Everything I Know About Writing I Learned from the Killers' Mr. Brightside, Part 2 of 2
gotta gotta be down because i want it all
We’re back for Part 2 of the hit series!
Where we left off in Part 1, we were racing toward the climactic midpoint, but right before we get there, The Killers slip in one more little moment worth lingering on.
LESSON 8: We Love An Unreliable Narrator (Up To A Point)
The line: “Now they're going to bed and my stomach is sick/
And it's all in my head, but she's touching his… /(…chest)”. What’s great about the all in his head line is that it answers something we’ve probably been wondering about all along: how does the dude know all this is happening?? He’s either omniscient, a stalker, or imagining all of it. From this, my guess is it’s probably a little of all three: as he’s falling asleep, he overhears her bumming a cigarette from someone outside his building while she waits for her cab, and then he kind of fever-dreams the rest in a frenzied, half awake bit of conjecture. “It’s all in my head” doesn’t mean none of it happened — which would be too jarring a wrench to throw into this because if none of it happened at all, what’s even the point? None of it exists, so none of it matters, so we would have lost all narrative tension and just been in that weird floaty zone. Instead, we get the sense that there’s a tension between what’s real and what nightmare scenarios his insecurities are playing out for him. And that makes for good storytelling!
The lesson for novelists is to be mindful of that balance between action and perception. Tip too far and we lose all sense of reality and with it all narrative tension. Stay too close to simply action and you could miss out on an opportunity to create layers of meaning and complexity in an otherwise too linear moment.
LESSON 9: Set Expectations, then CrUsH Those Expectations!
In that last set of lines, the rhyme scheme and narrative set up for it all to land on the word dick, but instead, of course, we launch into a whole new section of the song with the word chest! Surprise! Still steamy, and the dick part is silent but still lingering in the air like a possibility because of the unresolved rhyme, but we’ve gone in a different direction than we thought, and it keeps us on our toes. Besides the kind of meta, in-joke aspect of it, there’s a tremendous narrative momentum that can be gained from leading readers down a path that seems to lead to one place and then suddenly pulling the curtain on something completely different. Used with precision (which means not overusing it, for one thing), it puts us on alert that we have to pay attention.
As this example perfectly illustrates, this is both a story technique and a language one. When we feel the gravity of a sentence pointing at very particular directions and the writer suddenly switches it up on us in the last beat of the line, we’re thrown but often in a pleasant way, that joy of being surprised is what keeps us reading, keeps us feeling like we don’t really know where things are headed after all, keeps us wide awake and excited for all that lies ahead. Poetry is great at this! Find some and look for it!
LESSON 10: Rhythmic and Tonal Variety Matters
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