| This post contains affiliate links always indicated by this hint {*} in curly brackets. If you buy something after clicking on one of these links, it adds up in my coffee box, because as an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualified purchases. Thank you very much for your support, which enables me to continue creating useful content foryou! |
Innovation, a Technique for Survival
Do you know anyone who loves stagnation, who prefers the familiar and the usual to the new? I, for my part, don’t know anyone like this.
We humans are a demanding species, we need change like the air we breathe, we are fascinated by the new, we always want to improve and we long for the unprecedented.
Storytellers who do not satisfy our curiosity will lose us as an audience rather sooner than later. We see it at every party: there are those who hold on to their drink until the very end, grateful for every bit of attention, those pitiful bores who fail to get the punch line of their joke. And there are those around whom crowds form, who captivate and inspire their conversation partners and are still talked about long after the party is over.
The good news is that no one has to remain a bore. He or she should try un peu de la Schonôlogie.
My previous article was about planning murders in order to develop exciting crime stories, about the basics of aesthetic crimes. From your feedback to my blog post, it became clear to me that you, dear readers, are concerned with the question: How can murder be not only exciting and amazing, but also sophisticated and innovative?
With this article I want to answer your questions and help you to innovate successfully. The object to be innovated here is crime, its detection and the storytelling about it. Nevertheless, the schonological innovation methods described are also applicable to other areas.
What is Innovation?
Innovation means „improving renewal“. This can proceed peu à peu or radically question what has existed before. Accordingly, a distinction is made between incremental, i.e. step-by-step, evolutionary improvement and disruptive innovation, i.e. sudden, profound, revolutionary renewal.
If some of you are now in despair in the face of the Herculean challenge of bringing about valuable innovation, please relax first. Because:
»Innovation is Inevitable«
Bernd Friedrich von Schon, Schonology
Since zeitgeist, world view, human image, technology and media are constantly changing, innovations occur almost by themselves. They cannot be avoided. So how do we proceed if we want to innovate consciously?
There are various methods that try to systemise the innovation process – such as Design Thinking, TRIZ, Kaizen, Scrum or Triangulation. All these methods have a common starting point, which leads to the following advice:
»Welcome Problems Kindly«
Welcome problems, because they are starting points for every innovation. The origin of any improving renewal lies in problems that are still unsolved or have been insufficiently solved so far.
Only problems have to be discovered first.
In order to awaken our innovation-loving problem awareness, to train it, to apply it to our object and to create the new and better, we proceed in four steps. We address in turn: 1. the status quo, 2. the context and 3. ourselves – to create the future in the 4th step.
- Status Quo
First, we consider the status quo of the object to be innovated – in our case: the crime genre. In this first step of the status quo evaluation, it makes sense to describe the object, to ask what elements it is made of and what functions they have and how they fulfil them.
Which »Functions« Do Stories Fulfil?
Prodesse, delectare, movere – to teach, delight and touch, these were the classical demands on stories.
In addition, stories are meant to reveal and reflect reality, they can shape identity and community and convey values.
Lisa Cron explains in Wired for Story (2012) {*}, with reference to evolutionary biology and neuropsychology, that we use stories to simulate and test actions in possible risk situations in order to ensure our actual and/or social survival. Stories should also provide the satisfaction of having learned and experienced something new and meaningful. Triggering feelings and appealing to our senses anchors stories in our memory better than facts.
Of course, especially artistic texts are not limited to these functions, au contraire, they often even dissolve fixed functional references in order to let us experience the world in a new way. We have to keep this in mind for the quality of our stories.
Regardless, the „functional“ view above provides us with useful clues on how to improve stories.
Regarding crime fiction, we could conclude that it serves to negotiate social norms, right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, but also to entertain by means of suspense and pleasant creepiness, that it consists of the elements „crime“, „investigator „, „perpetrator „, „search for clues“, „investigative technology“, „narrative style“, „moral of the story“, and so on. The function of the crime is, for instance, to make the audience feel moral indignation and to arouse the desire that the crime be solved and atoned for.
Now the object and its parts as well as their function(s) can already be questioned as to whether something about them can be renewed and improved. Is the characterisation of the investigator just a tawdry cliché? Is the subject matter still relevant? Is the negotiated morality still relevant to the times? Important questions are also: Can something be meaningfully left out? Can other emphases be set? What is missing?
Radical innovation requires radical questioning of the status quo.
In our questioning, it is therefore helpful to proceed as abstractly as possible. After all, anyone who asks how the Jaguar XK150 purring down the road can be improved is already limiting and fixing herself. Those who ask how we want to travel, what vehicles are for and why we travel, open up greater scope for themselves from the outset.
[AI-generated image: Pink Jaguar XK150]
This investgating and questioning already leads away from the, firstly: status quo to, secondly:
- 2. Context
By „context“, I refer to the reality that surrounds us, together with the determining „megatrends“ that are emerging.
