On Other Worlds: Amalgam (August 01:03)

This month, I'm concentrating on my favorite stories, trying to figure out why they mean so much to me and what I can learn from them about storytelling and about myself as a storyteller.

The last two entries dealt with three works which seek to transport their audience to a new and different world of their own creation: the Riddle-Master novels by Patricia McKillip, the film Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, and Dinotopia by James Gurney.

This entry will deal with trying to draw some conclusions from the analysis of these works and my reactions to them.

photo courtesy of IMDb.com

These are the components, what are the conclusions?

Obviously these three stories have more similarities than they have differences.

In all three, the emphasis of the author is on verisimilitude: their highest goal is to make us believe in the world they are creating for the story to play out in.

The differences are in the approach to that world-building.  The first is a printed novel, the other two are works of visual art.  The first two are traditional narratives with objectives, heroes, villains, beginnings and endings.  The third has a beginning, but otherwise obscures dramatic tension in favor of sheer exploration.

The first is a world where magic is grounded in reality by description and by the feel only, and is otherwise still magic in the traditional sense, that is, a mysterious force or forces that defies technical or rational explanation.  It is like our world, but is not set here. 

The second is a world much like our own, but where ancient technology, so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, stumbles its way into the paths of the principle characters and holds sway in the major events of their lives.  It's set more or less in our world, or at least in a different version of our world, one much older and with stranger treasures far.

The third is set in our world, just in a tiny and lost corner of it.  There is no magic per se present, unless it's the presence of the living creatures themselves, and the changes in the human culture their presence works.  Of the three, it's the most concerned with being life-like.

Apart from this, the three are very similar.  They are all essentially guided tours of the worlds they inhabit.  

We're invited to inspect the various interesting things unique to the world of the story, and explained their comparative importance in either the course of the plot or the lives of the relevant characters, if not both.  

The story moves us to a new area, we receive information about that area, its inhabitants, customs, special features, trinkets, and oddities, there is a twist in the exposition of the narrative or a climax of some kind is reached, and we move on to another area.

What these authors are writing for us in creating these stories is nothing less than a glossary of terms, or a customized encyclopedia, of people, places, and things.  Filled to the brim with small and well-drawn details and  memorable associations with the characters, the entries are often explained in terms of other entries, each time pushing the world a little more out of line with the day-to-day reality we're trying to escape by exploring their pages, making the world of the story that more its own.

Patricia McKillip's Realm of the High One.image courtesy of wikipedia.org

Obviously a glossary read from A to Z without context or character would be both boring and incomprehensible.  A progression must exist from simple familiar concepts to complex and alien ones, building by logic and analogy as the tension or tone of the narrative shifts to move us along.

In Dinotopia, where the narrative is simply one of exploration, the reading of the glossary is sequential by geography; the explorers are shipwrecked at A, they journey through B, C, and D to the capital E, along the way being sidetracked to F, G, and etc.

In the two more straightforward stories, the ones with plots to resolve and enemies to overcome, the exploration is mingled with the objectives of the characters: we have solved the problems at A, we must proceed to B.  They are chasing us at B, we must rush on to C, and etc.

In both cases, the end of the story comes only when we have seen all the worlds have to offer, understood their last secrets, joined the ranks of the characters who are the most privileged explorers to happen upon these far-flung settings, in finding out what few of its native inhabitants have guessed at.

So these simple stories become scavenger hunts set inside glossaries, or simple linear challenges with scenery, like a miniature golf course.

The power of the story, the impact it has on the reader's attention and their memory, is in the vivid and unique details, and the associations those details form with the struggles of the indefatigable characters who experience them, and with us by extension.

Where do these stories go wrong?  Or, if these stories manage to avoid them, where do stories like these often go wrong?

Primarily in characterization.  With so much emphasis on the world and its trappings, it's easy to lose sight of creating people with depth, consistency, and clear beliefs and objectives to exercise as the tour guide plot unfolds.

I've mentioned in the passage on McKillip above that she averts the common pitfall of knocking the reader out of the moment of the story with overly direct and distracting character description.  I would add to this that all three books manage to give us characters we want to root for, whether they're complex figures in the imagination or not.  They are real, they are sympathetic, and we are happy they are having this adventure and seeing these things.

Worse, more and more often nowadays authors and screenwriters seem to be encouraged to write their main characters as "blanks", people who move through the story without really expressing any opinions of their own, taking no action other than blunt and generic emotional responses to the actions of other characters: these are functional placeholders.  We are meant to insert ourselves into the story through their eyes.  

