Somebody linked this on my facebook wall, and it got me to thinking about food.
That's right, food.
Have you noticed the creep of fiction length? Once upon a time, a fantasy novel might have been 50k-70k words. No longer; if you don't have 100k+ words, it feels short and not worth your dime. But what is all that filler that occurs? Mostly mellow-drama, both used as plot source and characterization. We think we're getting "deeper" into the characters, but when this is based on mellow-drama, it means the characters are necessarily shallow. Likewise, a plot based upon the petty squabblings of characters (super-heroes who fight each other based on some small insult or past relationship, often endangering the whole world for their pettiness), is a sideshow about disfunction. And not interesting disfunction, not character transforming disfunction, like a good villain or hero has, but mundane disfunction, because their problems are just like our problems.
Imagine Bruce Wayne getting all icky over some squabble over a girl with some friend, risking his overall mission for petty revenge. Now, a character who did that sort of things might be interesting, because you see how shallow they truly are, and that can become a pretty alluring exploration so long as we have a notion that this is not okay, and is in fact stupid. We shouldn't be invited to "sympathize" with a character like that as we typically are. We shouldn't think that this is 'normal' or okay, or at least we shouldn't think this makes the character layered and "deep". The primary characteristic of such a character is that he is shallow.
Yet, if we don't have all that in a book to fill it up, we don't feel quite right when its done. A modern novel has to be somewhat exhausting; it must not just sate, it must satiate. We aren't satisfied unless we are overfull, which becomes more and more difficult because it gives us expanding appetites! So we pack in more and more cheap calories in the form of mellow-drama. Our meals don't have more vitamins and minerals than they did, they've just gotten bigger, more calories laden, and actually "lighter" on nutritional density. A 1940s carrot had 40 times the magnesium of a modern store-bought carrot.
More later.
