badly written. But they are written to be "clever" instead of having any sort of soul. There's only so much that robotically reworking the plot can take you.

Pan's Labyrinth was one of the darkest movies I've seen in my life, but because Guillermo del Toro really cared about it, the response wasn't apathetic.

The series Galavant and The Princess Bride film are great examples of being on the complete opposite end of the scale. Super bright even when bad stuff happens, not taking themselves seriously at all, they're pretty much unanimously loved because the writers and cast and crew had a great time and their enthusiasm is infectious.

This is the good side of Author Appeal. If someone really wants to see a story where lesbians aren't sexualized or racism no longer exists, it's going to catch on.

So, to write a story with meaning, don't just write about what you like, and don't write to be clever or political. Find what you really care about. If you don't care that a character gets killed as punishment, don't kill the character. You'll probably change it anyway.

Chekhov wrote a story called 'The Bet.' A character bets that he can stay in solitary confinement for 15 years. The other character waits for him to come out before the deadline is reached so he can win the bet. That is literally all that happens.

Yet as a reader, it has haunted me for years. Not because it was a discussion about how humane solitary confinement in prison was, which was the political statement Chekhov was apparently making. I don't care about politics, but I am borderline claustrophobic, and what I responded to were the details.

And it can work the other way around from minimalism to helping readers to immerse themselves into a world. It doesn't matter if the main character is a platypus on Mars—if the author cares about SOMETHING in the story, people will gladly suspend their disbelief.

This is why Harry Potter was so popular. It didn't have the best prose in the world, but Rowling genuinely cares about that series with a depth that most authors don't bother getting to. The Weasley family's hair color was personally significant to her, because she wanted a family of redheads who weren't made fun of. It didn't have any bearing on the plot whatsoever, but that level of personal investment really spoke to people.

As a writer and actor, I have more energy expressing myself with things I care about, and there is much more of a response from both myself and the audience (which currently consists of my classmates). I put in little details which people remember, which draw them to finish reading the story or come up to me and say that they were hanging on to my every word. It is visible—when I care about my writing, the words pour out of me without effort. When I care about my monologue or scene, I drop nearly all of my bad physical habits and unnecessary gestures.

Me caring about this topic in particular is why I've been writing this post for an hour.

edited 21st Jul '15 9:38:12 AM by Leradny

So, how do you give your work a sense of meaning? What is it in a story that makes the audience think the events depicted therein really mean something?

As writers, we never REALLY know what the audience takes from our stories. Because we created it, we automatically have a hugely different viewpoint and knowledge of it than someone who's reading it for the first time.

We can get an IDEA of what our audience takes from it, from reviews and how much money it makes, and the manner in which it gets known—but aside from the individuals that we ask personally, we can't know what the meaning of our work is to every single member of that audience.

Stories mean different things to different people.

Some people love a work for the world, the style, or the characters. Some people hate it for those very same things. Other people LOVE TO HATE a work. Either they just love bashing it because they find it repulsive, or they recognize its merits intellectually, but can't avoid a blood-boiling personal dislike of it.

You'll never know which feeling you'll evoke from which people, so just write what you want and try not to worry too much about the audience.

Alternately that's an incredibly shallow decision made on a whim, rather like the sequence that ultimately lead to Pansy Parkinson's marginalization. (And not one she showed particular fidelity to.)

Writing about what you care deeply, passionately about is one of the many "that way madness lies" paths of writing. You embrace your issues and your desires and pretty soon you end up with something that's really only interesting to people party to your exact issues and desires. This is why something like Evangelion is considered insightful and deep by self-important socially-inept 15-year-olds but fails utterly to connect if you first watch it at 25. This is why the first two seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation are terrible compared to the next five; they're all about deeply dealing in the stuff Gene Roddenberry cares about. This is why "message fiction" generally doesn't succeed in getting its message across correctly when it went on to widespread acclaim as something other than part of a school curricula. (c.f. The Jungle)

This is where you've completely misunderstood why the reader connects with Rowling's work, or the audience with The Princess Bride. It has nothing to do with the author or the actors caring deeply about the story they're trying to tell, investing it with some kind of deep personal significance that the rest of us are drawn to. (Indeed, you seem to have brushed against this realization.) Personal significance is personal; at its best it comes across as prurient and pornographic to deal with for the audience, at its worst incomprehensible.

