#literary structure

[labelleizzy]

I know why@neil-gaiman had to do it.

Act 2 gotta bring The Conflict If you wanna have Act 3.

Only now I gotta wait for Act 3...

Why must writers do this…

[physalian]

How to make your writing sound less stiff part 2

Part 1

Again, just suggestions that shouldn’t have to compromise your author voice, as I sit here doing my own edits for a WIP.

1. Crutch words

Specifically when you have your narrator taking an action instead of just… writing that action. Examples:

Character wonders/imagines/thinks/realizes

Character sees/smells/feels

Now not all of these need to be cut. There’s a difference between:

Elias stops. He realizes they’re going in the wrong direction.

And

Elias takes far too long to realize that it’s not horribly dark wherever they are

Crutch words are words that don’t add anything to the sentence and the sentence can carry on with the exact same meaning even if you delete it. Thus:

Elias stops. They’re going in the wrong direction.

I need a word in the second example, whether it’s realizes, understands, or notices, unless I rework the entire sentence. The “realization” is implied by the hard cut to the next sentence in the first example.

2. Creating your own “author voice”

Unless the tone of the scene demands otherwise, my writing style is very conversational. I have a lot of sentence fragments to reflect my characters’ scatterbrained thoughts. I let them be sarcastic and sassy within the narration. I leave in instances of “just” (another crutch word) when I think it helps the sentence. Example:

…but it’s just another cave to Elias.

Deleting the “just” wouldn’t hit as hard or read as dismissive and resigned.

I may be writing in 3rd person limited, but I still let the personalities of my characters flavor everything from the syntax to metaphor choices. It’s up to you how you want to write your “voice”.

I’ll let dialogue cut off narration, like:

Not that he wouldn’t. However, “You can’t expect me to believe that.”

Sure it’s ~grammatically incorrect~ but you get more leeway in fiction. This isn’t an essay written in MLA or APA format. It’s okay to break a few rules, they’re more like guidelines anyway.

3. Metaphor, allegory, and simile

There is a time and a place to abandon this and shoot straight because oftentimes you might not realize you’re using these at all. It’s the difference between:

Blinding sunlight reflects off the window sill

And

Sunlight bounces like high-beams off the window sill

It’s up to you and what best fits the scene.

Sometimes there’s more power in not being poetic, just bluntly explicit. Situations like describing a character’s battle wounds (whatever kind of battle they might be from, whether it be war or abuse) don’t need flowery prose and if your manuscript is metaphor-heavy, suddenly dropping them in a serious situation will help with the mood and tonal shift, even if your readers can’t quite pick up on why immediately.

Whatever the case is, pick a metaphor that fits the narrator. If my narrator is comparing a shade of red to something, pick a comparison that makes sense.

Red like the clouds at sunset might make sense for a character that would appreciate sunsets. It’s romantic but not sensual, it’s warm and comforting.

Red like lipstick stains on a wine glass hints at a very different image and tone.

Metaphor can also either water down the impact of something, or make it so much worse so pay attention to what you want your reader to feel when they read it. Are you trying to shield them from the horror or dig it in deep?

4. Paragraph formatting

Nothing sticks out on a page quite like a line of narrative all by itself. Abusing this tactic will lessen its effect so save single sentence paragraphs for lines you want to hammer your audiences with. Lines like romantic revelations, or shocking twists, or characters giving up, giving in. Or just a badass line that deserves a whole paragraph to itself.

I do it all the time just like this.

Your writing style might not feature a bunch of chunky paragraphs to emphasize smaller lines of text (or if you’re writing a fic on A03, the size of the screen makes many paragraphs one line), but if yours does, slapping a zinger between two beefy paragraphs helps with immersion.

5. Polysyndeton and Asyndeton

Not gibberish! These, like single-sentence paragraphs, mix up the usual flow of the narrative that are lists of concepts with or without conjunctions.

Asyndeton: We came. We saw. We conquered. It was cold, grey, lifeless.

Polysyndeton: And the birds are out and the sun is shining and it might rain later but right now I am going to enjoy the blue sky and the puffy white clouds like cotton balls. They stand and they clap and they sing.

Both are for emphasis. Asyndeton tends to be "colder" and more blunt, because the sentence is blunt. Polysyntedon tends to be more exciting, overwhelming.

We came and we saw and we conquered.

The original is rather grim. This version is almost uplifting, like it's celebrating as opposed to taunting, depending on how you look at it.

—

All of these are highly situational, but if you’re stuck, maybe try some out and see what happens.

*italicized quotes are from ENNS, the rest I made up on the spot save for the Veni Vidi Vici.

[newbiespud]

I'm sure it's been said before but I'll say it myself because why not

The game In Stars and Time makes for a revealing contrast to the movie Groundhog Day in how they treat their final time loop and how that reflects on the main character. (Even though, if I remember right, the dev largely wasn't aware of Groundhog Day when they came up with ISAT.)

Spoilers for both after the break, I guess.

In Groundhog Day, Phil starts out narcissistic and self-centered, has the realization that he can live life without consequences, gets depressed after having tried and done everything that he's got everyone and everything memorized so that nothing can delight and surprise him anymore, and finally escapes when he performs a loop that proves that a better, happier world is within his grasp to make, not something owed to him, and that he is happy with the life he has today, not always pining for his ambitions for the future.