It is often forgotten in the history of the crime genre that reality has had a decisive influence on its development from the very beginning. Admittedly, the journalistically sharpened reality.
For as early as 1773, Newgate Prison, London, published the so-called Newgate Calendar {*}, in which crimes, confessions and executions were described in order to deter and thereby also, well, entertain. So the Newgate Calendar was similar to current true-crime formats. Thus it became an influence for the crime genre that only arose in the following century.
Even today, reality should serve as an inspiration for any storyteller, because it is often stranger than fiction, in other words: full of characters and surprising twists that even the most ingenious story writer could not come up with. So it is always worth getting involved in research.
Moreover, in comparison with contemporary reality, it quickly becomes apparent in view of our object to be innovated – dissected into elements, questioned in terms of its functions – whether it still satisfactorily fulfils its functions.
Is there, for example, a new kind of crime? A new investigative technology or new methods? A new type of investigator or perpetrator?
Of course, the context also includes the audience. If we change our idea of our addressee, our choice of subject matter and themes, our plot design and, above all, our tone and style will inevitably change.
Moreover, the context may also provide new, relevant themes, even suggestions for new functions of storytelling. To understand this, it is worth taking a look at the genre’s past.
Change of Mentality – A Source of Innovation
On the one hand, the crime genre descends from the so-called “analytical drama” (also called revelation or discovery play (as opposed to goal or unfolding drama)). The best-known example of such a drama is Oedipus the King by Euripides, written approximately 425-429 B.C.
[Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808-1825)]
The analytical drama shows us the dangerous or tragic consequences of an event in the backstory, which is not itself shown on stage. Instead, this event is only revealed retrospectively as the plot progresses – just like the crime and the course of events in the detective story.
The influence of the Newgate Calendar has already been mentioned.
Furthermore, the genre originated from the Gothic Novel of the 18th and 19th centuries, in which the uncanny had supernatural or inexplicable causes.
The early development of the crime genre already shows how innovation becomes inevitable through the context of a „megatrend“, an overarching change in mentality: In the wake of enlightenment, rationalisation and the success of empirical natural science, it was only a matter of time before an investigator would appear on the scene who would use scientific methods: Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin, who sets out to disprove the superstitious assumption that something supernatural led to the gruesome Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) {*}, and to reveal that the course of the horrific crimes, though extraordinary, can be rationally explained.
In Dupin’s wake, the gruesome and the inexplicable have always been put to rest by rationally conclusive investigators, the most famous of whom is undoubtedly Sherlock Holmes.
[A monument to Holmes on Bakerstreet, photographed on my last trip to London.]
In the course of the „megatrend“ of the scientification of life, it seems understandable that – in the first heyday of the genre in the first third of the 20th century – cosy crime stories developed, which, although exciting and gruesome from time to time, were not too threatening overall, but amusing, elegant and entertaining. Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, both creations of Agatha Christie, are the best known heroes of this sub-genre.
In the wake of two world wars, however, crime novels in which cheerful detectives solve violent crimes and thus restore an intact world that had fallen into disarray appeared simply démodé. The hardboiled detective story emerged, in which disillusioned loners like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe not infrequently failed.
The lesson of genre history: If we want to innovate, we must question the status quo of our subject matter even today to see if and, if so, how contemporary themes, mega- and counter-trends are reflected and whether the narrative elements chosen still do justice to them.
Are the chosen investigative methods still current or long since passé? Are the characters also suitable as representatives of a milieu that is important and relevant today? What about the cause-and-effect logic of detection in the crime genre? Is it not often chance that plays an important role? How is the crime motivated? What does this reveal about the society in which we live? What are virulent contradictions and conflicts within the world today?
In the Anthropocene, it makes perfect sense to investigate eco-crimes or the milieu of radical environmentalists – or climate change deniers. In the age of “Predictive Policing”, it seems to make sense to investigate by means of algorithmic computer recommendations – and at the same time to critically examine these procedures. In pluralistic societies, it seems appropriate that the dramatis personae are diversely orchestrated, be it in terms of sexual orientation, migration origin and/or subculture, to name just a few examples.
The above three sources of the genre – analytical drama, journalism and gothic story – can be limited and/or expanded: Which strict rules of the genre can be broken with gusto? What if the crime remained unsolved? What if we show the backstory but not the solving of the crime? What if the investigator and the perpetrator are one and the same? Or: What would a crime-operetta hybrid look like? A crime-romcom? A fantasy crime thriller?
With the emphasis on context, I don’t want to speak to any zeitgeist or even fashion – after all, fashion is the opposite of style. Au contraire, I want to encourage us to be ourselves. This brings us to the third point:
- 3. Ourselves
Every story creates an image of the world. In its own way, it is both truthful and mendacious: Mendacious, because it necessarily condenses, exaggerates and abbreviates. Truthful because it conveys a certain world view and usually also a „moral of the story“, the famous fabula docet, which often seems universal or at least comprehensible.
