Analysing the Lost, the Itinerant and the Fractal
Recently I’ve written three pieces of fiction, each more bizarre than the last. The first, ‘The Lost Builder’, was inspired by a draft of the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange background art and utilises some of the world (or specifically species) building points I raised in ‘worldbuilding for Xenoperspective’. The second, ‘The Itinerant Storyteller’, had no particular inspiration but features some interesting writing techniques that act as an extra layer to the story (and had to be built into the world of the story in order to make sense). The third, ‘The Fractal Now’, is an almost (but not quite) nonsensical exercise in building a world where one or more of the usual rules we follow as humans is suspended. In this case the rule that time is experienced as some form of progression.
Here I’m hoping to shed some light (but not too much, I still want to write more about the Builder, the Storyteller and Now) on the world each story is set in and how it affected (and in one case effected) the writing style and narrative.
So let’s start with the simplest.
The Lost Builder
The world for this story is a fairly desolate one. Coming as it did from a piece of art, several of the major assets of the world the story is set in (please note that ‘world’ here might not mean planet. In this case it means ‘tiny slice of land where the story takes place’) were already set before I tried to fill in the gaps. The world is mostly desert, though there is a city, some volcanoes and a strange shiny structure. In the original draft a rocket is launching from the city to an unknown destination (though the final artwork features sky-sharks. Things would have been very different if I’d used that image as a starting point for the world). There is also a large robot and a girl.
At this point two things are clear about the world:
1: There’s a decent amount of technology. This immediately gives a genre (sci-fi) and a reason for the girl in the image being so comfortable with a 5m-tall robot. As starting points for world building go: Genre is a pretty big one.
2: It’s pretty bleak. There’s sand, volcanoes, a city and not much else. The few plants in the image seem scruffy and sparse, and even the city looks like it’s seen better days. This gives an avenue for exploration. Why is the planet like this? Is it natural? The result of a disaster or exploitation?
Filling in the blanks I decided the world was being exploited by ‘offworlders’, a term used by the girl in the story. This neatly tied up the departing rocket and the desolate nature of the planet, and gave some backstory for the girl, as if the world was being exploited then any native inhabitants would be similarly exploited. It’s also a nice story hook, allowing for any number of villains or opportunities for exploration. In a sci-fi world it makes sense as over-utilisation and resource scarcity are common themes. The choice of ‘offworlders’ is deliberately vague. They could be anything.
As I wanted to tie the story in to the concept of world building I decided to make the protagonist of this story an ancient robot, somehow tied into a ‘world building’ network. Naturally any story needs a problem to solve, in this case the robot’s inability to access that network (represented in the image by the holographic projection of the world building logo). The exact nature of the network doesn’t need expanding at this point, but it serves as a motive throughout the story (as short as it is); the robot aims to reconnect to the network. The girl aims to get out of her life of being exploited. Together these goals provide a powerful story hook to continue with, especially given that we know space travel is possible.
The choice of first person was one I made in order to increase the sense of mystery and confusion in the story. Again: This comes from my choice of world. Telling a story about a robot that’s lost its connection to the world it knew is poignant in third person, weird in second person (especially if you’re reading it on the internet) but disorienting in first person, and since disorientation was what I was aiming for the choice of perspective was obvious. If I’d built in that the robot had access to the network then I could have used second person, turning the story into a strange Alternate Reality Game. If the robot knew what was going on in the world and the girl didn’t know as much then third person would have been better, as then I don’t have to spend time telling the reader what they should know from a perspective inside someone’s head. In that case the robot becomes a character of mystery. These are individual narrative choices, but they are affected by the world I built, and the kind of story I wanted to tell in this world needed to be taken into consideration when I was building it.
In this case much of the story is a consequence of the world that was built. The motive of the robot springs immediately from my choice that there once was a ‘world building’ network but now the robot can’t get to it any more. The girl’s motives spring from the choice that the world is a desolate one (as depicted in the artwork). The potential for continuation springs from the fact that technology is known and space travel (or maybe even further) is available.
Maybe the robot will re-establish its connection. Maybe the girl will get away. There are a lot of potentials inherent in this world.
The Itinerant Storyteller.
The first thing I have to say is this: If you haven’t read the Itinerant Storyteller you should do so before reading on.
Read it? Good.
The main feature of the world (again, this doesn’t mean planet. Here ‘world’ gets a little complex, for reasons I’m about to get into) is that the nature of reality is somewhat fluid. The story being told isn’t a consequence of that, but the writing style employed (notably deliberate continuity errors) is. A mysterious man seems to have the ability to change reality as he goes (and as the reader reads). Whether this is magic, technology or something entirely different is not made clear, and in fact multiple genre tropes (brown cloth robes, swords, laser pistol) are used to further obfuscate that. This leads to a strangely confusing introduction to the story and the world it’s set in.
There are hints as to the exact nature of the world in the title and later in the story, when the mysterious man uses the word ‘superfluous’. Superfluous to what exactly?
This is where the building of the world truly impacts the narrative. When building this world I decided that there should be a race (well, maybe a race. Maybe not. It’s complicated, for reasons I’m about to get into) which are more affected by narrative than by the reality of the situation they are in. The reason for this was to introduce a way of exploring multiple worlds that I might have built in one story without having to worry about whether the atmosphere on a gas giant would crush the protagonist’s lungs or how magical radiation would affect the human nervous system.