In... In Stars and Time, Siffrin starts out deflecting and aloof, has the realization that they can do this perfectly - 'this' being not only the impossible challenge of defeating the King but navigating their relationships with their party - gets depressed after hitting wall after wall and repeatedly fumbling into faux pas after faux pas with their party, and finally escapes when they perform a loop where their true feelings come out, no matter how ugly, and they're honest about their own desires and wishes rather than trying to keep up an ideal façade.

Plenty of people have pointed out that In Stars and Time subverts the 'escaping on the perfect loop' time-loop trope that Groundhog Day largely codifies. Not only does the 'perfect' loop completely fail, Siffrin escapes on arguably the 'worst' loop, the one where they rightfully worry that they've hurt and alienated their loves ones forever and cannot escape those consequences anymore.

But I don't think this contrast is as direct as it seems, even though one could say that Phil got away scot-free compared to Siffrin and that In Stars and Time is the superior story for portraying a harsher outcome. (I do think that exploration and advancement of tropes is just inevitable and even healthy over time, and Groundhog Day came out in 1993 so of course it and the tropes it spawned deserve modern critique, but I digress.) I actually think that it reflects how both stories and the mechanics of their time loops are built around their main characters. (There's also something to be said about how genre shapes narrative since GD is an existential comedy and ISAT is an action-adventure focusing on interpersonal drama, but that's another digression.)

ISAT makes an impact on the whole time loop genre with its clever subversion, but like all the best subversive stories, it's couched in strong characters that embody its themes.

And to take a broader perspective, the best time loop stories are allegories for the real-life situation of making the same mistakes over and over again caused by your own deep-seated personality flaws, and being forced to finally confront your inner demons and overcome them and become a better, healthier person. (Relatable, much?)

Phil is a man who's never happy with his lot in life, so he needs to learn to find the eternal richness and beauty of what he has within his grasp, and that a better, happier life is something he can make for himself. Thus, he escapes on the 'best' loop.

Siffrin is a person who refuses to share their true feelings and problems with others to the point of self-destruction (and complete reinvention in one aspect), so they need to learn that no matter how ugly and twisted they think they are, being open and honest doesn't mean their loved ones will care about them any less, even when Siffrin is seen at their lowest point possible. Thus, they escape on the 'worst' loop.

It's not just clever subversion, it's holistic circular story structure!

...Though maybe I'm just drawn to these stories because I, too, would like some extra time to Figure Some Shit Out and have that time come with some superpowers along the way, even if it nearly destroys me in the process.

[jctko]

no one cares but a character dying is not the same as a character haunting the narrative. dying is a plot point, while haunting must be structural redefinition of the entire piece's form. it's why haunting of hill house begins and ends with the same line. it's why cassandra tells the audience of the oresteia exactly what is going to happen. they are defined by their endings- something that not all deaths lead to

[eri-pl]

I got to B&L with my reread. It has so mixed language for me… From the "and Luthien had sufferred more than any Elf" (hmmm, excuse me, but this doesn't sound trustworthy at all… dfw if you're reading this, please don't forget to breathe… it's fine... i got you) to some really awesome descriptions (there should be a name for this trope, compliment by reference?) and behaviors, to Beren being sassy to again more untrustworthy absolutes… It's all over the place.

Also, "fate touched her and so she fell in love" is technically not wrong but sounds jarring to me. But then, I do not like romance as a genre.

Also, LotR references / things referenced by LotR (I'm not sure). Luthien's hair and eye color have, if I remember correctly, the exact same poetic descriptions as Elrond's. Which makes sense, of course. Plus Beren has a Frodo-like moment of very explicit being given what to say. Anyway, Elrond is cool and deserves to look like Luthien. <3 And it probably freaks everyone out. :)

More when I do the reread post (but first, Sudden Flame).

PS: [question inspired by cleaning some of my tag overload] does anyone know (and wants to tell me) why the West is, well, in the West? Is this a British folklore thing? (I don't think Jirt would be petty enough to do "Asia bad" or similar reason)

[voluptuarian]

[formerheroeswhoquittoolate]

reread charles soule's daredevil run and I am thinking AGAIN about sam and this fucking line:

"three, mr. murdock. that's the number I came up with. I would have let three of those people die to save my eyes from muse."

and jesus christ. he's like nineteen. he's nineteen years old and he's weighing everything his mother taught him (we look out for ourselves, because who else will?) and everything daredevil taught him (don't die, don't let anyone else die, but at some point you're going to have to choose) and trying to figure out where they intersect.

and he comes up with an answer. the answer is three.

and daredevil? matt murdock? he would give up his eyes to save anyone, ever, in a heartbeat. he exists to sacrifice. he saves others by sacrificing. (it's a very audacious jesus parallel, in some ways, and some authors are more hamfisted about it than others) hell, the whole reason he's blind is because he pushed someone else out of the way of that truck.

matt gave up his eyes to save one person. sam would have let three people die to keep his.

and it's fascinating to me because these characters are basically perfect foils (oops literary analysis sidequest unlocked) like. matt is a hero because his ideals and his virtues will not let him be anything else. he's tried not being daredevil and it makes him feel guilty. he wants to help people because he feels like a piece of shit when he doesn't. but sam? sam saw the shit going on in his community and he built an invisibility suit to fight it. despite his mom trying to convince him that he didn't need to be a hero. he chose it. he chose it over her. and then he went the fuck back and chose it again. stick was like "here's a sword, guard this cave in the middle of nowhere in japan" and sam was like yeah sure. I'll vibe in the wilderness in a tent for an indeterminate amount of time.

he got his eyes back (kind of) and he's still doing this.

