If You Knew the Story

[rowyn]

tuftears mentioned in this post on fanfic the "'self-insert' character who knows the whole story by heart and suddenly finds himself in the midst of the action."

I rarely write fanfic, and I've never written fanfic of this type. But when I'm reading certain kinds of stories, I find myself daydreaming this very often. Not with every story, or even every good story: it is most likely to happen with stories that are tense and compelling, and have one or more of the following: 1) horrible events that would be easily preventable with foreknowledge 2) likable characters that abuse each other because they don't know one another as well as the reader does 3) a lot of doomful foreshadowing. So, for instance, I daydreamed a lot of self-insert stuff when I was reading Sanderson's Words of Radiance, but none when I was reading Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Conflict of Honors. I suspect I'm more likely to do it with long novels and series than with short ones, because I'm spending more time immersed in the story's unresolved conflicts, but length is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Like Tufty, I don't think that plopping a knows-all character into the middle of an existing narrative makes for very good fiction. But I did find myself wondering how to write original fiction around the same basic premise. The "character who has read the book of your lives" is the kind of genre-savvy trope that tends to throw an audience out of the story by calling too much attention to the fact that this, too, is a story. Even so, there are examples of this kind of work in mass-distributed fiction:

• Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, about a boy reading a book who eventually becomes part of the book (although IIRC he doesn't get to use his knowledge of the book's events as prophecy).


• The Last Action Hero and The Purple Rose of Cairo both involved a 'real world' and a 'fictional' protagonist, where the 'real world' protagonist was familiar with the works in which the fictional one appeared. Neither one used familiarity with the specific story to affect the outcome, though in Action Hero the 'real world' protagonist used being genre-savvy to predict the outcome of various fictional events.

None of these are good examples of what I'd like to try. I think that a prophet protagonist would be the best substitute for the self-insert. Something like this:

• Prophet has visions of other characters, from their PoV. Some of these are things that happened in the past. Some of them are about the near or far future.


• Prophet uses the visions to figure out what needs to be done to prevent disasters in the future, acts to do so, and thus changes the outcome and renders some visions the prophet already had obsolete.


• Prophet has new visions based on the new future. Repeat until resolution.

I could see having some fun with this, especially with "oops that makes things worse" actions on the part of the prophet. The work that it'd most be like is Edge of Tomorrow, although the idea would not have Edge's video-game-like rehearsed quality, since the prophet would only get to see things twice (once in vision, once in real-time).

I don't know if I'll do anything with this. I tend to write too long anyway, and writing up multiple timelines for the same story sounds like it would exacerbate this tendency even more. But part of me wants to do it, because I think it would be interesting to have one character that knows so much about the others, even though they don't know her. That's why I want visions of the past as well as the future: I like the idea of a protagonist who knows and loves the characters the way the reader does, because she knows them as well as we do.

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

This does sound like an interesting take. Maybe the plot twist could be that the prophet is actually being opposed by someone else who has the same power! Or someone who *used* to be on the same side but thanks to the precognition-like ability, they now believe their best result lies in aiding the opposition.

How would you write it so the readers understood what was being changed? Write the story twice so end-to-end? Frequent flashbacks? From the viewpoint of another character who doesn't understand how the prophet knows so much?

[rowyn]

The way I envision writing it (I'm probably not going to) would be effectively multiple first-person PoV. The prophet would be one protagonist. She would have visions of various other characters (some protagonists, some antagonists). The visions would be from the PoV of the other character: while the vision is happening, it feels to the prophet as if she is that character. They'd also be written in first-person PoV and encompass parts of the past, present, and future of that character. The prophet's challenge would be to figure out how that person impacts the cataclysm she's trying to prevent and how to get that person to help her avert it. Because she would be so intimately bound up in the lives of the other people she had visions of, she'd also look for ways to avert personal catastrophes that happened to them. I imagine the latter conflicting with the former.

You'd get re-tellings of parts of the story, as outcomes changes based on the way the prophet's actions change what other characters do.

But I'd definitely have the prophet be a central PoV character, if only because it's so rare that prophets are central PoV characters.

I'd be more inclined to make the cataclysm very hard to avert (and its causes hard to pin down) than to have an antagonist prophet, if only because that makes the timelines even more convoluted. o_O

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

An antagonist prophet would certainly make things more complicated, but really, isn't it unfair that only the good guys get prophets? ;) Where was Voldemort's prophet to give him instructions on how to achieve world domination?

Anyway, you have enough writing projects, but it is fun to think about things like this now and then. ^_^

Personally, I'd push for a science fiction telling. Maybe something like Quantum Leap, but leaping into the past within either only the protagonist's own mind or a set of people who might seem unrelated at first but as the story develops, it becomes clear how they became entangled with each other's fates to the point that it makes sense for them to know what someone else did in the future/past.

[jorrocks-j.livejournal.com]

Best. Mary Sue. Ever:



Obviously written by someone who'd read one too many English Country Gothic novels and got tired of screaming you blithering idiots! every time she turned the page.

So she wrote her own, put herself in the story, and spent it dispensing brisk good sense to every cliché in the genre.

