Welcome to Gaia! ::

Yes, this is long. I'm sorry, but it's something that I wanted off my chest, and I thought it might be interesting discussion.


A Preliminary Question:

So! I was working on a longer-ish (novella length: 25,000 words) story recently, and I got to thinking about how I write. Not 'how I write' in the sense of word choice, or even in the sense of which ways of structuring a story seem to appeal to me as a writer. I started to wonder how I choose the stories that I want to tell.

Perhaps this is a quirk unique to me as a writer (some of you will recall that I tend to write not plot-driven or character-driven stories, but to choose a theme and then write characters and plot that help me talk about that theme), but I still think it’s an interesting question. How do you, as a writer, pick the stories that you write? What does a story need to have to make you want to write it?

I’ll tell you my answer, because that answer (combined with several classes on classicism and postmodern theory) led to the real meat of what I want to talk about here. I realized that the stories that I write lately are all, to some extent, my attempts to figure out a meta-idea (more on what I mean by this later).


Some thoughts on what I'll call my One True Story

I’ve written about a man who blew up a planet; about a rock star mourning the man who was his muse and his lover; about the way that a sister can linger like a ghost in memory, even years after death. I’ve written about what office drama means for a guy who kills zombies for a living. I’ve written about a planet who flirts cutely with a comet. This is stuff I’ve got up on Gaia (it’s in my journal if you want to read, but there’s no need to read anything to understand what I’m getting at). There are other stories sitting in my WIP folders, or that I’ve written for classes and not posted here. The length of the material varies from 1000 words to 65,000 words (yeah, the 65,000 one isn’t on Gaia).

What I realized, looking at all of these, and thinking about the stories I’m writing presently, is that to some degree or another, I’m trying to tell the same story. I use different characters, different worlds, different philosophies about life and love and happiness for each one, but in a not-unimportant way, I keep trying to tell a story about what it really means to love someone unconditionally.

I’ve explored it a thousand different ways, many of them so different that I’m willing to bet that readers wouldn’t notice that the stories were in anyway connected, but in my own brain, often unconsciously as I was writing, the same impulse drove a lot of my output. In some way, there is a One True Story that I feel compelled to write, and a lot of my creative output has to do with different tangents to the same sphere.

I don’t think that all of this means that I’m uncreative, just that there’s a meta-idea I can’t get out of my brain, and my output is a primary way of approaching the secondary or tertiary level idea that I think about. To borrow a metaphor from music: it’s the tonal structure on which my little compositions are crafted. Instead of pentatonal scale, I write in octatonal. It’s a choice that my listeners won’t notice at all, and it won’t affect the message of the piece or whether I choose to write fugues or symphonies, but it nonetheless is the very foundations of whatever I’m composing. Thinking about the One True Story, for me, is like realizing that your musical staff has eight notes, and wondering why this is so.


In which perhaps I have been writing too many lit analysis papers lately...
(Skip this if you don't like academic stuff)

Now, I would ordinarily think that this is kind of interesting and move on, but my classes on Postmodernism all of a sudden were hitting close to home. You see, one of the tenets of postmodernism is that there is no One True Story, no unitary subject or master-narrative. In fact, Pomo is all about the plurality of discursive practices, the multiply overlapping cross-cultural identities.

“So what?” you say. “You’re just not a postmodern writer. You’re a Romantic, get over yourself.” Possibly true. But specifically postmodern themes have informed a whole lot of my writing. That story about the dude blowing up the planet? Is all about the sense of displacement, the effects of colonialism on the colonized, the sense of absurd in the everyday: themes straight out of Finnegan’s Wake, except with more grammar and less stream-of-unconsciousness.

Thinking further on this matter, I realized that some of the stuff I don’t have on Gaia, a lot of the experimental work that I’ve done, follows this same pattern. I’ve written explicitly Pomo stuff before, but I’m still writing about what is in some way my story, this tale that I feel compelled to tell. I don’t think I’ll ever tell it fully, I don’t think it can be told fully. But I think that a whole lot (not all, but a lot) of my writing is informed or motivated by my reactions to this meta-theme.


In Conclusion!
(Or, You can start reading again here if you skipped the academic stuff)

So I was wondering: do any of you feel like you’ve got a One True Story? If so, does it affect your character choice or plot lines (it actually doesn’t for me, it just informs how I’m going to approach those characters or plots)? Do you think I’m being very silly? Anyway, talk amongst yourselves!