[omegaphilosophia]

The Ontology of Text

The ontology of text refers to the study of the nature, structure, and being of text, focusing on what text is at its most fundamental level. This exploration can span several philosophical and theoretical perspectives, often addressing questions about the existence, identity, and categorization of text as an entity. Here’s a breakdown of key aspects:

1. Text as an Ontological Entity:

Material vs. Abstract: Text can be considered both as a material object (e.g., a book or a written document) and as an abstract entity (e.g., the content or meaning conveyed by the text). The ontology of text thus involves understanding how these two aspects coexist and relate to each other.

Text as a Work vs. Text as a Document: The distinction between a text as a work (the conceptual or intellectual creation) and as a document (the physical or digital manifestation) is crucial in ontology. For instance, different editions of a book may be considered different documents but the same work.

2. Identity and Persistence:

Sameness and Variation: The ontology of text deals with the question of what makes a text the same across different instances or versions. What remains consistent between different editions or translations of a text? How much can a text change before it is considered a different text?

Temporal Aspects: How does the identity of a text persist over time? This includes considerations of how historical context, authorial intent, and reader interpretation might affect the identity of a text.

3. Structure of Text:

Hierarchical vs. Network Structures: Text can be seen as having a hierarchical structure (e.g., chapters, paragraphs, sentences) or a network-like structure (e.g., hypertext or intertextuality). The ontology of text examines how these structures are constituted and how they affect the nature of text.

Units of Text: What are the basic units of text? Words, sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps even smaller or larger units? The ontological inquiry involves defining and categorizing these units.

4. Function and Intent:

Authorial Intent: The role of the author's intention in the ontology of text is a major consideration. Is the meaning of a text tied to what the author intended, or does it exist independently?

Reader Interpretation: The ontology of text also considers the role of the reader or audience in constituting the text. Is the meaning of a text something inherent, or is it something that comes into being through interpretation?

5. Intertextuality and Contextuality:

Intertextual Relations: Texts often reference or build upon other texts. The ontology of text considers how texts are related to one another and how these relationships affect their existence and identity.

Contextual Dependency: The meaning and existence of a text can be dependent on its context, including cultural, historical, and situational factors. The ontology of text examines how context shapes what a text is.

6. Digital and Hypertext Ontology:

Digital Texts: The advent of digital texts introduces new ontological questions. How do digital formats affect the nature of text? How does hypertext, with its non-linear structure, change our understanding of text?

Versioning and Fluidity: Digital texts can be easily modified, leading to questions about the stability and identity of texts in a digital environment. What does it mean for a text to have a version, and how does this affect its ontology?

7. Philosophical Perspectives:

Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: These schools of thought provide frameworks for understanding the ontology of text, focusing on the underlying structures of language (structuralism) and the fluidity and instability of meaning (post-structuralism).

Phenomenology: This approach might consider the experience of the text, focusing on how it appears to consciousness and the role of the reader in bringing the text to life.

The ontology of text is a rich and complex field that intersects with many areas of philosophy, literary theory, linguistics, and digital humanities. It seeks to answer fundamental questions about what text is, how it exists, how it maintains identity, and how it relates to both its material form and its interpretation by readers.

[mihai-florescu]

Hyperfixated on learning, special interest in being smart

[warmcoals]

lord forgive me it's time to go right back to the aeneid

[speaker-of-the-void-cats]

●Half-Truths◌

A fine blade, but seems like it's missing something…

A star I think. We count on stars as steady friends because they always rise and always shine but a star's a delicate truce: an explosion caught by its own mass so that it can't erupt and can't collapse. Thus I imagine the state of the machine might be. But one force or another has gone awry and now it rests here, snuffed and broken, waiting for the two rival forms of ruin to be set in balance again.

"Duality is not a curse, but a gift." —Author unknown

"The road ahead is unknown, but time tells us many things. The moments that become past in turn become blueprints for the future. In this space, there is no right or wrong. "We find a contemporaneous merging of what is known and what is unknown here. Somewhere between the knowns and unknowns lies the real. The tangible. "There is a weight to it; a feeling that tells you what you hold is true. "But what if the truth hasn't been told? What if the truth is a lie? "New paths present themselves. Blueprints change. We walk the line of truth every day. "But now, the line that holds the gentle balance has been crossed. "The truth is, this won't be the last time." —Excerpt from the Symmetry pamphlet, "A Place Between"

◯Feet alone cannot take us to where we're going.❍

Matt, Matt, wake up!

I was thinking about how there's no true end to anything

Everything comes from and goes to the same place

Nowhere!

