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kaigouIn the last post on this topic, I said I'd come back later to this statement:
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.
When I say "hang from this combination", I mean that when we think of our living space, we most often think in terms of living room, dining room, bedroom, just as authors think of this plot point, that world-detail, this character. What's a lot harder to grasp (and one reason Susan Susanka is a best-selling author) is not how these spaces relate to each other, but what's created in the spaces between them. In a formal sense, these spaces-between are hallways and traffic routes, and in a story these can be the segues scene-to-scene; those we can see and grasp because they're a delineated between-space. What's hardest, it seems to me, is grasping the space that doesn't really exist in either, either by virtue of existing across two spaces or the more nebulous existence of one that's central and separate but without visible boundaries such as when traffic routes like hallways aren't delineated by the physical boundary of a wall.
One example is an open floor-plan where the dining room is on one end, and the living room on the other; the space between the two areas isn't (usually) a formally outlined area of its own, but it's not really dining room and it's not really living room, though it may be traffic-space from front door to kitchen.
Frex, architecturally: if you have the perfect wallpaper to go with your perfect dining room chandelier, but it's foot-wide orange peonies on a robin's-egg-blue background with trailing lime-green vines, setting aside that you have potentially some really bad taste, the fact is that if you then install your nine-foot sectional bright-yellow sofa that rests on the multi-colored striped rug and hang the wallpaper that just fits that 'area' so perfectly it makes your teeth hurt... if that second wallpaper is bold vertical stripes of hot pink and chartreuse, well, each room individually may be the absolute latest in design but when you stand in that between-space and experience both rooms as part of the space where you stand, then it's going to be an eye-popping, stomach-churning moment.
(Don't laugh too hard, because I have stood in that house, and yes, wow, it was vertigo-inducing. I'm not sure whether the rattan curtain in the kitchen doorway -- painted to look like an old Hula-girl -- made it totally hip or was the final straw I'd need to convince a jury that designer-murder would be justified self-defense.)
The fiction version of this is what you get when an author comes up with a bunch of fantastic accoutrement for one part of the story, and then another bunch for another aspect of the story, and doesn't realize that when you stand in that space between them, you're either dizzy from vertigo or able to see all the way down the hall and into the toilet.
This is why I doubt that the author of the critiqued work truly planned to have "colonialism good, natives bad" -- I suspect it was more that while designing/writing, the author came up with a series of design-flourishes that put a positive spin on colonialism, and at the same time came up with a series of design-flourishes that sought to undermine the "noble savage" crap. He never stood or thought to stand in that space between the two spaces, to see both at the same time and thus realize that s/he had just designed two rooms that combined have the power to cause aneurysms in small animals. Including some reviewers, it seems.
That's one reason urban fantasy and the other this-world genres, like techno-thrillers or mysteries or cyberpunk, can seem a little flat to me. The author is using the story like a stage play, where the characters stand at the edge of the stage and gesture vaguely in that direction. We don't have to see the kitchen to know that's the door from whence comes the character bearing the turkey; we don't even have to see the Statue of Liberty if we're shown characters standing "at the prow of a boat" pointing off into the audience. The author can make the world seem awfully big, as big as it is in the real world, or the author can make the story really flat, as if all the interesting stuff is happening off-stage -- that is, when the story pales in comparison to the real world upon which it's suspended (or hanging itself, pun quite possibly intended).
A working example might go something like this: 1, the society reads as egalitarian per gender roles. 2, girls cannot be prime minister/president/king. If the story's society is truly egalitarian, then gender role equality would logically extend to include 'positions of power' -- otherwise it's not egalitarian, just awfully liberal (but only so far). The author might write around this seeming plothole/contradiction by, say, claiming the position of Emperor is mandated as first-born-son by the country's constitution; but then, we can think of plenty of real-world examples of countries without gender equality that did/do allow women to inherit (if not be elected for) a position of power.
Either way, what effectively happens is that our real-world understanding of 'egalitarian' conflicts with the story's definition of 'inherited power'. That's where you get an intersection/conflict between the story and reality. The story posits an expansion upon reality (eg egalitarian gender roles) while simultaneously (and contradictorily) limiting those options via the author's imposed rules/story-axioms.
For this, I do believe I'll need pictures. But no powerpoint! because I have not sunk quite that low.
