In a nutshell, the book’s thesis is basically this: In order to solve problems, societies must add complexity. Complexity is a valid method for solving problems, but increasing complexity comes with increasing energy needs.

Once a society is no longer able to sustain the energy costs of its level of complexity (i.e. when it reaches the unsustainable end of an unsustainable model) the society collapses. Tainter provides many examples of this model in previous societies including the Roman Empire. Specifically, he claims Rome collapsed because the level of energy and capital needed to maintain the empire was solved by the continual conquering of external societies. Once there was nothing close to conquer to acquire easy resources, the society became unsustainable and collapsed.

The idea the book presents fascinates me for several reasons, because the idea seems to easily extend itself into all complexities that could aptly named societies: personalities, gadgets, markets, businesses, and even our own current struggle with oil and energy in America. But the aspect that fascinates me most, as a writer, is narrative.

In this post I’d like to talk about the narrative as a society and see if it’s possible to apply Tainter’s ideas to building a functional narrative. I’d like to examine the idea of writerly resources, and also see if there are any lessons we can glean.

Why You Should Bother Reading This

But first, I’d like to get the “why” out of the way. (Feel free to skip to the next heading if the overzealous “why” doesn’t interest you.) Why apply Tainter’s ideas to an aspect of human creation that he did not intend? I absolutely loathe the tendency in literary theory to apply, with seeming random chance, the ideas of one thinker to a system of ideas for which those ideas were not intended.

There are so many dreadful examples of this type of thing in literary theory that I can’t even begin to address them all, but, in case you don’t know what I mean, the most egregious have titles like “A Marxist Application of Capital in Examination of Dr. Suess’ The Snetches” and “Horton Hears a Who: An Neo-ecological Critique in Seventeen Parts” and “The Lorax Versus Gwendolyn Brooks: A Jungian Microbattle” and so on. Obviously, these are all fictitious examples, but you surely understand the concept.

The problem with these types of analyses is twofold:  one – these types of articles are based on the understood premise that one must publish to gain and retain university tenure and one of the easiest ways to do this is by applying whatever thinker’s ideas happen to be in vogue at the moment to whatever fiction or nonfiction also happens to be in vogue at the moment, with the understanding that the combination of the two must not have been broached before. Of course, since the spread of the vogue is tumultuous, one is never short of topics. Whether this is a valid juxtaposition (aside from its use to build a career out of gibberish) is never considered.

Two, as an extension of one: these types of articles do nothing to extend human understanding of epistemology, literature, or anything else useful – they only do what they are intended to do, which it is to create a vortex of verbose verbiage so devastatingly complex so as to shame university colleagues to admit they had neither the time, interest, or capacity to delve into its dark, demonic depths to attempt to understand it, and will be happy thus far, to extend tenure if only, please, would the Professor kindly leave the room and never speak of the broken artifice of the system again. Or, at the very least, if it must be spoken of, maintain that the system is both a healthy and valid method for determining suitability for a teaching position at a place of higher learning and the apt self-aggrandizing pat on the backside in front of lesser-published colleagues.

So, why, then, knowing all that, must I persist in this seemingly random application of Tainter’s ideas to narrative structure if I’m not pursuing tenure and know that this post will be overlooked by 99.7% of the reader’s of this site because it also seems a dark, demonic vortex of verbose verbiage? To that I answer, with a bipartite bellow: “Screw you, you dissenting curmudgeons!” and “Well, I’m interested – please feel free to regard this as a type of mental masturbation in the worst possible way.”

But in all seriousness, I’m writing this because I believe there is actual gold to be mined here. There are lessons to learn and time to be stolen from writing fiction. And I am no one if I am not a writer who enjoys analysis, lesson learning, patronizing talk, and procrastination. So onward and upwards!

Narrative as a Society

With those shenanigans out of the way, we first have to examine narrative as a society. We need to determine whether this idea can function as an actual concept, not simply a metaphor that drops its screws and cracks once sat upon by a voluptuous mental concept (a poorly built chair under a fat guy, as it were). So is it? Can a narrative be looked at as a society?

