this is a new one

I get story ideas from dreams fairly often ("Straw" is a readily available example, if you're curious), but this is the first time I've had an insight into narrative craft.

The idea that a narrative is a series of questions is not a new one. It's another way to think of genre, if you're approaching it from the academic rather than the marketing angle: a genre can be defined as the list of questions a story chooses to answer. (Notice that it isn't the story's answers that necessarily define its genre, but the questions it engages with.) And it has occurred to me, in thinking about this dream of mine, that one way to judge the degree of conventionality of a given story is to look at how many of its answers you can predict before you finish it (or before you even start). The question of all romance is, "Will the protagonist find true love?" If you're reading a category romance, you know that the answer is yes before you so much as read the first line. (I deliberately chose an extreme example to make it obvious what I'm trying to say.) If the story poses a question ("What's wrong with this protagonist?") and you immediately roll your eyes and answer ("He's insane." "She's dreaming." "He's a vampire." "She's a ghost."), then you are reading a highly conventional story. If the story poses a question and you don't know the answer--or you think you know the answer and it proves you wrong--then you are reading a story that is either not conventional or that has deliberately engaged with its conventions in order to confound them.

None of this was the point of my dream.

The point of the dream was the relationship between conventionality and narrative tension.* It pointed out first that, yes, if the story poses a question and the reader knows the answer ("Will the homicidal demon nutbar take out the hapless bystanders in the teaser?" "Oh HELL yes."), there's likely to be a significant decrease in narrative tension, and a significant INCREASE in reader impatience, especially if the answer is not something the reader wants to watch play out. (I badly wanted to be able to TIVO my imagination at that point, so we could just skip past the part with the riding lawnmower. And on the other side, think of the disgust of the little boy in The Princess Bride: "Is this a kissing book?")

But if this were a simple 1-to-1 correspondence, there would be no market for highly conventional stories, and it takes only the most minimal acquaintance with the media-consumption habits of the modern age to see that that ain't so. And my dream went on to show reasons why that's so, how the answering of questions interacts with narrative tension, even if the audience knows the answers.

Point one, most obviously, is that narrative tension is heightened if the reader doesn't know the answer. What do the mysterious partially excavated underground fortifications have to do with the homicidal demon nutbar? (I never did get an answer to that one.) Even if the big question of your story has a conventional answer (Will the protagonist find true love?), you can still have plenty of narrative tension around the questions of "how?" and "with whom?"

But the second thing, and the thing that I hadn't ever realized consciously before, is that you can generate narrative tension by deferring the answer. In particular, by introducing other questions related to the conventional question which are not themselves conventional. So, given that my dream was pretending to be a TV show, the main (and conventional) question was, Will our heroes defeat the homicidal demon nutbar? And we know the answer is yes, even if I woke up before they managed it. But--unlike the thing with the riding lawnmower--that question isn't answered as soon as it's posed, nor is it obvious what the answer is. Beyond "yes"--but the question of "how?", which can't be answered right away, is the thing that any narrative is about. Narratives aren't about yes/no questions; they're about "how?" And before that question ("how will they defeat the homicidal demon nutbar?") began to be answered, new questions were put into play, like the underground fortifications, and the fact that our heroes were being transported willy-nilly from one alternate universe to another, all focused around those fortifications and the homicidal demon nutbar. What's the connection? I still don't know. The dream teased me with a partial answer (and, no, I wasn't really surprised to learn that the fortifications had human bones mortared into their foundations), but it deferred the resolution past the span of the dream. (Yes, thank you, I am frustrated by this.)

Of course, it is possible to lean too heavily on the tactic of deferral; you have to judge how long your audience will remain interested in a question before they need an answer, and likewise, how many complicating questions they will tolerate. I despaired and gave up on Robert Jordan because it didn't seem as if the major questions of The Wheel of Time were ever going to be answered and I could no longer keep track of all the complicating questions he'd thrown at me, but I know that a great many people have not given up. So that particular question is a matter of the alchemy between writer and reader and thus, like all such things, unfathomable.

But I understand something about building narrative that I've never fully grasped before. Which isn't bad for a night's work.

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*For the two people who probably want to know, the dream was pretending to be an episode of Supernatural. I don't know why, as I have watched in total about three minutes of one episode of that show in my entire life, but it is not news that my subconscious moves in mysterious ways.

Haiku Earring Party

If you participated in the Haiku Earring Party at WisCon this year, elisem would like to hear from you.