This could be seen, in theory, as the uttermost logical consequence of this tour guide kind of storytelling: rather than have a hero or an explorer with their own opinions and actions getting in the way, just have a body that has nothing descriptive about it that we can occupy with our imagination, in order to take part in the story fully.

The problem with this approach is that a protagonist who doesn't have to make any effort to get from one end of the story to the other isn't very sympathetic, and it gets tedious in longer works where the lack of characterization of the main person in the story becomes more and more and more obviously a contrivance of the plot.

Better to have simple characters, with simple, quasi-generic motivations (avenge their parents, get to safety, see this really cool thing) that anyone can associate with, hopes and fears we can identify with, and with temperaments or character traits we find sympathetic.  They don't have to be profound or troubled or complex to make this kind of story work, but I would argue that they do need to be there.

There can also be too much of a good thing when it comes to exposition.  A clever design or element of the story world, no matter how clever or beautiful, can be boring or seem irrelevant and distracting when it isn't grounded in terms of the plot.

In Dinotopia, this line is a little hazier to draw, as there isn't a plot line per se to justify details by, but the "it was notable enough to write down" or "it was memorable enough to mention" law seems to be in full effect, and the story makes sense on these terms.  Everything introduced and explained either is personally interesting to the philosopher-narrator, or is somehow of importance to the characters of the episode at hand.

"Palace in the Clouds" from Dinotopia by James Gurney

image courtesy of jamesgurney.com

Finally, I should talk about the limits of this kind of storytelling.  I mentioned in discussing Castle that it lacks both the high-minded message of its sister story Princess Mononoke, and the down-to-earth and heartfelt journey of Spirited Away.

I love these stories for their simplicity, and for the free-spirited fun and wonder they serve.  I think that the elements of a good glossary and an interesting miniature golf course built into it are good starts for making any story, but won't do all the work of a Great Novel, one that has a Theme or a Meaning.

The characters can't just be tourists if you're trying to make the reader reconsider something in their own waking lives.

The struggle can't just be for "the whole world" if we are going to wonder whether what the characters do is the right thing.

I think all these things are probably necessary for weaving a good story.  If you don't have little details and traits that at least set your character's world views apart from your own, it will be a struggle to get your reader's attention as a storyteller without a monster of a dramatic hook for them to chase after.

That is to say, most of the Great Novels I've read, or at least books I've read and understood to be great, have elements of this kind of story in them.  We have to be transported at least a little in order to get our feet under us as an audience and begin investing our emotions in the characters and their journey.

Great stories, I think, ought to do more than simply distract us from our lives for a little while.  They should raise questions, challenge accepted ideas, make us wonder about life or look at our own lives in a different way.

While books that offer escape are a great place to start as a storyteller, if you're hoping to do more than entertain, further time and consideration are required.

On Other Worlds: Castle in the Sky & Dinotopia (August 01:02)

This month, I'm concentrating on my favorite stories, trying to figure out why they mean so much to me and what I can learn from them about storytelling and about myself as a storyteller.

The first installment was on a series of novels by Patricia McKillip.  Today I look at two works of visual art; one is a film, the other a picture book.

Overall, the theme is stories that bring us into worlds of their own.  Why do they work, how do they do what they do, and why do they have such a hold on our imagination?

Laputa: Castle in the Sky

Studio Ghibli, 1986

photo courtesy of IMDb.com

Once every few months, in the middle of the workday, when I feel like there's too much confusion and too little meaning in much of what I'm doing with my time, and I need to take in something both simpler and higher, nobler, in feeling than the entertainment I use to emborider my leisure the rest of the time.  I'll decide that it's time to watch a Good Movie, and very often if I'm longing for something genuinely heartfelt and beautiful, I will put in a film created by Hayao Miyazaki.

If I feel like I need to be cleaned of some bad feeling, I'll watch another personal favorite, Princess Mononoke.  If I feel heartsick, or worn down by life, I go for the matchless Spirited Away (this one is also handy if you're trying to convince someone new to this sort of movie that they can be worthwhile).  But more and more often the feeling I need to dispell by revisiting my collection is of being stumped, stymied, unflowing, or dried-out.  In a word, uninspired.  When I feel this way, the movie I watch is Laputa, released in the U.S. as Castle in the Sky.

