I learned about this principle from the Stuff to Blow your Mind episode “The Gods must be Counterintuitive” — their example of a story that goes too far is a Brothers Grimm tale “Donkey Cabbages”, which is associated with this engraving. It’s an awf… — I learned about this principle from the *Stuff to Blow your Mind* episode “The Gods must be Counterintuitive” — their example of a story that goes too far is a Brothers Grimm tale “Donkey Cabbages”, which is associated with this engraving. It’s an awful, hard-to-remember story.

This piece was originally the end of Monday’s, and hinges upon some of the things that were said there (particularly the discussion of myth-functions and MacBeth.) I’d suggest reading it, but you can probably catch up without it.

There is a trait shared by all of the stories that I mentioned, and it contributes to their success – they all achieve memorability by including what I call a “minimally contradictory element” (or, “MCE”.) A minimally contradictory element is something that diverges from what is expected but which seems obvious after you see it.

Consider: “the Smith and the Devil” is the story of an immortal, supernatural being getting outsmarted by a mortal. MacBeth is about a hero turning on his king for his own benefit. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” shows a sailor committing the sin of killing the albatross that saved his ship. Mad Max: Fury Road showed an abject man helping to save a group of vulnerable women, led by a woman who had become the right hand of the misogynist “living god” who was chasing them.

Each of them has an important divergence from the expected pattern: the mortal wins; the hero betrays; the mariner kills; the right-hand is a woman. Paradoxes like these pull in the reader, presenting them with a mystery that they want a solution to, even in a story where a mystery isn’t the point. The contradiction draws attention, waking a viewer who might otherwise fall asleep at the end of the first act.

Finding a point to insert an MCE is part of the reason that considering things from the paradigmatic standpoint is one of the pieces of advice that I give people. To make a narrative work (or, honestly, any artwork: a technically perfect painting with an odd design choice will be more memorable than a completely technically perfect painting; a well-made savory dish with a hint of cinnamon will be more memorable than an identical dish without) you need a point of divergence from the expected, so you have to know what’s expected in the type of story you’re trying to tell.

Consider, also, the original Star Wars features an MCE, but it’s only apparent in context. Star Wars (not yet subtitled “Episode IV: A New Hope” at release. George Lucas has been a revisionist from day one) was released in 1977. Other popular science fiction films of that decade (only including ones released before Star Wars here) included:

Soylent Green.
Omega Man.
A Boy and His Dog.
Dark Star.
Logan’s Run.
Rollerball.
Westworld.
Zardoz.
A Clockwork Orange.
Solaris.

Which should give you an idea of the timbre of predictions about the future being made: almost nothing but cannibalism, rape, and bad feelings without a particular source. Star Wars bringing in a mythic tone and an adventurous spirit changed things drastically. The movie itself was minimally contradictory: what if we made something with the tone of the things we loved as kids, but using what we know now? What if the good guy is actually good, and can actually win?

George Lucas isn’t a gold-plated genius, he recognized not only that people expected dystopic stories, but that they were getting tired of them. That the studios had locked themselves into a loop of making one type of movie because that was apparently the only type that sold (ignoring that it was the only kind that they made.) Consider the tone of the original Star Wars theatrical trailer. Notice the music: the orchestral bombast of John Williams is missing, replaced by a tense, repetitive string piece and knowing the tone of the film makes it seem uncanny and wrong. They were trying to make an adventure story seem dark and threatening, when they had made a movie that would be beloved by children as a thrilling adventure for decades.

In short, they made that presentation because that was what the studios expected, but they knew what kind of movie they had made. They knew it was nothing like that. The whole experience was a contradiction, but it was a pleasant contradiction because it was throwing back to the adventure stories that people had grown up with – all Buck Rogers and Star Trek (aesthetically. Star Wars couldn’t be made without Star Trek. Don’t @ me, I say, despite the fact that I’m not even on Twitter.)

Of course, following this, Star Wars style adventure science fiction became the default for a while, despite the fact that there were still more dark, dystopian stories being made (including The Empire Strikes Back, which is closer to the more popular tone of science fiction, is acknowledged as the best of the original trilogy, and is still seen as a departure. People feel that the darker tone of Empire is an innovation, when it’s more of a return to baseline, brought on by greater studio involvement.) The original film had such an impact on the zeitgeist that it convinced people that something rare was standard.

Hey, remember Krull (1983)? No? Maybe there’s a reason for that. It’s essentially the “Donkey Cabbages” of science fantasy. — Hey, remember *Krull* (1983)? No? Maybe there’s a reason for that. It’s essentially the “Donkey Cabbages” of science fantasy.

Sure, there were a number of imitators (Paramount tried to keep up with 20th Century Fox with Star Trek, with mixed results,) but they are less memorable, because they were no longer contradictions. Because Star Wars worked, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Krull, and Laserblast did not.

In short, what counts as contradictory depends on your audience and what they’ve seen. This is why a lot of contemporary science fiction seems aesthetically bankrupt. Much as there’s an Overton Window in politics, you can imagine there being a “window of normality” or some such in the arts, and seminal works are those that hit the sweet spot right at the edge of it, shifting the window. But this means that creating a seminal work is chasing a moving target: what seems normal shifts with what comes out.

This is why I say you should start with a simple premise and include MCEs to differentiate it from all of the other expected stories. Of course, what counts as “a simple premise” is very culturally dependent. I love Neon Genesis Evangelion, but if you tried to boil down that plot and present it in a series of engravings to Elizabethan England, you would quickly lose your engraving shop. The “teenager piloting a giant robot” idea was at one point a MCE (and an extremely metaphorically-charged one: you can’t stuff a child into a massive, armored simulacrum of an adult body and force them to fight without it being a commentary on the nature of war. At minimum.), but quickly spread and was established enough to be used as the foundational premise for another MCE.

I happen to think that chronologically after Star Wars the most influential science fiction film was Independence Day – and we’re still, essentially, living out the Independence Day period, where spectacle trumps everything else. A very solid argument that The Matrix beat out Independence Day in cultural importance, but even The Matrix was just fusing the elements of Star Wars and Independence Day together (it did so in an innovative way, but it was the fusion of mythic scale and spectacle, and when you get down to it.)

China Miéville (previously mentioned here,) photographed by Chris Close, taken from BOMB magazine. Pretty much everything he writes is just a bit askew from normal reality.

Note: I’m looking at films here because literature – including genre literature – tends to be hyper-conservative. I could talk about horror, but then I’m really just talking about Bram Stoker, Lovecraft, and King. I could talk about fantasy, but then I have to talk principally about J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Jordan – and, honestly, I think that the rebellions against the dominant fantasy paradigm (the so-called “New Weird”, in short) are far more interesting.

I’m getting off into the weeds.

Let me summarize: to make a piece of art good, it has to be memorable (admittedly, it’s a bit of a square vs. rectangle thing. Not everything memorable is good.) To make something memorable, you need a contradiction easy enough for your audience to easily remember.

What counts as contradictory and what counts as too big to easily remember depends on your audience. This is why artists are often given the instruction to know your audience.

It’s good advice, you should take it. And if you don’t have an audience you should invent one in your head that you want to appeal to. Try writing with one particular person in mind and see if that makes it easier.

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The Principle of Minimal Contradiction: Memorability and Storytelling