******** you for doing this while I'm drunk.



I'd like to just say, "Postmodernism is bullshit," but Endrael pretty much already said that.



So why am I posting here?






I don't know. Maybe I should say something self-centered, like "I write character-driven stories that are, really, a strange amalgamation of plot and character that cannot function apart from each other due to the manner in which I bullshittify the two into a single thing." Or maybe something down the lines of "Of course some 'higher thingsuchwhatever" is going to pervade your work--you're a human."



Or I could say, "I just write stories." That'd be the short version.






Maybe sometime tomorrow, when my eyes aren't so sticky.

1) Excellent thread
2) I find that in my writing I insert a lot of religious undertones. They aren't even obvious/noticeable most of the time, but they are there. I usually have my characters display their morals. I'm also very interested in what makes people human, and often end up studying that aspect of people in my writing. In short, I agree with you.

Haha, I now get to try to respond to a lot of people all at once (and then I go to bed, it is very late here)!




Yes, this is what I'm talking about exactly. Even when you're not writing 'that story about Justice-with-a-capital-J', it's sort of sitting in the background. And word to the postmodernists being wrong. I think my relationship with Pomo over the years has evolved to mutual detente: I think it's really interesting (even compelling, sometimes) in theory, but I'm not certain that I can internalize it deeply enough for it to really make a difference in how I think or write.



I wonder about this. With writers like Tolkein, it's easy to see the themes in their work, but with other writiers I feel like perhaps they write a really seminal work, and then they reach a point where they've said all that they feel they need to on a subject, and thier writing afterwards goes in a radically different direction (I'm thinking Heinlien here, but there are lots of examples). So maybe it is possible to write the definitive statement on one of these themes, and not feel the need to write it any more.

I think that you're probably right (at least in my case) that the broadest themes of my work do more to determine which characters I won't use than which I will. So I guess it's stretching it a little to say that these ideas don't really influence my plots or characters.

I...really don't get themes that much. Mostly, my modus operandi is simply to get this feeling that this story would be utterly awesome to write, and then go about doing it, and then, as I muse on it when I'm not writing it, themes and stuff will occur to me - but the theme is something that occurs to me after I have some concept of the story already in mind, not starting with said theme and wondering what kind of story I could tell that'd express it.

But come to think of it, the two bigger projects I'm working on are basically rejections of most of the themes you guys've picked.

Calinca & Terry's Necromatic Adventure! Well, even in their golden age, necromancers were famous for their lack of respect for life, law and morality. They were the kind of people who would sneak up to Olympus and key Zeus's chariot with NECROMANCY RULES, BY THE WAY IT WAS I, AURIXOS OF THEBES WHO SCRATHED YOUR PAINTJOB, I DARE YOU TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT on both sides.

Now, all of that was a long time ago, and of course this isn't set in Ancientgreecia, but Calinca is still the product of a fairly twisted tradition. Hell, she pretty much uses an army of a hundred thousand people as a sacrifice - she knows the battle ahead is hopeless and ******** the prophecy that says she's to lead them to freedom and redeem the necromancer name - so she gives them an uplifting speech, then sneaks away during the night and lets the forces of the Monotheist Temple cut them down as a numerically superior, disciplined force is wont to do.

Before that, she charms a young Temple Inquisitor, who comes to believe that there is still some good in her so he joins her party to redeem her and bring her to Ostego. He ends up giving his life for her, and because she still needs a protector, she raises him up again as a tortured undead abomination who has seen what lies Beyond and can never unsee it again.

Sonya's Magical Patricide
Sonya wants to kill her father - and she can't remember why, she just remembers she really wanted to this one time, and she's so sure of herself she's certain she wouldn't have wanted to kill him if she hadn't had a very good reason to.
So she embarks on a quest for vengance, and drags in a couple of other people, and they're pretty much both sacrificed to the Quest. At least one of them is a magically-gifted blind boy who is lied to about what the Quest even is, and who would never have been willing to die for her if he knew she was actually trying to kill her father.
And of course she has a pair of sixshooters who may or may not have been Stormbringer in a previous incarnation.
She kills her father, and it turns out her reason to do it was really ******** petty.

You've got a pretty interesting point there, and it's been explored before.

J. Campbell wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is a really roundabout way of examining all myths and breaking them into a single one, the monomyth, that is common among all cultures.

And by myth, he really means any 'epic' story. Including Star Wars.