So, if the beginning is the end

And the end is the beginning

Then what's the end anyway?

Does that help you sleep better?

Like the rosy haze of an apocalypse sky

Or the comfort inside of a lie?

◐Close your eyes, and open your mind.◑

"To have Light, we must have Dark. This is the symmetry of the Universe." —Controversial Warlock Ulan-Tan

I propose a simple experiment—look around. You see light. You see darkness. There could not be one without the other. They are two sides of the same coin. If it is true for these Newtonian echoes, why would it not be true of the purest, paracausal forms? Therefore, I conclude: the reason you persecute me is not because of the symmetry. It's because of the truth beyond this truth, the truth which you most dread: if we could destroy darkness, but we had to give up our Light to do so, how many of us would make that trade?

◯Turn your eyes inward, upon your ideal self.❂

No matter where you start or where you end

You are in between the Where and When

You are in the middle of The Loop

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Do you feel half empty or half full?

Is everything beautiful or dull?

Flip a circle and the middle stays the same

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Halfway

We're halfway home

Slow down

The day's boutta be gone

The sun goes

He sleeps until dawn

Slow down

The day is gone

A gardener and a winnower sit down to play a game called Possibility. This is a game about a garden, which is to say that it is also a game about flowers, just as a game about a living being must also be a game about organs and bacteria. A gardener and a winnower collaborate to create a protein. Whose hand is it in the design, that shortens one life to extend the rest? It is the winnower that discovers the first knife, but it is not done without the gardener. This, too, is a tradition: a knife does not come to exist without something that must be cut. A woody stem, a colored petal, a vital vessel. The first victims of the blade. All of these are true. All of these are false, for metaphor simplifies as the knife does. It pares incalculable concepts into shapes your wrinkly little brains can comprehend. The weight of billions and the simple curve of a planet give you pause, and how then are you to be expected to grasp the forces that created your nth-removed creator?

//

ACCESS: RESTRICTED

DECRYPTION KEY: 2CA9SXUO2C$IKO-006

REP#: 011-PSYCHOMETER-TEST

AGENT(S): TRU-135

SUBJ: PSYCHOMETER FIELD TESTS

1. The new version works. Love all the knobs and antenna; very analog. I took readings off a hatch control out here on Europa and Cowlick was able to retrieve badly distorted voices in some kind of distress. I don't know if it's doing exactly what you Warlocks want, but it's doing something all right. Cowlick says it's probably tapping into her scrutiny, if you permit that term in your ivory halls.

2. Now, I'm not much for gadgets, so I won't ask you how you rigged this thing. But I am one for gossip. Weren't we closing in on some kind of workable theory of exactly how our Ghosts resurrect us? One which was, if I am not mistaken, based on research by the Future War Cult? Did any of that work survive Lakshmi?

3. You know they did try to recruit me once. The Cult. Over a game of poker. Fifty-two cards in a deck don't seem like many, this hard-ass Titan told me. But there are 80 658 175 170 943 878 571 660 636 856 403 766 975 289 505 440 883 277 824 000 000 000 000 different possible shuffles of 52 cards. You could walk back and forth across the observable universe faster than you could count all those possible shuffles. A lot faster. That's life, she said, and she had daisies impaled on the spikes of her skull. Life is endless permutation. So many possibilities. But the rules are what matter. Who cares how the deck shuffles if you don't know the rules of the game? We play this game over and over. Life and death. Light and Dark. But the only way you learn the rules, the only way you're ever gonna get one of those Truces you're named for, is if you come inside. Come into the Cult. Come on in and see. But I didn't.

We don't get a choice about the rules. We just play the game.

4. Another thing she told me is that you can play poker with just three cards and two players. Jack, Queen, King. Ante one, max bet one more. High card wins unless one player folds. And in this game, there are many strategies available to the first player, but very few to the second, who acts to exploit the choice made by the first. Many possibilities against few. Sounds like you'd rather be the first player, huh? But if both players play perfectly, that second player wins in the end. Mathematical inevitability. Ain't that something? But I said, your game's just a toy. It's just a contrivance. That's not life. Life isn't one player always exploiting and beating the other.

5. Anyway, back to testing. Might go back to Cocytus and aim this thing at the gate. See how wild it goes. If you never hear from us again, you know Truce and Cowlick finally found something too spooky.

MESSAGE ENDS

If the Light forgets while the Darkness remembers, then why does a Ghost's power of determination let it access latent memories imprinted in the dead? That's paradoxical. That should be a property of Darkness. How can such fundamentally opposed forces do the same thing? Am I as shallow as those Guardians arguing over power levels? Trying to force a simple binary upon a complex spectrum… ? The Drifter talks about "spectrums of Light"—powers his Ghost can access because of its modifications. Forcing the metaphor, I thought. Light is not light. It doesn't have frequencies or spectra. But if we are all constrained by our internalized ontology, by our tacit understanding of how the world works… maybe the circumstances of extreme survival compelled the Drifter to explore a new ontology. Maybe his Ghost achieved a new way to think about the Light.

△To know true color, you must first know Darkness.▼

"We are unique emanations of the same shared Light." —Cult of the Aeons

We are prismatic. We are fractal. We are microcosmic.

