something about premise and worldview

[ritaxis]

There's this fellow, who goes by the handle Wildepad, who participates in rec.arts.sf.composition, and he's having a hard time of it. He keeps offering little bits of story premise and asling the group what they theink of it and invariably almost everybody thinks something really different from what he hoped. There are some consistencies: he keeps setting up stories which concentrate knowledge and power and egency in the hands of the protagonist or a person close to the protagonist, and in which the people who are structurally slaves or followers of some sort accept this more or less blindly. Often this involves time travel, or the passage of future information. But that's not the point. The point is that a premise is not a story and can't be read the same way as a story. If I say to you, "I'm writing a story which is not religious at all, and not a horror story either, but it involves demonic factional forces attempting to manipulate the behavior of ordinary people in order to line up various factors to influence their own internal politics -- but the side effect of all this, not the goal, may well be the destruction or serious harm of the universe as it is," that's a premise, not a story, and your reaction to it, positive or negative, isn't going to tell me much about whether the story would work or not. Even the silliest premise, even the ickiest premise, might be part of a successful story. Anyway, I think it's stupid to try to get approval before you write something. Better to let them look at a draft, when you've had a chance to develop the thing.

Now. I adore Toni Cade Bambara (not past tense because even though she's dead I still adore her!) and one of the things she was into was a kind of collective writing process, not a collective doing the writing but the writer responding to, reflecting, expressing, answerable to, and modifiable by a community's sensibilities. I still approve of that. But you need a coherent community to be part of to do that, and while rasfc is a community, it's not a coherent one -- it's a nebulous, loose community whose strength lies not in its ability to produce a unified worldview but in its ability to support people with diverse world views as they carry out similar tasks with respect to those world views. Like the difference between a group of people who are all fiscal programmers working for a wide variety of institutions, including governmental, ngo, corporate, small business and charity orgnaizations, on the one hand, and a group of people who all belong to the same institution and do different jobs. The former have a lot in common, but the things they have in common are about how to do the job and h8ow to integrate the job with other jobs, and what the latter have in common are things having to do with the mission and the experience of the institution. So the conversations the two types of groups will have will be different, and a person who tries to have the one type of conversation in the other type of group is very likely to be frustrated and is also likely to frustrate the people he's trying to have the conversation with.

I clearly do not share mission, world view, or raison d'etre with Wildepad, but I do share task, to an important degree. So if I try to talk about the former with him, unless we're just smiling and nodding our heads and thinking "this is a really interesting new monkey in the zoo," we're going to have a hard time. But if we talk about task-oriented things, we can have useful conversations.

I think a problem lies in recognizing which conversations are which, and I think the times that I've had bad experiences in the group have been when I thought I was asking about something factual or mechanical but I included details that were laden with world-view triggers. And I think that's WIldepad's issue too.

I put this here because it's too long for rasfc.

Comments

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I haven't known how to answer his premise questions for a while now. I think you've hit the issue dead on. In some ways, I've found it easier to get along with rasfc, tho I don't post there much, than I have on the AOL writers boards since Patricia Wrede left them, but I've had the best time of it in discussions on LJs that I enjoy reading, plus my own. And that's because I either read LJs that fit my views or are amenable enough to a variety of opinions to make it comfortable to discuss things. The right venue for the discussion is so important. Good entry, even if it was too long for rasfc. :)

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't been following rasfc for a while, but I remember the commune and the tv threads...

I think the key thing that I came away from them with is that motivation (and hence story) is a product of both character and situation. (I know Patricia said the motivation came from character and not situation, so I could be completely wrong here, but let's assume I'm right for a moment...)

So, if you have any two of the three, then you can reasonably expect people to derive the third (and then to be able to argue about it, comment on it, etc). If you give people only one of the three, you cannot expect them to come up with the same answers for the other two as you did.

If you give people a situation, and ask them for a motivation, they will need to invent their own character in order to come up with an answer. The character is almost guaranteed to not be not the same as the one you had in mind, and so their motivation will also be different. (Likewise, if you give a situation and ask about character, they will need to invent their own motivation, and they'll come up with a different answer from you again).

Now, the big thing is distinguishing when you're in a situation when you have two of the three, and when you only have one of the three. When you have two of the three, deriving the third is an exercise in logic. You can argue over right and wrong. When you have one of the three, deriving the other two is an exercise in speculation. You can't argue sensibly about one of the missing parameters unless you have already nailed down the other one. If people think they're in a situation where they have two of the three, and they really only have one of the three - well, there you have the problem... Either you need to supply at least two of the three upfront, or supply just one and make it clear that that's the only part that's up for discussion.


Khiem.