The author cared deeply about the characters they were writing; about Hermoine and Ron and Luna, about Dumbledore and Snape. The actors were having fun with the characters they were playing; most of us find giving the whole Dread Pirate Roberts scene fun, we like to quote the movie, because it's fun to act those lines. These are not stories we love because they connected with us on some deep personal "this is what I support" level. They are stories we love for their characters; whether considered carefully and visualized fully or simply full of life and vitality.

If you want everyone who's just like you to care about a work, by all means, make it about what you care about. If you want everyone in general to care about a work, pour your time and effort into the characters and their dynamics.

edited 21st Jul '15 1:23:44 PM by Night

You will never COMPLETELY win an audience, which is what the OP seems to be concerned about way too much.

New writers want to get a BIG audience, but experienced writers strike a balance between "what they want" and "how to connect with the audience."

There's a difference between universality, which in TV Tropes terms is Values Resonance, and an Author Filibuster—which is what the previous poster seems to be talking about.

It's not an either-or deal between "write what you care about" and "do what the audience wants." You can take a little bit of both.

Night: That's an extremely black and white interpretation.

I never said you had to put EVERYTHING YOU LIKE into ONE STORY. Just one thing that you particularly care about is enough to establish a connection with readers. Like... people change over the years, or maybe something won't work for the story.

Diana Wynne Jones, Lemony Snicket, Hayao Miyazaki, they are all examples of putting stuff they care about into their work and you know how many people like them? A lot. Not everyone, by all means, but they all have solid audiences.

It's certainly possible to edit work to make sure it's publishable and approachable to a general audience AND keep the stuff you like. Miyazaki put pigs into almost all of his work. It's not like everyone in the audience is thoroughly enthusiastic about pigs as he, but it's silly to say that it detracted from his work or kept him from establishing a solid fanbase.

I should clarify. My use of "meaning" is: how does a writer get the audience invested in the characters and events of the story?

I think this definition is most applicability to the kinds of stories people on this site are writing, which as far as I know is pretty heavy in speculative fiction and light on literary fiction.

I'm aware that what makes a story connect with an audience is going to vary between people to some degree, but as far as I know there should be certain methods that every successful author uses that work with the vast majority of people to get them to care about your writing.

A thought I had about what makes conflict meaningful is that in a given story there must exist a capacity for change, and change for the better. Walking the knife's edge between a better world and a worse one is what creates the tension that sustains an active and engrossing conflict- especially when it's a genuine open question as to which of the two outcomes is truly the better one.

Conflicts that are overly black-and-white become stale and uninteresting- there's nothing to think about outside how the good guys will beat the bad guys. Conversely, stories where everyone's an evil prick give the audience no reason to care about how events resolve either way- a frequent criticism of Warhammer 40k.

So... Are you trying to write something with meaning yourself, or are you just wondering HOW people write?

Generally, the only advice most writers CAN give is "write what you want."

Everything else depends on a HUGE amount of factors as to figure out the "meaning" of it.

Hell, look at The Jungle—Upton Sinclair wanted to write something that emphasized the tragedy of factory-working immigrants, and he's the reason OSHA was created to help them out.

edited 22nd Jul '15 2:17:38 PM by Sharysa

It sounds like what you're asking is really more how to "hook" readers than anything else.

It's not just change.

When the page says that "Meaningful conflict is the source of drama", it's saying that the things that drive your story should have a reason behind them.

In a way, this has nothing to do with audience reactions, even if it's about them (it's complicated).

As a creator, you cannot force your readers to feel something in particular. Even when it looks like you were able to provoke a specific emotion in your audience (fear in horror; wonder in fantasy; repulsion in FanFiction), not everyone will experience the same thing. Even the same emotion will not be experienced in the same way, for the same reasons, and in the same intensity by two people.

What you can do, however, is guide the audience through a certain path and give them a rich experience. To do this, you MUST have a rich experience to give. This includes and it's not limited to a good story, engaging characters, and an interesting conflict.

For now we'll focus only on the third point, "an interesting conflict", although the other two are just as important.

Let's say you have a lamp post (character) in the middle of a city (story). Is this good enough for you? It might be, but it's not good enough for me and it won't be for a lot of people.

