[Op-Ed] Not every story is worth telling

The Comic Industry, much like Hollywood, has a very specific problem. There’s no name for this problem that I’ve been able to find, so I’m going to coin a phrase that accurately encapsulates the nature of the problem.

That phrase is “creative socialism.”

It’s the belief, whether real or imagined, that all ideas are equally good and have equal value and merit. And just like socialism, this is a false belief that’s done more harm than good. Here’s why…

A story… a GOOD story… requires a few basic ingredients to work. You need a protagonist who is the object of the reader’s focus. You need a conflict that presents a challenge to the protagonist during whatever journey they’re on. By the end of the story, either the protagonist or the world around the protagonist has to have undergone a meaningful change.

Ideally, the reader can connect with all these ingredients on both an intellectual and emotional level to make the story memorable, and above all else, the goal of a story is to engage the reader, either as entertainment, the transmission of a unique message, or both.

That’s an incredibly high-level recipe for a story, but if you look back throughout history at every story that’s endured, you find all these ingredients.

Come back to the present day, and what do you find from the larger Comics Publishers? Recycled, rebooted storylines where the faces and names change, but the story goes to the same place or nowhere at all. Cool “concepts” or interesting “ideas” about what to do with established characters but no coherent journey for the characters to undertake. Excessive bouts of decompression where the first leg of a journey from point A to point B spans multiple issues but barely takes a few steps forward.

There is possibly a myriad of reasons why these storytelling missteps occur, but it always goes back to the root of the problem – Not every idea is a good one, and not every story is worth telling.

If I leave my home for a trip to the market to get milk, and I return without incident after purchasing milk, technically, that’s a story. But it’s a story that fails to satisfy the most important goal – engaging the reader.
Nobody cares about my trip to the market. More importantly, nobody is going to pay money to hear my story about going to the market.

Therefore, my story isn’t one worth telling to anyone other than friends and family who want to know where I’ve been for the last 20 minutes.

How do we fix this “creative socialism”? The answer starts with self-awareness and the acceptance that what you, as the creator, think is interesting may not be interesting to anyone else. At the risk of sounding counter-intuitive, stories are not meant for the creator, they’re meant for the audience that hears them.

In its purest form, storytelling is a giving process. Creators are giving something new to the world. But that giving comes with a responsibility to ensure what’s given has value. How do you know if a story has value? Listen to your audience, get to know them, and give them the stories you know they crave and are receptive to hearing.

If you hear a creator say, “I only write my stories for me,” RUN. If you hear a creator say, “The audience doesn’t know what they want. We have to tell them,” RUN. If you hear a creator say, “I don’t listen to feedback,” RUN. These are creators intentionally sabotaging their role as a storyteller.

If you’re a creator, don’t take this Op-Ed as a personal attack. It’s meant to highlight a problem many feel but few articulate. But understand this, your first obligation as a storyteller is to engage your audience. If your story doesn’t pass that first test, dump it or rework it. Better to be known as a great creator who takes too much time than a bad creator who spews out junk constantly.

If you’re an editor, do your job and filter the heck out of those stories. Sometimes a creator is too in love with what they’ve produced to see when their creation is not up to snuff. It’s hard, but you’ve got to protect them from themselves. That sometimes means saying, “no, this isn’t good enough.”

Ultimately, we all want good stories, but we’ve fallen into this trap of thinking all creators and their story ideas should be treated as equally good. They’re not, and the sooner we get back to publishing what works and scrapping what doesn’t, the better off we’ll be.

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