I get story ideas from dreams fairly often ("Straw" is a readily available example, if you're curious), but this is the first time I've had an insight into narrative craft.

The idea that a narrative is a series of questions is not a new one. It's another way to think of genre, if you're approaching it from the academic rather than the marketing angle: a genre can be defined as the list of questions a story chooses to answer. (Notice that it isn't the story's answers that necessarily define its genre, but the questions it engages with.) And it has occurred to me, in thinking about this dream of mine, that one way to judge the degree of conventionality of a given story is to look at how many of its answers you can predict before you finish it (or before you even start). The question of all romance is, "Will the protagonist find true love?" If you're reading a category romance, you know that the answer is yes before you so much as read the first line. (I deliberately chose an extreme example to make it obvious what I'm trying to say.) If the story poses a question ("What's wrong with this protagonist?") and you immediately roll your eyes and answer ("He's insane." "She's dreaming." "He's a vampire." "She's a ghost."), then you are reading a highly conventional story. If the story poses a question and you don't know the answer--or you think you know the answer and it proves you wrong--then you are reading a story that is either not conventional or that has deliberately engaged with its conventions in order to confound them.

None of this was the point of my dream.

The point of the dream was the relationship between conventionality and narrative tension.* It pointed out first that, yes, if the story poses a question and the reader knows the answer ("Will the homicidal demon nutbar take out the hapless bystanders in the teaser?" "Oh HELL yes."), there's likely to be a significant decrease in narrative tension, and a significant INCREASE in reader impatience, especially if the answer is not something the reader wants to watch play out. (I badly wanted to be able to TIVO my imagination at that point, so we could just skip past the part with the riding lawnmower. And on the other side, think of the disgust of the little boy in The Princess Bride: "Is this a kissing book?")

But if this were a simple 1-to-1 correspondence, there would be no market for highly conventional stories, and it takes only the most minimal acquaintance with the media-consumption habits of the modern age to see that that ain't so. And my dream went on to show reasons why that's so, how the answering of questions interacts with narrative tension, even if the audience knows the answers.

Point one, most obviously, is that narrative tension is heightened if the reader doesn't know the answer. What do the mysterious partially excavated underground fortifications have to do with the homicidal demon nutbar? (I never did get an answer to that one.) Even if the big question of your story has a conventional answer (Will the protagonist find true love?), you can still have plenty of narrative tension around the questions of "how?" and "with whom?"

But the second thing, and the thing that I hadn't ever realized consciously before, is that you can generate narrative tension by deferring the answer. In particular, by introducing other questions related to the conventional question which are not themselves conventional. So, given that my dream was pretending to be a TV show, the main (and conventional) question was, Will our heroes defeat the homicidal demon nutbar? And we know the answer is yes, even if I woke up before they managed it. But--unlike the thing with the riding lawnmower--that question isn't answered as soon as it's posed, nor is it obvious what the answer is. Beyond "yes"--but the question of "how?", which can't be answered right away, is the thing that any narrative is about. Narratives aren't about yes/no questions; they're about "how?" And before that question ("how will they defeat the homicidal demon nutbar?") began to be answered, new questions were put into play, like the underground fortifications, and the fact that our heroes were being transported willy-nilly from one alternate universe to another, all focused around those fortifications and the homicidal demon nutbar. What's the connection? I still don't know. The dream teased me with a partial answer (and, no, I wasn't really surprised to learn that the fortifications had human bones mortared into their foundations), but it deferred the resolution past the span of the dream. (Yes, thank you, I am frustrated by this.)

Of course, it is possible to lean too heavily on the tactic of deferral; you have to judge how long your audience will remain interested in a question before they need an answer, and likewise, how many complicating questions they will tolerate. I despaired and gave up on Robert Jordan because it didn't seem as if the major questions of The Wheel of Time were ever going to be answered and I could no longer keep track of all the complicating questions he'd thrown at me, but I know that a great many people have not given up. So that particular question is a matter of the alchemy between writer and reader and thus, like all such things, unfathomable.

But I understand something about building narrative that I've never fully grasped before. Which isn't bad for a night's work.

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*For the two people who probably want to know, the dream was pretending to be an episode of Supernatural. I don't know why, as I have watched in total about three minutes of one episode of that show in my entire life, but it is not news that my subconscious moves in mysterious ways.

I want to talk for a minute about why "genre" is the wrong word for science fiction and fantasy--though not necessarily the wrong word for horror. And how that makes the whole question of genre vis-a-vis sffh so damn complicated.

I'm sure I've said most of this before, probably more than once, so here's a cut tag for those of you who don't want to sit through it again.

( but if you do, click here )

TIME: 15 min.
DISTANCE:1.8 mi.
[break due to phone-call]
TIME: 18 min.
DISTANCE: 2.2 mi.
TOTAL: 4 mi.
CUMULATIVE TOTAL: 40.4 mi.
NOTES: Obstinacy. I has it.
SHIRE-RECKONING: We burst into song. Again.

