Incommunicado

And The Idiot Plot

This probably belongs in the Tropes I’m Tired Of series (see Tropes I’m Tired Of, Tropes I’m Tired of Spec Fic Edition, Tropes I’m Thankful For, and Tropes I’m Thankful For 2022 Edition), however, I’m so spectacularly tired of it that I feel I can fill at least 1,800 words complaining about it with room for little or nothing else. Also, I’m pressed for time and rant episodes of Shelf Life fly onto the page.

I’m going to be honest with you: I can get into most tropes as long as I feel like they’re harmless. By harmless I mean, I can’t get into a trope that relies on harmful stereotypes of people, but if it’s something like like “We were pretending to date each other to get our families off our backs and then we fell in love for real,” you know, I’m sure I can enjoy the story even though it’s an overused plotline. If it were a trope like “unemployed single mother earns her living by scamming wealthy men but accidentally falls in love with one of her marks” then I’m simply not going to read that book.

But there is one trope that, while mostly harmless in terms of people stereotypes just pushes my buttons to a degree that I cannot enjoy the story that employs it. So, today’s Shelf Life is an ode to this terrible trope that no one should ever use, why no one should ever use it, and some ways to steer a plot back to more engaging territory if you find yourself accidentally in these dangerous waters.

I say “accidentally” because everyone’s mileage will vary. There may be some people who love this trope and can’t get enough of it. I’ve never heard of anyone enjoying this trope for itself, but that’s not to say no one does. If someone’s out there using this trope wittingly (on purpose), then you do you and ignore the rest.

The trope that grinds my gears is:

None of it would have happened if only two people had communicated.

I do not like it in romance novels where the main characters are hopelessly in love with each other but, because they won’t just talk to each other, each is convinced the other one actually hates them. I don’t like it in the Harry Potter series where most of the plots would have been immediately resolved if Harry had just talked to any adult about his situation. I don’t like it in detective fiction or mysteries when the mistrustful protagonist keeps all their cards to themself when simply talking to another character would have allowed them to add up the information and find the culprit. I do not like it, Sam I am.

What bothers me is when characters don’t or can’t communicate for no other reason than the plot demands they don’t or can’t. Put another way, if I, as the reader, can’t understand or accept the reasons the author has laid out for why these characters just won’t say three clarifying words to each other—or if the author offers no reason—then we have a failure to apportion enough plot for the story at hand.

The miscommunication/lack of communication trope hinges upon the reader buying whatever excuse there is for why the characters can’t communicate crucial information. I want to believe that everyone—every consumer of story—has at some point in their story-consuming career had a moment of wanting to scream at page, stage, or screen when characters were being obnoxiously obtuse for no discernible reason. I have had that feeling plenty of times.

I read a book recently—I won’t name it but I feel like plenty of people will recognize it from this description because it’s fairly popular right now—where a good portion of the plot hinged on a young girl and an older woman failing to communicate, in a more buttoned-up Victorian era, about the girl’s first period. Like the girl and the older woman just kept communicating back and forth in vague terms and oblique euphemisms and it all ended up in a suicide plot. I had to put the book down. Oh my god please just ask someone what you want to know before you literally jump off a bridge.

It was infuriating. It was infuriating because: The young girl was depicted as clever and resourceful through the rest of the book, and the older woman compassionate, also resourceful, and much more aware of what was going on in the world around her than she let on. As the book went on and the failure to communicate dragged out in service of the plot it just got less and less believable and more and more contrived until I was completely exasperated. The failure to communicate did not feel truthful and appropriate to the characters as they were otherwise written. 

I feel like the author hung the entire plot on the stereotype that Victorian-era anglos were too prudish to talk about menstruation but like . . . we know half that entire society menstruated and got on with it, right? I really think any thinking person would summon the will to talk about an unpleasant subject before they summoned the will to jump off a bridge.

If a plot is going to hinge on a simple failure of communication between two (or more) people, there had better be a great, believable reason why these people can’t (or don’t) get past whatever their issues are and figure it out. Some good reasons might include:

• Someone is deliberately being deceitful (eg, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern subplot in Hamlet);

• There’s a clash of cultures that makes communication impossible (popular in science fiction); or

• You’re in a comedy of manners/comedy of errors that is satirizing this very trope (eg, The Importance of Being Earnest).

For an example of a culture clash and a comedy of errors smashed into one, consider the dolphins trying to tell humans to get the heck off the planet in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I believe the failure-to-communicate trope is overused because it has such a glorious history in English. I feel like half the Shakespeare oeuvre and most of Jane Austen’s novels depend on it. If this is such a well-loved trope in our literary history, what exactly makes it go bad sometimes when authors attempt it?

If you read Roger Ebert’s 1990 review of Narrow Margin, he talks about “the idiot plot,” which, in his words, is: 

Any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot.

I posit that when the miscommunication/lack of communication trope fails it’s most often not because of any failure of the trope itself, but that to make it hang together the author had to employ an idiot plot. That if any character, anywhere in the story, would stop being an idiot for one second and ask a critical question, the problem would be resolved.

This trope is stripped naked and held up to the light in Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace,” and is what makes that story so tragic. There’s a story that asks the dramatic question, “would you rather ruin your entire life or spend thirty seconds speaking to another human being?” Do not let an introvert make this important decision.

If you want to use miscommunication as a plot device, it is imperative that you hold your characters and their actions up to an extreme level of scrutiny and ensure they are not all acting like idiots. Anyone, however intelligent and capable, can have a moment of temporary idiocy—the idiot plot, though, depends on everyone being an idiot at the same time. This is never going to stand up to an audience. It is incumbent upon the writer to provide solid, believable reasons why communication was impossible.

A simple way to make sure you’re not employing an idiot plot with this trope is to assign the cause of the miscommunication to a bad actor; that is, a character deliberately impeding communication between other parties for their own purposes. For instance: Two characters who are hopelessly in love but won’t actually talk to one another because they’re both just too awkward is going to irritate me. However, if you throw in another character who is purposely trying to keep the couple from revealing their feelings, these characters go from being idiots to being deceived. 

A character can be a bad actor in foiling good communication for nefarious purposes—for instance, when Wickham in Pride and Prejudice sabotages Darcy’s pursuit of Elizabeth—or for benign ones—for instance, when Emma Woodhouse in Emma discourages Harriet’s interest in Mr. Martin.

If your plot hinges on miscommunication, make sure the reasons are rock solid and logical and that your characters are intelligent and behave coherently. In my opinion this is one of the easiest ones to get wrong.

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