always the odyssey, never the iliad

[bedlamsbard]

So I have this weird habit of, in writing -- especially with original fic, and to an extent with fanfic -- to write the afterstory and not the forestory, even when the forestory/backstory is a hell of a story in its own right. With Spaceforce, my senior project original novel, I skimmed over the three years of wandering around in alien enemy space and went straight to what it's like to come home after that, and the story that spins out of that. The colonial fantasy novel looks like it's doing the same thing -- skipping the set-up about how twenty-some years ago this group of colonists landed and were abandoned and survived and going straight to what happens when contact is made again; we don't know how the characters got to the points where they're at. The Narnia rip-off -- it was basically reset it modern-day America -- did the exact same thing, skipped the LWW backstory and went straight to the aftermath, what happens when the characters come home. (Although, actually, one of the interesting things about that story is that the narrator wasn't one of the traveling children, but their older brother, so there would have been a fairly steady chunk of the story where the reader may have thought the travelers were completely nuts.)

I do this in fic too, to an extent. A lot of my interest in Narnia comes from the aspect of "Jesus Christ, these kids must have been fucked up when they came back to England"; it's the afterstory. (Although I do write a fair amount of the forestory/backstory -- I hesitate to call it either one, because it's not qutie -- but it's basically the LWW story I'm not writiing.) And within the context of the Golden Age itself, I tend to write where we see the ripples but not the stone -- the Natare incident, for example, the time Peter was MIA. We see ripples from that everywhere, but we haven't had that story. Likewise with my Peter's claustrophobia and the Caves of Angrisla bit. (Although I have written this story; it's just not in anywhere near presentable form because I have to fuck with the format again.)

This is probably one of my writing quirks that I can blame on fic, where we're used to already knowing the forestory and having to imagine the afterstory. The problem with doing it in an original is that you have to figure out a way to get the forestory/backstory across without making it seem clunky. (I disapprove of flashbacks. For the record. Lynch pulls it off most of the time, but it's hard to do. The colonial fantasy story will probably have flashbacks, though.)

This announcement brought to you by my Ancient Novel class, wherein we just finished going over the Odyssey and how it's not even close to the story everyone thinks it is.

Comments

[katakokk.livejournal.com]

LOL, that is so Odyssey.

But you're right, they probably would be pretty screwed up after they came back. :D

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

And the Odyssey is one of the first stories I was ever told, so I could probably skip the fic and trace it back to that. *rolls eyes*

*thoughtful* LWW is the Iliad. PC is the Odyssey. Huh. *prods carefully* I bet you could pretty much separate all stories into those two categories.

[1aquaesulis76.livejournal.com]

So in other words... you skip all the boring parts, and dive straight into the point where the story gets psychologically interesting. The bad part being? Ah - where you have a completely new verse & have to find ways to explain without getting exposition heavy. Hmm, nasty. The kind of thing where character 1 matter-of-factly accepts XYZ, character 2 is all huh?, character 1 says because of N - duh, and character 2 goes N????

Cue flashback

[bedlamsbard.livejournal.com]

I also tend to despise origin stories, because dude, I'm not interested in the character learning how to do everything, I went to see them when they're really friggin' competent AND psychologically screwed up. (Like, my senior project novel, the Spaceforce original? One of the MCs is a female scientist who before her tour of duty had never handled a gun before, etc., etc. -- typical scientist. When she came back, she was a crack shot, always carried a weapon, can put a grown man down in about two seconds flat, and once woke up with a knife to her mother's throat.)

I think the colonial fantasy story is going to end up being this way, albeit with flashbacks. (Possibly flashbacks in the Lynch style, though; he tends to not be overwhelmingly anvilicious.)