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

[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.)