Think of this as a sort of map, of which one section might look a bit like this:
Consider each color-patch to be an axiom of one's culture (in this case, Western-focused because, well, I'm Western so it was easier to come up with stupid examples). These aren't facts, because a fact is something objectively true, and while it's an axiom of this culture's mythologies that vampires suck blood, it's rather iffy to consider that a 'fact' seeing how, well, there are no vampires -- not in the classic Dracula mythological sense, at least. It can be a fact, of course, such as in "cars drive on land" (as opposed to "fly in air"); it can be a moral statement -- "murder is bad" -- if an ambiguous one if you ask about homicide. It can be a belief, such "angels are good," which if you believe in angels, you may see as a "fact", and if you don't, you may see as a point-of-mythology, but either way, the concept that, in general, "angels are good" is an axiom (assumption) of this culture. The axiom may even be a stereotype, such as "computer geeks are introverts" or "blondes have more fun".
However, just as that strip shows a series of color gradations in the rainbow, with each incrementing after the other in hue, so too are these axioms gradients of each other. "Murder is bad" would rest side-by-side with "manslaughter is sometimes justifiable" and perhaps that would stand adjacent to "if someone tries to hurt you, it's okay to hurt them back". That is, the axiom of "hurting another person" is in itself, a series of graded axioms from one end of the range to the other, and the endpoints then connecting to the next, and so on.
I already know, generally, how things work in the real (my everyday reality based generally on the same as the author's), so the author isn't necessarily required to spell it out for me -- just like you can walk into an unfamiliar house and stand in the living room and say, "I bet the dining room is through that archway." It's not because dining rooms are logically attached to living rooms, but because the architect/builder is -- more likely than not -- working with the basic assumptions of our culture, and one of those is that dining rooms are usually next to living rooms.
That assumption would be one more point in the axiomatic flow, and its contingent parts would flow from or into this dining-room-living-room part: if dining rooms weren't automatically next to living rooms, what is, then? If it's the master bedroom, then this necessitates moving the master bedroom, and what goes in the place now empty? Adjusting one point can have radical results all the way down the line.
Thing is, you just can't stick the entire world in a story -- hell, you don't even really want to stick in everything in just your half. There's a limit to verité, after all, so when an author building a this-world story considers the axioms of the characters' world, two things happen. One, those axioms get settled down into some basic statements, loosely thrown together and selected as they relate to a character. That's part of character creation (consciously or unconsciously): does X like clowns, does X believe in elves, is X a scientist or a doctor or a bricklayer?
Two, the axioms of our existing world are often neutralized to some degree, either to reduce them in impact when they're not a story's focus, or because the author him/herself doesn't have the skill (or inclination) to incorporate all the nuances. Axioms can also be slanted by the author or the characters, shading what might've been an orange hue into a burgundy; they can be rearranged, in a sense, by removing a point in the continuum and letting the story explore what happens at the intersection of the two axioms now become adjacent -- which is what's happening in a story that asks, "if murder were not bad, how would that change the world?"
The first points of change, it seems to me, would be to those cultural axioms immediately contiguous. But in all cases, unless you're an old English guy sitting on a rock talking about primordial soup and what it has to do with the price of coffee in Toledo, you're probably going to want to avoid writing the entire world in your story. That's how you get fiction, versus reality, as mapped in this continuum of cultural axioms.
Because life simply isn't that clean as to be a circle; it's full of intersections and overlaps and backtracks, even in these axioms.
At its simplest level, a story is about an intersection of two axioms. The first we could consider the story's theme, with the second being the obstacle. (The yellow delineates the extent of the story's scope; what falls outside its scope is cast in a bluish/desaturated hue, to offset what does get the story's attention.)
One axiom could be "true love is wonderful," and the second axiom is "soldiers go off to war," and there you have two cultural axioms that, when crossed, form the basis of a story in which two people fall in love only shortly before one of them gets deployed to Afghanistan. Move that second axiom just a smidge to the right, and your obstacle may be "gays aren't allowed in the military," and now you have a romance in which the obstacle is that falling in love puts the soldier-half's career in jeopardy. (I use that example for a dual purpose, in that this statement -- "gays aren't allowed in the military" -- as example of how culturally-based any axiom-map would be, as this axiom is patently not true in the British Army, which does not ban gays and lesbians: in other words, an axiomatic obstacle in one culture isn't necessarily universally so.)
Fiddling around with this map-concept, I realized it also works well to illustrate what's wrong with some stories. Like, say, the following:
This is a story set in the inner-city which makes absolutely no mention of drugs. Or a story in which four women attend college and not one of them is raped. If the yellow is the scope of the story, and all axioms within that scope are those axioms that have impact on, or are important to, the story, a big fat hole in the middle is where a story stops abruptly at recognizing or admitting a contiguous axiom that would otherwise logically follow.