(Also: Gandalf as the leader of The Quivering Brethren. Priceless!)

[rowyn]

Hee!

Yeesh, a book from 1932 and twelve different publishers are trying to charge me $7+ for an e-book that's got to be in the public domain by now. *eventually finds a site that has it as a free download*

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The very first stories I wrote as a kid (that I remember) were about self-insert into fantasy worlds, but they were unique (if typical and cliche) fantasy worlds and not ones the protagonist had read about.

A lot of MLP fanfic does have protagonists who've watched the show travelling to Equestria. A few have even tried to be prophets of sorts? It works more or less well depending on the actual relationship between the 'real Equestria' and the show. If they explain 'past' events to the characters and they all "That's completely wrong! They left out all the details! We were searching for the elements of harmony for *months*!" then obviously any prophetic value is going to be very vague.

So usually, the protagonist prophet stories are based on time travel. There was one where the protagonist actually pretended to be a prophet, and decided to go solve all the horrible monster problems early, before anyone died. Which pointed out just how lucky she'd been the first time, since even with decades more experience she had trouble with them the second time and ended up having to be rescued. n.n

[rowyn]

When I was a kid, I made up a cast of seven girls with various different powersets, most D&D-inspired, and whenever I read a novel I'd insert some of them into it. I never wrote any of them out; I'd just daydream about it.

I don't really like time-travel stories, in general; I almost always have the sense that the power could've been better used, and/or was too gimmicky/stupidly limited.

That said, one of my favorite lines in regard to time travel was in the extremely silly Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: 'What do you mean we're running out of time? We've got a time machine! We have all the time we need!' :)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I remember one of the new Dr. Who episodes lampshading that. "You have a time machine! Why are we always running?"

[narile.livejournal.com]

I read this and instantly flashed on when this sort of meta-knowledge is used as part of humor...specifically, Guy Fleegman in Galaxy Quest.

[The actors are flying a shuttle to an alien planet]
Guy Fleegman: [whimpering] I changed my mind, I wanna go back.
Alexander Dane: After all the fuss you made about getting left behind?
Guy Fleegman: Yeah, but that's when I thought I was the crewman that stays on the ship and something is up there and it kills me. But now I'm thinking I'm the guy that gets killed by some monster five minutes after we land on the planet.
Jason Nesmith: You're not going to die on the planet, Guy.
Guy Fleegman: I'm not? Then what's my last name?
Jason Nesmith: It's, uh, uh -- I don't know.
Guy Fleegman: Nobody knows. You know why? Because my character isn't important enough for a last name, because I'm gonna die five minutes in.
Gwen DeMarco: Guy, you have a last name.
Guy Fleegman: Do I??!! Do I??!! For all you know, I'm "Crewman #6"! [puts his head on Gwen's shoulder and cries] Mommy! Mommy!
Alexander Dane: [wearily] Are we there yet?

[rowyn]

*giggles*

It's pretty amazing that he didn't die on that planet. :D

[narile.livejournal.com]

That's cause he wasn't red shirt #5, he was in fact....

Fred Kwan: We gotta turn off that valve. Their oxygen's almost gone.
Guy Fleegman: Listen...I'll go in. I'll create a distraction. I got this [ brandishes an oversize alien gun], I'm OK. I might be able to hold them back long enough for the aliens to escape.
Fred Kwan: That's suicide!
Guy Fleegman: I'm just a glorified extra, Fred, I'm a dead man anyway. If I gotta die, I'd rather go out a hero than a coward.
Fred Kwan: Guy– Guy, maybe you're the plucky comic relief, you ever think about that?
Guy Fleegman: Plucky?
Fred Kwan: Besides, [goofy laugh] I just had this really interesting idea...yeah, let's go.
Guy Fleegman: Are you stoned?

Always helps to have someone else who knows the conventions......

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I loved that movie. :D I need to watch it again sometime.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I've found myself doing something like this, too. I don't know how usual/unusual this is, but I often find myself polishing a daydream, going through it, backing up, trying something else in my imagination, because it just doesn't seem RIGHT. Stupid adolescent "power trip" fantasies don't hold my interest any longer. It's easy and pathetic for me to just imagine Protagonist with Amazing Power who just, you know, POWERS his way through any obstacle. But then, my pickiness has the unfortunate consequence that sometimes I mentally "write myself into a corner," and end up abandoning that particular "daydream thread" on a sour note. If these things were turned into stories, a great many of them would have unhappy endings, because I couldn't imagine a happy one I was SATISFIED with. Pretty bad, huh? ;)

I sometimes imagine the "self-insert, knowing a great deal about the story universe," but one thing that occurs to me is that I really do not know all that much, given the lack of specifics in most stories. I would make for a horrible time traveler, I'm sure. Place me in the past and ... uh ... I know bad things are going to happen, and I want to stop them, but I simply don't know enough, and with enough in the way of specifics to pull any of those cliched "Watch as I predict the near future with unerring accuracy" that happens so often in TV shows and movies -- often involving predicting an outcome of some event as it's being broadcast on TV in order to prove a point to someone else.

