Penny Hero (dot) Net

I’m really really interested in the structure of fiction. Not just something so basic as knowing the difference between a framed and an unframed story. I’m really into tracing where the author chooses to shift in time between “present” time and the time of the narrative itself.

I’m also really into how a story can play with structure in a more physical sense. House of Leaves is a good example of this. The text itself is thought to be a collection of crap found somewhere, but the various narrators paint different, deeper histories of where that collection of stuff came from… and how it wound up published and in your hands. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is another one that plays with this kind of structure… it sets up the story as a story told on a late night orally, but the first narrator says that the text we are reading was actually given to him after that storyteller died, years later, and that he published it after that.

These kinds of structures displace the idea of “book” and “story” and cause the story or whatever you want to call it at that point to insert itself a little bit into our own world.

When an author does that, it’s awesome. If they can shake up the boundry between “book” and “me”, I practically orgasm.

So, I’m facinated by this. And thinking about these kinds of works has given me new ideas for cool structures that I could maybe someday make into stories. Things like, having two interlinear narratives… two different points of view seeing a story at the same time literally woven together line by line on the page. I know how it would look, and the kinds of effects it would have… but I don’t yet have the content to make it work.

Right now, I’m playing with a piece of fiction that on the outer-most layer is a fiction story (it has a title, but the title refers to the next “layer” in the structure), but it’s actually a story about a blog entry that recieves no comments, which is telling the story of the girl’s father’s death and how that effects her, which really turns out to be her trying to make connections with people in her life… It’s 4 pages long now, and I don’t know how it will end, or if I could get away with ending it with something bloggy like “but I have to go now, my mom just came in” or something.

I’m not sure that makes sense, because I’m writing this in “rambling blog style” instead of literary analysis-clarity style… but I’m really excited about some of these ideas. And for a long while I had my heart set on working on some of them with Gavin. But, I don’t think that’ll happen. I read a story by a classmate of mine yesterday, and I really admire her work. The only problem is that really working with someone on your writing requires a huge amount of trust and vulnerability and that takes time to build…

I guess I’ve got time though. I should start talking to more of my writing classmates. Some of them are really jozu.