A recent comment of a page of Rita got me thinking about how that whole story has become a constant dance between telling enough of the story to make sense, while simultaneously fragmenting and disconnecting it to create just enough discombobulation in the reader to sympathize with the way Rita is constantly struggling to make sense of her broken reality.
And to be honest it also makes me realize that this is a constant theme in much of my work: Five Glasses of Absinthe has a (not well-telegraphed yet) metanarrative of being told by its self-aggrandizing title character. The main character of Drowning City suffers from blackouts, and the reader will not know for sure what happens during them until she remembers. I’m currently semi-obsessed with a few ideas for stories of a vampire who cheerfully reminds her interviewer that she is not to be trusted, because why on earth would an obligate predator of something as smart as humans want to expose all their secrets?*
I’m beginning to wonder why the hell I find this fascinating. Is it merely that I like constructing puzzles for the sufficiently engaged reader? Or am I trying to tell myself something?
I mean, there’s a huge gap in my life called “the black hole of depression I fell into for many years after my father died”. And there’s a few strange fragments floating around that I really cannot remember how they were connected with anything else. Maybe I’m just trying to get people to understand a little bit of what it’s like to be me.
(I do have other ideas lying around that aren’t full of memory holes. Arguably I’m cherry-picking my output to support this thesis…)
* which gives me the idea that possibly her motivation for telling these stories is to gauge the sophistication of her audience, and to keep her dissembling in shape – any audience who can see through her maze of lies ay well be too dangerous to live…
This sort of nonlinear discombobulation storytelling is always fun to do, but it’s hard to follow through on. My first webcomic (Eaveston) was an attempt at doing that based on my fascination at the time with hypnagogic phenomena and sleep deprivation, but the story was WAY too ambitious for what I had the ability and long-term interest to pull off. Elements of that have worked their way back into my Unity comics, too, although I managed to keep it dialed back somewhat (and in the first book I telegraph and build up to it before actively subverting it in what’s essentially a “don’t be stupid” moment, after which the entire tone of the story changes).
It does seem like it’s incredibly difficult to balance the discombobulation with having a story that people can understand in the end or are at least satisfied with. Every now and then someone will voice their frustration with how my stories are never spelled out in the end, and I always waffle between explaining it in hyper-excruciating detail (which limits things later) and just asking them to come up with their own truth (which limits the patience of certain kinds of reader).
Someday I want to write a story in which there is no single ground truth behind what happened, but that seems to be very difficult to pull off. Making something consistently inconsistent and so on.
There are times I think it’s just a way to get around not being able to write a coherent story that’s actually entertaining when read straight up. I dunno. We’ll see what happens when I actually do more straightforwards stuff.
Personally I think some things should not ever be explained. I mean if you’re watching a Mysterious Briefcase movie you pretty much never find out what’s in it, and it doesn’t matter – what matters is that everyone wants it, and the convolutions they go through in trying to get their hands on it. So you may be either pleased or annoyed to know that not only will there never be any Official Word on “what’s really happening in Rita”, but I’m planning to introduce another possible explanation in the last chapter, that hopefully makes perfect sense when you go back and read the whole thing again…