---

There is a direct correlation between how much I know about the works Prof. Rabkin is discussing and how much I yell. Today was Jules Verne and I only muttered a couple of times. And at least one of those was him doing his conflation thing again, where he's talking about Verne as being in the tradition of Robinsonades, goes back to talk about Robinson Crusoe, and then announces that Robinson Crusoe demonstrates thus-and-such about science fiction.

Which, hello, it does not.

TIME: 30 min.
DISTANCE: 3.5 mi.
TOTAL: 29.7 mi.
NOTES: Too busy yelling at Prof. Rabkin to go for the burn.
SHIRE-RECKONING: I can see the River from here!

---

We've started Part 2 of the lecture series and Professor Rabkin is defining science fiction. He constructs a definition of science fiction in which the prototype has three characterisitcs:

1. claim of plausibility against a background of science (he's also asserted that Star Wars is science fiction, and I'd really like to know where he finds the claim of plausibility in it*)
2. high adventure (at this point, I yelled "MIKE!" at the DVD player, because Growing Up Weightless is brilliant science fiction and not even remotely "high adventure"**)
3. intellectual excitement (I will grant that good science fiction does provide this, but you know, so do mysteries. Fantasy can do it, too--at least I hope to hell fantasy can do it, or what on earth have I been doing for the past fifteen years?)

There's also an implicit, unexamined definition of science fiction against fantasy, whereby science fiction is (a.) for adults and (b.) literature.

And I'm sorry. Taking cheap potshots at the MOVIE VERSION of Dracula (and he doesn't even specify which movie) to assert that Frankenstein is more scientific and more plausible, and he conflates the Karloff Frankenstein with the Shelley Frankenstein anyway, since Mary Shelley very carefully avoids ANY explanation of how Victor animates his creature--I think that was the point at which I descended into name-calling . . . no, sorry, that was when he was expressing ASTONISHMENT that Asimov and Tolkien should be grouped together by publishers. I very nearly stopped the CD at the point where he was explaining prototypical definitions with the example of female beauty. "We look at a woman," he says, and you know what? That "we" does not include any women in it. It's that nice unexamined "the generic pronoun in English is 'he'" kind of misogyny which has no animus against women, and it doesn't matter unless you ARE a woman, in which case you suddenly feel like you've been asked to leave.

Also, when he talked about the types of definition, citing Wittgenstein (prototypical, functional, characteristic, and social) he forgot to mention the other crucial axis, prescriptivist vs. descriptivist. But since he's chosen to make a prototypical definition, he's prescriptivist by default. Which means I will be severely skeptical from here on out.

Also, he's trying to claim The Tempest is science fiction. Where is the science? Where, for that matter, is the claim of plausibility? WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, OVER.

Um.

Well, you know, it got my heart rate up. *g*

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*My Star Wars canon includes only three movies and does not contain the word "midichlorians" in its lexicon. And Rabkin's only talking about A New Hope anyway.

**Speaking of Mike, I hope he knew about and visited the Mid-Continent Railway Museum. We went last weekend, and I kept thinking, "Mike would love this!"

1. Larry at OF Blog of the Fallen reviews The Bone Key, which mrissa and stillsostrange have also recently confessed to liking. (Given mrissa and given stillsostrange, I consider this a very neat trick indeed.)

ETA: buymeaclue also likes it.

2. I have not abandoned the Due South episode analyses, but in the meantime I have a question for persons more knowledgeable about Canadian literature than myself. Is there a sub-genre of Mountie-lit, and does it replace or overlap with or otherwise have a relationship with the Western? Does Canada have an indigenous tradition of the Western (i.e., stories about cowboys and wild frontiers and lawmen and rustlers and robbers rather than stories about, say, Vancouver) or is that genre American?* I have a rather muddled idea about Due South and the Western, and it could use some grounding.

3. BPAL's Titus Andronicus (Dark musk and black amber with frankincense, red sandalwood, neroli and bergamot.) may be edging out Sin (Thoroughly corrupted: amber, sandalwood, black patchouli and cinnamon.) in my affections. Considering my unholy love for the play, this seems no more than appropriate.

4. Speaking of unholy love and Renaissance drama, if you're interested in revenge tragedy at all, I highly recommend Revengers Tragedy (2002). It's like the psychotic bastard child of Almereyda's Hamlet (2000, Ethan Hawke) and Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes), and like any self-respecting bastard in Jacobean tragedy, it takes down both its progenitors and does the Monster Mash on their faintly twitching corpses.

(N.b., our excellent local indie video store shelves Revengers Tragedy under Comedy. Be prepared.)

