An Ideal Number of Authors

Right now, I’m working on a collaboration with another author, which is both very cool, and tunes me in to some of the issues that come along with it. Not that this project is encountering any particular problems, but inside the process it’s easier to see where the problems might come in.

It was timely, then, that I ran across a couple of things that people don’t typically think of as collaboration, but which most certainly are. And yet, I think people often hold these sorts of things to the same standard of narrative coherence that we expect from more focused entertainments, like books. I mean, with books and stories, you have (generally) at most a handful of people actively involved, and at the end of the day it’s primarily the responsibility of the author(s) to do the actual writing.

But when you have something like the convoluted narrative structure of LOST, which has literally dozens of collaborators–writers, directors, producers, and cast–is it really any surprise that there’s no way the final episode could really have paid off the prior 6 seasons? Which shouldn’t be to say that it’s not worth watching, and enjoying, either in discrete chunks or as a whole Massively Multi-authored Oeuvre, but should anyone really try to hold Martin and Linelof to the same standard? If Martin botches the ending to The Song of Ice and Fire, it’s on him and his editor, full stop. That the LOST finale failed to satisfy… is that Lindelof’s fault? Or Carlton Cuse? J.J. Abrams? Or maybe Matthew Fox? Or…?

And I think that’s definitely one of the limits of the newfound enthusiasm for the Season-Long Television Story, as opposed to the episodic or hybrid formats. Maybe you can maintain some narrative cohesion for a season or two, but after that things will slowly start to get entropic. I think the same thing happens with modern comic books, and why Marvel and DC have to throw out these annual, reality-bending shake-ups that shave off digressive or lame story elements brought in by rushed deadlines and unfocused (or hobbyhorse-riding) creators. Whatever editorial controls are in place, especially with the big tentpole characters, it’s insufficient to maintain any kind of consistency even over a year or two, much less the 50+ years so many of these characters have been kicking around.

But, in both TV and comics, the narrative consistency and cohesion aren’t the main draw (as they can be in books), so I don’t think it’s an issue anyone’s likely to solve any time soon–short of dramatically cutting down the length of TV seasons (though cable is having some success with that) or permakilling a lot of characters in comics and promoting their replacements.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.