It's not as simple or noble-spirited as Princess Mononoke, or as sympathetic and poignant as Spirited Away, and it's not as well-drawn as either (coming earlier in Miyazaki's career).  The characters are hammy, the plot is labored and extremely well-used (especially if one has ever seen an Indiana Jones movie), and dialogue, especially in the Disney-produced English dub is often so ludacrous it seems baffling.

So why is it a favorite?

Over and above any flaws and more important than any meticulously rendered sequence of animation is what I find to be the film's heart: its beautiful simplicity.  Though the story takes a new twist in almost every other scene, the plot is an insolubly simple one: it's a race.  Both the plucky, under-prepared heroes and their imposing military  rivals do anything and everything they can to be the first to find a hidden floating island, the last remnant of a powerful lost civilization, and to claim the mysteries their for their own.

Everything in the story is built with this adventure in mind.  The goal is in the air, so the theatre of operations in the air.  The evil army's weapons of choice are airships, the handy pirates have a steampunk clubhouse with wings and buzz about on thin-winged flying bumper cars.  All this is easy to believe in once you posit a million tons of old stonework and forested parks sailing endlessly around the earth at the heart of its own eternal hurricane.  The movie is ridiculous, but it seems to know it's ridiculous, it doesn't claim not to be ridiculous.  Its only claim is to be original and fun.

How does it succeed in being original and fun?

Three key reasons: the spirit of the characters, the world of the story (and the art that brings it to life), and the stakes of the action.

As I get older, when I say spirit, or refer to matters of spirituality, I generally refer to morale.  That is, the general long-term feeling of a person or people.  It's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about above that requires the watching of one of these films in the first place.  Life is beautiful and too short; it is also, as any grown up has had to learn, an arduous and costly ordeal, full of delays and disappointments.  It gets us down.  Where do we turn when nothing seems to work out, or even to be worth the effort?  Friends, family, good places, fond memories, new experiences, clean clothes, soulful music, good food.  And good stories with characters who never give up, who keep going no matter what, and who always do the right thing in the face of insurmountable odds.  Spending a little time in their world is often just the boost I need to see my own world not as a broken-down, washed-out mess, but as a clean, blank page to work  with however I choose.

And what a world.

If nothing else, Hayao Miyazaki (and his team at studio Ghibli) is a consummate master of creating imaginary places from the smallest details up.  Everything from the curve of the airship's wings to the way the characters eat breakfast has been considered, and is presented in a way that fits with the design and feel of the rest of the world.  Cars, planes, tanks, trains, furniture, grenados, costumes, treasures, robots; everything has a touch of the same simple, well-proportioned, clean-lined and practical design.  The story is built out of pieces that could be real and work plainly and easily in our real world, but would belong to another world, the invented world of Miyazaki's story.  And the further we go into the story, the greater the degree and wonder of the invention grows, until 

The story is intended as a thrill ride, and therefore is at its best when it seems to be a half a step ahead of total disaster.  But what keeps us in our seats, and gives the spirited characters a meaningful world to struggle through, are all the wonderful little details of thought and execution that 

What stakes are the characters fighting over?  The fate of the world, of course, but that's not important.  That's what's always at stake in a story like this.

Why do I bring up the stakes as an important point?

The other two films I've mentioned above are identical to the qualifications of Castle I've listed so far.  Both are wonderfully well-executed imaginary worlds, and both are powered at their hearts by the indominable, even dogged perseverence of spirit of the characters.  In fact, Mononoke and Spirited are in many aspects superior films: if Castle has a moral message, it is certainly not as clear or imperative as Mononoke's, and if it's believability is grounded in the real-life feel of its details and struggles, Spirited has it beat by miles in both these aspects and many others.  So what makes this movie stand out?

Weirdly, it's just its imperfections that render it so appealing to me.

It isn't a movie that sets out to prove anything, it's not concerned with being overly realistic in tone or in grounding what happens in the smaller feelings of real life.  It's big, it's loud.  It's completely ridiculous.

It has lower expectations, and its story, relative to its sister stories, is considerably lighter without the baggage of excellence.  

It also has the corners worn off: what decides whether a detail is in the story or not is whether it makes the story more interesting, more engrossing, more thrilling, more fun.  

The premise it employs its invincible little characters towards is a constantly renewed "let's go see."  No more, no less.  For this, it retains an enormous value of durability.

Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time
James Gurney, 1992

image courtesy of jamesgurney.com

Illustrations are cheating, as everyone knows.

Perhaps no clearer boundary exists between the stories of our infancy and those of our elder childhood than whether the books we read have pictures in them or not.

"How can you READ this? There's no pictures!"

So what do we make of James Gurney's unrivaled masterpiece?  I know of very few books like this book (Aaron Becker's Journey, Wil Nuygen and Rien Poortvliet's Gnomes, and the works of Chris Van Allsberg come to mind), and none that succeed better on their own terms than this.

In principle, it's barely a story, the action of the whole book can be summarized in two short sentences: explorer and son are shipwrecked, they wash up on a beach.  They explore the island they've landed on.  There is no marked problem to overcome, unless it be whether they are truly marooned on the island or not, and there is no villain or drama, other than the mysteries and riddles of coming to rediscover and understand this magic kingdom.

I say magical kingdom because this is a fairy tale, a fantasy as surely as is anything dreamed up by Tolkien or Disney.  What sets it apart is its wonders all bear the weight and shadow of real people, real animals and objects.  The whole world of the story bears an incredible feeling of believability, through the incredible detail of its execution and the simplicity of its ingredients.

But what are its ingredients?

People and dinosaurs, living together in peace.  No more, no less.  

Gurney's secret is in what he calls in another book, imaginative realism: using light and color and all the practical knowledge at his disposal as a master of visual arts to render what doesn't exist as realistically as he can.

In the process of doing this, he lets all the little surprises of invention flow naturally from the central premise, and speak for themselves; architecture and philosophy, arts, crafts, manners and customs and costumes and legends and cities and swamps.  An entire world in full color right at your fingertips and pressed between the covers of a book.

The work is presented as the travel log and sketchbook of Arthur Denison, who as described above, arrives at the island by mistake from the 19th century we are familiar with.  The spirit of the narrative is of exploration and the delight of sheer discovery, in the spirit of the Time Machine, Out of the Silent Planet, or A Journey to the Center of the Earth.

There can be no doubt that illustrations are a shortcut in storytelling.  There is nothing wrong with praising an author for rendering a scene, using words alone, so vividly that we feel as though we've lived through them ourselves.  Knowing what things to describe and how to describe them is in many cases what separates good stories from bad, and the truly great storytellers from the merely very good.

Here, the pictures are more than just an aid to the story.  In a very real sense they are the story, and the words and dialogue written between them are the illustrations of the action that join them together into the narrative.  If there were no words printed in the book, the drift of the narrative and its meaning would remain largely comprehensible.  

It's Gurney's overwhelming talent for invention and incredible competence as a visual artist that make the story real.  

We don't need the tension of a problem to solve or a villain to overthrow.  The story can get by on the wonder of exploring the world, because the world is so wonderful as to warrant exploring.

On Other Worlds (August 01:01)

Once again July is gone. The year begins to show its age at sundown, the feeling of late afternoon seems to last for most of the day.

I have plans for some brisk and businesslike articles once autumn comes in and the world has its back-to-business crispness again, but before then I'd like to take time in the sunny and sleepy gap between months to think over what got me here in the first place.

I want to try and understand why people tell stories in general, why I want to write stories in particular.

There may be an unlimited number of answers to the first question, or the answers may in the end just be more questions without end.

But to the second question, why this is for me, I should be able to apply my reason and knowledge to uncover something worth knowing.

The simplest and shortest answer is probably best to start with: I want to write good stories because I love to read good stories.

Which stories are these?

For August, I will look at my favorites.  The stories that, for me, never get old, the ones that matter to me, and have become part of me over the years. I will take them apart, put them back together, and try to see what it is that gives them so much value.  Most importantly, what there is in me that makes sense of that value, that makes it real?

This is the first of four parts.  I'll begin the project with what to me is the simplest and easiest kind of story to love, the ones that create a world of their own and invite us to come explore them.

The Riddle-Master Trilogy 

Patricia McKillip (1976-1979)

"When you open your mind and hands and heart to the knowing of a thing, there is no room in you for fear." -Patricia McKillip, The Riddle-Master of Hed

Writing believable magic is a subtle art.  There’s both an aesthetic aspect, what does it feel like, and a psychological, what is the reason people do what they do. 

What would it feel like to live in a world where the possible and the impossible are interwoven just along the border of the imagination? What reason would people have to create such powers, and then how would those reasons change once they were used?

