Two Examples From Inductive Composition

Here are two pieces that I wrote using what I called "inductive composition" in my previous post. I of course need a minimum of two to demonstrate it. These use the same characters and could be a part of a larger story, but I wrote them as independent stories, each centered around a particular idea. I also wrote them in reverse of the order I present them here, which is chronologically. I wrote the second one first and that spawned and idea for the first.

Both stories were inspired by some of the concepts I related in my post on genetic engineering, I also tried to relate these ideas in Divide The Sea, a much longer story. I wondered if I could refine the concepts to their purest narrative form. I don't know If I've succeeded, but in any case I offer these for your consideration.

Flowers And Sand

Compared to anything else that came across her tablet screen, the questions were stark. Their semantic and visual simplicity is what terrified her. Each was a sequence of no more than ten words without a conjunction or dependent clause among them. The eggshell white background and black, monospaced typeface served only to heap more anxiety upon Lizette as she stared at the exam and nearly saw it peering back into her.

The first question out of one thousand read: “Do flowers ever make you feel sad?”

Lizette had answered this with a yes and failed to move on because the next question read:

“Do old friends sometimes feel distant?”

She sensed movement and looked up to see a hazy figure against the ocean and sky. The beach was made of rough sand and it ended in grassy dunes. The person, the only other human Lizette could see, stepped onto a boardwalk that wove among the dunes and ended at the slender brick road on which the house stood. An autumn breeze had descended and was messing around with sand and the grass and the figure’s floral dress.

A moment later, the woman had climbed the porch and entered the large room that faced the ocean. It was cool in there and full of plants, some nearly two stories high. A table stood in the middle and Lizette sat at it, across from the other woman. The tablet lay near the edge of the table, face down. The woman looked at it and raised an eyebrow.

“It’s no use.” said Lizette. “I know what it will say. Lian, do you think I’ve changed so much?”

Lian said, “Are you asking because your husband didn’t come home last night?”

When Lizette didn’t answer, Lian removed a deck of cards from her purse. She lay them face up in a grid. Each bore an image, a title, and a couplet. Lian instructed Lizette to stare at the arrangement for a moment and try to remember what she saw. Then she flipped them over changed their positions, making sure that she moved with enough care to allow Lizette the opportunity to follow where each card went. She assembled them into a grid again.

“Turn over three.” said Lian. “This isn’t a magic trick or a seance. You saw the cards and your brain followed them, even if you weren’t paying attention. Whatever you pick, something inside of you has chosen it.”

The first card pictured a man standing on a balcony and holding a burning sheet of paper,

The top read, “The Perpetual Actor” and the couplet at the bottom said,

He needs no crowd, no audience for his voice

The script is loud and divines every choice

Lizette turned over a second card, entitled “Lover’s Shade” and picturing a man followed by an inverted shadow, a silhouette with a head that touched its owner’s feet. The man covered his eyes from blinding sunlight, but was unable to stop a crack that was splitting open is face. An eye peered through the crack.

Daylight uncovers hollow faces and eyes awake in kind,

hoping strangers lie in places of lovers left twice behind

As Lizette touched the third card, Lian put her hand on top and held Lizette’s hand down.

“You know what this is?” said Lizette.

Lian nodded and let her eyes flood, saying, “I was hoping for something different, but you see things too well. I’m the dishonest one.” She drew a long breath. “None of this is your fault; I’m to blame. Go to my house and you’ll find him there. Hate me if you want, but you should forgive him.”

Lizette left and Lian went back to the beach, where she dialed someone on her phone.

“I went over thinking I was going to tell her the truth, but when I saw her face I couldn’t. She was taking the exam again because she senses that she’s changing and you won’t love her anymore. That poor woman, she doesn’t know how else to live. You were right, if she finds out that you cheated on the test, it will crush her. The only thing she’ll ever think is that you were never meant to be together. Better to let her believe I led you astray.”

Lian held up the third card, the one Lizette had chosen but never seen. It was “The Lock and Key.”