In reality, however, it is up to us to play fate and decide which actions in the imagined cosmos make sense and which do not, whether there is such a thing as sense or whether absurdity shows its cold or anarchic, even amusing side.
The influence of context touches on precisely this truthfulness: in a world shaped by scientific reason, it became noticeably „untrue“ to narrate the uncanny as inexplicable. To a sensitive contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe, this contradiction was obvious, he felt disturbed, his innovative awareness of problems awakened.
When we tell stories, they are also telling tales about ourselves. Our world and human image inevitably inscribes itself in our narrative – and that is just as it should be. We are called upon to find our attitude to the chosen material and to develop it according to this mindset. Of course, our attitude to the subject matter also determines the style, which is, as it were, the dress in which our story is clothed – it is a matter of finding our own „voice“.
Therefore, in our critical scrutiny of elements and functions of the genre, our attitude is our guide: What do we abhor? What do we want to praise? What do we want to warn against? What do we recommend?
This „imperative“ to find a stance and a voice is not meant to paralyse you, however, as some of you might think that you have to prove that you have a fully spelled-out stance before the story development even starts.
To prevent paralysing writer’s blocks, it should be emphasised that an original perspective on the material often only emerges in the development process, and almost inevitably so.
My favourite philosopher joke:
„If two philosophers agree, one of them quite certainly is not a philosopher.“
In other words, those who deal meticulously, painstakingly and precisely with questions, problems and attitudes will inevitably find their own stance.
Should you nevertheless be unsure – remain undaunted!
Because: Artistic freedom allows you to try out attitudes like clothes, to change them from story to story.
It should not be forgotten, however, that artistic narratives in particular are well-suited to being „mysterious“. Accordingly, creators do not have to know why they are fascinated by a theme, why they prefer a certain method of murder, why they are attracted to a certain crime, why they prefer one victim over another.
[The following infographic shows at a glance where spurring problems can be found between the various innovation-relevant spheres of influence: ]
- 4. Creating the Future: What if …
Once everything is in place – 1. a state-of-the-art understanding of the object, its elements and functions and how they have 2. become outmoded, dysfunctional or bland against the backdrop of the context, and 3. an attitude – things can and should get wild, bizarre, downright exaggerated, even unrealistic.
In a certain phase of the innovation process, Design Thinking recommends formulating challenging “Stretch Goals” that exceed puny targets by miles and go beyond any framework.
Stretch Goals encourage you to think the impossible, because only the (initially and seemingly) impossible is radically innovative. Stretch Goals encourage you to stop thinking and to take risks.
By following an unmistakable seismograph – your enthusiasm – Stretch Goals help you to unearth „Dark Horses“. The term from horseracing refers to outsiders who unexpectedly win the contest even though no one expected them. „Dark Horses“ refer to all-too-easily overlooked opportunities and undiscovered niches – because only the never-before-seen is disruptive-innovative.
What would be a completely new statement on the chosen subject matter and theme? What would be the most outrageous crime of this age? What could be the crime novel of the future? How does my story bundle the experiential knowledge of an entire generation? How can my investigator become the prototype of a completely new genre? Which genres can be combined in amazing and new ways?
Fail Forward – Mass Creates Class
Regardless of the ambition stated by the Stretch Goal, the aim is to create a sheer mass of crazy ideas.
Psychology professor Dean Keith Simonton explains with the so-called Equal Odds Rule that creative quality results from quantity, which means nothing less than: The more ideas you generate, the higher the probability that you will develop excellent ideas. Therefore, it is recommended to first welcome every idea.
For no-holds-barred idea generation, sprinkle in a good pinch of madness by deliberately pursuing lunatic objectives and questions: How do I build the world’s worst crime novel? How would the dumbest perpetrator go about it? What if the detective used irrational methods? What if my tomcat Ambrosius was the culprit?
Only after a sheer mass of ideas – building on our preliminary work in steps 1, 2 and 3 – have been developed do we discard them or pursue them further, sort and curate them, subject them to scrupulous quality control: Is the theme profound and yet densely presented in its complexity and multi-layeredness? Is there an interesting dialectic of form and content? Does our story make new statements about our social reality? Is it relevant? Is it touching? Does it inspire?
Once you have sensitively analysed the 1. status quo and the 2. contemporary context, identified problems and found an 3. attitude and 4. vision, then thought up a lot of fresh ideas, discarded them, polished, curated and sorted them, then nothing should stand in the way of your groundbreaking innovations in the crime genre – or elsewhere.
I wish you every success in trying out the schonological innovation methods suggested here. Follow your enthusiasm and let yourself be surprised by the new and better.
Sincerely yours,
[Postskriptum: About the contribution picture above: To explore the crime genre, I twirled me a Hercule Poirot moustache and headed to the „Kriminalhaus“, Hillesheim (Vulkaneifel, Rhineland-Palatinate), and ordered a flambéed plum pudding at „Café Sherlock“.]