a few notes on adopting orientalistic fiction

Probably more than just a few, but you know me.

Back in the midst of the LLF debacle, Kirsten Saell observed that the M/M genre is a "phenomenon...where a fairly large group of authors from Group X write *solely* about the lives of members of Group Y..."

I've turned that over in my head more than a few times since then, and incidentally it's part of what spurred some of my comments about fanfiction, in the last few posts. Not enough to get mentioned, but it was an ingredient in the stew. When I'd tossed that question at CP, he mentioned orientalism, which is most definitely a century-old (or more) fixation for the West, but I don't think that really applies, not as a literary genre. I mean, if I walked into a bookstore and said, "where do I find all your books about the Far East?" I'd either get shown to the travel section, or given a blank stare.

( But if I went looking for domestic/US-based orientalism, that's easy... )

juxtaposition: did you mean for that to happen?

In the last post on this topic, I said I'd come back later to this statement:

The things that make the story hold together are things I already know, so the ramifications of a story's outcome don't really require this specific story to highlight them; any story, really, could hang from that combination and thus outline the space between.

So this is me, coming back.

But first, so you have a visual of what I mean when I talk about the juxtapositions of what-I-know, I'm going to tell you a little story about one of the houses I looked at, back when we first moved into this city. According to its marketing info, it'd been renovated from a dumpy little 60's-era ranch into a modern house, now with four bedrooms plus a study. The real estate agent and I walked in, and the front door opened directly into the living room (and right there was major mark against it, since I believe in thresholds) and the front part of the house had been changed into formal living room & dining room (second mark and let's leave, because there's not enough of me to need a front parlor and a family room, thanks).

What had us in quiet snarky laughter was the addition. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time; they took the back length of the house -- which from a quick look had originally been the bedrooms -- and merge and convert those into a large den. Then they added a wing onto the left-side with three new bedrooms, which in turn mirrored the master bedroom's wing on the right side, creating a nifty courtyard between them.

Except when you stood at the front door, you could see through the archway to the family room. And in a direct line from that, down a hallway, with the bedroom doors on the left. And at the end of that hallway, a door. Which was open. And revealed the toilet.

That's right. When you walked into this house, you could see straight through the house all the way to the toilet.

Like I said, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, except for no one realizing that moving this here, and putting that there, and making this go like so, meant that guests would have an eyeful of your toilet. With the lid up. Hi, welcome to our home, we're twits who don't realize we're trapped in bad architecture.

( That's what I think of when I think of some stories: these are lovely characters. Too bad they're trapped in the bad architecture of a story, even if it did probably seem like a good idea at the time. Now with 20% more images!! )

[cont. in part II]

this is where fanfiction enters the picture. so to speak.

[cont from part I]

I know I love to analyze, but this is mostly because it comes easy to me, and that in turn is because I was raised to see patterns in everything. Stories are just one more instance of a (created) pattern; when I'm reading, I'm also building a mental picture of a string of discreet points, each drawing on the previous. Eventually the story's points — be these allusions to coReal axioms (ie, the implication that US laws continue to apply in this story), or character-points (eg backstory details), or the author's own overlaying axioms — wrap around and form a shape that becomes the story's whole.

[note: for lack of any more succinct way to put it, I'm using coReal to indicate the reality we share. It's the this-world, but without delineating whether we must share culture to get the coReal, since that's an entire discussion on its own. Besides, I got tired of typing out "shared reality" and misspelling "reality" as "realty". Bleah.]

Incidentally, this is one reason that major info-dumps early in a story — like in the first five pages — drive me absolutely crazy. They interrupt the logical flow of information with side-trips that form a chunk of information, and are most obtrusive when the succeeding paragraphs don't continue from there. That is, the digression isn't a lazy way towards the next step, but is actually a tangent that requires the author (and reader) backtrack to the topic at hand. I don't knit, but it feels like what I imagine it must to start a new project and be following along, only to have to back up and undo the last six stitches before continuing. Make me do that more than twice, and I will, more often than not, just close up the story and not bother with more. I'm already losing the pattern, and that makes me frustrated, and it's awfully hard to see any good in a story when it starts me right off bewildered and annoyed.

I don't mean to give you the idea that I'd say a story has a square shape or a cloverleaf or an eighteen-point star; it's not that precise. More like some stories have complex shapes, and others have simple shapes. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl dies in teeth of combine engine: probably a circle or a square, something relatively simple. A complex whodunit with a variety of potential culprits, and we're getting into loop-de-loop territory as the detective tracks red herrings, comes around again, tries something else, and so on.

Past the loop-de-loop or cloverleaf are stories like Shogun or A Game of Thrones and who the hell knows what those shapes are. Maybe fractals. On acid.

( The shape of a story, the value of intersections, fanfiction-as-dialogue, and why a successful fanfiction work may ultimately fail as original fiction. )