If you think that this key guards a secret then you are wrong

Captive truth wants to flee, but you’ve been the keeper all along

Prophecies Once Spoken

From the distance afforded by the hills, the descent of mortar shells sounded almost calm, like the soft shoed rumbling of a thunderstorm gathering a few miles out to sea. Aaron stood in the archway of his chapel, where morning dew clung to the moss on the stones. He surveyed the steppes cut into the hills on which his abbey stood. Each plateau blossomed in a different brilliant color. They bore wheat and vegetables as well as weedy grass on which pigs grazed. The most important crop was Aaron’s unique breed of peonies that looked like candy because of their glossy swirls in purple and white and blue and gold. Aaron was dismayed the see a depression in the middle of his flower bed. The shadow assumed the shape of a human body.

He crossed the courtyard, throwing corn which chickens pecked from the seams between paving stones. When he reached his peonies, he realized that one of his guests had died. Aaron fetched a cart and took the corpse into the basement of his chapel, where he kept a morgue in which he prepared bodies for their final passage. On the wall hung a dried and pressed flower behind a square of cracked glass. Handwritten words on the backing paper read, “In honor of your first artificial breed, love Elish.”

The next morning, two women and three men climbed the hill. The three men were nearly, though not entirely, identical. The same was true of the women, the most striking difference between them being the blue eyes of one and the golden eyes of the other. They passed a dead pig in the tall grass. Its mouth was turned to the sky and a dark mass of insects flew in and out of it. Aaron had been crouched over the pig and when he saw the group he stood.

He said, “Elish”, as though unsure it was her.

The blue eyed woman said, “The natches burned out our neighborhood.”

“Won’t your own kind take you in?”

“Things with us aren’t good. Perhaps you can pretend to be our kind again?”

One of the men said, “Were you lying when you said he was refined?”

Aaron said, “Yes, I’m not a victim of genetic design. I’m a natch.”

Elish said, “When we met he was pretending to be refined. How could I have known? He was lucky; he was born just as smart and strong as any man designed to be that way.”

The five of them argued and the three men left.

Aaron said to the yellow eyed woman, “I’m surprised you came Lian, let alone stayed.”

Years before, Lian had claimed that she and Aaron were having an affair. Even though the match making program had placed Aaron and Elish together, it wasn’t perfect. Lian was herself a constant reminder of technology’s imperfection. Her eyes weren’t meant to be gold. When Elish pressed Aaron about the fictional fling, she found a truth far more unsettling. Aaron had forged the results that placed them together. He had said it was because he’d wanted so much to be with Elish. His wife concluded it was because he was a natural born who wanted so much to find acceptance among the genetically engineered elite.

Lian said, “When war comes, sometimes you find friends among former enemies.”

Elish smiled and said, “Our argument with the others was a ruse. My kind, as you call us, sent me here to spy on you, but as for me I’d like to make amends. Will you come back down the hill?”

She held out a wedding ring, to which Aaron replied, “You might want to look at something first.” He brought them to the morgue and said, “I get a lot of pilgrims.. They want to be more than they are and blame the regulations of refined society for their impoverished creativity. Unfortunately, the peonies killed this one.”

Elish shook her head, saying, “No, you’re lying, just to drive me away. You never forgave me.”

She left, leaving Aaron and Lian alone. Lian asked what Elish had meant and how she could possibly think that Aaron has somehow arranged the body as a stunt when he didn’t even know they were coming. Aaron explained that Elish understood the truth immediately, but that people believe what the need to.

“You know that.” he said.

“What do you think she wants to believe?”

“I designed my peonies, but now they’re sick. It’s the germs that give them those colors. The effect on nearby animals is a change in pheromones that draw poisonous blue flies to breed in their mouths when they sleep. But it only affects those with a particular gene that is, unfortunately, essential to the engineering process. It is like inbreeding; it weakens us. The result is a complex disease that science cannot cure fast enough. All of you being the same, you lack the happy accident that would reveal the truth. And all of you may die of the same thing.”

Lian nodded, saying, “Elish is an agricultural engineer. It seems her work is meaningless now.”

