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I first noticed this sometime in high school when my sister and I were geeking out over Escaflowne: there were places where individual scenes, individual moments, refracted into all the Big Themes of the series. There was something fractal-like about it. A fractal is a geometric shape where you see the same pattern, the same complexity, no matter how closely you zoom in, and Escaflowne seemed like that to me.
I had some predictions for the Printz award this year, based partly on gut feeling and partly on sheer enjoyment, but perhaps mostly on this kind of fractal thing. Terry Pratchett, and M.T. Anderson, and Margo Lanagan, wrote books in which almost every single sentence somehow contributed to the thematic heft of the whole. (I'll consider Frankie Landau-Banks in more detail after I reread the book; I was having an awful day when I read it, and not really capable of analysis.)
When I first began writing I was very suspicious of Style, for many reasons. For one thing, I thought I couldn't do Style. For another, I didn't really like most of the stories I read that seemed to be all about Style, whether that was spare like Hemingway or at the opposite end like Faulkner. Mostly it seemed like Style was just a decoration, something separate from the Story. And I read Samuel Delany's book on writing, and he argued just the opposite -- he argued for the style being absolutely organic to the story -- and I didn't know whether I'd read something brilliant or something I disagreed with intensely. Because I was still very suspicious of Style.
But in some ways, I think, when you have that level of fractal complexity, it lets you take on the huge issues without being overly preachy. Because the thematic arguments in a book like Octavian Nothing are woven in at such a deep level, there's enough room for complexities and contradictions and exploring little facets of the theme -- and you can get a very powerful theme across without doing the obvious dialectic that Robert McKee talks about in Story where you have one thematic idea ("crime pays because the criminal is ruthless") competing with another thematic idea ("crime doesn't pay because the detective is clever") and in the end one of them wins. This works fine a lot of the time -- but I think when you rely on the Big Story Events to carry all your thematic weight, it's sort of like using mallets to get your message across. A book like Octavian Nothing would collapse utterly if you used mallets. You have to use a lot of tiny little jewelers' tools -- and a writer like Margo Lanagan or M.T. Anderson can accomplish that.
I need to figure out that trick.
I had some predictions for the Printz award this year, based partly on gut feeling and partly on sheer enjoyment, but perhaps mostly on this kind of fractal thing. Terry Pratchett, and M.T. Anderson, and Margo Lanagan, wrote books in which almost every single sentence somehow contributed to the thematic heft of the whole. (I'll consider Frankie Landau-Banks in more detail after I reread the book; I was having an awful day when I read it, and not really capable of analysis.)
When I first began writing I was very suspicious of Style, for many reasons. For one thing, I thought I couldn't do Style. For another, I didn't really like most of the stories I read that seemed to be all about Style, whether that was spare like Hemingway or at the opposite end like Faulkner. Mostly it seemed like Style was just a decoration, something separate from the Story. And I read Samuel Delany's book on writing, and he argued just the opposite -- he argued for the style being absolutely organic to the story -- and I didn't know whether I'd read something brilliant or something I disagreed with intensely. Because I was still very suspicious of Style.
But in some ways, I think, when you have that level of fractal complexity, it lets you take on the huge issues without being overly preachy. Because the thematic arguments in a book like Octavian Nothing are woven in at such a deep level, there's enough room for complexities and contradictions and exploring little facets of the theme -- and you can get a very powerful theme across without doing the obvious dialectic that Robert McKee talks about in Story where you have one thematic idea ("crime pays because the criminal is ruthless") competing with another thematic idea ("crime doesn't pay because the detective is clever") and in the end one of them wins. This works fine a lot of the time -- but I think when you rely on the Big Story Events to carry all your thematic weight, it's sort of like using mallets to get your message across. A book like Octavian Nothing would collapse utterly if you used mallets. You have to use a lot of tiny little jewelers' tools -- and a writer like Margo Lanagan or M.T. Anderson can accomplish that.
I need to figure out that trick.