Comic: Every Story has Two Sides

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On "The Game" (August 02: 01)

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.

In the first part of this series, I focused on stories that work primarily to build up other worlds take us through them while the story lasts.

In this second part, I'm starting on a second kind of story that particularly draws my imagination while they're going on and my memory: stories that have a point to make, and choose to make their point through messing with their audience's minds.

The Game (1997)

"I don't care about the money. I'm pulling back the curtain. I want to meet the wizard."

The Game is a film from director David Fincher, produced between the woundingly speculative Seven and the new testament for male adolescents Fight Club.

It opens easily enough.  Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) believes himself to be a successful businessman.  His mansion is immaculate, his luxury car is fast, he does business and has lunch how and with whom he prefers.  As it happens to be his birthday, he is paid a visit by his little brother Conrad (Sean Penn), who says he's given his brother an unorthodox gift: participation in something called The Game.

It's put on by a company called Consumer Recreation Services, or CRS for short.  It's played out by real people, a sort of live-action adventure with no set parameters or known end result.  Nicholas is told when it starts, but not what will happen or what the rules will be.  He finds a clown in his driveway with a key in his mouth.  There's a minor spill in the restaurant Nicholas goes to for dinner.  He isn't often told outright that something happening to him is part of the game, but he's never told anything isn't part of it, either.

And every time something odd happens to him, there's a moment where he, Nicholas, or we, the audience, or both, say to ourselves, "Alright, is this real?  Is this really happening, or is it the game?  This can't be fake, can it?"  And even though it's done it a hundred times already, every time this happens, the story still manages to surprise us.

Gradually, then surprisingly, then violently, the game seems to go  wrong.

Soon things are completely insane.  His fortune is stolen, his credibility as a human being is destroyed, the CRS offices are abandoned, his brother is running scared of what he's got them both into.  Guns are going off.  Things go from bad to worse, and the apparent dangers and disasters Nicholas is put through are nowhere near as harrowing to us as never knowing what is really happening, or why and how the game went wrong, or who to trust.

The brilliant thing about The Game is how it tells you, outright, that it is a story about a story, and then deftly tricks you into forgetting that it is a story at all.

It carries this off by constantly, expertly, and ruthlessly betraying the confidence we place in everyday occurrences and certainties, and replacing the world of the character brick by tricky brick with illusion.

The strength of the movie is that it knows it is an illusion, and uses to the absolute hilt its ability to fool us into believing things that we know aren't real.

I still remember the first time I watched the film, and struggled constantly to understand whether or not the danger to the character was "really happening," seeing the stakes rise higher and higher, and higher.  Again and again I said to myself, "there, that's conclusive, they couldn't risk doing that in faking that sort of thing," and again and again I would remember that it was a movie, and that they must have faked the scene in some way or another in order to get it on film.  Therefore, how could I be sure that it wasn't still part of the game?

As a story to learn from, it could be considered the keep-them-guessing tale par excellence.  As mentioned above, the story is sort of a magic trick, it states blandly that this is a story, this is not a reality, then spends its length trying to test which things we as the audience refuse to believe could be real or not, and what we reasonably believe could be scripted, staged, manipulated, or planned out ahead of time.

It's also a master's course unto itself in terms of audience expectation; how to play to it, when to ignore it, how to confound it utterly and then somehow also pay it off in full.  It would be difficult to go into details without spoiling the good parts, but watch it with a notebook and pay attention to whom Nicholas trusts, whom he distrusts, when he seems to be at ease and for what reason, and why we aren't expecting what happens next to happen.  All of this, cleaned of its particulars and understood on principle, is valuable information on how to make this kind of story come alive.

Perhaps my favorite part is that, whenever we get the fleeting feeling that "this must be real, they cannot have faked this," whether it flies away a moment later or not, for that moment we manage to convince ourselves, at the impetus of the story, that what we are experiencing is real and not fake, even though we're still caught up in the larger story itself, something which is itself intrinsically fake, all the time.

It's an odd movie, at times seeming to be a thriller just for thriller's sake, objectless except for its one endlessly restated and relentless object.  Yet it is an utterly absorbing character study, and an unforgettable exploration of the small details and assumptions we make to get by in the world, and how these can be used by the skillful storyteller against us to bewilder and estrange our expectations, and also in our favor, to engage our sympathy and drive us towards sharing with the characters in emotional release.

