Yes you could ask people to give you a synopsis of your work if you wanted to test the solidity of your plotting. Myself I'd be more interested in having them explain why each event happend and what it meant, like assigning them a critical reading test/essay.

My main interest is also speculative fiction, specifically the societal fiction you mention, so I'm not sure I agree with the idea that that is more asociated with writerly style than high concept. [wink] Actually, I would argue that speculative fiction is a trope or milieu genre and whether a story is apeculative or not has nothing to do with its plot structure. It's just that people get distracted by the spaceships and dragons and don't classify sf books by whether they are adventure stories, ingenuity stories, epics, romances, mysteries, thrillers, or what plot genre the core story behind the worldbuilding is.

I wouldn't say gimmick fiction is opposed to classical techniques though, gimmick stories often have very strong moral statements, and the gimmick often spawns related worldbuilding (although in a short story there is necessarily a limit on how much worldbuilding you can convey to the reader.) And societal fiction generally includes one or more gimmicks, because a gimmick is really just a particularly interesting part of the worldbuilding which takes an important role in the plot. If I want to write about what a society of shapeshifters would be like I have to have the gimmick of shapeshifting, and whatever explanation I make up about how shapeshifting works will suggest related gimmick abilities or objects.

And don't worry about staying on-topic, if people wanted to talk about analysis and emulation they would have done so already, so the thread is free to be taken whatever direction people are actually interested in. [smile]

Quote: Original post by ESPNOnlineGames
Your ideas are really interesting. In folklorology there is actually something called an Aarne Thompson Tale Type, whic essetnailly breaks down a fairy tale or myth into essential motifs. They are actually faily useful too, because they provide the minimilistic underlying form to what your story can be. Using fairy tales is also useful because they in the first few words most people can complete the entire story. For example, if a story begins with a little girl in a red cloack carring a basket of food into a forest, we already can guess her destiation, her obstacle and her out come. This creates a lot of room to play with our expectations and have fun with doing the story in new ways. (Hopefully not in the rashoman style so recently attempted).

I must have somehow missed this post earlier, or maybe the post type-stamping system is screwing up again... Anyway, I wanted to say that yes I've looked at motif indexes, they are quite interesting although they tend not to get into as much depth as I would like - specifically they don't make guesses about the symbolic and cultural significance of the symbols the way Levi-Strauss does. So I would say that a motif index is useful for exploring the breadth of folklore, but it's only really useful if you first understand the depth of at least one group of related tales.

I would say that societal fiction must necessarily have a gimmick at its heart - the posited change in the world is itself a gimmick, as with the example of shapeshifting. The difference, however, is very much one of kind and not just degree. Gimmick fiction is interested in the short-term, local effects of a single change or capability. Societal fiction is interested in everything else; I would suggest that a series like Foundation takes this to the extreme, in that his gimmick has no local short-term effects; in fact, this is part of its central design.

The thing that I suggest is different in these terms from standard fiction is that world-building for societal fiction provides much more than a skeleton. If you're specific in the attempt, you get archetypes, worlds, tools, and often even events that must be in place to illustrate the society and the changes you're positing. I don't find a more "standard" story skeleton helps nearly as much in that light; it is too strongly constrained by the output of the world-building.

I'm a little confused by that last post - what is a standard story skeleton? By standard did you mean non-genre worldbuilding, or did you mean something about plot?

I think that societal fiction has to be about _both_ the short term and long term gimmicks. With the example of shapeshifting it is not a change in the world, but in a particular species and their culture, and also in the particular individuals of your cast which are students learning new abilities, members of that species meeting outsiders, or vice-versa are outsiders meeting members of that species. If the shapeshifter has to eat an animal before they can change into it, then acquiring the ability to turn into a human suddenly becomes a dramatic plot point. If shapeshifting is easy to get wrong you could have a class of little shapeshifters trying to become dogs but acccidentally turning themselves into a hilarious array of mutants which the long-suffering teacher must sort out. The short term, specific applications of a gimmick are the funny and dramatic ones whether we're talking about short stories or novels - the long term ones are the more philosophic but less exciting ones.

I also think that what provides a skeleton for what depends on what order you create a story in. I do theme first, then gimmick and vague setting, then character archetypes and roles, then plot, then details of the characters and setting, then history. But other people do it in a completely different order - if they do the plot before the characters, for example, then the plot provides the basis for the character creation rather than the other way around.

I think standard was the wrong word to use. The most common story skeletons I've seen outside of spec-fic circles start with characters or plots. Spec-fic writers that I've worked with, on the other hand, tend to start with the world itself.

I think that maybe we're talking about gimmicks differently. The thing that you see in a shapeshifter gaining the ability to become human is the fact that they've had to partake of a human body/mind to do it. The thing that I see is the culture-normality of it. The question that matters in societal fiction, in my opinion, is whether it's culture-normal to do that kind of thing. The actual gaining of the ability is just a short-term effect, but it has very long-term context and consequences.

As a ball-shrinkingly ironic aside, I'm trying to progress on my novel and can't even get the world building to work right now. So maybe I should shut my mouth.

Generally speaking, I, personally, find poetry collections to be far more useful than entire novels written by others. Pick a poem that resonates with your theme, and start doing poetic analysis to draw out all possible meanings and symbology in the poem, and then reverse-engineer key components of the book into your themes.

I forget who it was (Steinbeck?) that said that he wrote books after he found out that he couldn't write short stories, and that he only took up short stories because he couldn't master poetry. A good poem is a very dense thing, and loads of meaning and imagery can be extracted from every line.

I heartily agree with you about the copying/emulation thing, sunandshadow. That world I built (see 'Need feedback on world I've built' *coughshamelessplugcough*) is inspired by Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. I was reading the books when I wondered what it would be like if the dead people in the underworld viewed the land of the living in the same way that the living viewed the underworld.

Everything just fell into place after that.

And a lot of the greatest books and movies were inspired by other books/films. The aforementioned Sword of Truth series is...'inspired' by the Wheel of Time, whish is, in turn, inspired (but to a lesser degree than the SoT) by a ton of other things. Star Wars was based on 'the Hidden Fortress,' and many dungeon crawlers were 'inspired' (see Sword of Truth) by Diablo. But that last example isn't very positive.

I've probably said little-to-nothing on topic in this post, but I don't care.