About once a year, or every other year. I return to the world of three books.  

They are:

The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976) Heir of Sea and Fire (1977)Harpist in the Wind (1979)

now usually sold collectively under the title listed above, but first encountered by me under the enigmatic name Riddle of Stars.

Again and again I walk the journey of these books.  I wait lonely  beside a fire with a certain harpist, in the middle of vast fields of night.  I sit hungry with an ancient king for days, in a clay hut, until he cuts my hands, to give me the shape of winter winds, so I can run with the wild vesta, find a wizard thought long dead and ask him one question.

What's at stake in these stories has been at stake a thousand times before: a nameless evil force returns out of the past, to destroy over the world and everyone in it.

So what sets this book apart? 

Three things.  The characters, the magic itself, and, most importantly, the details.  

The characters, their descriptions and behavior, getting to know them and be surprised by them, I will leave to McKillip, and to you. I think it's better you forge your own bonds with them if you want to enjoy the story.   However, one comment: she does give us a brief description of characters when they come into the story, but unlike what so so often happens in genre fiction, her imagery adds to the scene every time rather than taking one out of it. The feel of the hints of the imagery of each character locks so tightly with the tone and action it not only keeps us in the moment but becomes necessary.  How could she not have described them? It was part of what happened.

I mentioned above that the trick to writing this magic well is twofold: one has to find the right feel or aesthetics of the thing, and the right emotional reason behind it, and to write your story along the line that bridges the two.

In an ordinary magic trick, the game is usually to take an ordinary everyday object and make it extraordinary. A card floats, a woman vanishes, a bird appears out of nowhere. The fiction writer, in terms of the feel of the fantastic, has a somewhat easier job than that if the real life illusionist; we have to present something which feels mundane and solid enough for the reader to believe in, then find a way to re-present it in a way that is extraordinary.

McKillip’s magic takes this task to what may be its logical limit: her world is one where the concerns and activities of the people is almost universally mundane: the farmers farm, the traders trade, the students study, the rulers rule.  But woven through all of these, and essential to all, is what the story calls the power of land-rule, the second-sight of the world’s rulers, who are by and large the book’s key characters (our hero is one, and his journey opens mostly as a way to meet and consult his yet un-met peers in each of the unique portions of the realm).

They are each able to sense and understand every inch of their kingdoms; every gravel shard in the towering mine-mountain, every new-planted seed in the fields, every root of the swamps, every wolf in the forest.  These are bound to the land-rulers, and the land-rulers to them, they are in many ways one and the same thing.  All other magic in her stories is derived or dependent in some way on this principle: the beauty and emotional power the ordinary things in nature have over our lives.

Thus the entire world of McKillip’s story is the basis for her magic.  The stakes are still world-sized, but are so much more wonderfully personal than we usually find them: the world ought not be destroyed just because it would be bad in general, but because we are made to empathize with the characters and their reasons for loving the world they live in.  The world has value in and of itself.

And in believing in the wonder such a world would hold for its inhabitants, we are handed our own ordinary world back, glowing from inside with a new extraordinary light of its own.  Those far lakes are our lakes, those splendid, unique, and powerfully beautiful trees are the ones standing along the fields beside the road we take every day.

McKillip takes the un-obvious and crucial decision to wed the reason for her characters and her world to have magic with the feel and sense of the magic itself, and her world is all the more fantastically real-feeling for it.

Finally, there are the details.  It’s what almost every good story is made of.

These three stories thrive on description, on the beauty of the images and of her way of bringing them through, which is vividly impressionistic and almost prismatically indirect.  That is, she has a marvelous knack for taking something, or a person, or a place, that is resistant to description, and give us in very few and simple words the exact feeling that such a thing might leave us with looking back on it later.

Unlike Tolkien, that famous and meticulous attendant to a sort of written tableau vivant, and whom McKillip cites as an inspiration for the work, McKillip paints her imagery with a spare, almost minimalist hand; you will not notice what she’s leaving out, because it is of no relevance to the story she’s telling.

It is simply itself, and in sentence after sentence, page after page, you get the impression of an artist who has found just the right line to draw to key the energy out of a sketch of life.

Her words emphasize the points that the characters see as both unexpected and weirdly familiar: in other words, what they find memorable.  There’s an overpowering example of this ability almost on every page of the story, and without doubt it’s what’s brought me back to walk the journey again and again over the years.