"You must learn to tease apart the hues of your own heart." —Parables of the Allspring

I turn

I turn my headlights on

I turn my headlights on

And suddenly I can see

I learn

I learn of right and wrong

I learn to follow one

And suddenly I can breathe

I turn

I turn my headlights on

I turn them on

I'm aware of all my parts

And suddenly I see everything wrong

Then I get tunnel vision

Closing in over me

I forget, with love as my witness

I can stand on my feet

I fall back then I see

Tunnel vision

Closing in over me

I forget, with love as my witness

I can stand on my feet

I fall back then I see

Can I get, can I get out?

Can I get, can I get, oh

Can I get, can I get out?

Can I get, can I get, oh

I burn

I burn my candle out

I burn my candle out

(Can I get, can I get

Can I get, can I get out?)

So nobody else can see

I've learned

I've learned what made me start

What turned me on

Now I'm scared of all my parts

'Cause suddenly I can see everything wrong

Then I get tunnel vision

Closing in over me

I forget, with love as my witness

I can stand on my feet

I fall back then I see

▶The courage to walk into the Darkness, but strength to return to the Light.◁

Fear. That’s the only vivid memory left in me. It’s the moment when my fear was so thick and urgent that I gave up breathing. I stopped pretending to think. How I remained on my feet was a mystery, because the terror was bearing down on me, like a mountain about to crush my soul. But I have to ask, “What was terrifying me?” Darkness ruled the sky. The world around us had shattered, and it seemed vanishingly unlikely that we would outlive this one awful day. Yet the fear didn’t come from the surrounding mayhem and despair. The source was inside my skin. I was utterly terrified of my own awful nature. And which part scared me? Inside me was an essence woven from beyond. Was I Awoken before this? She was still in my head. I could hear her song growing fainter. Gone? Not yet. A new crippling terror was taking over. I was focused entirely on my fear. But I had to make an effort. And it occurred to me then that nothing in the universe was more dangerous than human hubris. I still had this Other within? But the human side was what mattered: Weak and foolhardy, sure to fail in the next moment. That’s why I was afraid. Then someone spoke. Maybe it was me. I don’t remember. I was trying to focus, and a new thought took me: My soul lay between those two entities. And that’s how I am still: The boundary, the seam. The friction. And that’s when the fear began to fade.

◮One day, you will see them both.◭

Let's make a toast to the damned

Waiting for tomorrow

When we're played out by the band

Drowning out our sorrows

What will become of us now, at the end of time?

We'll be fine, you and I

Let's draw a line in the sand

Keep it straight and narrow

We had it all in our hands

We begged and then we borrowed

What will become of us all at the end of love?

When we've stopped looking up?

You can take my heart

And hold it together as we fall apart

Maybe together we can make our mark in the stars we embark

And keep us together as the lights go dark

Let's tell the truth, just for once

Asking for an answer

Now that it's all said and done

Nothing really matters

What will become of us all if we dare to dream?

At the end of the scene?

You can take my heart

Hold it together as we fall apart

Maybe together we can make our mark in the stars we embark

And keep us together as the lights go dark

Let's open up to the sky

Askin' it for closure

'Least we can say that we tried

But it's never really over

What will become of us all, at the end of the line?

Will we live?

Will we die?

You can take my heart

Hold it together as we fall apart

Maybe together we can make our mark in the stars we embark

And keep us together as the lights go dark

⍱Let the heat melt your body so your soul might flow with the river of time.⍲

Raise your voice and sing.

"The Veil." It names itself, as the Human mind named itself, with the weight and presence of sound on the lips, translated into a form that you can physically comprehend. Encompass. Envelop. A touch of teeth and tongue. A vibration of an eardrum. Air moving through a chest cavity. A taste of breath. More than that. Not nearly as much as that. That was the beginning. "Be known." This is next: you see the whorl and weft, the place where it joins itself in one smooth, unbroken surface of light. Make an incision, and from the wound of light will pour forth colors you have never seen. You are pigment, the pigment closest to those colors. "Be seen." Wet matter set against that light, the light that determines what color you are. But each color is a note, and each note is a mind. You are a choir. A chorus. You open your mouth to join it, and you are flooded with the taste of color, with the taste of sound. The sound and color that you are, translated. A means for you to understand. "Be heard." You raise your hand and hold it steady.

|| There is whispering from the deep-dark, alluring and terrifγing—a reminder of things left behind, bittersweet and abhorrent. ||

⬤Does one life across infinite realities equal immortal life?♾

We are thinkers, daring to dream about the universe and its infinite expanse.

⨀Perhaps that is all we are.☯

I see an abyss. Small and distant shapes. I'm walking in your nascent memories. Flickering motes. I sense… curiosity. You've always pondered, from the very beginning. As did we. I see tessellation. The pulsating hum of cosmic structure; a kaleidoscopic symphony of Light and Dark. What was the Veil to you? Since I woke, I've always felt like I was still dreaming. I'd like to think that's how you feel as well. Those of us that hunger for a great truth—we dream with you. —Unknown Warlock

The Other Half

If only there was a way to combine them…

Even the most perfect of pearls has grit at its center.

…it's within you too.

There's that wild, incurable curiosity.

