Robin Sloan

I’ve been think ing about how I might con­struct larger sto­ries out of such chunks. Have you read Louise Erdrich’s Love Med­i­cine? That’s what imme­di­ately came to mind. Very dif­fer­ent part of my brain from Snark­space, but you might find it inter­est­ing. The char­ac­ters are the chunks. It’s like the organic inside-​​out ver­sion of the GRRMartin stuff we were talk­ing about: all these char­ac­ters are liv­ing in the same world, and they all have these tight, well-arc’d episodes of drama in their life in which the other char­ac­ters are sur­face play­ers, and as a reader you can see the coher­ent semi-​​omniscient third per­son whole emerge from the chap­ters, but each individual’s lim­ited per­spec­tive is still com­plete in itself, because their emo­tional expe­ri­ence of the episode is com­plete in itself.

This Jumbo thing is very intriguing.

“I’ve been think­ing about how I might con­struct larger sto­ries out of such chunks.”

The project I’m work­ing on right now is some dig­i­tal fic­tion — a col­lab­o­ra­tive story space. I cre­ate the sto­ry­world, and the sto­ry­space, and every­one can con­tribute to it in what­ever fash­ion works for the world — text, mul­ti­me­dia, comic, what­ever — in what­ever length. Flash fic­tion (as in super short rather than Adobe) works really well in that sort of context.

Many years ago, I mused about the idea of writ­ing a story that was pack­aged as a box of play­ing cards (maybe out­sized, like Rider-​​Waite) that could be read in any order, and some­one informed me that it had already been done. 

(Pause for a moment to con­sider that even though this was an Internet-​​mediated con­ver­sa­tion, I still envi­sioned the work being pro­duced in a phys­i­cal medium. That says some­thing about when this hap­pened, or maybe just about me.)

Unfor­tu­nately, I can­not remem­ber the author who did it, or the name of the work. I think I remem­ber who told me about it, though not exactly when or where. Any­way, I could ask, and find out who/​what it was, or find that he had for­got­ten even men­tion­ing it (or maybe I mis­re­mem­ber who told me), or that it was just an off-​​the-​​cuff joke — or we could just start over again with “wouldn’t it be neat if you could write a story that could be shuf­fled and still carry some coher­ent narrative?”

I’ve seen card games that revolve around story ele­ments, but those are more like impromptu story prompts that force you to cre­ate an essen­tially ran­dom story on the spot, I think. It sounds like what you have in mind is some­thing that tells a rel­a­tively sta­ble story, but via a slightly dif­fer­ent route, each time?

Or maybe like a story kalei­do­scope, where the pat­terns keep chang­ing but it’s the color palette that stays more or less the same? (What is the color of a story?)

(Can I sneak in a men­tion here that I’m work­ing on a back­wards seri­al­iza­tion — post­ing each chunk in reverse order of the nar­ra­tive — so it could be read two ways, sort of … I don’t know if it would stand up to being shaken up any fur­ther, though, even if the nar­ra­tive isn’t entirely chrono­log­i­cal. I think it would have to be built dif­fer­ently for that.)

Re: Pat­ter­son, he’s basi­cally work­ing a stu­dio model, right? Just like back in the day you could com­mis­sion a por­trait from Rem­brandt and what you got back was actu­ally a work from the “stu­dio of Rem­brandt” — not that I’m sug­gest­ing their work is at all com­pa­ra­ble aes­thet­i­cally. I’m also not the first one to say this, either — some ancient pro­file of him drew the anal­ogy, I think (peo­ple have been writ­ing about Pat­ter­son and his man­u­script fac­tory for years, although it’s only rel­a­tively recently that he’s allowed his appren­tices’ names on the book covers).

Any­way, I was talk­ing with some friends the other day — we all write, at least casu­ally, and many of us have recur­ring char­ac­ters and themes we play with. And one of us said, “I want a repos­i­tory of all your char­ac­ters that I can appro­pri­ate for my own sto­ries.” Sort of open-​​sourcing our char­ac­ters. And that got me think­ing: How do you open-​​source a char­ac­ter? I mean, what is the source of a char­ac­ter, as dis­tinct from the works that char­ac­ter appears in?

Any­way, I feel like tele­vi­sion writer’s rooms must have this licked, more or less — the prob­lem of how to mar­shal a group of writ­ers to tell a coher­ent story within an estab­lished set­ting and cast of char­ac­ters. Although I’m sure there are many fla­vors of that model as well (with vary­ing lev­els of dura­bil­ity of output).

And I’ve got to stop writ­ing blog-​​sized entries in this com­ment box (but it’s so tempting …)

I think a “nar­ra­tive set­tlers of catan” would have to be visu­ally sim­i­lar to the cur­rent edi­tion of D&D.

How do you want that orga­ni­za­tion to look? And what are you try­ing to make?

One of my favorite mod­els for this kind of sus­tained cre­ative endeavor is the Tiffany Stu­dios, mak­ers of stained glass and inven­tors of sev­eral new tech­niques for work­ing in that medium. Louis Com­fort Tiffany was the “man with the brand”, much like James Pat­ter­son, but in fact he worked with many other artists — like Clara Driscoll, who was recently iden­ti­fied as the designer of sev­eral of the most famous Tiffany lamps. The Stu­dio was both artis­ti­cally and finan­cially suc­cess­ful for many years — almost a cen­tury later, it’s still the most famous stained glass design firm in the world.