Author's Sketchbook: Two Lights

drawn on an iPad 2 using a Wacom Bamboo stylus in SketchBook Pro

On Word Counts, Page Counts, and Effective Statements

Photo courtesy of http://unsplash.com/

I have developed and am slave to all the habits of a large and long-winded writer.

I like to come at my topics from a long way off, slowly circle them, making side points and what I believe to be mostly worthwhile observations, and finally get to the point of what I’m talking about not at first, or second, or even third, but essentially only once I’ve exhausted the process of introducing my ideas do I start making it plain how the various things that I’ve said add up to a whole, a single idea.  

The effect of my essay style is intended to be similar to that of a story; development after development, a general drift to the content, culminating in a crisis and a final explanation.  

Hopefully sometimes this works and is, if not efficient, then maybe is at least intellectually stimulating or satisfying.  But it’s not as easy for the reader to read as just putting the point out there and then making a case to stand up behind it.  

It would probably be better, or at least more effective, to be able to say what I have to say without all the wandering, the side points, the slow progression of observations and ideas.  

I use more words than I have to.

When I was in school, almost every writing assignment I was ever given was in terms of page count.  As I’m sure it was with most of us.  I want three pages on what Prufrock is really saying and what it says to you by Monday.  The final paper will be ten pages long.  Generally, as I’m sure it was with most of us, the idea was to get to the page count and stop, but if you went over it was okay.  It wasn’t like there was a page limit.  I remember once in 5^th grade my teacher, who was particularly excellent, gave me back my short story, which had opened up on me and spilled into page after page after page, and said it was too long and I had to do it again.  My mind was, in a manner of speaking, blown.  Too much?  It didn’t make any sense.  I was actually surprised and confused at first, and then kind of hurt, as I’d enjoyed writing it, but it was probably the most important lesson in how to write I’ve received.  And I’ve received it again and again and again, and it still hasn’t sunk in.

One day I’ll do an article on The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and how it packs more useful information on how to figure out how to be your own writer in its 100 or so pages than most of the other books you’ll find on the shelf near it.  Today is not that day.  The one piece of wisdom that has sunk deepest into my brain, and which has been the hardest to reconcile with my methods as a writer, is that fewer words are better than many words.  Your message is more effective when it isn’t watered down.  Try to say it with the smallest number of plain, straightforward, well-chosen words you can, and the rest will mostly take care of itself.

Everywhere you look on the web these days, it seems like people quantify their accomplishments in amateur writing in terms of word count.  The biggest user of this yardstick that I’ve had dealings with is National Novel Writer’s Month, NaNoWriMo, which I’m overall persuaded is a good thing, if a little misguided.

Why do I say misguided?

Mainly it’s a matter of word count.

The idea behind NaNoWriMo, for those not already familiar with the game, is that you sit down and, in the thirty days of November, produce a 50,000 word manuscript which, at the end, you get to call a novel, because 50,000 words is the standard lower limit definition of how long a novel is, as compared to a novella or long short story.

Turn in 50,000 words by the end of the month ant your assignment’s complete, class.  Not a page count this time, but you get the idea.

How many words is 50,000 words?  It seems like a lot.

Well at my speed it takes about 5 hours to write that much, and probably something like 50 hours to write that much, if I don’t get distracted.  I might be able to get that number of hours writing down with overwork during designated sleep hours and caffeine abuse, but let’s not push it.

The problem, at least for me, is that in the big picture 50,000 words is actually not that much.

In my experience, most good novels, the ones that let you stretch your legs and get to know the people involved, get a feel for what’s happening and live in the story for a while, are at least twice that long.  Most of the best ones I’ve read so far are four times that long or longer.

In fact, I can think of only a handful of books I’ve read that were, say 60,000 words or shorter that I would say felt like complete novels with beginnings, middles, and ends, and I could tell that each of those were the result either of concentrated, rigorous work in honing down the story to its barest elements as a part of the statement (see Slaughter-house Five), or of consummate talent and a bold and simple idea (see Fahrenheit 451).  In either case, I would say that the low word counts of these stories were the mark of people who could turn out substantially more than 50,000 words in a single month if they had to, and if which words they chose didn’t matter, but who would say that the length of a story, independent of its effectiveness, is the last thing worth worrying about when you’re writing it.

