On Saturday, I decided to make some additions to my Christmas-music library. As I browsed, I saw a listing for this song, a version of the French carol that we know in English as "O Holy Night." Great, I thought. I own several versions of this song in English, but I love the French version and didn't have a recording of it. So I clicked on the listing and hit play.
I only lasted about five seconds. 😫 🙉 (Why is there no emoji for covering your ears in pain?)
First of all, whoever arranged this version put the tempo on fast-forward. No, no, no. Not for a song that's more or less a lullaby.
Second, the male singer cannot. Pronounce. French. I don't think he was even trying! Maybe there are some languages that sound okay if you speak/sing them with English-style pronunciations. French is not one of them! It was so cringe-worthy that I didn't wait to hear how the female singer would do.
Yes, I wanted a different version of the song than what I already owned. But not that different.
The late Blake Snyder spends an entire chapter on a similar problem—which he calls "Give me the same thing . . . only different!"—in his classic book on screenwriting, Save the Cat! As he explains it:
"You can't tell me any idea that isn't like one, or dozens, found in the [literary] canon. Trust me, your [story] falls into a category. And that category has rules that you need to know. Because to explode the clichés, to give us the same thing . . . only different, you have to know what genre your [story] is part of, and how to invent the twists that avoid pat elements"
—Save the Cat! 22-23
Part of that process is learning to keep those twists within the boundaries of your chosen genre. Otherwise, you confuse and frustrate your audience by violating deeply held, if sometimes unconscious, expectations. That undercuts the effectiveness of the story, as Snyder shows in a brief but insightful analysis of the film Arachnophobia. (I highly recommend not just that section but the entire book.)
What examples have you encountered of "Give me the same thing . . . only different" done well (or badly)? Use the social-media links at the top of this page to join the discussion!
Write on,
Candice
P.S. As an apology for exposing you to that truly awful recording at the beginning of this post, here are a few Studio C sketches about Christmas caroling gone hilariously wrong:
And some of my favorite arrangements of "O Holy Night":
(Photo: Usman Yousaf, Unsplash)
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