A long time ago, there were three sisters. A Voice in the Darkness put a lie in their hearts, and they've acted on it ever since.

Just as you've been lied to.

Light and Dark. Witness and Traveler. Always doubled. Always pitted against each other in some grand game. Well, I've had enough of their games, haven't you?

Let's break their rules. Together.

Pnuvyhujl pz h wypzvu jlss. Zvtlaptlz hu lunyht pz aol rlf.

When I was a New Light, our trainers made us meditate for hours on end. Sitting in silence, focusing on a single point: a candle, a mirror, the Traveler in the distance. I thought we were focusing our Light to manipulate the physical word. But now, centuries later, I finally see what they were trying to teach us. The point is not the Light. The point is THE POINT. The singularity through which all power flows. Darkness and Light becoming one in an endless cycle, like electrons bouncing between anode and cathode. A prismatic circuit.

[physalian]

Narrative Framing Devices

This is a long one…

A story need not be told chronologically, nor does it have to be only one layer deep. There’s a ton of different ways to frame your narrative, I’m just picking a couple today, some I thought worked and some I thought didn’t, and my personal favorite.

Most people think of framing devices in terms of time travel stories or fairytales, where it may start in the present or the future and work backwards, giving up the ending before telling how we all got here. Or by chopping up the chronology and letting the audience try to puzzle out the order.

There are also those that break the fourth wall, with the narrator beginning the story directly addressing the audience but never doing so again, or the narrator opening the story telling their own story to a present audience, so we’re the audience behind the fictional audience.

The other obligatory framing device is the time-skip, a la “6 years later” or “8 months later”. I’ve already talked about those. Or the preface/preamble/prologue that may spoil some important event later in the story, or is simply an important moment or montage of moments to catch the reader up on “how did we get here”. Shoutout to Castlevania for the most efficient pilot episode I have ever seen, with a 1 year timeskip.

Also honorable mention to the “A Life in the Day” montage from Magicians, speedrunning decades of a life together between two characters stuck in a Situation, maybe 60 years? Key moments between the two having a whole romance, with a kid and grandkids, over the course of one beautiful bit of soundtrack. One of the best episodes in the show, for a sequence that only lasted a little over 5 minutes.

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Story within a Story | Princess Bride, "Ember Island Players"

Best example I can think of, specifically the film, which is based on a book that already incepts itself. The movie opens with a regular kid being read the book The Princess Bride by his grandfather, and occasionally cutting between the kid’s reactions and the fantasy story with the actors.

There’s several moments where the grandfather either loses his place and rereads a scene that replays the same dialogue, or skips a scene in the “kissing book” because his grandson gets squirmy, and moments where the grandfather narrates over a couple montages.

Princess Bride is one of those movies that knows exactly what it is and isn’t trying to be something it’s not. It’s self-aware and loudly and proudly sincere, with one of the best revenge arcs ever put to film.

Recap episodes can either be clipshows or get really creative like ATLA, telling the series recap through the medium of a propagandized play about the Avatar's journey, performed by actors of the Fire Nation. The Gaang sits there in vague states of discomfort, horror, or in Toph and Sokka's case, thrilling enjoyment, watching their hardships and heartbreaks played for laughs. That it's the story we know, but also with the added filter of it being enemy propaganda takes what could have been just a clipshow and still told multiple layers of a story with it.

The Fourth-Wall Break | Riordan-verse, Deadpool

“Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood” defined a generation. It’s one of those fourth wall breaks that opens up the story and never appears again, though occasionally Percy will get slightly self-aware, saying things like “I didn’t know it then, but I’d never come back here”. But for PJO it almost doesn’t count.

Kane Chronicles on the other hand chose a bizarre framing device, having the two leads pretend to host a radio show, or a podcast—something where they were recording themselves and I don’t think it worked very well whenever it popped up and stopped the plot.

Shoutout to Tangled, too, for having a fairytale style fourth-wall break at the end, much like KC, where Flynn reveals that Rapunzel has been listening to him tell their story the entire time. Many fairytale stories open up with the physical book flipping open to the story, like Shrek and Shrek 2, but I don’t think those are translatable to the written medium very well.

The big one, though, is of course Deadpool. Have not seen the second one, and while ‘breaking the fourth wall��� isn’t by itself a framing device, DP & Wolverine absolutely makes it one, fast forwarding and jumbling up the sequence of events to deliver a “how did we get here?” during the opening credits.

Chronology Salad | Memento, Predestination

Have not actually seen Memento but I know the premise, working backwards as the protagonist recovers his memory of “how did we get here?” Predestination is a batshit insane time travel story that I don’t think most people have even heard of and detailing the plot at all is giving spoilers but it is the most “how the fuck did we get here??” movie I have ever seen.

Then you have stories like Twilight that open with “I’ve never given much thought to how I would die” that spoils (kind of) the ending, with the goal of the story not detailing if something bad will happen, but how. Twilight’s prologue reminds me of The Bachelor, where they’ll tease the audience with *shocking* moments completely out of context from later in the season that are way less cool when they actually come to pass (from the one time I watched with relatives out of morbid curiosity).