Then there's the cousin to the Big Hole map, which would be a story that tries to cover a whole bunch of wildly-divergent axioms, while also neatly avoiding some of the sticker intersections. I'm sure you can think of a few examples yourself; the ones that come to my mind are almost entirely doorstop tomes, which tend to have a massive scope just so to keep the eight hundred pages from getting boring -- and the broader the scope, the greater the chance the author will overlook, or even elect to skip, certain logical intersections.
Then there are this-world stories that may expand or shift a set of axioms just enough to distort the logical shape. Perhaps the combination of "cars drive on land" and "women have the vote" gets dragged together to intersect with a tilt in the axis to become "women aren't allowed to drive". Suddenly the ramifications of this single twist turns what had been a linear streak into a twisted shape; sometimes this is the author exploring the ramifications, and sometimes it's the author's unintentional creation as a result of trying to convince us of two contradictory/intersecting axioms, such as the egalitarian-society co-existing with no-women-in-power.
Or a story can go even wider from that, if trading out a set of cultural axioms sends the story shooting off into logical axioms that would be a natural extension of the change. Seems to me this is what's happening when you've got distopic futuristic stories like Handmaid's Tale or Alas Babylon and that ilk.
I'm not saying that the average author sits down and says, 'how does it change things, overall, to change just this one thing?' From what I've seen, most authors don't ask that (especially outside speculative fiction), and either their good instincts guide them or they completely miss the twisting going on. From the author's perspective, the story isn't necessarily focused on that intersection or twist, anyway; that's just background to the story's main thrust (as identified by the yellow) and the story itself probably occurs in the space between these slightly-tweaked axioms.
When you get into speculative fiction is when you might see a subset/loop whose axioms are replaced with meanings/purposes radically different. The colorful parts are replacing some axioms, but the logical connections between them may mean that some get pushed to a slightly different shape than the real-world equivalent. This one seems to me to fit stories like techno-thrillers, where there's a secret government conspiracy and black-ops special assassins and the expansion-points happen where the story requires a more advanced technology than currently exists (because you'll need to monitor and supervise your sooper-sekkrit black-ops special assassins, and it's hard to hide a Cray in your basement).
What matters to the points I'll be making later is that this loop acts like a closed circuit; in a techno-thriller, it's stock-in-trade to have a lot of shenanigans while an ignorant public goes about its business. That makes even the tweaks into a closed-off loop, because the vast majority of cultural axioms are to some degree public and/or shared; if a subsection doesn't share the details of how its reality differs from the cultural axioms, then you get a closed circuit.
The second map is an example of the author tweaking a few things but leaving the remainder of the real-world loop intact; that's the visual for me of a story that says "here are the things different, but whatever I've not mentioned, you can just figure it works the same as in real-world".
The third map is possibly my least favorite of literary tools; there's a reason I drew the author-created axioms directly over the real-world sub-loop. Let's say that real-world sub-loop is the techno-thriller playground of "politics and the military complex". There are a lot of contiguous and interdependent axioms in our real-world that circle around the intersection of those two subjects, so it's no surprise some authors want to play with that. What gets me (and bores me, really) is when the author replaces these whole hog with story-based axioms.
Frex, a story in which some super-secret organization has a mandate to fight the human trafficking trade. That would be great, except most developed countries already have some kind of militaristic or gov't force dedicated to that kind of crime. In the US, it's the DSS, so when I read a story where the author's gone ass-over-teacup to create a force that's really just the DSS with a few tweaks, it feels flat, to me.
The author's reinvented a wheel by (to some degree or another) extracting any real-world axioms and replacing them with the story's own fretwork, which is far more tenuous given a lack of easy familiarity on the reader's part -- but it also means the real-world complexity has been dulled down to only that complexity the author can imply. And some authors just plain aren't good enough to imply anywhere near the complexity of axioms that makes the real-world so fascinating and full of surprises.
[cont. in part II]
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.
When I say "hang from this combination", I mean that when we think of our living space, we most often think in terms of living room, dining room, bedroom, just as authors think of this plot point, that world-detail, this character. What's a lot harder to grasp (and one reason Susan Susanka is a best-selling author) is not how these spaces relate to each other, but what's created in the spaces between them. In a formal sense, these spaces-between are hallways and traffic routes, and in a story these can be the segues scene-to-scene; those we can see and grasp because they're a delineated between-space. What's hardest, it seems to me, is grasping the space that doesn't really exist in either, either by virtue of existing across two spaces or the more nebulous existence of one that's central and separate but without visible boundaries such as when traffic routes like hallways aren't delineated by the physical boundary of a wall.
