A story should insist on what it needs.
Think of, for example, a standard melody. A standard is both stripped and canonical, it will teach itself to its listener immediately and break its way into mindless humming forever, and yet insist on new interpretations of feeling and circumstance.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow is an American standard, and the words matter less than its opening octave and the play inside of that octave in the first four bars. Those first four bars are so suggestive, so evocative of what could be, that they are enough to bear endless variations as long as we are given the first ten notes.
We may require less than that, as a variation gets deeper. Just that first octave spanning somewhere is enough to remind us of the foundational feeling of the standard long enough to learn something new about the appeal inside of this standard—longing, disappointment, contented heartbreak.
All that, from two notes. Somewhere.
From ten notes—somewhere over the rainbow, way up high—is enough craft to imagine where longing, disappointment, contented heartbreak might go in the entirety of human experience. In a jazz session, those ten notes might take us to raw heartbreak, to joy, to the bedroom. Hawaiian ukulele great Israel Kamakawiwo’ole takes those ten notes to a dreamscape that somehow challenges everything we ever thought about dreaming, or longing; he suggests that happiness is something different than we believed. Willie Nelson hits every one of those ten notes with a laugh in his voice and the edge of a fiddle against his guitar as if to say somewhere, but no where I’ve been. There’s a live recording of Tori Amos, her crowd rowdy, drunk, almost obscene and then, somewhere. Her audience stills—she moves right to where it’s almost a lullaby and makes it one, to soothe the beasts who would love her, but give her the wrong love. Patti LaBelle growls that somewhere, sings us every note in the octave, all the way up, on a slide, beckoning us to long and to be wooed and to get our heart smashed into glittering pieces, and like it. I’ll be back real soon, she says. We believe her. Somewhere.
It’s a standard because it insists on what it needs—sex, happiness, regret, control, delusion—while still evocative of why we understand it in the first place. Somewhere Over The Rainbow will always be about longing and dreams, but it asks the listener to get there by the road they’re traveling. Or to sing from where they’ve been. Where they’ll never go. Somewhere. Anywhere.
A standard is a standard because it bears up to getting played again and again, and the more it is played, the more it is to be believed. It is flexible enough to accommodate endless variation and still maintain understanding; it is generous enough to accommodate endless human moments on display. A standard exists to provide a strong enough framework to hold what we find too painful to trust to an original and untried effort.
We believe in the standard, and the standard accepts and receives what we give it without losing the reasons we trust it in the first place.
It isn’t, however, a trope. A trope isn’t even a variation on or an interpretation of the standard. A trope can never be a standard because on its own, it means very little, even if it is attractive or recurring. A trope is unable to accommodate every possible variation even when it is a powerful one. In a story, it is an element used by multiple stories within notable time frames. Tropes, then, change. Standards, the stripped down elemental standard, do not.
It’s very easy to lose sight of this. To invest a trope with timelessness and flexibility that it simply can’t have. It’s also difficult to precisely identify tropes, because they change and are necessarily unstable, and because there are so many and some are so recurrent and enduring that they may seem to be standards.
When we invest a trope with the faith or belief that it will bear endless interpretation, we’re actually limiting the broader scope of our craft—because—such investment in the trope does not give us the freedom to abandon it.
A story should insist on what it needs.
This insistence is absolute. Whether Somewhere Over the Rainbow is thrashed into a distorted amp or crooned acapella or layered over and over for a full symphony arrangement it is always about dreams. It insists on dreams. This insistence, and insistence for something necessary to the human project make it a standard. We know what that opening octave means, no matter how we hear it. Somewhere. We listen for the dreams, and we listen for everything else those dreams may be about.
Happily Ever After. This is our standard.
We believe in the standard, and the standard accepts and receives what we give it without losing the reasons we trust it in the first place.
The craft is accepting the standard not as a constraint, but as the framework to hold whatever it is it needs to tell the story of happily ever after. We’ve heard this before, of course, it is an explanation for the diversity in our stories and in our voices, for the breadth of our revelations to the other. What we must be reminded of, however, is that nearly everything else are recurrent elements, tropes, and these are not standards and incapable of bearing the weight of everything it is we are capable of doing. Even the idea of a heroine is trope, a hero is a trope, certainly the categorizations of the latter are tropes and the absence of categorizations of the former is a kind of trope-in-the-negative. And again, to invest a trope with the power of a standard denies us the freedom to abandon the trope. The standard insists on our constant interpretations and reinterpretations, on variation—it’s all freedom from the foundation of an idea we can believe in no matter how many times we play it—happily ever after. Somewhere.
Too, we can carry pain into a standard and trust the standard with this pain—pain that may not be transformative if it’s taken in by something that hasn’t been so well used and so well tried and so well understood. Happily ever after, yes, but by which road?
What’s more, a standard is something all of us have agreed to commit to—it is our something true that is capable of snagging everything else. It is an expansive constraint, but an insistent one, with one universal requirement and no end to the personal ones.
Three notes, the very last ones, at that.