The first time I watched Bullet Train I was blown away, not so much by the plot—it’s fine—but by the imagery. Every scene is filled with oddities that individually are so distinct that they must have meaning to the plot, right? Some do. The wild part is that many are just there to be red herrings or background art.
It reminds me of when the rapper Eminem marched hundreds of bleached blond doppelgängers into an auditorium while singing The Real Slim Shady. There were so many possibilities, where was he going to pop up?
I am calling this technique Flooding the Plot with Chekov. (Remember his gun rule?) Recently I watched the tv show, Daybreak, and they used the same level of imagery to muddle the predictability. While the show was far from narratively perfect, episode after episode I was pleasantly surprised by connections that had been set up and disguised very successfully.
All this is well and good for visual mediums, but can we as narrative authors pull off this level of Flooding?
I don’t know.
On paper we are limited to words and descriptions. When someone writes As Alice wandered by the pond a yellow goldfish glinted in the sunlight that danced over the surface of the water. There is a good chance that goldfish is important, especially if a few chapters later we see it again. “Oh no,” Alice cried to the yellow goldfish. “If only Gerald hadn’t been drowned!”
Generally, something should show up three times if it is important to the plot: once to set existence, another to remind the readers that it exists, and then at the climactic moment. The yellow goldfish smiled to himself and released a few bubbles toward the surface. Alice stared, mesmerized, and began lowering herself into the pond, soon to be another of his victims.
Ideally there are other suspects, or plausible reasons for the spate of drownings that we have seeded as well, but in the end the reader should throw up their hands and realize, Of course it was the psychotic goldfish!
The problem with Flooding on paper is that good Flooding is done in the background; on paper, there isn’t a lot of background. Setting descriptions get bogged down by excessive details, and dialogue can feel convoluted and bulky if it strays off topic.
“Oh Ferdinand, your eyes are like chocolate chips in a melting cookie. It’s so special that you remembered my birthday today, especially as that very distracting parade is going by with a man in a bunny suit. Your lips are so soft Ferdi; are you using a new variety of chapstick?”
Given the right character—especially one who is scatter brained or distractible—this kind of dialogue could work?
“Yeah, of course I can come along to the party. Wow, look over there at the guy in the bunny suit, you don’t see that every day. Get me a blue raspberry slushy on your way over would you? And a couple corndogs? Oh did I tell you my sister got out of prison yesterday? I sure hate her boyfriend, yeah, he’s planning on moving in to the garage…”
Another tactic is to give the character a very active internal dialogue.
“Sure,” I agree, my mind racing with thoughts of anything but the upcoming party. Dear gods! Why are Ferdinand’s lips so slimy? Is that a disease? Has he been eating blue raspberry slushies or is he hypothermic? Huh, is that a man in a bunny suit? I guess Easter is coming up.
The biggest hiccup with Flooding is that the human brain likes patterns. We know as readers that if something feels specific on the page that it is likely to be important at some point. So if you mention something over and over and then in the end it isn’t relevant to the plot, it makes the story feel unfinished, or like there are bits of plot dangling around like slobber off a bulldog.
So will Flooding work on the page? I still don’t know, but I hope you’ll give it a try this week. Write a scene with lots of specific details then skip ahead in the story and write the climactic scene. See how you feel about it. Happy Writing!
6 hours later…Well. I just finished my first book for my Friend Recommendation Summer Reading Series and was it ever timely! Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. It is about a guy and his ex-girlfriend’s cat as they make their way through the first part of a D and D style dungeon as part of an intergalactic reality tv show. This book masterfully Floods the plot with so many potentially important items and characters—and utilizes them in interesting ways—that I read the book cover to cover and was delightfully surprised time and time again.
Evidently the answer is yes.
Look for my review on Dungeon Crawler Carl next week!
Mamasquatch the Writer 
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