The Big "If"
how we make nothing (and everything) happen
I rewatch this one tv show every four months or so.
I guzzle the 16 episodes over two days, always on my phone, always swimming in feelings. It’s an escape ritual, a spiritual retreat, and yet another class for my lifelong inadvertent creative writing MFA.
(Am I going to tell you the name of the show? Nah. I’m embarrassed, and I love it with a clandestine, starry zeal. My relationship with the show is like the octopus Argonauta argo. If it sees us, it scuttles away.)
I learn so much writing craft from this tv show. Yes, I took writing classes in college and graduate school, and I’ve read more than a few craft books. I’m grateful for 99% of them. It all goes into the pot of confidence and experimentation on the page.
But I learn the most from movies and tv, both the things made and the making of them. (Have I told you about my Mad Max: Fury Road wall? Also, lately, my slim compendium of weaving knowledge has helped me approach a new phase of the novel. “Learn anything” is the lesson, I guess? )
From my beloved secret show, I learn about the power of brazen colors. I learn about simplicity in dialogue. I learn how to make a landscape convey a moral code. I learn how to create intimacy through movement, and how to get shivery delight out of big emotions in still bodies. At least I learn enough to try.
(Will I tell you the show’s name now? No. But here are three clues. It has two seasons, it’s not White Lotus, and it’s not Sesame Street.)
This past April, I finally heard the music.
This is a show with a lot of music. We’re talking snippets of 100+ pop songs across the two seasons.
The first season’s music is wonderful—exciting and cheeky and amplifying the scenes with a benevolent, loving, multi-dimensional awareness far bigger than any one character or plot point. Am I describing soundtrack as god-force? Yes. And it’s great.
The second season is not.
The second season has more songs and more songs that are all the same. They sound the same, but even worse, they feel emotionally the same. Even the ones in French!
Ugh. I grew bored and irritated as I watched. Yet our dissatisfactions are exceptional teachers, so I asked myself, what the ugh is happening here? why?
You will be shocked and ecstatic at the answer. Get out the party poppers and the bass-heavy club tracks!
It has to do with lyrics. It’s about grammar.
Nearly every season-two song operates on an “if.” The word “if” or a variation thereof is in almost all of them! This means the songs are written in the conditional tense.
As in, almost nothing ever actually happens. The lyrics only pose questions, spin out fantasies. They wonder, and want, and remember, and fret. They live in what might happen, what we wish could happen.
If I did this, would you do that? If I just changed I would be like this, like this! Would you want me then? Will you see me there? Can you ever take my hand? Will you let it go? Just picture me, picture me, picture me. I can’t remember your face! I’m so scared we won’t be happy again. We could be free.
This is lovely and fine and as soon as I realized the pattern, I hated it.
Such suspension of action makes sense in season two. The show soaks the characters in a honeyed preemptive nostalgia, a longing for the present moment as it’s happening. It’s kind of achy and sweet, and inward-facing, circular lyrics fit.
But for pete’s sake, nothing happens. In all these songs, nothing ever happens. En masse, they become zombie songs, full of the shapes of emotion without bodies in time or space, without any weather, without any choices or consequences.
Jeez! What’s the deal with songs where no one never has to live life? What’s the deal with 46 songs like this in a row?
Then, as often happens in inadvertent life-based MFA programs, a lustrous valley of craft opened before me.
Whatever’s going on with the tv show and its songs, look at what the conditional can help us do in our writing.
The conditional keeps at least two realities alive at once. A brilliant friend (Hi, Cheyenne!) pointed this out to me. A line can suggest what’s actually happening without stating it, by referring to what “would be.” 2 for 1! Everyone gets a Schrödinger's cat!
Say you’re working on a story or song or memoir or play or essay. (You’re in a rewriting phase, well after the long unbridled romp of the early drafts.) When might a character speak in the “if,” in fantasy and hope, keeping two realities alive but being disembodied in both?
Are they living in shame? Are they afraid of losing possibilities? Or they don’t believe they can make choices for change?
Are they seeking power? Do they want to control an overwhelming experience? (And what was it?) Control how other people see them?
Maybe they haven’t had much real experience to talk about, so the “if” gives them a big emotional contrast? A way to feel real? Prove themselves?
Are they theoretical physicists? Or gamers?
Do they just love anticipation and imagination a million times more than reality?
Maybe their culture punishes mistakes or differences, and the “if” is a way to escape and explore freedom?
And then, what needs to happen to change an “if” character? What bumps them into action, or at least telling stories where things happen? How do they react when pressed into action? How do they need to change, or how does the world around them need to change? No telling if this is a positive or negative thing. Just the opportunity to change or not, which is what stories are.
Also, are we keeping our writing in perpetual “ifs”? Always in fantasy, always in maybe, always in question? Do we notice that in our work? Do we want it?
And in the craft of our lives, do we ever speak with a lot of “if”? When and where do we seek out the “if” in art? Do we want to change? How? Or not?
(To be clear, these are all questions to ask of our selves and work with a light, curious touch, if at all. The answers waft back to us in odd moments unloading the dishwasher and in dreams, in journal scribbles and the unbearably lucky making of another cup of tea. Don’t worry about it, what I’m trying to say.)
I’m still irritated at the second season of my anonymous ur-text tv show. But I can’t deny the power of “if,” that crafty half-lit firecracker.
If I ask you what you think about “if” in your writing or life, will you tell me?
In Other News
Watch This Flick!
The extraordinary independent documentary YOUR FAT FRIEND is available for streaming this month.
Please, if you have 96 minutes, if you have $15, watch it. Go here to watch the trailer and rent it. I promise you, it will uplift, challenge, and move you.
Podcast News
The Read to Me podcast will debut a new episode in June… with an enhanced format… new music… and a co-host! No ifs. It’s happening.
Other Writing
Because my friend and business coach will lovingly tsk me if I don’t, here are links to my recent and other writings. Thanks for reading.📖💖
***On Argonauta argo: “When the air is serene, the sea calm, and she believes herself unobserved, the Argonauta adorns herself with her beauties; but I had to be prudent enough to enjoy her rich colors and graceful pose, for this animal is very suspicious, and as soon as it perceives that it is being observed, it withdraws its membranes into its shell in the blink of an eye and flees to the bottom of the cage or the sea, reemerging to the surface only when it thinks it is safe from all danger.” Jeanne Villepreux-Power
Thanks Becky! This is a piece that I'll come back to more than once. It poses an interesting question(s) that as an aspiring writer, will be useful to pay attention to!
Fabulous writing advice! ‘What if’ opens a view to another world, not necessarily a comforting view. Most of Euripides is what-if based. And hello, dear Becky, I’m so glad I found you here in the course of trying to catch up with my favorite folks. Xo