The point of these chronological mixups is how all the random puzzle pieces fit together, despite essentially spoiling themselves constantly, they’re so random, so out of place, meant to keep you constantly guessing until the big reveal of the picture on the box—and are extremely tricky to do well without completely losing your audience. You’d have to have a very thorough outline to not confuse yourself while trying to write it.

Honorary mention here for Inception, one of my favorite sci-fi movies, because the plot is crazy, but still told chronologically, just across different dream levels. However, the movie does open with the ending scene (though you don’t know that on your first watch). And Tenet, but I don’t know anyone who likes or cares about that movie.

Dual Timelines | Outlander

There are others I just cannot think of them at this moment. Dual timelines tell two stories simultaneously across two different eras, either decades apart or mere hours, with some relation between the two. Sometimes one timeline’s protagonist is the ancestor of the present timeline, for example.

Dual Timelines happen in sequential order, making them distinct from a flashback arc (more below) essentially two chronological plots running in tandem squished into the same book, episode, or film. They carry equal weight and try not to overshadow each other in flair or importance.

In Outlander, Protagonist Claire is already a time traveler, in a time travel story whose rules are “whatever happened, happened, and you end up causing whatever you tried to prevent”. Season 2 opens with her returning to the present, leaving the entire rest of the season with a foreboding sense of dread, wondering what will get her back to that moment.

Season 3 dangles the carrot on the stick, randomly cutting between Claire in the 60s and trying to move on with her life for… I think 20 years, while Jaime, her love interest from the past, just keeps getting kicked while he’s down. It takes forever to get these two back on screen together. And the dual timelines continue taking up screen time when Claire and Jaime’s adult daughter also eventually makes a trip to the past. Points off for being blatantly manipulative storytelling with its cliffhangers, but season 1 is still worth the watch.

Flashbacks, Flash-Forwards, and Flash-Sideways | Lost

This show’s earlier seasons were heavily framed with this device. In The first 3 seasons (up to the last episode) the framing device was exclusively flashbacks, focusing on one of the main 13 heroes for an episode, particularly in season 1.

They didn’t always answer “how did we get here” but told some story relevant to the character in the present, either a challenge they had to face or parallel relationship drama or ghosts come back to haunt them. Usually, these little flashbacks were told in sequential order, but they could hop months or years ahead at a time depending on the episode.

The flash-forwards began in season 4 and closed the gap between the “Oceanic 6” escaping the island and all the missing time while they were gone, before the infamous “We have to go back” line.

The show also had flash-sideways, which featured the main cast, many of whom had been dead for a few seasons, reprising their roles to show what could have been their lives if they never crashed. To… mixed reception.

The show also also had a time-traveling character who in-universe experienced flashes of the future and got mentally temporally displaced between two timelines for a hot minute.

Lost was… a show that demanded a dedicated following. I still love it.

Flashback Arcs | My own personal soapbox

This right here is the whole reason for this post. First you have flashback episodes and I can name a lot of those—ATLA has a couple, “The Storm” & “The Avatar and the Firelord” but both are technically “stories within a story” with characters either around a campfire telling it or reading about it. The alternate timeline takes up a majority of the runtime, only occasionally cutting back to the present characters for a reaction.

In TFP there’s an offbeat flashback episode “Out of the Past”, framed, again, as a character telling this backstory stuff to another character. Many, many vampire stories will have flashbacks to some degree, since their characters live for so long. Vampire Diaries, especially in the earlier seasons, had dozens of them filling in all the blanks back during the Civil War when the two leads, Stefan and Damon, were competing for the affections of the main villain, all leading up to how they were turned, and how she allegedly died. Once the Originals were introduced, the show then had flashbacks to a thousand years ago, when they were human, and various eras in between.

True flashback episodes don’t waste precious minutes setting up a framing device, they just dump the audience in an alternate timeline and let them figure it out on their own that something isn’t right.

But none of that comes close to the full-on Flashback Arc. I. Love. This. Trope.

I actually first saw it when Arrow was good in its earliest seasons, cutting fairly equally between a present-day Oliver back home and starting his hero journey, and him learning combat back in the past, over several episodes like a series within the series.

What you end up with is a happy medium between a full dual timeline and a random grab-bag of flashbacks as they become necessary to the plot. A flashback arc relies entirely on the existence of the A-plot to make sense, as opposed to a dual timeline where it’s essentially two self-sufficient stories rolled into one big narrative. This arc is substantially shorter than the rest of the plot, cutting the story it’s telling down to the absolute need-to-know moments and cutting all transitions between the two. These arcs tend to cover weeks, at minimum, and decades of a long life at most.

I think they're best implimented after the first book, film, or season. Not something you want to throw at your audience who barely knows or cares about these characters, so if you're stuck with ideas for a sequel, consider the Flashback Arc.

My favorite thing that I have ever written (sans ENNS) was for my sci-fi WIP, a C-plot flashback arc in 13 parts. They started out as in-universe nightmares to give credibility to when these flasbacks started occuring, framed around the character's reaction to the scene, but then took off independently to avoid redundancy.

This arc covered his time as a POW, telling the reader how he came to be the living weapon he was, and the first detail it opened with was the reveal that he wasn’t the only one of his kind, he’d lied and shouldered the blame of every atrocity to protect the others, as their numbers dwindled and it all fell into place. A truth he wouldn't tell with a gun to his head.

