Today’s blog post is brought to you by Derek, Forgemaster of Editing.
One of my favorite but otherwise useless bits of movie trivia concerns Carrie Fisher (frankly, a lot of them do) asking George Lucas why she wasn’t permitted to wear a bra beneath her iconic white dress in Star Wars. His iconic answer: “Because…there’s no underwear in space.”
Well, why not, George? See, when you’re weightless in outer space, your “body expands but your bra doesn’t, so you get strangled by your own underwear.” Friggin’ duh, right?
George Lucas is arguably one of the most visionary filmmakers in history. He also doesn’t know how bras work. I mean, he probably does and has a dry sense of humor, but in case I’m wrong, this anecdote proves that even masters of their craft can fumble the absolute smallest of details.
What happens when that minutia isn’t so minute, though? I’ve never cared that the Death Star’s only weakness is a conveniently torpedo-sized exhaust port, but somebody else thought that literal plot hole to be so egregious that they wrote an entire film around justifying its existence. Rogue One: a Star Wars Story cost at least $200,000,000 to make, which I assume is a lot more money than the Galactic Empire would’ve spent on, like, installing a series of protective grates in their moon-sized superweapon.
I’ve noticed while reading some contemporary fantasy and science fiction novels that their authors fall into an understandable and enticing trap: describing the universes into which they’ve poured so much love. No, I’m not at all intimating that world-building is a bad thing; in fact, it’s imperative. Problems arise, however, when scene-setting is so overly complex that it can’t help but contradict itself and interrupt what might otherwise be a compelling story.
To me, Star Wars (the aforementioned film, not the franchise as a whole) excels as fantasy in part because its worlds are fascinatingly alien but aren’t treated by their inhabitants as anything but normal. Characters casually discuss esoterica like “protocol droids” and “the Kessel Run” like we talk about Taco Tuesday and Spooky Season. They light up our imaginations without demanding that we dig so deep that we lose sight of the horizon and its twin suns.
If the developmental editor in me could offer just one morsel of advice to budding writers, it’d be that they should trust their prospective readers’ intelligence and curiosity to engage with what’s unsaid even more than they might click with what’s overtly stated. Focus on telling a story so gripping that we’ll still be filling in the gaps on our own long after we’ve finished reading.
One of those gaps might even get its own movie someday.
