What Barb From ‘Stranger Things’ Can Teach You About Writing

readers hate empty promises

Sometimes, when you’re working on a novel, you lose your way and don’t quite know why.

(By “sometimes,” I mean consistently.)

This is true whether you’re trying to make sense of a messy first draft or trying to figure out the soggy middle of a book you’ve revised 20 times. If you’ve ever been through this, you know that the obviously wrong parts of a book are actually gifts: There’s no question that a too-long scene needs to be cut or a totally extraneous character must go. These you can fix with a song in your heart because they’re so easy to spot and so satisfying to cross off your revision to-do list.

But then there are what I call doldrums: long, seemingly decent passages that satisfy all the basic requirements of competent fiction but lack a pulse.

Doldrums are difficult to fix, because most readers are too nice to tell you about them. In fact, readers (of the sort who care about you and are invested in your happiness) will often gladly tell you how wonderful the language is, beautiful writing, etc. etc., skimming over the fact that they were bored to the point of drooling.

“This just isn’t coming together for me” is editorial speak for “I’m bored out of my fucking mind, but you seem nice.” I know a lot of writers who polish novels to a high gloss but still get no feedback apart from this bit of literary GLOMAR. And they are, rightly so, baffled as to what they can do to fix their books.

Well, I can tell you! But first …

Let me introduce you to what I call the Barb Effect.

<Spoiler alert!>

If you’ve seen Stranger Things, you know that the Death of Barb was something of a scandal.

Barb was main character Nancy’s sartorially intense teenage bestie and her disappearance was, essentially, just a plot device. Harm coming to secondary characters to motivate primary characters is nothing especially unusual, but Barb’s swift disappearance in the second episode of the series really upset people. There was Justice for Barb merch, a hashtag, Jimmy Fallon skits, and everything — much more of a reaction than a plot-device killing typically gets.

And that’s because the audience knew Barb should have been more than a pawn.

I think there are lots of interesting possibilities here, not the least of which being that conventional narrative (horror especially) has a tendency to kill off queer characters, and to some viewers, Barb reads as gay. I think there’s something to this, but that’s not the primary point I want to make about Barb.

In the most basic kind of narrative mechanics, Barb is just too much character to kill off. She has too much presence as acted by Shannon Purser, and her styling is too perfect. It’s the glasses, the blue puffy parka with mutton-leg sleeves, the music teacher blouses, the red hair, the sensible friend advice.

Everything about how Barb is characterized and depicted tells the viewer: “Pay attention, this person is important.” Barb is a walking accumulation of detail.

And it just pisses people off if you signal “this is important” only to demonstrate that in fact, it wasn’t.

Stranger Things broke its contract with the audience by flattening a character who had so much dimension. If Barb had been a sort of nice but unmemorable (or unlikable) character, or a more distant friend to the main, her second-episode disappearance would have been unremarkable. Likewise, if she had disappeared toward the end of the season, her presence in the plot would match the level of importance-signaling. But instead, the story chose an awkward middle way which just seemed to highlight how unfair it is for the Barbs of the world to be treated as instruments within the lives of their more popular friends (in my opinion).

First drafts are murky because when you’re discovering the story, you truly don’t yet know what’s important. This is true even if you write to an outline. Some elements of a story just shift during the process, and by the end, you’ll find that you occasionally laid more groundwork for a certain incident than it ended up requiring, or that a character you didn’t initially see as central took on more importance as the book developed.

In your manuscript, you probably have a lot of Barb. Barb characters, yes, but also Barb places, Barb scenes, Barb flashbacks. Barb objects. These are moments when the amount of detail, focus, attention, or significance that you’ve layered into a character or a line of dialogue or whatever promises importance which the story doesn’t uphold.

Workshops can horribly exacerbate Barbness because 1) readers find it very easy to notice moments of unfulfilled promise 2) instead of questioning whether that extra attention is necessary, they often say, “I wanted to see more of what happens at the halfway house” or “I wanted to know more about her mother.” If you took this advice without measuring it against your own sense of the book and tried to appease all the readers, you might end up adding a whole lot of stuff that just isn’t relevant to the story.

Ah, however! On the other hand, it’s also possible that your story is giving you lots and lots of little nudges to indicate that there’s something deeply important which you’re missing. These are little glimmers of extra weight and intention and interest which accumulate around a certain character, or a theme. Maybe you repeat a certain word or image without knowing it. Maybe the narrative dwells for a beat in an unusual mood or point of view.

Unfortunately, workshops often fail in this way as well because 1) readers find it easy to identify pattern interruptions 2) instead of questioning whether that interruption may actually be an emergent bit of genius, they often say, “I don’t get this, it’s unrelated, take it out.” If you took this advice without investigating the hints the book is giving you, you might end up missing the most incredible material in your precious soul.