5. The Formerly Feral Ninjas are very odd little girls. I don't know if this is to do with being feral rescues, or to do with being warped in their childhood by me and mirrorthaw and heresluck, or if they would have turned out this way regardless. But definitely odd. They have Designated Petting Places. Outside a DPP, one does not touch the cat; inside a DPP, one MUST PET the CAT, biPED. The First Ninja will actually come fetch me and lead me with imperious mews to her DPP. Her sister, the Second Ninja, is more flexible about these things, and will designate temporary PPs as needed (You may pet me when I stand here as opposed to the true DPP: I am standing here! You must pet me!), although some places are simply Not Suitable and you will NOT touch the cat you icky biped. Neither of them approves of bipeds bending over them. The Second Ninja's DPP (the radiator cover in our bedroom) puts her at waist height, whereas to pet the First Ninja, even in her DPP (the front stairs), it is necessary to sprawl full length on the stairs and follow her as she weaves up them. Or down them, for that matter, although she's only persuaded me to do that once. What's interesting is that they have quite distinct and nontransferable DPPs. I've never seen the First Ninja in the Second Ninja's DPP at all, and while the Second Ninja perforce transverses--and often hangs out in--the First Ninja's DPP, she does not want to be petted there and attempting it will get you fled from as perfidious and untrustworthy and probably planning to eat cats.

Catzilla and the Elder Saucepan think the Ninjas are very weird.

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*Yes, it is embarrassing how little I, as an American, know about Canada. Also embarrassing that I am, in this, typical of my countrymen and -women. :P

Mang Tomas the Storyhunter is awesome.

And I want that gun.

Due South, Pilot
Original airdate: April 23, 1994
Favorite line:
DESK SERGEANT: You like pigeons?
FRASER: I don't have much experience with them.
[...]
DESK SERGEANT: It's not that they're dirty. It's just that I'm starting to question their loyalty.

Spoilers for all four seasons of Due South below the cut.

( They'll hunt you to the ends of the earth. )

(GUILDENSTERN: Ahem.
ROSENCRANTZ: I don't know how the next scene starts! Shut up!)

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peake posted yesterday about this attempt to define a "slipstream canon." Or possibly I mean a "slipstream" "canon." Or, well, here. Have some quotation marks--""""""""--and punctuate as seems best to you.

( for them as cares, click with the clickyness )

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(ROSENCRANTZ: There! See? I'm writing. Satisfied now?
GUILDENSTERN: [reading over ROSENCRANTZ's shoulder] No.)

coffeeem has a wonderful post about Western as a genre. As she points out, what she says about Westerns goes for SFF, too.

It's a thought-provoking morning in the SFnal corner of the blogosphere. Which is good, because outside the blogosphere it's -5 (F) and snowing, and I am so not leaving the house. Except of course to check the mail.

---

John is musing about Hugo categories, with surely the most rigorous casual thoughts ever recorded for posterity on the Intarwebs.

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Scott is ranting a beautiful and well-deserved rant about ideas in SF: "ideas are like cat toys for authors; they're what we play with as cutely as possible when we think people are watching." The phenomenon he's responding to is, I think, one I posted about a while back: to wit, that there are two entirely different categories of people who read SF. Different in that they want COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS from their reading. Sometimes, a writer can please both camps. Sometimes, she can't. Sometimes, he doesn't even WANT to.

And sometimes readers react to that as if it were meant--exquisitely crafted, even--as a personal affront.

SF is no longer monolithically "the literature of ideas," if it ever monolithically was. SF is being written, published, bought, and read that doesn't give a damn about science, hard or soft, or about the sort of social thought experiment that LeGuin brought to SF's table. It's SF that wants to blow things up and not have to think about it.

I'm a member of the SFBC, although I almost never buy anything (budget!), and I've seen in their flyers over the past few months more than one SF book that is defending, even glorifying, genocide.

This is genocide, of course, of evil BEMs* created specifically by the author for the purpose of deserving genocidal retribution.

Circular logic, much?

Because, see, the thing about fiction--any kind of fiction--is that the author sets the parameters. If it is inevitable and necessary for the characters in a story to commit genocide, it is inevitable and necessary because THE AUTHOR MADE IT THAT WAY. Don't forget the puppet master, folks. Don't ignore the man behind the curtain.

I have a problem with the idea of making genocide a simple, inevitable, necessary decision. Or, you know, not even a decision at all. A given. I don't deny the possibility, for the universe is infinite, that there may be, out there somewhere, a race of BEMs so inherently, biologically anathemetic to us that there will be no choice for the brave little toaster human species except to wipe them out.

But I really, really doubt it.

And even if there is such a species and we do have to wipe them out to ensure our survival, that doesn't mean they will have deserved it. It will not be something we should be going around patting ourselves on the back about.

And although I am very very leery of yoking moral purpose and fiction together, if SF has a moral purpose, or any kind of moral responsibility, I think that moral responsibility is NOT to practice the rationalizations that will let future generations commit genocide without guilt. We have enough genocide already, thanks.

If you're gonna blow something up, you should have to think about it first.

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*Bug-Eyed Monsters