How To Avoid Cheese

[How To Avoid Cheese
By Perrin A. Larson

         People giving honest opinions of my stories have seldom, if ever, accused them of being cheesy after reading or hearing the whole thing. They do sometimes if they only read or hear the beginning, but if I summarize the rest of the story, they quickly retract their critique.
         Following high school, I began to see a pattern in most entertainment media, both written and otherwise. I was able to place most of it into one of two categories, “weak” or “strong”. For some time, I was unable to define these categories, but I knew they existed. Some fiction just felt lame. I couldn’t always tell why, but I just knew that it felt “weak”. Over time, I began to see the things that would make or break the quality of media. Is I figured this out, I finally saw what people meant when they referred to something as “cheesy”. Here are some of the common types of cheese I have seen throughout the entertainment world, and how I have learned to avoid them in my own fiction.
         The main thing I keep in mind is that cheesy, or weak, media feels contrived, while strong fiction comes from the heart. Anything an author does that contributes to contrivance will weaken the story in the eyes of its audience.
         The first type of contrivance comes in the form of “plot devices”. These things rear their subtle heads whenever an author wanted things to happen one way, but knew that they would naturally happen another way. The author hems and haws and racks his or her brain for a way to resolve the discrepancy and still get what they want, but comes up empty. In the end, they take the easy way out and contrive  an unusual circumstance that forces the course of events they desire. They do this by inserting plot devices--unexpected events, characters, laws of physics or magic, etc. that the author inserted for little reason beyond the fact that they were suddenly needed to fix the plot.
         I have found that at least some plot devices are unavoidable in most stories, but there are a couple things I do to disguise them. First of all, I always re-engineer the entire global picture of the story for each plot device I must use. As I plan a story, I carefully try to think out as much of the fictional elements that I think I will need, in advance, before sitting down at the keyboard. These elements then serve as the natural laws of my fictional world by which I limit myself as I write, even as the natural laws of the real world limit the story of what we do in reality. If as I write the story, I find that a new law is absolutely needed, or that an old law simply must be broken, I stop writing. I go back to the drawing board and recreate the entire fictional world and story from the beginning. That way, the effects of the new story element can be felt throughout the entire work as if they had always been there and were meant to be there from the beginning.
         Another rule I follow to hide plot devices, is to never ever ever use a device that I don’t thoroughly like. Remember, uncontrived work comes from the heart. Always  make it the way you like it, and the spirit of the work will remain coherent.
There is one other solution I have sometimes used to solve the need for a plot device when the problem cannot be fixed within the original story parameters. I stop playing God. I give up the story as I wanted it to happen and allow it to change. In effect, I give my characters, and my world, a little free will, and allow them to set their own destiny as they do what I know they must do under the circumstances. This often frees up endless new possibilities, ultimately enhancing the story, rather than ruining my vision for it. It is seldom good to insert a plot device without having first explored the possibility of actually allowing a story to change the way real life does.
         Another type of cheese I often see, is what I like to call “fiction to prove a point”. I do not mean that fiction that is written to make a point or stress a theme or moral is necessarily weak, but when an author stretches the bounds of belief to make their point, their cheese can get very moldy, very quickly. A minor example of this is the main theme of Marvel’s X-Men stories. They are constantly trying to portray their mutant characters as being needlessly persecuted by a prejudiced humanity, when the truth is that most people would actually think the mutants were cool, and would envy them. They don’t even bother trying to come up with an excuse for why people start rabidly and irrationally throwing rocks at anyone they think is a mutant. I also commonly see examples of theme cheese in anti-Christian media, but I won’t get started on that bone here.
         I have found that the best way to avoid theme cheese is to realize that if I cannot make my point believably, I am either using the wrong story to make it, or my point is incorrect.
         Perhaps one of the most common types of contrivance is the stuff my sister calls “annoyingly epic”. Epic cheese is made by trying to make a story, or something in it, very big and grand without laying the proper framework underneath it. Beginning writers that are trying to be too serious are notorious epic cheese farms. A thing or event cannot have epic significance without an underlying epic-scale universe and history in place for it to have significance to. An epic mystery or puzzle implies a similarly awesome solution that the author should make sure he or she has worked out in detail before they begin writing. Even in fiction, where the author is God, something does not become amazing just because the author says it is. The audience must be shown how great it is. This is one reason why J.R.R. Tolkien’s Stories (The Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarilion, and others) are celebrated as amazing epic adventures, rather than pathetic attempts at such. He did not try to make his stories grand. He simply wrote stories about a fictional world that he had already spent years dreaming about and building upon until it became larger than life. His stories were automatically imbued with epic scale and significance because they were built on something of that magnitude which already existed.
         My rule for writing epic material is to never try to make it epic. Whether or not I intend for it to be, I always make sure I have my background information thought out before I start writing the story on top of it.
         The last type of cheese I remember having identified deals with originality. I am not talking about unoriginality. Unoriginality is beautiful if the author likes it, and it fits with the rest of their story. I am talking about when I can see that an author is desperately trying to be original at the cost of making things in a way that they like or know to be believable. Such authors pretty much always fail anyway, because in trying to avoid copying something, they make it painfully obvious what they are trying to avoid, and what they come up with is still just another version of the same thing anyway, because it has to fill the same role.
         Perfect and complete originality is impossible for any human. Everything we create comes out of our heads and hearts, and everything in our heads and hearts is a result of our own life experiences. Everything we make comes directly or indirectly from somewhere or something outside of ourselves. So again, the key is to not try to be original. I just make things in whatever way most moves me or brings me joy, and the result is always original enough, because it has me soaked through it.
         So, in summary, there are at least four flavors of fictional cheese: plot-fix cheese, theme cheese, epic cheese, and (un)originality cheese. Plot fix cheese happens when the author runs into a plothole and takes the easy way out by breaking or adding to their own rules, adding a random story element, or making their characters do something that they would not otherwise do. Theme cheese happens when an author has something to prove or teach, or a bone to pick, and they sacrifice believability to emphasize it. Epic cheese is made by inflating the importance of something without putting the necessary background in place to make it so, and Originality cheese is a result of someone trying to be more creative than comes naturally to them. Most all kinds of cheese come from an author forcing their world or characters to do or be something implausible or unlikely as a quick fix. “Contrived” and “forced” are a synonyms for “cheesy”. A writer’s greatest asset when avoiding forced writing is their sense of what moves them or brings them joy. My final advice is, don’t try too hard. Just do it your way, and keep writing.