DJ Elias: "Dear Max Gladstone: My Narrative and Mechanical Kinks"

             Dear Max Gladstone: My Narrative and Mechanical Kinks

by D.J. Elias

Narrative kinks imply preference, and while I personally tend to have leanings to some genres and imagery (I particularly like science fiction), that’s not what really makes a story stand out to me. For my personal preference, or narrative “kink”, I like pieces of media that are strongly stylized.

            This may seem really broad (probably because it is), but let me explain for a minute. There are so many times where I read a book or I watch a movie or I play a game and I think: “Man. I’ve seen this all before.” There are so many times where I turn on the television and I feast my eyes on another generic crime show with a handsome 30-year old actor with a forehead the size of his ego and his beautiful female assistant/love interest. These qualities themselves are not bad, but the way the show decides to treat their qualities, as simple tropes to appeal to general audiences, tends to make me bored.

            What I like is not necessarily originality (although it helps). You can use orcs and elves and all that Tolkien stuff and I’m ok with it. Space ships, time travel, it’s all fine with me. Hell, the characters can be clichéd too, and I’m willing to forgive it. But it has to make an impression on me. Whether it is through the writing, or the cinematography, or the way the piece of media plays around with the tropes and clichés at its disposal, it has to leave me impressed with your capability as a creator of things.

            I’ll take our most recent reading in SF as an example. The Last Unicorn isn’t really a complex book narratively, in fact, it tends to follow the monomyth pretty well. Sure, there are some weird things about it (the fact that the main character is a unicorn being a pretty big one), but it’s a fairly normal story about hope, belief, and beauty (with some good ol’ mortality vs. immortality thrown in for good measure). But the story and the characters aren’t what drew me in to the Last Unicorn, it’s the way that the author used its language to really give an idea of what the story was. For instance, this passage early on: “…And wondered at Arachne's new web, which was like a fisherman's net with the dripping moon in it. Each of them took it for a real web, but only the spider believed that it held the real moon.” The way that passage shows not only the character of the world but also the character of the spider is something I still marvel at.

            To be fair, that’s more of the mechanics of narrative rather than narrative itself. Stylization in narrative usually comes from doing one of two things (or, at least, from what I have seen):

1.      Do something entirely original (or if not original, derivative) with your plot/characters

2.      Play on the audience’s expectations

I’ve seen two quite a lot more often than one, since it is easier to derive humorous/dramatic scenarios from what we know than to come up with something completely original.

            This isn’t necessarily the road map to a good story, hell, far from it. There have been some bad pieces of media that play around with these two things this way. Also, stories can just be same-y and I can still enjoy it. The main point is that I, personally, tend to gravitate to this heavy style, rather than the more subtle things. Maybe I just like my things to be bombastic, but it gives me an easier way of saying: “Wow, this writer is awesome!” rather than just letting the writer fall to the background.