One example is an open floor-plan where the dining room is on one end, and the living room on the other; the space between the two areas isn't (usually) a formally outlined area of its own, but it's not really dining room and it's not really living room, though it may be traffic-space from front door to kitchen.
Frex, architecturally: if you have the perfect wallpaper to go with your perfect dining room chandelier, but it's foot-wide orange peonies on a robin's-egg-blue background with trailing lime-green vines, setting aside that you have potentially some really bad taste, the fact is that if you then install your nine-foot sectional bright-yellow sofa that rests on the multi-colored striped rug and hang the wallpaper that just fits that 'area' so perfectly it makes your teeth hurt... if that second wallpaper is bold vertical stripes of hot pink and chartreuse, well, each room individually may be the absolute latest in design but when you stand in that between-space and experience both rooms as part of the space where you stand, then it's going to be an eye-popping, stomach-churning moment.
(Don't laugh too hard, because I have stood in that house, and yes, wow, it was vertigo-inducing. I'm not sure whether the rattan curtain in the kitchen doorway -- painted to look like an old Hula-girl -- made it totally hip or was the final straw I'd need to convince a jury that designer-murder would be justified self-defense.)
The fiction version of this is what you get when an author comes up with a bunch of fantastic accoutrement for one part of the story, and then another bunch for another aspect of the story, and doesn't realize that when you stand in that space between them, you're either dizzy from vertigo or able to see all the way down the hall and into the toilet.
This is why I doubt that the author of the critiqued work truly planned to have "colonialism good, natives bad" -- I suspect it was more that while designing/writing, the author came up with a series of design-flourishes that put a positive spin on colonialism, and at the same time came up with a series of design-flourishes that sought to undermine the "noble savage" crap. He never stood or thought to stand in that space between the two spaces, to see both at the same time and thus realize that s/he had just designed two rooms that combined have the power to cause aneurysms in small animals. Including some reviewers, it seems.
That's one reason urban fantasy and the other this-world genres, like techno-thrillers or mysteries or cyberpunk, can seem a little flat to me. The author is using the story like a stage play, where the characters stand at the edge of the stage and gesture vaguely in that direction. We don't have to see the kitchen to know that's the door from whence comes the character bearing the turkey; we don't even have to see the Statue of Liberty if we're shown characters standing "at the prow of a boat" pointing off into the audience. The author can make the world seem awfully big, as big as it is in the real world, or the author can make the story really flat, as if all the interesting stuff is happening off-stage -- that is, when the story pales in comparison to the real world upon which it's suspended (or hanging itself, pun quite possibly intended).
A working example might go something like this: 1, the society reads as egalitarian per gender roles. 2, girls cannot be prime minister/president/king. If the story's society is truly egalitarian, then gender role equality would logically extend to include 'positions of power' -- otherwise it's not egalitarian, just awfully liberal (but only so far). The author might write around this seeming plothole/contradiction by, say, claiming the position of Emperor is mandated as first-born-son by the country's constitution; but then, we can think of plenty of real-world examples of countries without gender equality that did/do allow women to inherit (if not be elected for) a position of power.
Either way, what effectively happens is that our real-world understanding of 'egalitarian' conflicts with the story's definition of 'inherited power'. That's where you get an intersection/conflict between the story and reality. The story posits an expansion upon reality (eg egalitarian gender roles) while simultaneously (and contradictorily) limiting those options via the author's imposed rules/story-axioms.
For this, I do believe I'll need pictures. But no powerpoint! because I have not sunk quite that low.
Think of this as a sort of map, of which one section might look a bit like this:
Consider each color-patch to be an axiom of one's culture (in this case, Western-focused because, well, I'm Western so it was easier to come up with stupid examples). These aren't facts, because a fact is something objectively true, and while it's an axiom of this culture's mythologies that vampires suck blood, it's rather iffy to consider that a 'fact' seeing how, well, there are no vampires -- not in the classic Dracula mythological sense, at least. It can be a fact, of course, such as in "cars drive on land" (as opposed to "fly in air"); it can be a moral statement -- "murder is bad" -- if an ambiguous one if you ask about homicide. It can be a belief, such "angels are good," which if you believe in angels, you may see as a "fact", and if you don't, you may see as a point-of-mythology, but either way, the concept that, in general, "angels are good" is an axiom (assumption) of this culture. The axiom may even be a stereotype, such as "computer geeks are introverts" or "blondes have more fun".