“In work, as in love, she is insecure. I had hoped she changed, but she hasn’t. She’s like this man.”

The woman considered the man. His mouth was ajar. Behind the teeth blacked by insect waste, she could see a tongue pot marked by thousands of tiny craters. Blue flies inject their victims with anesthetic before borrow inside and laying their eggs. The larvae gestate in a matter of hours. Given that the cadaver’s eyes were opened, it wasn’t unreasonable to think this man had awoken to find himself paralyzed with a mouth full of worms competing to escape.

Lian said, “Aren’t you the happy accident?”

“I don’t know. I’m not so sure it’s happy for you and your kind.”

Inductive Composition And Theme Stories

My Favorite Poet.. Wait, I still have the meaning of that word wrong, don't I?

In his book On Writing, Steven King says he’s a natural “putter-inner”, meaning that as revises his first draft, he tends to add more material. That’s a problem because his goal is usually to make the second draft shorter than the first. I have this same problem, compounded by the tendency to start writing the second draft before I’ve finished the first. The longer my piece, the more likely I will go back to the beginning and started fleshing out material with new ideas. Often, I’m fleshing out stuff that’s already a bit overfed. That usually happens because the characters, settings, themes and other story elements have had too much time to sit in my brain and generate new ideas.

There is more peril in this behavior than merely bulking up a story that may first requiring some tightening. Another consequence is that I spool out new threads of thought that meander away from the central throughline. Sometimes these diversions are okay. I’m comfortable with pinning random ideas to the board and seeing what becomes of them later. Sometimes, however, they take on a life of their own. I become fascinated with a new turn on a story element and want to follow it further, adding more and more and circling back until the sideroad becomes a part of the main product. It can through the balance off or paint me into a corner. I can wind up turning a story that started out with a clear concept into something that is a little confused about what it is. At that point I may be tempted to put the work down and ponder it for a bit before having the courage to sort out the mess. It happens to the best of us, I suppose.

However, lately I’ve been trying to work on shorter stories and poems that are a little more immune to this trend. In particular, I’ve developed a fascination with flash fiction and haiku. My flash fiction is 1000 words or less and my haiku use the tradition 17 syllable pattern. There are many advantages to these literary formats. For example, they are more likely to actually get finished. Also, I am less likely to start messing with the content before I’ve finished a first draft. What’s more is that I have to be parsimonious with my words. I’ve found that this limitation is more freeing than constraining. There is the obvious result that short pieces can be more focused. However, I’ve also found that it appeals to my habit of “breeding” : when things I write generate litters of more ideas that I am then compelled to write also. Short works do not force me to throw out ideas. Quite the contrary.  They encourage me to break those ideas off into separate pieces. Each thought can be developed on its own.

One could ask whether this results in more disjointed results, where one speaks in sound bites rather than complete meals. After all, when I try to write a novel and add more and more ideas, it’s because I think they’re all related in some way. By spinning off new stories (or for that matter poems), have I risked shredding something that had the potential of being a whole fabric? I’ve come to the conclusion that ideas can be multitude, all with inter-relations, without forfeiting individual coherence. I’m not the first to have experimented with the way of writing I’m about to describe, but for lack of better terms I’ve coined it inductive composition and theme stories. Let me explain.

Inductive composition is a little like regular old brainstorming, except that each idea gets self-contained development, and the end products may stand on their own or together. Suppose you have an idea for a basic story involving two characters and a single conflict, something that can be related in a flash fiction format. This may spawn ideas about a continuation of that conflict, or new conflicts, or new characters that may relate to one or more of the original characters. Can each of these become the basis of a new flash fiction piece? Write them, making sure that they can still function independent of the others. The idea is to create a chorus of pieces. Each has an individual voice and together they add volume and new shades to various aspects of the story. At this point, one might rearrange the pieces and put them together in a single cohesive long story. You could do that, breaking their isolated existences and weaving them together. Thus, this becomes one way of coming up with the rough draft of a traditional novel. Or, you could select a subset of these pieces that seem to have a narrative relationship and arrange them together.

