meta-writing
Whew. Ok, so I am going to step away from the story I just wrote, and talk about the stories I didn't write instead. Or perhaps almost wrote.
So these are the things that I wanted to play with when I saw the prompt "once upon a time": narrative as creation, nested stories, the power of story telling and story tellers, quests, archetypes, reality and what's 'real', narratives that become more than they were, and a ship of stories.
Yeah, that was kind of a lot.
I eventually fixated on the ship of stories, but it took me a lot of mental meandering (and about 3000 words of discarded writing) before I settled down to tell the story I told. I tried telling the story of the ship after it had crashed and basically colonized a world with dreams and stories, and how it needed a new story teller to come and fix the world periodically. I still think that's a neat idea, but it didn't work. I tried telling the story of the ship in space, about to receive visitors for the first time in ages. Again, not so much. I tried telling the super long story of the ship itself, starting with "once upon a time there were these people who told lots of stories..." but damn, that didn't work either.
I was getting a little frustrated.
And I think the entire problem was that I didn't have a character. I was telling a story - in various degrees of epic size and proportion - and and I didn't have a character I felt was real in it. There were the archetypes, but The Princess is just a template, a blank to be filled in, an empty form to be filled with whatever the story teller (or the story reader) desires. Most fairy tales don't really have characters either - a lot of them don't even have characters with names, for cryin' out loud. The Fair One With The Golden Locks? Little Two Eyes? Yeeesh. Obviously, that wasn't going to work for me.
When I was writing from the perspective of someone chosen to become the new story teller, I tried making him a real character, but I was projecting so far into the future - humanity is out and among the stars, has basically forgotten its past and stories of origin, the ship to remind us of all that is adrift and then crashes, and then a thousand years after that we have this person called on to save the world as it's decaying beneath everyone. It was just too much. I couldn't get into that person's head, especially since I decided that the planet Anthology crashed on should already be populated - I liked the idea of these alien people living out and living in the stories of humanity, having to decide over and over for themselves how to modify them so that they become their own tales. So we've got distant world, alien narrator, distant future... even my imagination has limits, evidently. I could imagine it all, but I couldn't make any of it come to life.
Someday, when I feel particularly weird and able to write from the perspective of a strange alien who's been indelibly marked and changed by the fables and folklore of mankind? Then I'll write that story. That day, sadly, is not today.
I do like the story I finally came up with, and I think it does a lot of what I wanted to do when I saw the prompt. It helps that I identify with the narrator. I love stories, and I love making them happen. Don't worry, though. I would never blow up the sun. Just sayin'.
So these are the things that I wanted to play with when I saw the prompt "once upon a time": narrative as creation, nested stories, the power of story telling and story tellers, quests, archetypes, reality and what's 'real', narratives that become more than they were, and a ship of stories.
Yeah, that was kind of a lot.
I eventually fixated on the ship of stories, but it took me a lot of mental meandering (and about 3000 words of discarded writing) before I settled down to tell the story I told. I tried telling the story of the ship after it had crashed and basically colonized a world with dreams and stories, and how it needed a new story teller to come and fix the world periodically. I still think that's a neat idea, but it didn't work. I tried telling the story of the ship in space, about to receive visitors for the first time in ages. Again, not so much. I tried telling the super long story of the ship itself, starting with "once upon a time there were these people who told lots of stories..." but damn, that didn't work either.
I was getting a little frustrated.
And I think the entire problem was that I didn't have a character. I was telling a story - in various degrees of epic size and proportion - and and I didn't have a character I felt was real in it. There were the archetypes, but The Princess is just a template, a blank to be filled in, an empty form to be filled with whatever the story teller (or the story reader) desires. Most fairy tales don't really have characters either - a lot of them don't even have characters with names, for cryin' out loud. The Fair One With The Golden Locks? Little Two Eyes? Yeeesh. Obviously, that wasn't going to work for me.
When I was writing from the perspective of someone chosen to become the new story teller, I tried making him a real character, but I was projecting so far into the future - humanity is out and among the stars, has basically forgotten its past and stories of origin, the ship to remind us of all that is adrift and then crashes, and then a thousand years after that we have this person called on to save the world as it's decaying beneath everyone. It was just too much. I couldn't get into that person's head, especially since I decided that the planet Anthology crashed on should already be populated - I liked the idea of these alien people living out and living in the stories of humanity, having to decide over and over for themselves how to modify them so that they become their own tales. So we've got distant world, alien narrator, distant future... even my imagination has limits, evidently. I could imagine it all, but I couldn't make any of it come to life.
Someday, when I feel particularly weird and able to write from the perspective of a strange alien who's been indelibly marked and changed by the fables and folklore of mankind? Then I'll write that story. That day, sadly, is not today.
I do like the story I finally came up with, and I think it does a lot of what I wanted to do when I saw the prompt. It helps that I identify with the narrator. I love stories, and I love making them happen. Don't worry, though. I would never blow up the sun. Just sayin'.