However, just as that strip shows a series of color gradations in the rainbow, with each incrementing after the other in hue, so too are these axioms gradients of each other. "Murder is bad" would rest side-by-side with "manslaughter is sometimes justifiable" and perhaps that would stand adjacent to "if someone tries to hurt you, it's okay to hurt them back". That is, the axiom of "hurting another person" is in itself, a series of graded axioms from one end of the range to the other, and the endpoints then connecting to the next, and so on.
I already know, generally, how things work in the real (my everyday reality based generally on the same as the author's), so the author isn't necessarily required to spell it out for me -- just like you can walk into an unfamiliar house and stand in the living room and say, "I bet the dining room is through that archway." It's not because dining rooms are logically attached to living rooms, but because the architect/builder is -- more likely than not -- working with the basic assumptions of our culture, and one of those is that dining rooms are usually next to living rooms.
That assumption would be one more point in the axiomatic flow, and its contingent parts would flow from or into this dining-room-living-room part: if dining rooms weren't automatically next to living rooms, what is, then? If it's the master bedroom, then this necessitates moving the master bedroom, and what goes in the place now empty? Adjusting one point can have radical results all the way down the line.
Thing is, you just can't stick the entire world in a story -- hell, you don't even really want to stick in everything in just your half. There's a limit to verité, after all, so when an author building a this-world story considers the axioms of the characters' world, two things happen. One, those axioms get settled down into some basic statements, loosely thrown together and selected as they relate to a character. That's part of character creation (consciously or unconsciously): does X like clowns, does X believe in elves, is X a scientist or a doctor or a bricklayer?
Two, the axioms of our existing world are often neutralized to some degree, either to reduce them in impact when they're not a story's focus, or because the author him/herself doesn't have the skill (or inclination) to incorporate all the nuances. Axioms can also be slanted by the author or the characters, shading what might've been an orange hue into a burgundy; they can be rearranged, in a sense, by removing a point in the continuum and letting the story explore what happens at the intersection of the two axioms now become adjacent -- which is what's happening in a story that asks, "if murder were not bad, how would that change the world?"
The first points of change, it seems to me, would be to those cultural axioms immediately contiguous. But in all cases, unless you're an old English guy sitting on a rock talking about primordial soup and what it has to do with the price of coffee in Toledo, you're probably going to want to avoid writing the entire world in your story. That's how you get fiction, versus reality, as mapped in this continuum of cultural axioms.
Because life simply isn't that clean as to be a circle; it's full of intersections and overlaps and backtracks, even in these axioms.
At its simplest level, a story is about an intersection of two axioms. The first we could consider the story's theme, with the second being the obstacle. (The yellow delineates the extent of the story's scope; what falls outside its scope is cast in a bluish/desaturated hue, to offset what does get the story's attention.)
One axiom could be "true love is wonderful," and the second axiom is "soldiers go off to war," and there you have two cultural axioms that, when crossed, form the basis of a story in which two people fall in love only shortly before one of them gets deployed to Afghanistan. Move that second axiom just a smidge to the right, and your obstacle may be "gays aren't allowed in the military," and now you have a romance in which the obstacle is that falling in love puts the soldier-half's career in jeopardy. (I use that example for a dual purpose, in that this statement -- "gays aren't allowed in the military" -- as example of how culturally-based any axiom-map would be, as this axiom is patently not true in the British Army, which does not ban gays and lesbians: in other words, an axiomatic obstacle in one culture isn't necessarily universally so.)
Fiddling around with this map-concept, I realized it also works well to illustrate what's wrong with some stories. Like, say, the following:
This is a story set in the inner-city which makes absolutely no mention of drugs. Or a story in which four women attend college and not one of them is raped. If the yellow is the scope of the story, and all axioms within that scope are those axioms that have impact on, or are important to, the story, a big fat hole in the middle is where a story stops abruptly at recognizing or admitting a contiguous axiom that would otherwise logically follow.
Then there's the cousin to the Big Hole map, which would be a story that tries to cover a whole bunch of wildly-divergent axioms, while also neatly avoiding some of the sticker intersections. I'm sure you can think of a few examples yourself; the ones that come to my mind are almost entirely doorstop tomes, which tend to have a massive scope just so to keep the eight hundred pages from getting boring -- and the broader the scope, the greater the chance the author will overlook, or even elect to skip, certain logical intersections.
