The idea of narrative

Imagine a great matrix of characters, events, places, scenes, conversations, causes and effects, motives, emotions, purposes, actions, etc. -- continual, pervasive. The raw material of narrative everywhere, in huge quantities. How then do you turn that material into actual narrative?

You need to add a structure. And, I think, you can do that with anything, literally. Just today, e.g., think of the young dad in the Blenz coffee shop with his bright, laughing, 3 year old daughter, who likes going up to the counter by herself asking for a napkin, head barely able to see over its edge, but who knows how to order a decaf lattay, the dad striking up a conversation with the young woman with her shopping bags sitting by herself with a picked up give-away tabloid, her starting it though, bringing up her niece and nephew.

Or the two boys maybe about 8 with the young mom in the Wendy's, the boys all "Dude! You're still afraid of the roller coaster!?" "Yeah," from the other off-handedly, no hint of chagrin, the mom with her iPhone, but which she's at least partly using to play some sort of guessing game with the boys, only one of whom I think is her son, and that one going at one point,"How did I live when I was in your belly?" (no idea what brought that up), and the mom saying, "Okay, you know your belly button? Right? Your belly button?" "Yeah," goes the boy, a little puzzled, "Well," says the mom, "that's where you had a tube that connected you with my uterus, which is a sack that held you and fed food to you through that tube".

Consider either as incidents that could seed a narrative -- at the start or middle or end or even climax. But those are the parts of the structure that's needed to turn raw material into narrative product, which is what's meant by the "arc" -- traditionally at least that arc is built out of tension, requiring some kind of conflict, that rises to a climax and then falls away. Like music.

The main point being that story is dense, thick, a plenitude, but in the raw or seedling form -- what realizes it as narrative is tension, that provides the possiblity (though not in itself the reality) of structure. And that's what requires invention.


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3011 AD

The 1000-year future  -- pop: 10 trillion. That's trillion.

This began as a thought experiment to do with the so-called "carrying capacity" of the earth, which is supposed to be strained or exceeded  at current levels of population. Consider 3 orders of magnitude:

• First, look back some 8000 years, at a global population 1/1000 of today's, or about 10 million human beings -- some roaming bands, some fishers, some early farmers perhaps, all starting to crowd against one another. An early population crisis, as the earth approaches its carrying capacity for Neolithic cultures.
• Then look ahead 1000 years, say, and consider a population 1000 times as large as our current.
• A single super-city covering a substantial portion of the ocean surface area, as well as extensive underground capacity. (If the ocean city floated or extended below sea-level, it would displace enough water to possibly drown the continents, to avoid which would need supports.)
• Would also need a belt of equator-girdling space elevators to move excess population off planet in mass numbers, to enable population growth generally while keeping a steady-state population level on earth, finally.
• Also need radiator vanes (connected to space elevators?) to dump waste heat?

Think of a classic Utopian narrative -- the sleepers awake, 1000 years hence. Or perhaps they're artificial constructs, in cloned bodies, with memories and selves built out of fragments from the past -- something they only learn at the climax.


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Elementory and the nature of narrative

Time for a fundamental rethink of what the short story collection is about. Still like the title, and the story titles themselves, though the latter are a bit throw-away. And still like the the overall structure -- four sets of paired stories, told and re-told, and one connector ("Touch"), for a total of nine. But the elaborate architecture built around Frye may be a layer of arbitrariness too many. Really want to just focus on the notion of the Inversion and its consequences, as manifested on a kind of micro-level -- the interactions of individuals. Also some experimenting with just fiction and narrative per se. So, some possible themes:

• The notion of the "dirty earth" (re: the Bergman quote) as opposed to world-spurning. (Fire/Bone perhaps)
• The notion of the world's "unfairness" as opposed to those who deal with what they're given. (Water/Blood)
• The most subtle or difficult of all perhaps is the combination of a kind of Darwinian fatalism (or, perhaps better, acceptance) coupled with a sense of embedded engagement (related to the compatibility argument re: free will and determinism). (Earth/Flesh)

The first pair, Air/Skin, may allude to all of the above, first as preview, then as recap.

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