This race (or are they?) only really care about the story being told, not about the world in which it is told, and as such can take on whatever properties are required. If they need to be a different race for the purpose of a story, then they are that different race. If they need to have a laser pistol then they have a laser pistol. These things aren’t changes: This race doesn’t change from one race to another, they just are whatever they need to be.
Which is why in the Itinerant Storyteller there are continuity errors. It’s not because it’s a mistake: It’s because the race of ‘Storytellers’ actively change the world as the story progresses. If the storyteller is in a hard Sci-Fi world then everyone but them follows the laws of physics. If they are in a high fantasy world then magic is available.
Oddly it’s the use of the third person perspective (in theory the one that gives the reader the most potential information) that makes this writing style (and hence world) a nice one to use. Because it is assumed by the reader that the author gets things right the changes in detail become surprising, perhaps even mollifying. If the perspective were first person or second person then these changes could be put down to the protagonist’s own perceptions. That may be a very interesting storytelling method for a story around mental health or illusions, but as I wanted to make it clear something odd was happening with the very fabric of reality, only the most overarching reader perspective would do.
Now: In order to make this an interesting potential story there must be limits. No matter how ‘soft’ there have to be rules that a reader can understand, or everything that a Storyteller does is going to be a deus ex machina. In this case the rules are simple: While the Storytellers can change reality by changing the narrative they must also respect the narrative. This is why the Storyteller had to interact with the hospital staff at the end of the story, in order to make their continued presence ‘superfluous’ to the plot. Once they no longer have a narrative reason to be in the hospital room they can be elsewhere, but up until that point they have to be there. Up until this point in the story being told, nothing has been established about the genre, the plot, or the powers of the Storyteller, so from that character’s perspective anything goes. When exposed to more defined or well known worlds and clichés (put in a dungeon by the Big Bad, perhaps) this may change, rendering the Storyteller powerless where other characters may be able to escape.
This one element of ‘narrative continuity’ is the heart of this ‘world’, and though it’s not immediately obvious the entirety of The Itinerant Storyteller adheres to it. Naturally this opens up all manner of possibilities for further stories (which was somewhat the point) while retaining some semblance of control over the potentially world-shattering Storyteller. This world is simultaneously incredibly easy and incredibly difficult to build, as the rules followed in such a world must have some form of structure that any potential reader can recognise (bottles labeled ‘drink me’ always have odd effects, butlers are either nefarious or efficient.), but at the same time remain able to flex along with the story. The fact that a character in a story in a world I built can change the rules of the world in order to fit the story better makes for a challenging worldbuilding experience, to say the least.
I feel like I’m fighting my own creation for control of the world!
The Fractal Now
The fractal now is an experiment in writing in a world where there isn’t a concept of time. This is harder than you might expect, as time isn’t just intrinsically tied up in human experience, it’s also fundamental to… well, anything happening. At all.
Which immediately raises issues with the writing style, as it must not only be written in the present tense but also in purely the present tense (or as close as can be got). There can be no references to the past or anticipation of the future, as neither of those concepts make sense. Even words that have duration (such as ‘move’) should be avoided, though for the sake of actually writing something other than ‘It is’ I chose to be lenient on that particular requirement.
The result is intentionally odd as a result of both the world and the subject matter (which is deliberately meant to be obscured). Multiple references to moments and vistas are used to indicate how an achronal entity might experience time. The best analogy I can come up with (and one that I’m writing according to) is this:
Imagine an infinitely large flicker book. Each page represents a moment in time, and the contents of one page dictate the next such that if a page is changed then the results will percolate along the pages of the flicker book. You can look at any page, though since the book is infinite and you aren’t (you can only look at so many pages) you don’t know everything there is to know, only that some patterns of pages match other patterns of pages. Now imagine that each of these flicker book moments also contains another infinite flicker book of potential next pages and pages that could have led to this point. Each page in that flicker book also contains….
And the now becomes fractal, an infinite series of moments that can never be fully comprehended by anything finite, only skimmed through.
Of course: this breaks down because the entity doing the looking at the flicker book is experiencing some form of time as they move from one page (or set of pages) to another, but once again I wanted to write something more interesting than ‘Now is Now’, so let’s ignore that…
The entity in question in the fractal now is not, in fact, a single entity. There are multiple parts, there are multiple ways in which it interacts with these parts, and many of the parts are shown to be progressing through time (some parts are thinking, others are moving or burning), and though the entity knows that these things are moving through time it only experiences an instantaneous snapshot of their progress, knowing that they are moving and that affecting their motion on one page will affect their motion on all subsequent pages, but never actually seeing them move. This makes the choice of perspective easy, and although it’s not the most interesting thing about this world it is worth noting that in this case a large world filled with many entities that all require description to the reader is best explored in the third person, unless the tone of the story you’re going to create with that world in one of wonder or discovery. Trying to write a first person horror novel won’t work in a huge world, but writing a first person choose-your-own exploration book just might.
One final thing to note about the entity in the Fractal Now: it doesn’t seem to mind burning an awful lot of pages in the flicker book that is reality…