The parts may not be as cohesive as that traditional novel. They may even be somewhat contradictory. Nonetheless, it is possible for a general narrative to emerge and become visible to the astute reader.

I call this inductive composition, by analogy to the inductive method of reasoning (not to be confused with inductive mathematical proofs, which are altogether different). The foundations of an inductive argument are facts or propositions that come from independent sources. They weren’t created for any particular purpose. However, noticing a pattern, one may pull them together to argue that in concert they imply a certain conclusion. While better and better inductive arguments can support greater and greater probability of their conclusions being true, they can almost never provide absolute certainty in the way a deductive argument can. Of course, deductive argumentation requires axioms and strict adherence to formal logic, which is not true of reality.

Fiction is sometimes meant to represent reality, which is experienced in a sequence of moments that don’t have an ultimate purpose and which often have lots of blind alleys or observations that are interesting but not lent to absolute conclusions in the absence of omniscience and the ability to integrate such total knowledge. Reality is contradictory and subject. Yet, we press on with hedge bets based on an inductive assemblies of a thousand individual experiences. This is the model of inductive composition.

Them stories take this a step further. A theme story is composed of shorter stories that may not even contain the same characters or settings. Each component represents an individual emotional beat that might be typical in a larger story. For example, consider a plot summary based on the monomyth structure. One could write a sequence of shorter stories in which each piece details the emotional core of a particular stage in the hero’s journey. Don’t worry about continuity with anything else, just write something that evokes that stage the deepest sentiment and clearest representation possible. Then arrange them in their normal narrative sequence. Thematically, it tells a story, even if this isn’t true on the surface.

The major drawback of the theme story is that it makes no sense as a whole with the decoder ring. This may be okay, depending on your purpose. I could use a theme story as a platform for honing particular skills or exploring ways of looking at the larger story problem without being encumbered by commitments and connections that I have established earlier. Perhaps I could use that to write something more traditional. Or perhaps I could let it stand as-is. After all, each of the component story is supposed to stand on their own and should draw their strength from within, so to speak. The thematic progression might actually be clearer than you think to some readers.

I like to think this approach has a loose connection to the concept of nen actions in Zen philosophy. Nen actions describe the chain of thoughts that progress from an initial sensory input. The first nen is the immediate impression that happens when we first receive a stimulus. It is the sensation of colors and sounds without identity as a part of a larger pattern. We simply see blue and hear a string of notes. The second nen, which often happens so quickly we don’t even notice the first nen, is pattern recognition. We now see an entire image in a painting and may even identify it if it’s familiar to us. We now hear a melody and know the words. The third nen turns from passive recognition to active response. This could be a simple internal response, such as a pleasant feeling that comes from the things around us - or even a decision to ignore the input and move on. Or it could be something more dramatic, as when a stimulus triggers our flight or fight reflexes. Though in some sense the first kind if response might be considered passive, down at the level of nen actions we would call it active because it is a response that distinguishes you from a device that merely records its inputs.  

This is of course just an analogy. Writing any sort of fiction requires going beyond the third Nen (come to think of it Beyond The Third Nen sounds like a great name for a story or a prog rock album). However, I like the idea of sometimes just following a stream of ideas without first trying to connect them in some over-arching infrastructure. Sometimes one can be created after the fact, and sometimes themes and narratives emerge organically all their own. You make take a step back and find it there, something you couldn’t have discovered if you went in with a plan.

We Tried Meritocracy And Called It Communism

"Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

-Walt Whitman

"Look what I built with nothing but the power of my enormous head!"

People of the developed world, we don't live in a meritocracy.  I know you're all looking over your left shoulder at that Swede and thinking I am only addressing him, but I assure you that I am talking to the Americans gathered here as well.  In fact, I'm looking right at you and if the Swede hears me it's because he happens to be within ear shot.  Capitalist societies don't produce meritocracies.  The ideas are contradictory.  If you like capitalism that is fine and probably healthy, but don't walk around announcing that blue and red are the same color.  People might start thinking you're some kind of genius, and we wouldn't want that would we?  The moment the rest of the world starts calling you a genius, you've lost all credibility.