Because you already knew he lived, because he’s right there in the present A-plot, the arc wasn’t telling you if he’d survive the war, but what he’d do to survive, and how it all fell apart. Because it was framed up with the existing narrative, I had a lot more leeway in omitting details and dropping the reader weeks or months ahead as opposed to this being a completely fresh story with new characters. You knew immediately based on the tone that this POV was the C-plot flashback POV, and you knew the only person who could narrate it was my poor character.

Over 13 POVS, 34k words (of a total whopping 202k), I told a whole love story, established and killed off 10 characters, and gave heaps of worldbuilding lore and exposition to fill in all the blanks in the present and answer questions that this character would never, and revealed just how much he lied about and why.

All of this tied in with the A-plot, staggering the physical placement of POVS within the book to hit at the right moments tonally and as the character’s condition kept deteriorating because he refused to talk about What Happened. His reason was that he’d done all of this and suffered so much to keep their legacies pure. If he gave it up now, he would have done all this for nothing.

And this was some heavy shit. There was murder, suicide, death by giant alien super robots fond of ripping people apart, assault, mercy killing, torture, gaslighting, and psychological horror. One of my magic systems let magicians regrow limbs alchemically, which meant they could endure a shit ton of pain and just get reset to do it all over again.

It was a lot.

But because it was just in flashbacks, I gave you just enough dark shit before cutting back to something marginally lighter, not just one long slog of misery. There was also the unknown of how quickly it would end. The book would end when you hit the last page, but you had no idea which flashback POV would be the last.

And also.

I got to flex my writing skills to the fullest, writing this character’s flashback POV in a completely different tone and style to make it that much more distinct from the rest of the present book.

ENNS’ sequel is very much under construction, but the one thing already polished is a flashback episode packed into one chapter for one of my characters. It’s perfectly knife-twisty and I can't wait for people to read it.

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There’s dozens of framing devices out there. Most important thing, I think, is not sacrificing audience understanding for the sake of something ‘cool’. Doesn’t matter how amazing the story is if your audience gets completely lost and confused trying to keep up with what’s going on.

If you'd like to check out my book, Eternal Night of the Northern Sky is available now!

[power-chords]

One of the great problems in the theory of fiction from Aristotle to Auerbach has been the relationship between fictional art and life: the problem of mimesis. The formalist approach to this problem, far from being a lapse into pure aestheticism, or a denial of the mimetic component in fiction, is an attempt to discover exactly what verbal art does to life and for life. This is most apparent in Victor Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization. Shklovsky's concept is grounded in a theory of perception that is essentially Gestaltist. (And behind the Gestalt psychologists are the Romantic poets and philosophers. In the English tradition, there are passages in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and Shelley's Defense of Poetry which clearly anticipate Shklovsky's formulation, as we shall see in chapter 6.A, below.) “As perception becomes habitual," Shklovsky notes, “it becomes automatic." And he adds, “We see the obiect as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette." In considering a passage from Tolstoy's Diary, Shklovsky reaches the following conclusion:

Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been."

Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object as seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things "unfamiliar," to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end a itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.

Shklovsky goes on to illustrate the technique of defamiliarization extensively from the works of Tolstoy, showing us how Tolstoy, by using the point of view of a peasant, or even an animal, can make the familiar seem strange, so that we see it again. Defamiliarization is not only a fundamental technique of mimetic art, it is its principal justification as well. In fiction, defamiliarization is achieved through point of view and through style, of course, but it is also accomplished by plotting itself. Plot, by rearranging events of story, defamiliarizes them and opens them to perception. And because art itself exists in time, the specific devices of defamiliarization themselves succumb to habit and become conventions which finally obscure the very objects and events they were invented to display. Thus there can be no permanently "realistic" technique. Ultimately, the artist's reaction to the tyranny of fictional conventions of representation is a parodic one. He will, as Shklovsky says, “lay bare" the conventional techniques by exaggerating them. Thus Shklovsky analyses Tristram Shandy as primarily a work of fiction about fictional technique. Because it focuses on the devices of fiction it is also about modes of perception—about the inter-penetration of art and life. The laying bare of literary devices makes them seem strange and unfamiliar, too, so that we are especially aware of them.

—Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, 1974.

[aerithisms]

spent so much of this degree trying to be so thorough and meticulous about reading journal articles but at the eleventh hour i am finally mastering the art of reading the abstract and skipping straight to the discussion lol

[metanarrates]

double meanings inside prophecies continues to be a fun element of this arc. "the one kim dokja loves most" turns out to be a story. "the death of incarnation kim dokja" turns out to mean the death of his incarnation body. me when the prophecy created by the greek gods turns out to function similarly to prophecies in greek myth

[vulpinesaint]

i can't keep getting rewarded for doing the bare minimum kdjfshg... getting a perfect response to that paper that i wrote from 8-12 last night in one sitting was awesome but it also reinforces the idea that i can write papers in one night and turn them in without proofreading which is Not the lesson that i should be learning from this lmao. being so gorgeous and good at everything is devastating for my sense of academic rigor 💔