#WritersCoffeeClub Jul. 25 - Do you ever hinge plots on a misunderstanding?
Yes! The first 2 books of the big WIP hinge on misunderstandings, many of them intentionally created. What's a political story without subterfuge and misinformation? xD
In defense of misunderstanding as a plot device, speculation on a culture not my own
It seems fashionable in the Anglophone literary world to deprecate plots that depend on misunderstanding and I'm not sure why--aren't they a staple of white Anglo classics like the works of #Shakespeare and #JaneAusten? 🤔 I guess there are a ton of cases where the misunderstanding is kind of meh and written in for plot convenience more than anything intrinsic to the characters and the world, but like any other plot element it can be handled well or poorly.
Personally I love a compelling misunderstanding where misinterpretation and crossed signals arise out of circumstances central to the story like "civil blood mak[ing] civil hands unclean," (Romeo and Juliet) or because honest communication about subjects like romantic yearnings is so high-stakes it's basically impossible, especially for women (much of Jane Austen).
And maybe there's a tendency to kind of sneer at this because these stories took place in the Olden Days(TM) of whalebone corsets and slavery and people are supposed to be above all that now. The last time I checked misunderstanding didn't die out with the advent of industrialization, though, unlike passenger pigeons and dodos (too soon?). Despite the enlightenment and freedoms constantly touted to us, how much goes unspoken and undared, dropped, forgotten and (un)missed in the odd spaces that open up between our fragile forms? Which, and whose, silences and misapprehensions do the loadbearing work in our lives?
I think these questions of misunderstanding and miscommunication are worth exploring in any age, especially if books are optimized for exploring inner lives as seems to be another common consensus in Anglophone lit crowds. (Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Beowulf among others might disagree, but hey, they're old news and drawn from oral tradition so they get filed differently maybe? 🤷♀️)
re: In defense of misunderstanding as a plot device, speculation on a culture not my own
@ljwrites I can only speak for myself here - while I appreciate a well-written plot centering around misunderstanding, I find that a lot of them just... aren't. *Especially* in US television, but it's not exclusive to that.
In US TV there's often entire seasons of a show with an otherwise interesting premise that just gets bogged down in endless fights over romantic interests that could have been prevented if *anyone*, at *any* point in the several years during which the story takes place, had made even the smallest idle comment about that. Which even in the most dysfunctional real-world family, someone *would* have done, even if out of anger.
I just don't find that sort of 'misunderstanding' convincing, and I feel that it makes for boring, cookie-cutter plots that just drag on and on. There's so much other plot space that could be explored but that's left on the table.
I often shorthand this to "I do not like plots about romantic conflicts", even though plots with compelling romantic conflicts could plausibly exist - because in (popular) Anglophone culture, they are often so difficult to find. It seems to be better in books, but they're certainly not free of this issue either...
re: In defense of misunderstanding as a plot device, speculation on a culture not my own
@ljwrites Yeah, that sounds right to me.
re: In defense of misunderstanding as a plot device, speculation on a culture not my own
@joepie91 A lot depends on the details like how likely this misunderstanding/miscommunication is for that world and its characters, and as I've discussed, misunderstanding plots are frequently handled so poorly they turn people off the whole idea. I think that ties back to a misunderstanding, as it were, about misunderstanding on the part of the creators, as something that happens because people are thoughtless or careless and not because of compelling circumstances with a lot of structural issues, as in my examples of Shakespeare and Austen.