I would define a "meritocracy" as a society where the people at the top are there because of the innate value of their abilities.  This is a bit of a vague definition, and in some very broad sense meritocracy is synonymous with civilization.  There is anarchy, which by definition cannot exist (ref. William Golding), and meritocracy, which is everything else and thus all there is.  What I mean is that life, whether lived in the trees or in Manhattan, is nasty, brutish and short.  Our fortunes are governed by some form of selection, natural or otherwise.  If one defines "ability" as aptitude for whatever skill spells survival in the current death match, then of course the people at the top are those most well endowed with this skill.

One may scoff and ask whether being born to the right family counts as aptitude. In small doses it is true that many past and present societies have structures allowing some of their most unwitting citizens to assume fame, power and fortune.  Europe has its royals and America has its Congress.  Though in defense of Congress, they are only slightly less effective than monarchy and much less prone to hemophilia.  This situation is not sustainable, however.  Since there is no such thing as absolute power unless you are from Krypton, even the grandest duchess will have to resort to Machiavellian measures to maintain power.  L'etat c'est vous?  If so, then why did you find the need to demolish provincial fortresses and build Versailles?  Sometimes you have to admire the innate ruthlessness of those born to the throne and yet driven mad by the very real threat of loosing it.  That's right, there is no anarchy and no absolute power, only meritocracy filling the negative space between two imaginary regimes.

However, to make the discussion meaningful, we'd probably like to define meritocracy more narrowly.  We have to, if we're planning on boasting that we live in a society where merit is the measure of value.  Kings raised their princes to believe they were appointed by God and had no issue with the idea that some people were born specialer than others.  This didn't remove the very real need to wheel and deal, which wouldn't be necessary with God on your side, but the attitude represents a level of comfort with primogeniture that drives modern man mad.  We're all libertarians now and we don't like the idea that we were born with a leg up or that anyone wanted to help us.  For starters, that would mean having to share and help others, which lord knows is a habit we gave up in kindergarten.  Such a thought would also mean believing that we are not the arbiters of our own fate and that we do not live in a society that empowers all of its citizens equally.

Thus, we refine the concept of merit as a measure of value.  Who decides value?  Well, if I started out with nothing and became successful, then of course whatever it is I did to make that happen is valuable.  Since I believe I rose on the backs of impersonal forces, without the help of anyone with a personal interest in me, I can point to my anonymous peers and say that they have assigned me my worth.  We live in a democracy where people are free to elect whom they choose, assuming they are rich enough to avoid working through voting day and white enough to own voter Id cards.  We also live in a capitalist economy, where people are free to give their money to whomever they want, assuming that someone has convinced us that what is for sale fulfills an aching need.  Most of the time it doesn't, unless you include psychological needs.  In this case, yes everything we buy we need desperately to prop up our identities.  And that is why we buy into the ultimate shill, the fictional capitalist meritocracy.  Like the White Queen, we want to believe six impossible thoughts before breakfast.

Consider this: The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam.  It's a dissertation on the nature of the long con.  When you're going for broke, you make it appear as though you're giving up the game.  A reformed criminal is always more appealing that a man who has stayed out of trouble his whole life.  Likewise, we are easily impressed by an ad that doesn't sell anything.  Tigers don't change their stripes and major consumer products companies don't pay for advertising without a game in mind.  You know this, you aren't stupid, but the power of the long con is that there are too many redirections along the way to keep track of where it's going.  In the end, we have a system where value is determined by the masses and mined from their deepest desires, but under the control of those who know better.  As the above linked article points out, ads such as these depend on making you feel empowered, which you want, while at the same time giving you an authority to validate your identity, which you need though you may deny it.  The authority, therefore, remains, though it is camouflaged.  It has to do more work to project its power, but it has never gone away.  There are no anarchies and you don't live in a meritocracy.  Neither one would be very appealing.

