Jaws (1975)

When I told a friend of mine about the topic of this blog post, he said, “You’re not going to say what everyone else says about Jaws are you?” He was half-right. As such, this will be the least adventurous “choose your own adventure” blog you’ve ever seen, if there ever was such a thing. Readers who are familiar with the making of Jaws should skip part A and read only part B; readers who aren’t familiar with the making of the film can follow the usual A to B sequence.


A. The pre-production and early-production of Jaws imagined a very different film from that which was actually produced. Spielberg and company drew story boards that included the shark in many of the film’s early “attack” scenes. Their idea was to build a mechanical shark to be shown on screen. A crew working on the West Coast built a shark in a fresh water tank, but when the shark was brought to the salt waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the electronics failed. Unable to make the shark as responsive and mobile as necessary, Spielberg had to re-envision the shooting of the film without the presence of the shark.

Jaws is commonly described as a horror-film. The success of the film, as many have declared, is that the shark is absent for much of the film. The horror comes from our fear of what we cannot see.


B. What I’d like fiction writers to consider is the idea of constraints. Famous fictional constraints include George Perec’s A Void, a French novel that refuses to use the letter e, the most commonly occurring vowel in the French language, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which is a novel whose temporal setting is restricted to only a single day, and recently, Padgett Powel’s The Interrogative Mood, which is a novel whose sentences are composed entirely in the form of questions. In this fashion, Jaws’s constraint is the inability—or, necessary refusal—to show the shark on screen.

Why use constraints? Among other reasons, constraints force storytellers to employ techniques they wouldn’t ordinarily employ if they were free to tell the story as they wished; constraints generate innovation and invention of form, technique, and style. Often, it is a new form or technique or style that marks the success of a story, that captures a reader’s attention.