Many of the things that happen in story universes happen based on AMAZING COINCIDENCES in the first place, and once an alien element is introduced (self-insert monkey-wrencher!), it's hard to tell for sure what impact it might have on things. Once I've caused things to deviate from the original course, further prediction of events is dubious, because we're on another timeline now. Another thing is that in many of these stories, being a complete outsider without any particular inherent wealth or power on my own is going to make it hard for me to gain the ear of anyone who'd be able to ACT on any of this remotely-useful information.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

When I imagine myself in that situation, I fear that if I were being truly realistic, I'd probably end up spending an awful lot of time just fretting over the unknown consequences, and I should sadly not be terribly surprised if I end up MISSING the critical point where my "I read ahead in the script!" knowledge could be of much use. Being "genre-savvy" might be of some use, but only to a point: A large factor of genre-savviness is that it matters whether you are On Stage or Off Stage. If we get to listen to a group of characters explain their plan, at length, it will most probably NOT go according to plan -- because if that were to happen, the reader would be subjected to the plan and then the execution of said plan, and it would be very redundant to a certain degree. If, however, we are reading/watching a story and the characters gather together, and the leader goes, "Now here's the plan ..." and then we segue to the action, then there's a very HIGH chance of the plan going well.

Someone might also get the idea that "according the genre," it is impossible to sit around for any length of time without being attacked by ninjas/wolves/robots/aliens/zombies/tornadoes/whatever, because "too much talking is boring." But again, that falls into "is this on camera or off?" territory. If I'm trying to make an argument to a character that could significantly alter his outlook and course of action, that MIGHT be an "on camera" moment; in that case, I think I'd want to make sure I "headline" my arguments with nice, short sound-bites that sum things up nicely. Otherwise, I haven't a chance at impacting anything.

Maybe. Really, how could I be CERTAIN how things would work? I'd imagine I'd probably spend some time fumbling about, trying to sort out the rules, and never QUITE getting it right. It would take a VERY sympathetic universe for me to get things right the first time ... and if the universe is going to stick to its usual conventions, such "sympathy" usually only goes for the main character. If for some reason I wanted to change the course of actions because I happen to think that the main character is a wicked, twisted individual, and the so-called "villain" should prevail instead, I feel as if I might have better luck trying to coach the villain into behaving in such a manner that would be more INTERESTING and ENTERTAINING and COOLER than the "hero," and more deserving of a reader's sympathy, than to focus on the nuts and bolts of how to make the "perfect" trap a hero wouldn't be able to escape (because as long as he's the hero, he is GOING to escape, and some flaw in my plan will simply materialize out of thin air if necessary).

Actually, I kind of tried to wrestle with this with "Rulesbreaker" and then my halted attempt at "The Hero of Arborea," but neither one really quite felt right. (For one thing, I couldn't help but struggle with the idea of WHY this 'outsider-insert' is happening, anyway, within the rules of my universe. Does this sort of thing happen often?)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I think that an "If You Knew the Story" story could be quite interesting. It's not that it hasn't been done before. I mean, I think it's been done in the various Star Trek series at least once or twice, in a manner of speaking. But I find it to still be an interesting thought exercise, particularly when I think of all the ways that going into that situation THINKING you have all the answers could turn out to backfire horribly (and if there is any eventual success, it would be hard-won).

I don't know if I'm so keen on "try and try again until you get it right." There's already a venue for that: Video games with "save game" features. ;) I still plan on seeing the latest Tom Cruise film, and I have fond memories of "Groundhog Day," and I feel as if the TV series "Daybreak" had some great potential ... but it feels a little more compelling to me if you DON'T get do-overs. Or, if there ARE do-overs, then there needs to be some cost involved.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I'd mention some anime examples, but there would be spoilers, and you probably haven't seen them anyway. In one anime series, a solemn and precocious child character was revealed to be reliving most of her life over and over again, up to the point of her inevitable and brutal death. She got to "redo" it, but each time she started later in time, and whatever she'd done for the first days, years, etc., of the LAST attempt ended up "locked in" for the next time around, for better or worse. Eventually, she'd run out of time, but the implication was that she'd be stuck in a horror-loop of her last moments of life for all eternity as a price for failure. And even so, after so many YEARS of trying over, sometimes she'd just go through the motions, or do nothing, out of despair/fatigue. The only thing that rekindled her attempts to change things was when one of her friends seemed to exhibit residual memories of one of the previous "aborted" timelines -- and even then, she still had to go through several iterations of failure before finally making any progress. That series had a very hard-won success. It's too bad that once things started going WELL on the final iteration, the series turned silly-stupid and practically into a parody of itself. :P

In another series ... well, if you ever get a chance to watch the series "Stein's Gate," I'd love to talk about the implications for time travel from that. It's a bit complex, in that it involves multiple TYPES of time travel, each with their own implications. (It also has some stupid anime stuff that I could've done without, but on the whole I thought it did a nice job of addressing some of the implications of time travel (cause/effect paradox, time traveler disorientation, implications of MULTIPLE time travelers meddling with the same time stream, etc.) that some other works of fiction just gloss over ... though it really doesn't get around to tidying things up and explaining what in the WORLD has been going on, until the very end.)