Once upon a time there was a system called communism, and it was horrific.  God, it was just awful, we all know that.  What is the defining feature of communism?  I suppose there were many, but one that strikes me is that it was a true meritocracy.  In order for something to exist, there has to be a univocal definition of merit and a centralized means of enforcing that.  The only way that can happen is when the state owns all the means of production and a single party system owns the state.  That's what you're getting if you claim you want to live in a meritocracy.  What we live in is a market economy, where value is rooted in what we can make people believe they are buying into of their own free will and under the control of an ever shifting balance of power among that various forces that want to create that value.  I'm not suggesting that communism is a good thing.  I'm suggesting that meritocracy is a bad thing, or perhaps more accurately an imaginary thing.

Those in power used to promote the divine right of kings.  Today we say that we don't accept these arbitrary constraints and want to define our own value.  Our response is to create a new divine authority, this time crowd sourced.  We are still reliant on the notion of an independent authority legitimizing our accidental success, but greater self awareness has necessitated more complex rationalizations.  "Know thyself", said the philosopher, but what good has that done most people?  The most natural response to deep introspection is not personal development; it is a resolve to double our efforts at holding off existential angst.   Think of the alcoholic who weaves complex narratives to avoid change.  And you think, wouldn't it be easier to quit?  In the long term, yes.  In the short term it is easier to change identity than action.

Persephone

In honor of the approaching season, I wrote these ten haikus on winter. I intended them to stand on their own as simple juxtapositions of images from nature and observations about human nature. At the same time, as a group I wanted them to represent a version of the story of Persephone and Hades. To read them in that sense, take the order as left side top to bottom followed by the right side top to bottom.

If you like this, consider downloading some Fiction For Free.

I think that I'm not supposed to offer any words on interpretation, but I will anyway. I'm always paranoid that someday I will stumble across something I wrote and have no idea why I wrote it. Therefore, I catalog my thoughts on my work for my own sake and share it with you in case you might be interested. The Internet is useful for something, it seems.

You know the basic story: Hades steels Persephone to the underworld and while there she eats three seeds. As a result, she must stay with Hades for three months of the year and her mother is filled with such sadness that world freezes. I think this basic idea shows in the poem. What I added was the notion that Persephone was intrigued by Hades and his world, then a little repulsed, and then came to accept it. She ate those seeds and actually liked what she tasted. Upon her return to the world above, she thought of Hades with hesitancy. Then she returned to him and saw how he was different from the world of the gods above. They were known for their mischievousness and frivolity. They often did more harm than good. Hades, on the other hand, is left to do his work without the interference of the other gods. He turns out to be a conscientious administrator over the world of the dead, and a faithful companion. That is what happens in my version, anyway.

J Robert

Fictional Engineer 2: A Simple Story Foundation

This is part 2 of my musings on story construction...

A Simple Story Foundation

One way to start a story is with three primary entities, called the triangle.  One familiar example is the love triangle, but the concept is broader than that.  And note that I said entities, not characters.  One or more of the three may be a situation.  The ideal is that the story starts with a potential conflict between two characters and a character and an entity.  If it is two characters, it is essential that they each have at least one internal conflict that is related to their external conflict.  Even better, their internal conflicts may be opposed in some way that neither understands.  For example, two characters may be lovers.  One has an inner conflict of suspicion - “maybe he’s after my money rather than my heart” - while the other has a conflict of self doubt - “maybe I’m not good enough for her”.  The external potential conflict is that their parents do not approve of the relationship.  This scenario may exist in a status quo for some time, until the introduction of third character, who throws a wrench into the works.  For example, the wealthy family hires a private eye to spy on their daughter’s lover without the their daughter’s knowledge.  He befriends the couple and then falls in love with the daughter.  Or the other way around.  In either case, the PI plays on the inner conflicts to bring the external conflict to a head.  Either tragedy of comedy may ensue, depending on the writer’s intent.

If this sounds vaguely like the plot of a Hollywood movie, that’s because it is like the plot of many movies.  It’s also a little like the plot of Othello (a little).  It’s reliable.  And though it’s formulaic, it’s versatile.

