the ramble dump

Those currently trying to access The Aberration Chapter 15 will be faced with this message:

This chapter is currently being revised. It will return, massively improved, sometime soonish.

Anyone who visits this site with any kind of frequency will know that I have a tendency to go back and repeatedly edit the stuff I've already uploaded, usually one or two months after the fact. In the past I've offered various specific, long-winded reasons and excuses for each time I've done this, but I won't go into any specifics about Chapter 15 here. Its sparkly new edition will be posted along with the horrendously delayed 16 in the not-too-distant future.

There will, however, be spoilers for Chapter 14, so watch out for those.

Nearly all of the time, when they're not nitpicks over grammar or general attempts to improve the quality of description, these alterations boil down to something not working with the flow of the narrative. This might relate to how the story progresses from one point to the next, how events transpire, how the characters react to these events or to each other, and how those characters develop as a result of all these other things. It's a partly intuitive process: if an event feels overly contrived, or if a character feels inconsistent with how they usually act, or if anything about the story feels too forced, it sits uncomfortably in the final product. It can result in the story losing some of it's believability.

To some extent, even things like the specific characteristics of the characters themselves are not something that can be dictated in an overly deliberate way. Likewise, smooth transitions from Point A to Point B can't always be meticulously planned out--you can't account for everything until you get to the stage of actually writing it. That's why some of the Starcustard chapters ended up so long: because we set out, roughly, to cover a certain amount of ground in terms of outlined story in each chapter, and ended up requiring a lot more ground than we expected. When you're writing, you have to feel your way through the narrative, follow it a natural way so that it comes to be something you can believe in yourself before you expect the reader to do the same. That's probably why it usually doesn't work as an immersive, believable story when the author sets out to dictate the actions of some character in order to conform to a message that they are trying to convey--when the characters are reduced to functions of an idea or plot point at the expense of...well, character. (Thus: boo, allegory.)

This isn't to say that the writing process has to be something completely out of your control, or something that you have to surrender entirely to your subconscious. It obviously doesn't work like that. Control is, of course, one of the most important things in storytelling. It's about managing to strike a balance, but not a compromise, in attempting to achieve some kind of realism (or, at least, in order to make the experience real enough to be appreciated). But there are certain things that a story, a narrative, needs to be held together--the plot to frame it, the characters to drive it and the cohesion to bring everything together. Big ideas and viewpoints are all well and good, but they need to come from somewhere--they need to be grounded in a believable foundation.

These are things that seem to be true of many novels that I've read or films that I've watched, as well as presenting themselves as something repeatedly confounding when I come to write my own stuff. Hence all the revisions. Chapter 15's main problem was exposition: cramming in too much stuff I felt I needed to explain in order to get past it, at the expense of pacing, believability and narrative sense. To get anything worthwhile from a story, the reader has to be able to experience it in a way that doesn't pull them out of it every time the author feels the need to muscle their way in for some more control. There are times, I have found, when you just have to give in to the narrative--otherwise you start making compromises to the integrity of the narrative that can cause everything to fall apart.

Which brings me to Mike. Mike's fate is currently undecided. For the longest time I've been trying to determine a reason for Mike to be there; trying to feel out a purpose for him in the story. This sounds a lot like reducing him to a function, but in this sense, characters become functions of the narrative--as a part of that narrative--rather than being reduced for the sake of functioning as part of a specific plot point or any motive that might lie behind the story. This doesn't mean denying the fact that characters drive the narrative, but rather that there is an interdependency between the two that develops organically and emerges along with other things such as themes and plot.

In the case of The Aberration, the narrative is already being driven, and moulded, by Master Beef and the plot and ideas that have formed around him. Whereas Beef had always been at the core of the story, even if later themes and character developments had not yet emerged, Mike, like several other characters (including Detective Muse, Sim Hyde and the Microwave) had always sort of been attached to the story for the sake of it. Unlike these others, however, Mike's reasons for creation, and attempts to develop him beyond that, have not leant themselves to enabling his character to be continually relevant, and though over the years I've repeatedly reduced his personal story to fit in with everything else, I've never quite been able to assimilate him completely into the coherent whole. In other words, I don't know what to do with him. While I feel he's worked in a perfectly valid way as a character so far, it's reached the point that the only thing that feels natural to do is to write him out of the story, maybe able to offer one or two more hints at the wider plot on his way out.

It does sound as if he's being judged by his worth to the plot, and to some extent this is true. But as already explained, the Mike's character has to relate to all the other aspects of the whole. The characters drive the story or narrative, which is the sequence of events. The plot--what the story is about--is something that, in this case, has emerged as these characters have been driving the story. Narrative, plot and character have all formed in a mutual sort of way. But Mike has ended up the odd one out. I could invent new story just for the sake of keeping him in the picture, but there's no point in having a character perpetuated in this way. His character, failing to resonate in the same way as the others, would require his own plot, if he was given any plot at all, and his story would be irrelevant.

With regard to killing off characters, a similar thing happened with the character of Mars in the early chapters of Starcustard, though in his case it was more an immediate demand of the world as we'd constructed it, rather than simply having no place for him in the story after that (although we may not have done anyway). In our excitement of plot we'd inadvertently pushed him into a situation that there was simply no way around if we didn't want to contradict everything we had already said.

The character of Mike has suffered rather from a lack of direction, in terms of plot and character. Many of the characters in The Aberration have ended up treading narrative backwater at various points in its history, causing me to re-evaluate and revise repeatedly in order to sustain it (most significantly when it was in its Manifesting Surreal iteration, consisting of mounting absurdity and about to collapse in on itself). As a result, though it's been far from easy, the narrative has begun to form into something that feels at least somewhat coherent. Unfortunately for Mike, for the time being at least, he is no longer a part of it.

As a final note (and a little hint at other things): although on the level of plot Mike's (apparent) death does nothing but remove him as something with no further use, on the level of the narrative--which can incorporate things like, say, meta-commentary--the very necessity of his removal may yet itself function as something more significant in terms of the wider narrative picture. If you follow that, I'll leave you to try and figure it out once you start getting a sense of what that wider picture is. Until then, the important thing, in terms of what this post has been getting at, is that this function operates as a valuable extra feature of the narrative, but does not exist at the expense of narrative integrity as a whole.

Edit 23/07/08: some slight rephrasing due to a confusion between the concepts of 'plot' and 'story/narrative' (I got them the wrong way around).

Labels: i am the ramblemaster, rabbit-hole theory, starcustard, the aberration

# posted by Chris @ 10:23 PM