Well, a society has many things: rules, people, a structured organization, a large number of dissenting parts sometimes working together and sometimes in opposition, a beginning and an end, a capacity for thematic ability (at least as reported by the media), and a system for resource management.

Narratives also have these things – rules for format and structure (don’t you post-modernists sass me now – even in your wacky BS exploratives you still create internal structure and rules, even if they are only internally consistent, not externally), characters, plots and subplots that sometimes work together and sometimes oppose each other, a beginning and an end, themes, and creation via resource management. So far, so good. We’ve passed the fat guy test, at least, and can happily move into further exploration – can Tainter’s ideas apply to narrative?

From here on in, I’m going to assume you have either read the book or are willing to take my word on what it says (deity help you). If you’re the latter I’ll do my best to present his ideas with as much due diligence as possible, hoping not to misrepresent him in any fashion, with the exception of where it suits me to be polemical. If you have read his book and I misrepresent his ideas, feel free to call me out in any manner you see fit.

An Examination of Resources

The central tenet, as I understand it, of Tainter’s work is this: problem solving requires complexity and complexity requires energy.

Let’s take for an example a theoretical society that’s troubled by shit in the streets. They can solve this problem by adding a sewage system. However, adding a sewage system introduces complexity that requires energy: labor, capital, and the creation of some sort of regulatory body to manage the construction and maintenance of the system. If the society is able to sustain that level of energy, they can happily build a sewage system and reap the benefits. However, one of the benefits of a sewage system is the elongation of life, due to reduced disease.

Now, because members of the society are living longer, they have a new problem – they must solve the problem of a larger population of the elderly. They can solve this by building larger dwellings so old folks can stay with families, or retirement communities so they can live alone with the care they need, or by slaughtering everyone over the age of 65.

Separated from morality, these are all valid solutions, but each solution requires more complexity and energy, whether it’s more building materials, capital for some sort of social security, or the training of death-squads (not to mention an axe-sharpening program to sharpen their axes – they dull quickly). If the society is able to sustain the level of energy required, they move on, happy with their solution and onto new problems to solve. It continues until the society has introduced complexity but does not have the energy or resources to maintain that complexity.

Now, the main resource, or energy, as I see it, when it comes to building complex narratives is this: writer attention span. A writer can only build a narrative so long and so complex before she can no longer sustain the time and energy required to finish it. This resources contains all the constraints a writer must contend with, because they trickle down into all the aspects of writing a complex narrative: mastery of craft, mental attention span, time-management, monetary resources, artistic license, and everything else. With an unlimited amount of energy (understood to mean time, attention, and money) in the writer, a narrative of unlimited complexity can be sustained. Since this unlimited resource pool is a mere fantasy, not a reality, constraints must be introduced.

How to Structure a Narrative Based on Available Resources

The most obvious way to tailor narrative complexity is to put constraints on length. This is why so many budding authors are encouraged to begin with short-form narrative, such as the short story. Limiting the resources limit the complexity of the narrative to a sustainable amount – the hope is that the author will reach the constraints of the medium before exhausting all available energy (attention, time, money, etc).

This is, of course, assuming that the short story is compiled at a reasonable level of craft. A story can be anything, but remember, more complexity requires more energy, so the most ingénue authors should probably begin with one sentence stories. Flash fiction is the current term in vogue for this concept. Once flash fiction has been mastered, and indeed, this requires a mastery of sentence level grammar, pacing, and all those other tiny little rules that loom so monumentous on the dark horizon, other lengthier forms can be attempted.

That’s the idea, anyhow. But artificial constraints on length doesn’t really teach us anything about narrative structure, only narrative form, so perhaps it’s not the best place to limit our resources. We could, of course, focus on plot instead. Instead of limiting ourselves to 3000 words, limit ourselves to a single thread or plot, or two threads at most, and put upon ourselves the idea that every sentence in the narrative must advance either of those two threads – any sentence, or even word, that does not advance those threads must be trimmed so as to maintain sustainability. This is another obvious notion, once it’s considered.