One thing I like about this example is that is demonstrates that conflict need not indicate aggression or opposition.  The two primary characters are actually in love.  But if there’s no conflict, there’s no story.  The story is not that they’re in love.  The story is that there are unresolved issues that will test that love.  The story begins with the cinder that lights that powder keg.  

So the triangle begins with two entities, a potential conflict and a potential resolution.  If any of the entities are characters, then they each have at least one inner conflict relating to their external potential conflict.  If the entities are in opposition, then we leave it this way.  If they are not in opposition, then we must add a unifier.  This is something that brings them together.   This is not the same as the potential resolution.  A resolution to a potential conflict is only strong enough to keep the conflict from boiling over, it is not strong enough to bring them together.  There must be something else that stands alone without other mitigating factors.

In my example, the unifier may at first seem obvious: they are in love.  But stating this is no better than stating the theme without involving the specific circumstances of specific characters.  Why are they in love?   There may be many reasons, but the story must story with at least one clear and powerful reason.  For example, they may have both been in imprisoned in a foreign country because they volunteered with a humanitarian mission opposed by the local government.  They helped each other escape.  Along the way, we may find other things they share in common, but this is a good start.  If we twist it further, we can make this unifier relate to the central conflicts: the woman’s family believes her humanitarian stint was just a phase and wants her to “grow up” and prepare to take over the family business.  The man wants is worried that his lover was never really committed to the cause anyway.  Throw in the third wheel and the story gets in motion.   

Next up: Stories and Sub-Stories

Fictional Engineering, Part 1

No One Builds A Story Like a Crazy Scot

This is part one of a multi-part series I'm calling fictional engineering.  I'm an engineer by trade and a science fiction writer by delusion, so it made sense to me to characterize narrative composition as an engineering design process.  It isn't always that way, of course.  I tend to lose discipline with this technique a lot and that's okay.  However, I have found a few of these ideas helpful.  You'll probably find that they aren't exceptionally groundbreaking.  What I've done is synthesize some concepts I've encountered over the years from other writers.  In way it's a manifesto: out of all the ways I've seen fiction constructed, these are the ways that work for me.

Introduction

Every story is centered around conflict.  A single sentence summarizes the central conflict.  This sentence invokes at least one character and the situation the story puts them in.  Beyond that, every character, scene and theme can be defined in terms of conflict at some level.  Conflict is the energy that makes the story go.

Conflicts can come in three primary varieties: between a character and him/her/itself, between two characters and between a character and his/her/its situation.  These conflicts are analogous to the cliche (stated in masculine terms of course): man vs himself, man vs man and man vs the world.  

The “world” represents anything that is impersonal, be it an animal, a bureaucracy or a machine.  This is why I use the term “situation” instead, because the defining characteristic of this type of conflict is that one half of it is an object, not a subject, in the relationship.  A situation is anything that cannot reciprocate the character’s feelings of conflict.  If an animal, bureaucracy or machine obtains enough autonomy and personality in the story to reciprocate, then it becomes a character and should be classified in a character vs character conflict.  On the other hand, a person may be handled as a situation if he or she doesn’t have sufficient personality or autonomy to warrant full character status (e.g. the anonymous store clerk who is “just doing his job” and is more the face of a bureaucracy than a character with individual motivations).  Clearly real people can’t be categorized this way, but a story may have dozens of people like this.    

The difference between a character vs character and character vs himself type of conflict is less straightforward.  Can’t the latter be reduced to a special case of the former, in which both ends of the conflict are the same person?  In many cases this may be true, providing us with two simple types of conflict: character vs personal entity and character vs impersonal entity.  However, there is often at least one important difference.  A character cannot typically change his orientation to himself over the course of a story.  Conflict may bring characters together or split them apart, but a person must always live with himself.  This changes the way conflicts may be resolved, or not.  People usually find a resolution to their conflicts with other people, whether it is coming to a common understanding, finding an outlet that is external to the relationship, or ending the relationship.  The last option is a last resort.  If nothing else, one can resolve tension by severing the rope all together.  Outside of suicide, this option is closed to inner conflict.  That crucial difference (and there may be others) can be put to good use.  More on this later.

