Artificial Stoppage: Making Sure Diversions are Amusing
Longtime followers of the blog will know quite well by this point how much respect I have for The Good Place. Between its nigh-perfect first season, to the amazing turns it took as the story progressed, to the thorough satisfaction of the ending, I could, and have, go on at length on all the various aspect that show did right. But there’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially as I watch other programs more frequently during these lockdown times: The Good Place broke with standard story-telling structure by accelerating past plot points and taking ideas further, rather than gumming things up with artificial stoppages.
Before we go much further, this is your official spoiler warning. As I’m going to be dissecting plot elements from The Good Place, can’t very well do that without spoiling them. I’ll try to limit things to the first few seasons though, that way if you’re waiting on Season #4 to hit streaming, this won’t give anything away.
What is an artificial stoppage? It’s a term I use for hurdles in a story that don’t really exist, they’ve been forced into place by circumstances, most often a misunderstanding. For an example, see just so many rom-coms, though those get a bit of a pass due to formula expectations of their genre. Essentially, anytime you’ve yelled at a screen because if two characters would just talk then the whole issue could be easily cleared up, you’ve seen an artificial stoppage.
Now, contrary to how it might come off, I don’t think artificial stoppages are entirely bad things. Part of a story is pacing, and sometimes slowing down one aspect of a tale is essential to make it all hang together well. In my experience, they work best with comedies, as lower stakes don’t yield as much frustration. It also helps when the stoppage doesn’t eat enough time to get agitating. The trouble comes when plot points are hung on them, forcing the entire story to grind into gridlock for something the audience knows isn’t an actual problem.
Let’s circle back to The Good Place, and talk about how they did essentially the opposite of artificial stoppages. In Season 1, we learn that Eleanor is in The Good Place by mistake, her name being the same as a much better person who deserved heaven. In 99.99% of other shows, that is the core story-arc of the series. Every season finale would bring Eleanor to the brink of discovery, and she would narrowly escape in the season premiere, probably with one or two more side characters now knowing her secret. Artificial stoppages would run rampant, as Eleanor has chance after chance to perhaps find escape or safety, but is held back by some minor misunderstanding or temporary character issue. At the end, Michael finally finds out the truth, maybe slip in a twist that he’d caught on ages ago, everyone hugs, cut to credits. That’s the show I was expecting when it kicked off, because decades of TV have conditioned me to that formula. It’s why I suspect so many people didn’t stick around at first: based on what we knew of TV, there was no way for such a premise to be enjoyably sustainable.
That’s why, as amazing as the Season #1 finale was, it wasn’t the first time The Good Place kind of blew my mind. That honor went to an episode in the middle of the season, when Eleanor surprised Chidi, Michael, and the audience watching at home, by publicly outing herself and her situation to the entire neighborhood. Taking what easily read as a series-long arc and cashing it out in a middle season episode, not even a finale, was my first major hint that this was more than an incredibly written show with an unbelievable cast. It was pushing at the constraints of the medium, challenging what I thought I knew about sitcom story structure. In a way, this moment laid the groundwork for the bigger twist at the season finale.
Skipping the artificial stoppages, the fake hurdles for their characters, meant The Good Place had to keep developing real problems to tackle, usually as a natural consequence of the characters’ own prior actions. It propelled the plot along true, but also meant that time usually wasted on non-issues could instead be devoted to small character moments. Instead of slowing down to do an episode where Chidi buys Eleanor a gift that trips some weird association she won’t talk about, they slow down to do one where Eleanor confronts her mother and interrogates their flawed relationship. Pacing is still very much considered in the overall tale, but the main story never gets delayed for problems that go nowhere.
These are tactics and lessons that are absolutely transferable to other mediums, books included. When working on a slower section of your piece, take a moment and ask what the purpose of the characters’ current challenges are. If the answer is “to slow things down” then that’s okay; again, good pacing is part of telling an enjoyable story. But if you’re going to take that detour away from the main plot, it shouldn’t be for reasons that needlessly frustrate the reader, unless it’s a specific case where that’s your goal. Outside those circumstances, it’s generally assumed you want those reading your book to enjoy the experience, so make the diversions and slow-downs something fun to read.
Rather than have two characters get into a fight mid-drive, prompting one to walk out and creating a split narrative where they have to find one another, why not have a tire blow out next to a creepy old roadside motel? Spend a few chapters poking around, maybe they find a secret clown training camp if it’s comedy, a clown cult if it’s horror, or a clown cult post Kool-Aid if it’s dark comedy. Things they have to deal with, chances for character development and exploration, and when it’s over there’s now an event in their past you can call back to. “Remember that room of clown corpses we found in Nevada?” is a bit more interesting of a line than “Remember when we got into a two-hour fight because you thought I didn’t like your mix-tape?”
There will absolutely be times in writing a book when you’ll need to let the plot take a few moments and rest, for the reader to catch their breath between major events. While artificial stoppages are often a part of how we facilitate that pacing, with some care and extra development, we can make plot-pitstops that are as much fun for the readers and the main road.