So we have two limits so far – length and plot threads. Other constraints can also be applied – number of characters, length of scenes, length of sentences – aspects of the narrative can be limited forever until we can reach a sustainable medium. But how, exactly, does one determine what to limit? Maybe you’ve found no difficulty writing a 200,000 word magnum opus when given the chance, but the work never feels complete. Or maybe you can’t seem to write for more than 20 minutes without needing to eat, sleep, drink coffee, urinate, play with the thermostat, or see what the significant other is doing and whether she/he/it happens to feel particularly amorous at the moment.  What then?

The trick, I think, is to examine what exactly you were writing before your energy (attention) became unsustainable and simplify that aspect of your narrative. Please keep in mind that this does not have to be the last sentence you were writing, or even the last paragraph. The lesson to be learned from Tainter is that the issue is the problem that was solved that increased complexity to an unsustainable energy level. This is the thing that must be eliminated. Maybe this happened three pages ago when you introduced your third new character in as many pages and had to take a break because now all the characters are meeting for the first time and you can’t figure out how to make character three interesting. The issue is the addition of the character, not the meeting. It happened three pages ago. Of course, it doesn’t just have to be the character, it can be any of the constraints we previously mentioned or something else we haven’t considered.

Now, this lesson needs two important caveats that must be introduced right now, right before the protests comes tumbling out of your mouth. I can hear you mumbling under your breath already (or was that the cat in the other room? Can cats mumble? HEY! DON’T GET DISTRACTED!) – so I have to address these two things.

One, don’t use this idea as an excuse to not test yourself. That’s a gross misapplication. If you know that you’ve gotten messed up by adding a third character in the past, that doesn’t mean you always have to limit yourself to two characters. You don’t know with all certainly, unless you’ve performed extensive experiments, that it was the third character (and not just the third latte) that made your narrative unsustainable. Also, self-limiting in all circumstances is lame. Keep trying. Each narrative is a new society and you don’t know what limits that narrative has until you reach unsustainability.

Two – Tainter writes in his book that once a society has reached a level of complexity, even if that level is unsustainable, that the complexity can probably not be removed, because removing the complexity simply adds more complexity, which requires more energy, and speeds up the collapse of the society. What lesson can we draw from this?

Well, first we have to assume that he’s right. Second, we have to assume that he’s right even when applied to narrative as a society. Third, if we’re cool with those two assumptions, we should draw this lesson: finish the narrative as soon as possible.

The reasoning is this: societies become unsustainable (cue music: Danger Zone) before they collapse. The trick is to practice enough that you understand and recognize the threshold when your narrative crosses over into unsustainability and finish the narrative before that unsustainability requires the collapse of the narrative. There is a window there that can be exploited, and indeed, must be exploited with as much caffine, adderall, alone-time, and whatever else crammed into as short a timeline as possible.

Oh, and just in case you’re reading this, Stephen King, the Dark Tower series reached unsustainability at the beginning of book five, but you didn’t finish the narrative inside the important window, hence, the rest of the series sucked. I commend you for trying something absurdly grand, however, and I look forward to you trying again. Also, did you get the flowers I left on your doorstep, Stephen? I waited outside for three days, but left when I saw the cops coming. I hope you liked them!

Call to Action

Okay, let’s review, before this article becomes unsustainable, too. I’m in the window, folks. I’ve written this all in one sitting and my brain is starting to hurt, just a little. So let’s sum up, draw some conclusions, and get outta Dodge.

What have we learned here? Quick, let’s say it out loud before we get too distracted: one – narratives should be limited somehow to our level of sustainable energy. Two – we still need to determine the mechanism by which the unsustainable threshold can be identified so we can practice spotting it and know when to dial it back and finish the thing. Three – uh, is there a three?

Ummm…three…uh…crap.

My attention has just collapsed.

It’s about newspapers transitioning into the digital age, but it fits the discussion we’ve been having from the last post. It’s definitely worth a read. What do you think?