Then there are this-world stories that may expand or shift a set of axioms just enough to distort the logical shape. Perhaps the combination of "cars drive on land" and "women have the vote" gets dragged together to intersect with a tilt in the axis to become "women aren't allowed to drive". Suddenly the ramifications of this single twist turns what had been a linear streak into a twisted shape; sometimes this is the author exploring the ramifications, and sometimes it's the author's unintentional creation as a result of trying to convince us of two contradictory/intersecting axioms, such as the egalitarian-society co-existing with no-women-in-power.
Or a story can go even wider from that, if trading out a set of cultural axioms sends the story shooting off into logical axioms that would be a natural extension of the change. Seems to me this is what's happening when you've got distopic futuristic stories like Handmaid's Tale or Alas Babylon and that ilk.
I'm not saying that the average author sits down and says, 'how does it change things, overall, to change just this one thing?' From what I've seen, most authors don't ask that (especially outside speculative fiction), and either their good instincts guide them or they completely miss the twisting going on. From the author's perspective, the story isn't necessarily focused on that intersection or twist, anyway; that's just background to the story's main thrust (as identified by the yellow) and the story itself probably occurs in the space between these slightly-tweaked axioms.
When you get into speculative fiction is when you might see a subset/loop whose axioms are replaced with meanings/purposes radically different. The colorful parts are replacing some axioms, but the logical connections between them may mean that some get pushed to a slightly different shape than the real-world equivalent. This one seems to me to fit stories like techno-thrillers, where there's a secret government conspiracy and black-ops special assassins and the expansion-points happen where the story requires a more advanced technology than currently exists (because you'll need to monitor and supervise your sooper-sekkrit black-ops special assassins, and it's hard to hide a Cray in your basement).
What matters to the points I'll be making later is that this loop acts like a closed circuit; in a techno-thriller, it's stock-in-trade to have a lot of shenanigans while an ignorant public goes about its business. That makes even the tweaks into a closed-off loop, because the vast majority of cultural axioms are to some degree public and/or shared; if a subsection doesn't share the details of how its reality differs from the cultural axioms, then you get a closed circuit.
The second map is an example of the author tweaking a few things but leaving the remainder of the real-world loop intact; that's the visual for me of a story that says "here are the things different, but whatever I've not mentioned, you can just figure it works the same as in real-world".
The third map is possibly my least favorite of literary tools; there's a reason I drew the author-created axioms directly over the real-world sub-loop. Let's say that real-world sub-loop is the techno-thriller playground of "politics and the military complex". There are a lot of contiguous and interdependent axioms in our real-world that circle around the intersection of those two subjects, so it's no surprise some authors want to play with that. What gets me (and bores me, really) is when the author replaces these whole hog with story-based axioms.
Frex, a story in which some super-secret organization has a mandate to fight the human trafficking trade. That would be great, except most developed countries already have some kind of militaristic or gov't force dedicated to that kind of crime. In the US, it's the DSS, so when I read a story where the author's gone ass-over-teacup to create a force that's really just the DSS with a few tweaks, it feels flat, to me.
The author's reinvented a wheel by (to some degree or another) extracting any real-world axioms and replacing them with the story's own fretwork, which is far more tenuous given a lack of easy familiarity on the reader's part -- but it also means the real-world complexity has been dulled down to only that complexity the author can imply. And some authors just plain aren't good enough to imply anywhere near the complexity of axioms that makes the real-world so fascinating and full of surprises.
[cont. in part II]
no subject
Date: 1 Dec 2009 10:17 pm (UTC)I did actually do something kind of like this on a WiP a few years back, while I was still getting the hang of basic storytelling techniques -- I had a critique that pointed out the characters kept repeating stuff. So I sat down and logged every single scene, and went through line and by line with color-coding to indicate what got discussed in each scene. Certain pieces of info (eg "this is a bad guy" or "I really like her" or "they're brother and sister", whatever) got patterned to make them distinctive, after realizing these bits of info were being repeated over and over. It was quite eye-popping when done but it made a huge impact on me to see just how often I was retreading points and inadvertently emphasizing things that weren't, in the overall scheme, that important.
What we repeat multiple times becomes of major importance to a reader, like a peculiar corollary to the gun on the mantle. It gets mentioned, so it must be important, eh. Plus, when I wanted to make sure I was being really subtle on my foreshadowing or red herrings, it helped to make sure I really was being subtle, and not just fooling myself by forgetting what'd been said two scenes before.
no subject
Date: 3 Dec 2009 11:06 pm (UTC)Sounds like a ton of work, but also definitely worth it to be able to see the patterns.