What we need now is for something to happen to that lamp post, we need conflict. Because that's what conflict is, it's what moves the story forward, what challenges the characters and makes them grow (or remain stagnant!); it's the soul of drama.

Now, let's say a sheet of paper flies into the lamp post... and that's it. We have a conflict there, but it's not interesting nor meaningful. The things that happen (the sheet of paper flying) need to be interesting and happen for a reason. In other words, there has to be a meaning behind the things that make your world (work) turn.

Without those meanings, all you've got is "well, things are dark because that's what the author writes!" And let's be honest, that's a terrible compliment.

Giving meaning to your work doesn't mean turning it into the next Don Quijote de la Mancha or War and Peace. All it means is that the conflict, the things that make the work work, needs to happen for a reason. That's all you need to give the audience in order to set yourself apart from the people who write the Nutritional Facts on a bag of Doritos.

Why is the writer inspired to the characters and events of the story?

The answer to that can suggest relatability. Underdog begins a journey to triumph? Sibling rivalry? Parental love needs to adjust to growing identity of the child? Messed up with something and need hope of redemption? Somebody messed up a happy status quo and need hope of an answer to "What do we do now?" Got an idea of what the consequences could be, or should be, of a person claiming the freedom to choose the consequences of their own actions?

Somebody in your target audience can relate to that, or has wondered about that.

Vocabulary. Grammar. Punctuation. Spelling. Pacing. Detail.

If I considered the premise a given (see above for possible premises) and I advised you to make everything metaphorical of that premise...from the character's embodiment of the premise, to the events as developing the premise, to a setting expressive of the premise, and ensure thematic unity...at worst, that advice would generate text that is pompous and manipulative, at best it's advice that applies more to literary analysis than to writing and is therefore useless. Literary analysis only comes after the text is written. If you're trying to write—to evaluate and create at the same time, that's probably not going to work.

Words mean things. Work it out from there? Artistic success isn't a paint-by-numbers thing.

If you want something of yours to be read and critiqued, with suggestions to align it more to the meaning that you want to convey, then maybe that would be closer to what you're looking for.

Always exceptions. I mentioned The Other Side of Silence and its Crapsack World. Matilda had an obvious villain and that could still be meaningful. Apparently Death Note doesn't have particularly likeable characters but the worst of the bad buys being left to a treacherous fate is still satisfying.

edited 22nd Jul '15 7:00:25 PM by Faemonic

In general, I think that anyone who writes to try and CREATE meaning for the audience is essentially writing downplayed Oscar Bait. Only instead of awards, you want an audience.

Many writers mention that they can't force themselves to write. They can discipline themselves by making a schedule and getting themselves into the mood for writing, but attempting to wring out the words onto paper/screen will usually result in something average at best or complete shit at worst.

Similarly, you can't force your writing to have meaning. You can write as authentically and well as you can, and you can steer it towards a certain end, but you can't physically beat the meaning—the message, theme, allegory, or whatever—into the readers' heads. To do so will end up making you look insecure or like a control freak.

If people see the meaning you intended for the story, then that's cool. If they see a different meaning, then that's not necessarily a bad thing unless it's a REALLY Misaimed Fandom.

edited 22nd Jul '15 6:51:34 PM by Sharysa

Annie Proulx wrote Brokeback Mountain as a protest against the industrialization of rural America. I read it in her foreword of a book that kept together the short story and the screenplay. I don't know anybody who had that specific meaning conveyed to them.

Better world? Morally ambiguous characters? I don't know, I just liked the scenery.

edited 22nd Jul '15 7:04:43 PM by Faemonic

I like the style and the characters, even if the actual plot is Fair for Its Day.

Hell, Brokeback Mountain actually helped me score really high on the essay portion of a test in high school.

@Gault

Here's a successful method for getting audiences invested:

Give your characters clear goals, clear obstacles in the way of those goals, and clear stakes if they fail.

Have your characters spend their every moment in the story pursuing their goals as hard as they can.

Make your characters really struggle to achieve their goals. Even better if they have to sacrifice something along the way. (Trinkets, wealth, respect, dignity, limbs, their own lives, etc.)

Don't let your characters achieve their main goals straight away. Keep them hanging in the distance until the very end of your story, which should ideally coincide with your story's climax.