Why fixate on word count?

It’s an easy target, I think, and it’s difficult for people who aren’t writing all the time to churn out 1600 or so words a day (math?) in order to hit 50,000 words in 30 days.  If you are writing every day, I would say that 1,000 words a day is a great goal to start with, especially if you’re talking about unrefined first drafts, in which case a person should be able to turn out 365,000 words, roughly The Brothers Karamazov, in just a year.

So it seems like word count isn’t everything.  How does this relate to me as a storyteller, again?

Well, the last time I did NaNoWriMo, I hit about 80,000 words by the time I was done with the month, and I felt I was about one-third of the way into my story, no further.  It was a great time, and I cherish the manuscript that came out of it and continue to work on it to this day, but when I hit 50,000 words, it wasn’t done.  If I could get it down to 50,000 words one day, I would probably see that as a more impressive and a more worthy accomplishment than hitting the roughly 240,000 words I seem to think I need to tell my story in full, at least the first time out that I’m trying to think it through.

But the main thing, the conclusive thing, that I would say about myself is that I write too many words and don’t have a clear way of getting right to my point.

So what’s the matter with me?

If I had to force myself to guess, I would say that it’s because of two reasons.

First, I’m an unclear thinker, at least where first drafts are concerned.

In many ways, good writing and clear thinking have a symbiotic relationship.  Or maybe good writing is a parasite that feeds off clear thinking’s blood without giving anything back, I’m not sure.  But I know that most of the things I have to do as a writer to feel like I’m doing a good job at getting my ideas across are basically reducible to being able to think things through clearly and to express them as plainly as possible.

For instance, when I write dialogue for characters, I write what I hear them saying in my head.  Simple.  They do the talking for me, really, I just dictate what they would say.  That and try not to use too many adverbs in how they’re saying it, unless it helps give an image that further refines the feel of what they’ve said.

When I describe a place in a story, my inclination especially in my earlier writing, is to drift towards too much detail rather than too little; it’s for this reason that my ideal book would be illustrated, so I could concentrate on giving indirect characterization through their impressions of something the reader feels they’ve objectively seen, rather than spend time trying to persuade people that what they’re seeing is the way something really was for sure because I said so.

Where was I?

When I get muddled and begin struggling with a piece, it’s usually because I’m having difficulty in clearly seeing what it is that I want to say.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because I think the journey to understanding, even when you’re trying to understand yourself, can turn up a lot of useful surprises from the details.  But it is certainly distracting when you’re not able to pin down what it is you’re after, but have a strong idea that there’s something there.

Second, I would say that my word counts are too high because I’m too lazy.  This may seem counter-intuitive, but bear with me.

I once watched a video (and I hope it’s still available on youtube... oh good! here it is). it was called Talking Funny.  The video is a prolonged discussion about stand-up comedy, humor in general, and life, between Ricky Gervais, Louis CK, Chris Rock, and Jerry Seinfeld.

Anyway at one point they’re talking about how they come up with the idea of a joke, and how they’re thinking over something that’s funny, but it’s not clear what the joke is.  And they’re talking about how it’s not really clear what’s funny about a thing, and it’s not clear what the joke is or how they’re going to use it in an act in the future, and Jerry says,  “But there’s something there.”  There’s a feeling one gets, about something waiting to be brought to light and made useful creatively out of some common or ordinary thing, or out of anything, and which it will just take time and effort to puzzle out.

I guess that’s my whole lazy approach to essay writing, really.  If I knew what my point was, clearly, at the start of my essay, I would just say that and be done with it.  What I like to do is take the reader along with me for the experience of my figuring out what I’m talking about as I’m talking about it. 

The problem is that I run up quite a word count while saying something that I could have said in a very few words, if I had bothered to write one draft, figure out what I’m trying to say, and then start over with that in mind and build a second, shorter, shinier essay out of that.

Laziness.

Cut away everything that doesn’t directly relate to making that point, to let the point stand on its own and make itself plain to the reader.

That is probably the hardest part of the job for me.