Regardless, becoming aware of and addressing these moments is crucial in making a whole, engrossing, undeniable world in fiction. When you get vague feedback like, “This just isn’t coming together for me,” this is where the problem lies.

Types of Barb

Self-indulgence

As writers, we tend to add things because we think they’re cool, we like how they sound, or we’re having a lot of fun writing them. No writer adds Barbitude out of a desire to mislead the reader; we just get caught up. I think this is probably related to the advice to “kill your darlings” — there can be an inverse relationship between a detail’s relevance and the writer’s love of it.

I admit, I am guilty of this. My writing process is an immersive, somatically inflected one, and for a long time I thought that meant I had to include every little nudge and nuance in the finished product. I thought that the radical point-of-view immersion I was going for warranted it. And to be fair, it can have a lot of power. But becoming a strong editor of my own work demands that I understand my tendencies, and this is frequently the reason I end up striking things from the manuscript.

Getting honest with myself about how much a flourish promised vs. what it offered in return changed my second novel for the better immeasurably. When I went back into the book thinking of it explicitly as a contract with the reader, I found myself much more able to assess whether the side story or character was necessary.

If someone had you over for dinner and they served you five courses, a flight of rare teas, a string quartet, a massage, a therapy session, and then a whole chocolate cake, expecting you to eat or enjoy it all, at some point you would cross the line from fabulous enjoyment to discomfort. A host who gives more than you can comfortably accommodate is giving for reasons other than your satisfaction, at which point it’s no longer really a gesture of generosity and compassion, is it?

Laziness

After reading a draft many times, I find that a fog settles over certain pages and chapters. There’s nothing outwardly wrong with them, and once I’m in the middle of reading them, they seem to justify their existence. But somehow the story loses steam thereafter, for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent.

That fog is a sign that something about the passage or scene is making a promise the story doesn’t fulfill. It misleads the reader in a subtle way, making for more problems later.

Sometimes these Barb-inflected moments are small — so small that you may be tempted to think, “eh, that’s fine.”

But think about it this way: If a ship is going to sail across the ocean, its navigational bearings must be exactly correct. One degree of difference may not seem like a big deal, but when multiplied across thousands of miles, it means the difference between ending up on the correct continent or not.

A novel is a long-distance story; you’re asking the reader to spend about 8 hours in your care. Little calibration errors carried across the whole landscape of a book become massively dissatisfying for a reader.

Suppressed Genius

Sometimes an unfulfilled promise should be fulfilled rather than rescinded. This might be especially true if you have a very stern inner critic harping at you while you write. If any part of you is self-censoring, you may have tried to put the lid on some really fascinating, rich, intuitive material.

The lucky thing about rich, intuitive material is that you can never really eradicate it from a book, even if your critic is extremely mean and weaselly. It will always be there! It will always find a way to poke through, to hint and shimmer beneath the surface.

When you look at these hints and shimmers together, they may point you in a fascinating direction or reveal some hidden wisdom in the manuscript. But they all too often go unnoticed or unremarked upon — or, unfortunately, edited out entirely. Have you ever read a book that is, for all evidence, well-written, intriguing in subject matter, and structured perfectly, yet you just can’t make yourself care about it? This is the root of such problems, and it’s awfully difficult to address because it’s invisible; it’s about what’s missing rather than what’s wrong.

Keep your promises

There is something you can do about all of this, however: Train yourself to see every single word in your writing as a decision (because it is).

And once you’ve done that, train yourself to evaluate every single decision in your writing as a promise.

Yes, every single one.

I know that sounds intense, but, well, creating a holographic universe which a stranger is capable of reanimating using their own deeply personal index of memory and sensation is what you’re doing when you write a novel (or poem or story), and yeah, I’d say that’s pretty intense.

To make a story work, you must be impeccable with your promises. It’s fun to write an extra detail or two about a mysterious stranger sitting across from your main character on a train, but those extra details will always cue a reader to look for more significance, and they’ll be disappointed if they don’t find it. (Unless, of course, a general sense of moody unease and cosmic potential is what you’re after, in which case, lay on, MacDuff.)

At some point in the revision process, you have to begin making decisions based on your reader’s enjoyment rather than your own. And that means becoming deliberate about what you’re offering, testing every decision to determine whether it works toward that end. If you find yourself in some kind of revision doldrums, it probably means that you haven’t yet arrived at the central decision-making paradigm of the book; you haven’t chosen what, above all else, you want to convey to a reader. And until you do, every promise is potentially an empty one.

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