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Storytelling is our universal language. It is how we humans explain ourselves to each other, and share all that we experience or imagine. Novels are essentially storytelling of great length and complexity. Novels are mixed and baked from many diverse ingredients, such as World-building, Character development, a writer’s personal Style, and Plot. But one of these things is not like the others.
Plot is the Engine of Storytelling
Plot is unlike those other ingredients. They all add space, breadth and depth, to a story; but Plot alone controls the passage of time in a novel. If a plot is well contrived, then laid out skillfully, moment by moment, it can keep readers ever-curious, eagerly turning pages, and unable to put the book down until long past our bedtimes. Plot is the engine of a book, stoking our tension to the boiling point, shocking us with fresh revelations, then relaxing enough to gather our thoughts and see where things are heading now — before ratcheting our heartbeats tighter once more. The tempo may vary, between a book by Marcel Proust or another by James Patterson; but each will have its stakes, surprises, and changes of direction.
Good books, lively deep and absorbing books, are cooked up from all the ingredients I mentioned, and many others too: World-building, Character, Style, and Plot. As much of each as a writer can cram between their covers. They bring flavors and texture, they make the story engaging and credible, so that we can walk through it and feel like we’re there, living through all that drama, becoming friends or enemies or unsure about each character. Each of those categories is utterly unknown until you open a new book; except perhaps the writer’s Style if you’ve read other books of theirs, and any hints you’ve gleaned from reading reviews and blurbs touting the book in your hands. Each category holds hundreds of secrets for attentive readers to discover, as the story unfolds.
As you read and reread one of your favorite books you will get to know, and perhaps fall in love with, the people and places you find therein, whether they are Anna Karenina or Frodo Baggins, Joyce’s Dublin or Le Guin’s Earthsea. These are indeed four of the finest fictional creations, crafted across years by genius authors, each of them constructed from thousands of words, interwoven with color and flair, overflowing with surprises.
But those surprises, baked into fictional Characters and Worlds, are different than the surprises that make up the Plot. For the Plot is where all the bonafide spoilers are hidden.
The Poisonous Secrets of Plot
The worst spoiler I ever heard was blurted out to me by my own brother. Just as well it was Clay, I guess. Because if anybody can so bruise my aesthetic joy, yet get fully forgiven for it later, it’s him. We were sitting down to watch a Hitchcock —I won’t say the name, but you may well know which I mean— with one of the most famous twist endings in all of cinema. So famous, indeed, that Clay was certain I must have already known about it. Well, once he blurted it out, I sure did.
How much did Clay’s blunder spoil the movie for me? A lot. It’s a brilliant gut-punch surprise, which turns the whole story you thought you were watching upside down. Luckily for both of us, this movie has so much more in it than one startling twist, between powerhouse story and acting, Hitchock’s brilliant and original direction, that I just hung on tight to the roller coaster ride, and was blown away by the whole show. On the other hand, that one nasty shock my brother gave me (before Hitchcock started in with all of his) was what first turned me into an evangelist against spoilers.
So what’s a reviewer of books or movies supposed to do? When you want to explain to your readers what a story is about, the simplest and clearest way to do that is to tell them the shape of the plot. Now, if the reviewer in question is your six year old niece, gushing about Toy Story 4, that’s par for the course. But when an experienced professional reviewer does that, it’s careless and lazy of them.
If a book or movie is shallow and formulaic, premature spoilers won’t usually matter much, because that cookie-cutter story wasn’t about to surprise you anyway. There just isn’t much Plot to spoil. But if a story aims for greatness, and gets somewhere close to that, then here is a lot more going on: more substance, meaning and craft to digest, when you read or watch it. There is also more intricate Plot to spoil.
Some people, forgiving souls, will say spoilers aren’t worth worrying about. Because a good book has so much else in it, so a spoiler or two won’t diminish your reading pleasure much. Whereas I contend that plotting is one of the chief arts in crafting a novel, it makes the grandest part of the whole design, the spine the book stands on. A truly ambitious storyteller conducts a symphony of many parts, setting dozens of instruments in harmony or counterpoint, playing every note in perfect pitch and time. We readers, page by page, are getting to know the characters and their entanglements, gradually gleaning the texture of this world, the hints and forebodings combining into widening dramas. A reviewer might show us key turnings, glimpses of the romances, betrayals, triumphs and deaths a plot hinges on — but a novelist tells their whole story properly, weaving those brief turnings into a far richer design. As we read hundreds of pages leading up to these crises, we immerse ourselves in the novel’s world, so that when we reach the dramatic peaks we see them explode in full color, we feel them wringing our whole hearts.