There. That method will serve you well in almost any genre, any medium, and for any story length.

edited 24th Jul '15 10:03:31 AM by Tungsten74

Bumping this thread because of a brilliant summary that I read from somebody else about a character.

I think it could apply. The description went: She's got some legitimate issues, but all we see is her persecution complex.

To convey a sense of meaning, the issue that is surely related to somebody's idea of The Human Condition can't just be a logical exploration but a legible one too. If it makes sense but only after the audience thinks about it, then that means it's not capturing the audience on the work's surface level and the audience's emotional level.

I heard that interpretation after that episode of the Game of Thrones miniseries, the one where that sadistic creep Ramsay Snow gets legitimized as Ramsay Bolton. There was what passed for a heartfelt speech from his sadistic creep dad, and then soaring victory music, and I was wondering why these two get to have this scene with soaring music and noble, heartfelt speeches with the wind in their hair. Aren't they the worst of the bad guys? Well, apparently in film school they tell aspiring screenwriters to just give the character a goal. Any goal. Any character. If the stakes and obstacles are at par with one another, the audience will care.

In the case of Ramsay Snow-Bolton, that really didn't work for me, but I didn't stop watching until Sansa got married off to that sadistic creep. I didn't use to like Sansa because I thought she was silly, but once she wised up there was the potential for her to actually do stuff, and then she didn't get to actually do any stuff. I don't care if the spoilers say that it's going to make her into Lady Stoneheart. I can't un-think anymore that it's writers making characters go through this, not that this (a world) is happening to people (characters.)

edited 27th Jul '15 7:54:54 AM by Faemonic

I never got the impression that anything involving Ramsay was meant to be awesome.

Dude is fucked up, but here he is getting legitimized as a legal non-bastard. That's the world of Game of Thrones—it's a reaction to all the shiny happy feel-good stuff about medieval fantasy.

Good point. Is this where formula loses relevance and intuition (+good writing of course) comes in?

edited 26th Jul '15 10:58:44 PM by editerguy

I think it's worth pointing out that the whole formula I outlined above, and said works well in any situation, is really more of a "lie to children". Or maybe more accurately, a "lie to amateur writers".

I mean, when children are young, we tell them simple truths, right? Stuff like "helping people is good", "strangers are bad" or even "gravity pulls objects down". We don't delve into the exact reasons why X is good, Y is bad, or how Z actually works, because the child is too young to understand, nor do they really need to understand yet. But as a child grows up and develops a deeper and more nuanced view of the world, then we give them the deeper reasons. And those deeper reasons are a lot easier for the child to understand, because they've already been taught the simpler version. And then as they grow up and become adults, their reasoning (hopefully) becomes even deeper and more nuanced, and they learn ever deeper truths.

The same is true of the craft of storytelling. Amateur writers are told to give their characters motives and conflicts and so on, because that method does produce good stories. Seriously: it's a method that's been acknowledged and advocated since the playwrights of Ancient Greece. It really does work.

...If your goal is to write a traditionally-engaging story, that is. If it's not - if you wanted to write a more unconventional story, where having an unmotivated character, a vague or non-existent conflict, or even an uneven pacing structure is all part of the point, then of course you shouldn't stick with the traditional methods.

Thing is, you can't make a point of breaking the rules if you don't know what the rules are in the first place. Nor can you break the rules and expect a good result if you don't know why the rules exist, or how they work. It's all well and good to talk up a great, unconventionally-structured story as proof that the classic methods are bunk, and that you can just do "whatever" to make a good story, but I guarantee that the creator(s?) of said unconventional story knew damned well what the classic methods are and how they work, even if they don't explicitly acknowledge it.

edited 27th Jul '15 3:48:34 PM by Tungsten74

What do people think about the role of intuition in storytelling, though?

But we're comparing beetles in matchboxes if we go into intuition. I think sometimes intuition is just a collection of cliches we can't dig out of our mind, or psychological complexes that writers try to massage out into ink because that's more profitable than therapy, while other (overlapping) times intuition is what make a story authentic and subversive of whatever else is out there.

It sounds like you're saying sometimes you think intuition is not real, but other times that it's necessary for authenticity. I'm not really sure what you mean?

I don't see the problem with formula, though. At least to me, a blatantly formulaic nature doesn't rob a work of meaning. An experimental nature doesn't make a work more meaningful.

edited 27th Jul '15 8:42:56 PM by editerguy