If I were able to do that every time, I think I would probably be a much more effective writer.

So far in my time writing essays for other people to read, I’ve been plagued by a sense that I’m not quite getting to the bone of what I’m trying to write, so to speak.  I’m not cutting all the way to the heart; that in a sense even I don’t know really what I’m talking about, or what I’m trying to say.  I only really have my topic in hand, and my conviction that there’s something there worth writing about, and that if I keep working at it I’ll figure out what that is.

The problem is, I can’t spend much more than about an hour composing each essay I put together to send out into the world these days, and an hour only really leaves me enough time to wire my mind into my keyboard and cut a first draft brain-download of everything I’m trying to churn out and figure into some kind of a line.

If I had more time on top of that, I could start taking material away, and getting down to what I’m really trying to say, and how to best say it without anything extra getting in the way.

So, odd enough it might be to think about, if I were able to spend more time on these essays, they could be a lot shorter.

And probably a lot better.

But for now I just have the one hour.

So for now, while I’m trying to keep these essays short, the word count may stay high.  But I will try to cut to the chase more often, and get some effective writing done, rather than slowly circling in and treating my essays like they’re the stories of how I figured the essay you’re reading out.

Story: Out of the Trashlands - Part Two

Part one

A thousand questions were itching on my tongue, but I said nothing.  The sun was glaring down, and the morning was almost gone.  I looked around for what seemed like the first time; there were still long hills of nothing but the Trashlands all around us, and in the distance behind I could see the high south wall, small and distant, baking in the light without a shadow anywhere.  Soon the sun would break over the top of its shade, and the Revs sleeping off last night at its base would begin to stir.  I turned away.  We kept walking.

Soon I started to notice the hills were getting bigger.  It was taking longer and longer to get to the top, and the little valleys in between weren't so little.  Soon we were climbing up and up, leaning forward to keep our footing and sometimes almost crawling to make way up the steeper and steeper slope.  Then we were almost at the top, and I slipped and nearly fell all the way back down, but Shimmy caught me.  Then we were standing on the top, and I looked down, and I almost fell down again from what I saw.

It's the sort of thing that's easy to describe if you've seen one before, but impossible to see clearly if you haven't, so I'll do my best and hope that you understand.  There was a little shelter down below us, without walls, just a roof and several thick beams holding it up.  This by itself was enough to make me stop in my tracks; in Our Town there are mostly walls and few roofs, roofs are hard to put up and harder to keep up when you're building out of a trash heap.  This was old looking and stained all over, but it was sitting clean and even-looking, lines smooth and easy like the cover of the book had been.  There was a little squared-off raised ground under it, like someone wanted to stand on the solid ground but weren't happy that it was low and flat, so had piled up and squared off part to stand on and be high up and solid at the same time.  And there was a strange and squarish bunch of metal in the shade of the little roof, with holes in the side like the eyes of a house.  I figured it must be some sort of secret house of Shimmy's, but why it needed two roofs I couldn't figure.  All of this was new and strange, but none of this was what made me almost fall down.

There was a path dug through the trash, all the way down to the foamy ground underneath, and it ran straight away from the little houses into the distance and out of sight.  I'd never seen so much trash dug away, much less all in one place and all in a straight line.  It was like seeing a plank that could cross the hole Yemmi River, or seeing a hole in the sky.

But as if the long, long, long line of clean groudn wasn't enough, there were two long lines of clean, bright metal.  When I say clean metal I mean truly clean; no stain, no rust, no loss of light all along the great length.  They ran like two thin, perfect, still rivers down the middle of the clean path, cutting away through all the lines of the hills of Trashland, meeting with the brightness of the sky in the distance.

There was a word for this, I realized suddenly, and I felt like I'd been put back into my body from somewhere else.  There was a word for this my Dad had used, God rest, and had told me about, when he'd told me everything else about the way the world had been when he'd been a little boy like me.  How I remembered the word I have no idea, as most of that stuff has been picked up and washed away by all the thousand little things I worry about between waking up and dreaming, but this word I remembered, and it came back to me then when I saw it under that hot, stinking sky.

"Railroad," I said, in a little voice like I was going to cry.  I thought I was going to cry, because I was wishing Dad was there, God rest.