Premise

As stated above, a story starts with a premise.  This is a single sentence stating the central conflict.  The premise may be thematic or non-thematic.  A non-thematic premise has no “point”.  This is the sort of thing we might associate with escapist entertainment.  For example, “James Bond must stop a terrorist attack”.  A thematic premise states a conflict which is indicative of one or more abstract themes.  For example, “Hamlet plots to kill his uncle, whom he suspects of murdering his father to seize the throne.”  This premise is central to the story’s themes of revenge, treachery and corruption.  Clearly, the theme is not always obvious from the premise.  Indeed, it may be possible to swap my categorization of these two premises.  We may find that James Bond (however unlikely) has conflicted feelings about his job and starts to wonder what separates him from a terrorist, making the premise indicative of themes on just versus unjust causes.  On the other hand, maybe we could write Hamlet as an Elizabethan version of “Kill Bill”, in which Hamlet spends all of his time knocking off all of Claudius’ associates before slaying the man himself and riding off into the sunset.  We get a lot of blood and action scenes, much like the original Hamlet, but without the introspective monologues.

So what’s the difference?  This difference is in your mind.  You obviously know whether you want your story to be about some philosophical theme or not.  You don’t need to spell this out to yourself.  However, when we go that route we can find ourselves struggling to make the theme concrete.  A theme may be stated as a conflict: “is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them?” Stating the theme in terms of conflict is a good start, but it doesn’t make a premise.  A story has characters, and as the impetus for story, so should the premise.  Thinking in these terms forces a writer to restate the theme in terms of a specific personal story that illustrates that theme.  This is probably obvious, but it is important throughout the writing process to always be looking for the concrete.  If an abstract theme cannot play a role in a character’s concrete problems and pursuits, then why is it worth writing about?  Writing the thematic premise is the first step to bridging the gap between thought and reality.

Character

Every major character must have at least one internal and one external conflict.  There are exceptions, such as James Bond, who is usually portrayed as a sort of stone faced superhero with no history and no inner life, but even the most escapist stories typically have characters with internal conflicts.  And these conflicts need not be deep.  One of the easiest ways to make a character sympathetic is to create a space for contradiction.  For example, what if the Queen of England happened to be an excellent poker player?  What if this reserved grandmother sometimes took on a secret identity so that she could collect from hardened cockney gamblers?  Such a character is instantly likable and that humorous affability is based on inner conflict.  It’s not of the soul searching Hamlet kind, but it is conflict nonetheless and may result in both comedy and suspense.

Whether they be light or heavy, conflicts may be categorized as potential and kinetic.  A potential conflict is what we start a scene with and a kinetic conflict is the action that plays out the consequence of that potential during the course of the scene.  For example, two characters may start a scene with a personal history, such as divorce.  The potential conflict is that character A does not trust character B to avoid interfering with A’s relationship with their child.  That is a character vs character potential conflict.  On B’s side, the potential conflict is a desire to win A’s trust along with a desire for personal advancement.  That is an internal potential conflict.  The kinetic conflict occurs during the action of the scene, which in this case is a fight during which A says something that convinces B that preserving trust is less important than advancing career.  So B takes a job offer in another city and takes the child along - thus realizing A’s fears.

Every conflict has a resolution.  This is true even of potential conflicts.   Something has prevented a potential conflict from becoming kinetic up until the scene where the tension breaks.  In the above example, perhaps B has slowly been taking steps to earn A’s trust.  A is still suspicious, but is willing to be patient.  The kinetic conflict must overwhelm the potential resolution and result in a kinetic resolution.  The difference between a potential and kinetic resolution is that the potential resolution is a counter force against tension that maintains the status quo, while a kinetic resolution changes the game.  The potential conflict no longer exists once this resolution has come to a fore.  Sometimes, it ends there, because that is what the whole story was about.  Sometimes, it spawns new internal and external potential conflicts in its wake.

A Simple Story Foundation

In my next post, I'll put these things in motion and discuss story foundations.

In The Meantime, There's More To See