What If.

After returning from a week-long training course in London, I found the second season DVD of Dead Like Me in my mailbox. Still have a few episodes left to go, but I can say this much: the quality of the episodes is still very high, in humour, special effects, writing, everything. The only real difference with the first season is that more continuing plots have been introduced, which means that one or two episodes actually feature a 'previous episode summary' for those who have missed it.

This is to be expected. Because all you do as a writer is play with the big 'What If's. Let me explain... every bit of storytelling, no matter how big or small, wether it's for TV, movie, a play or even a comic, that is: every GOOD bit of storytelling, basically consists of having certain stable elements and then introducing a 'what if' scenario. Most stories are about a situation, which in itself is usually a big 'what if' - after all, you have a cast of chacarters but without a situation to place them in, there's no story.
I'll take The Grim DotCom as an example here. The main characters at the beginning, of course, are the Grim Reaper and John, a young geek. It doesn't really get interesting until the premise is introduced: 'what if John and the Reaper together start a company to provide IT services on top of death ?'
Then, at some point, this premise becomes a stable situation in itself. The Grim DotCom is founded, there's even a supporting cast, and all is well. There's a few antics (very small 'what if's) but other than that, the audience knows this situation by now and has accepted this. That's when you want to spice things up, and the only way to do that is to explore the deeper relationships and further developments that can arise from this situation. What if the dotcom became a multinational, employing thousands of people and involved in the stock market ? What if an ambitious blogger found out the truth behind this business ? What if the devil decided to stir trouble by starting a competing business ? What if John started dating the Reaper's daughter, Eileet ? These are the kinds of situations that take people to more extremes, which means they'll show more of themselves. After all, I'm writing this comic deliberately from an office environment approach, where - as all office slaves know - colleagues don't often show much interest in one another and may not get to know each other too well. Unless there's trouble and everyone's forced to work more closely together.
That's what corporate retreats are all about - what if this uncooperative bunch of cubicle dwellers are thrown in a survival situation and have to team up to perform tasks they may have never faced before ? - you get to know each other better in extreme situations. Personalities and personal strengths and weaknesses are revealed more clearly, and you can find great advantages in those.

As a writer, you of course want the audience to care about your characters as much as you do. But they don't know them the way you know them - after all, they weren't part of the creation process, unlike yourself. So you have to really showcase the character's personalities, and the best way to do that is introduce these more extreme 'what if'-scenarios, so the audience and the characters can find character traits that share a common ground. So the audience can identify with these characters, which means they'll seem more alive, closer, more real. It'll show the inner workings of your characters and their relationships, and of the world you've created around them.

This occurred to me while watching the episode of Dead Like Me where Mason kills this guy without there being a post-it. (Quick background explanation: the premise is that death is one big bureaucratic process where deceased souls might actually sometimes become a Reaper, like Mason and the rest of the crew are, and every day they get post-its which state the name, time and location where a soul they have to take will die. In other words, the guy that got killed wasn't supposed to die.) The 'what if' there is of course, what if a Reaper kills someone outside of the system ? The series had established the stable situation that this weird bureaucratic system controlled nearly everything, and that there was little to no escape from it. So that is the only loophole: what if a Reaper, after all a person with their own freedoms, killed outside the system ? Would there be punishment, and if so, what kind ? What happens to the soul of the dead guy ? What other mayhem would come from this ? How would the system that we thought we knew so far, respond to this ? Would this world be prepared for the unforseen loophole, is it something that has happened before and knows how to handle this ? Has it anticipated this ? Or will everything spin out of control ?
I won't spoil this for anyone who still wants to see this series, but another question that was never really answered about the inner workings of the world of Dead Like Me, is answered in the consequences. And a stressful situation has been created where a few characters involved are really put to the test and we get to see them under pressure. We get to see what they are really like and how they respond to this situation - we get to know them better.
Real life is made up of the weirdest situations one could ever think of. So all these plot lines and stories are doing is help us come to grips with the turbulent world that we live in. That is why we enjoy stories so much - we can identify with characters and situations, even if they're not like us but like something or someone we would like to be. This is the role that 'entertainment' plays in our lives - it helps us come to terms with our own identities, events in our lives, troubles, relationships, happiness, death, everything. Because everything's about changing situations. There's no such thing as a stable premise in real life. And there are always buttons of which you don't know what will happen if you push them. And you don't always get to cleanly choose what happens - sometimes you find yourself knee-deep in unexpected trouble. Stories tell us this, and stories teach us how to handle that, in the end, life is as unpredictable and scary as these situations can be. They teach us to cope with that, to know that this happens to everyone. And that, through unexpected developments, we get to know the world we live in and the people around us better.

I just wrote this to point out that all storytelling entertainment, in a way, is art. It makes us think about the world and ourselves, it dares to question reality as a status quo. It helps us learn.
So what if I have actual readers of this blog ? And what if they would actually respond if I asked them to ?
What if I asked you to contemplate your favourite bit of entertainment and its inner workings ? What if you told me if all I've typed above applies to you ? What if your favourite book, show, play, movie, comic, indeed helped you cope with this world, and you decided to share it in this posting's comments ?