To be fair, only occasionally do we reach that full enchantment, the ecstasy of total transport. Still, that is what every bold novelist is aiming for. The greatest of them, or the ones who somehow speak directly into your individual soul (who may not be great, just perfect for you), well you may get lost in their worlds for hours on end. You might be dazzled by their greenery, and feel the soil of Dublin, Middle Earth, Earthsea or Yoknapatawpha County against your own bare feet. I have walked in many fictional worlds, and felt their quiddities, then carried them inside me for years afterwards. I have also read hundreds of book reviews — but never once has one transported me, like a great novel can.
When you have a book like that to review, a book of substance and depth, why would you spoil it by revealing its Plot’s secret turnings? You have so much else to talk about. You can discuss every other element but Plot, to impart so much of its flavor and texture, all that makes the book special and unique. Then people who read your review will know whether this is a book they want to read entirely, or decidedly not. So, leave those turnings for the storytellers to reveal in their own time, those witches and wizards we know as writers, who weave the strongest magic and suspense into their Plots.
Are Spoilers Ever Helpful?
It can be tricky for a reviewer, sometimes, to give a comprehensive sense of a book without discussing some Plot points. In many cases, with some thought and imagination they can find a way to give just as large a taste of that book from other angles, without telling spoilers. But they get to write their own reviews, and may find it clearer and more direct to include spoilers. That is a fine and friendly way to review, as long as you post an eye-catching SPOILER WARNING, before any unwary readers see spoilers they’d rather not know.
I’m so determined to avoid spoilers, when I can help it, that I often avoid reading reviews of a story I’m planning to see, until after I’ve read or seen the whole work being reviewed. I’m sometimes relieved when I see a review of a book that I’m sure I’ll never read, as I can read the review fearlessly, since any spoilers there can’t hurt me. My bottom line on spoilers is, if you’re going to put thought and work into writing a review of any story-based art (e.g. book, movie, TV show, play or opera), then you have a responsibility to be mindful about spoilers: avoid them whenever you can, and when they’re essential to the review you want to write, signpost them loudly in advance.
Why do we all instinctively blurt out spoilers, before we learn to think first and be more discreet? We like to share our strong reactions, and Plot is central to any book or movie that wows us. Back before DVDs and binge-streaming, TV shows would play one new episode every week. There was a special feeling of community when you and your friends were all hooked on the same show, and would get together weekly to share the excitement of a new episode, or discuss it all together when you met up the next day.
Social media, with their ever accelerating spin-cycle, added the compulsion to be the first to post a fresh take on tonight’s episode, sometimes before it was even complete. This feels insane to me — but then, unhinged melodrama is social media’s top selling point, it’s how they get so many fools addicted, and unable to ever put their phones down.
The worst spoiler I ever read was in New York Magazine on May 20th, 2019. Some backstory, first. I really enjoyed the first four books of A Song of Ice and Fire (which the Game of Thrones TV show was spun from, overseen by its author, George R. R. Martin). But the saga is so dense, interwoven with sub-plots and a cast of hundreds, that it’s hard to keep its details fresh in your mind. It’s been eleven years since Martin published the fifth volume, and he still has two more to go. If I read each volume when it dropped, I’d have forgotten most of the earlier details in the interim.
My plan is to read the whole saga, from stem to stern, when (if?) all seven books are complete. I usually read a book before I watch the movie or TV adaptation of it, because I want to take that long collaborative journey with the author, imagining for myself exactly how their world and characters look, sound and smell, before I watch it on a screen where that world has been Hollywoodized into a prettier, safer version. So while I expect I’ll enjoy the Game of Thrones show, one day, I won’t even start watching until Martin has published all his books, and I’ve read them. Yeah, I can be pretty uptight and no fun at all, in some ways. I take my favorite stories far too seriously. But they’re sacred to me.
So, on May 20th, 2019, the day after the last Game of Thrones episode played on HBO, NYMag posted a review of the show’s last season, titled “King or Queen (name redacted)? Really?”
I’m being super-careful to blur the info in that headline, though I doubt anyone who cares still doesn’t know how GOT ended up, and who finally won the game of thrones, three long years ago. However I do care, all too much, and now that ending is blown for me, several years before I can enjoy reading it for myself. Even back in 2019 I was used to blogging and social media, so I knew enough that I’d never have clicked on a story that looked Game of Thronesy in any case.
Why on earth would a reviewer put that epic spoiler in a three word headline, so it was impossible for me to avoid? Or anyone else, who was planning to watch the last episode a day or two later on DVR? For clicks, no doubt. And may they burn in hell for it.
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