Shimmy nodded, if he were surprised I knew what it was he didn't show it.

"It was dug out," he said, "when I was young.  I help keep it clean."  He stood looking for a while, then gave a little shrug and turned away. "We have a journey," he said, and started down the hill.  I came after him to keep up, slipping and nearly falling again on the way down.

'Railroad' had come back to me, but somehow hadn't brought 'train' with it, which puzzled me when we were inside it and Shimmy was trying to tell me what it was.  The little metal house was built on wheels, firm and clean and still movable like all the rest of this miracle-place was, and it could move and run along the tracks.  It was what the tracks were for, though they were bigger and harder to keep clean.  When we'd reached the bottom of the hill, Shimmy had walked without stopping right up under the little roof, climbed up on the raised ground, done something to the side of the little metal house, and had climbed inside.  I was still standing in the sun and staring at everything when he opened one of the metal house's eyes and shouted at me to come.  I came.

It was hot in the metal house, and Shimmy and I went around opening all the eyes.  These, like his screen, were mostly still in place, and only a few were even cracked.  It was all one long room, full of chairs facing away from each other and stuck in place, all along the walls and rising up out of the floor.  It had a funny smell, like heat and oil and something else I don't know, but sweet and sour at the same time.  And over all was the flat blank biting smell of a shock line.

Shimmy left the two doors to the raised ground open to let the room air out, and started fidgeting with something like an engine way in the back.  I asked him questions, and he gave short answers, but all his answers made me ask more questions, and soon he got quiet again as he worked, so I got quiet to and rested on one of the chairs.  I kept staring around me.  Everything looked so clean.  I forget now most of what he told me.  I wish now I'd paid closer attention to what he was doing, I've never been able to get the engine in the back working on my own.

There was a buzz, and a jolt, and the doors closed, and the shock smell got stronger.  I stood up to see what was the matter, and suddenly the whole room moved, and I fell off my feet and hit the floor.  There was a clattering everywhere and the smooth floor under me was humming, and someting in me said it was too much, too much, and I'm sorry to say i just sort of curled up and started whimpering.  Shimmy helped me up, and said it was alright, and I sat in one of the chairs again.  Shimmy walked about, checking on the engine in the back and hauling the two doors open again so the air could move.

It is difficult to imagine clearly, but although we were sitting still inside it, the house was moving.  Through the open eyes and the two doors I could look, and see the hills of Trashland moving by on either side, sunlight and shade flowing by like water.  I stared until I got dizzy and short of breath, then I looked at the inside of the house again, mostly the floor between my feet.  I wish now that I'd kept looking outside, I'm sure there were many things to see, but I didn't see them, it was all too much, too much.  At least we were in the shade inside the house, and I remember the breeze felt cool against my neck.

Presently it began to rain outside.  Shimmy, who was standing at the front of the car, muttered and staggered about, hauled the two doors closed again.  He had a curious rolling way of walking on the floor of the moving house, which I realized was so that he could stand up and keep standing even though it bounced sometimes and swaying this way and that.

Somehow the rain helped calm the idea of our moving down, and I looked out the windows again at the storm flowing over the hills.  Only the hills were mostly gone, and it was just flat ground outside; it wasn't black, and it wasn't sand, it was just try earth without leaves or towns or anything.  There might have been hills in the distance but I'm not sure.  The rain was falling over all.

"Rain's coming more and more," said Shimmy to himself, looking out the front eyes and getting wet, as he hadn't closed them.  "The drout is finally passing.  Maybe one day it'll do some good."  I remember he said that now, but maybe he didn't and I'm not remembering right.  Anyway it feels right to say he said it, and the rain felt good when it sprayed in the window now and then.  After a while I held my first fours out the window to catch some of the rain, and drank most of my second in silence.

After a long time the rain stopped, but the sun stayed behind the low clouds.  The day wasn't as hot here, but it somehow seemed very very still, even with the wind blowing through the eyes and the doors of the house, which Shimmy opened again.

The sun was slanting down and swaying the motion of the house was making me sleepy when Shimmy said something.

"What's that?" I said.

"Climb up here, if you can," he said.  "You want to see this."

Comic: No Luck for the Sirenia

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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.