With the warm summer weather, many
of those ugly, dangerous plotholes are being fixed all over town.
During winter, the vast, complicated novel that is this city takes a pounding from the elements, and many well-used stretches of urban story fall into disrepair. There are gaps in the record. Memory lapses. Deals and transactions that don't quite add up. Did I read that right? Wait a minute, a few chapters ago they were saying something entirely different...
During winter, the vast, complicated novel that is this city takes a pounding from the elements, and many well-used stretches of urban story fall into disrepair. There are gaps in the record. Memory lapses. Deals and transactions that don't quite add up. Did I read that right? Wait a minute, a few chapters ago they were saying something entirely different...
So in spring, out come the
plothole-fixing crews. They put up their
orange and yellow barriers and get to work filling in all the gaps and cracks and rough spots in the metronarrative.
This is noisy, messy work, and disrupts reader traffic, leading to paragraph jams, frayed nerves and letters to the copyeditor about the perpetual state of narrative de/construction the city seems to be under. Anyone who's ever been bogged down at the intersection between two congested character arcs knows what I'm talking about.
Of course, that gooey filler they plug the plotholes with isn't meant to hold up in the long term. It keeps the story going, for sure, but doesn't really address the larger issues of storysprawl, rampant cast growth, and inadequate narrative infrastructure. For that it's necessary to look at the bigger picture of the stories we tell, how we tell them, and our future storytelling needs.
This is noisy, messy work, and disrupts reader traffic, leading to paragraph jams, frayed nerves and letters to the copyeditor about the perpetual state of narrative de/construction the city seems to be under. Anyone who's ever been bogged down at the intersection between two congested character arcs knows what I'm talking about.
Of course, that gooey filler they plug the plotholes with isn't meant to hold up in the long term. It keeps the story going, for sure, but doesn't really address the larger issues of storysprawl, rampant cast growth, and inadequate narrative infrastructure. For that it's necessary to look at the bigger picture of the stories we tell, how we tell them, and our future storytelling needs.
I guess we should just be thankful we don't have a plothole problem as bad as Toronto's.
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