Creative Writing and the Avoidance of Cabbage
In creative writing, there is a useful technique for getting information to the reader without a long introduction with copious background information. No doubt we’re all aware of the movie that opens with a narrator giving us the back-story to set the scene for the action to come in a massive info-dump.
“It is the year 2268 AD and the world’s population have rebelled against the technology of terror warfare, blamed for the great holocaust of 2207...” This could go on for several pages before we actually get to even meet the protagonist. Most writers know that info-dumping like this is to be avoided. But there is a better way to get this information to the audience, and good writers do it well. The technique I'm talking about is clever use of dialogue.
The trick is to get your characters to say things that will clue your audience in on what they need to know. Imagine a couple of field workers taking a break from their work, and one saying to the other, “My Grandfather always says that the worst thing about the 2207 holocaust was that it’s been over sixty years since anyone could legally get a decent cappuccino.” What I've done here is to relate the same information (or much of it) in a comment that might realistically be said by the character in the situation.
When done well, this can be an unobtrusive method of cluing your audience in on the vital information they need to understand some of the peculiarities of an otherwise unfamiliar setting. The problem that follows is that done poorly, the info-dump can just get shifted from the narrator to a character.
Another thing that often happens is that the author, realising that they can sneak information into dialogue, realises that they can also impart ideas or opinions that they want to communicate to their audience into the same type of dialogue. Writers often write books with more than just the desire to tell a good story, but often with the hope of communicating ideas or opinions to their audience. this is particularly true of a lot of science fiction writing, where not just the story itself is offered for critique by the audience, but also the ideas and themes behind it.
The danger here is that a character in a story is now being used as a mouthpiece for the author, and that the author will shoehorn their words into a piece of dialogue that can’t naturally contain them.
These two dialogue issues are similar, and both fall into the category of dialogue known as “cabbage”. Cabbage is any dialogue that is forced or unnatural for the characters in the setting, and exists purely for the purpose of communicating with the audience, rather than playing out the story and moving the plot forward.
The problem with cabbage is not that the information is being shared, but that it is being shared in an obtrusive and generally artless way. Consider a six year old telling a teacher “my family is having financial trouble because my alcoholic father gambles too much,” clearly an extraordinarily precocious child, and far too well informed. It would be more likely that the child doesn't understand the situation any more than “Mummy says I can’t have lunch today because Daddy gave all the money to the horses.”
A common mistake is to resort to the “as you know” cabbage statements. “As you know, Mike, the government have outlawed time travel experimentation after they discovered what Nikola Tesla had been doing all those years ago.” The problem with this statement is that Mike already knows this information, and the speaker knows that he knows it, because they began by saying so. No one bothers to tell someone what they are sure that person knows. What a character might say instead is “what are you doing? Time travel is illegal. Leave me out of this. You know what happened to Tesla.” Now the audience knows the relevant information, and they are curious about what happened to Tesla.
Part of good story telling is immersing the audience in the world and the events of the story. We want our readers to engage with our characters and feel like they are spending time in the settings we have carefully crafted. We go to a great deal of trouble to hook readers at the ends of pages and chapters so that they will read on into the next section. We don’t want anything to disrupt that process, because if they disengage too much too often, they may get bored and do something else.
In theatrical history, Burtolt Brecht described this disengagement as the Verfremdungseffekt or the “V-effect" as it has become known. This was something he intentionally tried to achieve in theatre to make his audiences disengage from the plot and the characters and think about the issues he was focusing on. He wanted people to critique his ideas, or their own. He wanted people to consider, or reconsider their feelings about certain issues, and he was more than happy to sacrifice their engagement with the characters and plot to achieve that end.
In more modern terminology we call this “breaking the fourth wall”. Imagine a stage set of a kitchen scene; the room has only three walls, so that we can see in from the audience. As we engage with the plot and the characters, we imagine there is a fourth wall to the room, and that the characters are really in their kitchen arguing about Aunt Mavis or whatever, and on some level we temporarily forget that we are an audience member who bought a ticket and sat in a theatre to watch the show. If a character in the kitchen turns to look directly at the audience and asks in the actor’s normal voice, “are you all enjoying the show?” they have broken down our imaginary fourth wall, and reminded us that we are watching actors on a stage.
As we read a novel, we generally don’t want to be reminded that we are sitting on a train on our way to work and reading a novel to pass the time. Cabbage dialogue draws our attention to the author’s hands in the same way that that a clumsy puppeteer might accidentally draw our attention to the strings of a marionette. The illusion is broken and now instead of being a fly on the wall in a great spy adventure or a romantic interlude on a magical island, I am once again, someone who is sitting on an uncomfortably crowded train on my way to work.
