Creativity

It seems bizarre to say and heart-breaking to realise that it needs to be said, but creativity is integral to anything creative. It’s not enough to tell a story but you must be able to look at all factors as if the project you are working on is more of a reflection of actual events and that you, the creator, are simply recording what has happened.

The best stories have messages but never tell you what is right and wrong. In the first Robocop movie, sure we knew who the bad guys were, but it was the multiple ways the story highlighted the dangers of corporate corruption without spelling it all out for us, that really made the story something that still stands strong today. The Story of Alex Murphy becoming the cyborg and how that affected him and his relationship with his family wasn’t brutal done with us constantly being told, we were shown. This is a skill that we are seeing less and less in the mainstream.

Creativity isn’t a gift that you can only be born with, so you could, if you were so inclined, learn this skill but it does take time and effort.

There is a debate right now about representation in the gaming world. My view is that more representation allows storytellers to explore new stories and ways to tell them, but I am let down with what we have had so far.

Rather than it feeling like a natural progression of storytelling or having something that you can get really excited behind, it seems more and more that we are forced to take hollow characters and are condemned when we turn our backs on media.

As a positive example, there is a film called; Nimona. This is a fantastic film and well worth your time. While I don’t want to spoil any of the film for you, I will say the lead character is gay, and at no point does this ever feel forced. At no point does it ever feel like poor writing just wanted to tell a story about a gay character. Instead, it is a wonderful story who’s lead character just so happens to be gay. No, compare that to something like, Batwoman. A show where being gay was the main feature and so, the show as a whole felt hollow and half-thought-out.

There seems to be no shortage of shows, movies, and video games that have no reason to fail but that just can’t find their footing.

With this in mind, we can find some comfort in knowing that writing is a skill, and any skill can be refined.

So strip everything back go back to basics. What is the story?

In the case of Batwoman, the story should have been, a woman inspired by The Batman to start helping the city. I’ve already written about She-Hulk and Morbius so I don’t want to spend too much time breaking those down. But Morbius chose style over substance and She-Hulk choose to ignore the source material and was written by people who by their own admission couldn’t get a simple comic book origin to or in a TV show. There is a consistent misunderstanding about ‘Plot’ and ‘Story’.

The plot of Lord of the Rings is that a Hobbit takes a powerful magic ring to a volcano. The story is one of friendship, obligations and picking that harder path not for reward, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Remember when you are working on your project, the story is not the plot, and the story is what’s important. You can make your characters, gay, trans, non-binary or a talking fish called Steve, as long as the story is solid, people will enjoy it- even if it is a bit clunky. Don’t believe me? Watch any episode of Star Trek or Babylon 5. These shows are clunky and some of the dialog can be a little stale but the story and the story of the characters drew everyone’s attention and that’s why even today they still stand strong today.

Dr. Who is another example of a show that has always had messaging and has always pushed a narrative- yet with the exception of recent years, it was able to do it in such a way where the story felt natural and nothing felt forced. It was in the beginning, a show about learning, which then evolved into a cometary about social issues, the sciences and war. In more recent years the approach was to simply yell at the audience, “You are wrong unless you agree with me!” This is not only a sure way to stop your message dead in it’s tracks, but also a way to turn people off of your story.

It’s not enough to say, this man is bad and that thing is worse. If you want to tell a story like that you need to show why the thing is bad. Top Dollar from The Crow isn’t an evil man because he’s an evil man. He’s not shown to be scummy or a low-life. He’s shown to be a truly evil man with his actions and demeanor. As the story plays out he reveals himself to be the villain that took over a city and reveals in the notion of something new.

It sounds so simple, and yet there is a massive chunk of our media that lacks this skill. Now this is something that can be corrected, but it takes people who actually care and love what they do. So much like video games and music, it seems like the Indi scene is something worth keeping an eye on. With the independent outlets, they don’t have the luxury of falling back on massive studios to subsidize their failures. So when they create, they create with a true passion.