“It is the year 2268 AD and the world’s population have rebelled against the technology of terror warfare, blamed for the great holocaust of 2207...” This could go on for several pages before we actually get to even meet the protagonist. Most writers know that info-dumping like this is to be avoided. But there is a better way to get this information to the audience, and good writers do it well. The technique I'm talking about is clever use of dialogue.
The trick is to get your characters to say things that will clue your audience in on what they need to know. Imagine a couple of field workers taking a break from their work, and one saying to the other, “My Grandfather always says that the worst thing about the 2207 holocaust was that it’s been over sixty years since anyone could legally get a decent cappuccino.” What I've done here is to relate the same information (or much of it) in a comment that might realistically be said by the character in the situation.
When done well, this can be an unobtrusive method of cluing your audience in on the vital information they need to understand some of the peculiarities of an otherwise unfamiliar setting. The problem that follows is that done poorly, the info-dump can just get shifted from the narrator to a character.
Another thing that often happens is that the author, realising that they can sneak information into dialogue, realises that they can also impart ideas or opinions that they want to communicate to their audience into the same type of dialogue. Writers often write books with more than just the desire to tell a good story, but often with the hope of communicating ideas or opinions to their audience. this is particularly true of a lot of science fiction writing, where not just the story itself is offered for critique by the audience, but also the ideas and themes behind it.
The danger here is that a character in a story is now being used as a mouthpiece for the author, and that the author will shoehorn their words into a piece of dialogue that can’t naturally contain them.
These two dialogue issues are similar, and both fall into the category of dialogue known as “cabbage”. Cabbage is any dialogue that is forced or unnatural for the characters in the setting, and exists purely for the purpose of communicating with the audience, rather than playing out the story and moving the plot forward.
The problem with cabbage is not that the information is being shared, but that it is being shared in an obtrusive and generally artless way. Consider a six year old telling a teacher “my family is having financial trouble because my alcoholic father gambles too much,” clearly an extraordinarily precocious child, and far too well informed. It would be more likely that the child doesn't understand the situation any more than “Mummy says I can’t have lunch today because Daddy gave all the money to the horses.”
A common mistake is to resort to the “as you know” cabbage statements. “As you know, Mike, the government have outlawed time travel experimentation after they discovered what Nikola Tesla had been doing all those years ago.” The problem with this statement is that Mike already knows this information, and the speaker knows that he knows it, because they began by saying so. No one bothers to tell someone what they are sure that person knows. What a character might say instead is “what are you doing? Time travel is illegal. Leave me out of this. You know what happened to Tesla.” Now the audience knows the relevant information, and they are curious about what happened to Tesla.
Part of good story telling is immersing the audience in the world and the events of the story. We want our readers to engage with our characters and feel like they are spending time in the settings we have carefully crafted. We go to a great deal of trouble to hook readers at the ends of pages and chapters so that they will read on into the next section. We don’t want anything to disrupt that process, because if they disengage too much too often, they may get bored and do something else.
In theatrical history, Burtolt Brecht described this disengagement as the Verfremdungseffekt or the “V-effect" as it has become known. This was something he intentionally tried to achieve in theatre to make his audiences disengage from the plot and the characters and think about the issues he was focusing on. He wanted people to critique his ideas, or their own. He wanted people to consider, or reconsider their feelings about certain issues, and he was more than happy to sacrifice their engagement with the characters and plot to achieve that end.
In more modern terminology we call this “breaking the fourth wall”. Imagine a stage set of a kitchen scene; the room has only three walls, so that we can see in from the audience. As we engage with the plot and the characters, we imagine there is a fourth wall to the room, and that the characters are really in their kitchen arguing about Aunt Mavis or whatever, and on some level we temporarily forget that we are an audience member who bought a ticket and sat in a theatre to watch the show. If a character in the kitchen turns to look directly at the audience and asks in the actor’s normal voice, “are you all enjoying the show?” they have broken down our imaginary fourth wall, and reminded us that we are watching actors on a stage.
As we read a novel, we generally don’t want to be reminded that we are sitting on a train on our way to work and reading a novel to pass the time. Cabbage dialogue draws our attention to the author’s hands in the same way that that a clumsy puppeteer might accidentally draw our attention to the strings of a marionette. The illusion is broken and now instead of being a fly on the wall in a great spy adventure or a romantic interlude on a magical island, I am once again, someone who is sitting on an uncomfortably crowded train on my way to work.
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