Tuesday 13 June 2006

Pic of the day: "Love is important, but so is friendship" says Elis-chan in Canvas 2, one of the many anime about young people who live with their cousin.

Writing without magic

Usually when I try to write fiction, a major pleasure for me is the worldbuilding. Even when the story is set on Earth, there is usually some exception to the laws of nature, some magic by any name. Setting up the scope and limits of the magic is a major part of preparing for a story. In a few cases, the story does not resolve whether the magic is real or only imagined by the main character. This is actually one of my favorite settings. But the magic is always there. Well, almost always.

I have found myself returning to a story which is probably a year old, but which I had only written two chapters of. This story stands out by not having any magic, mysterious or supernatural element at all. It is simply a story about two high school students, a boy and a girl, living together. They are half-cousins once removed, and the main hook of the story is the attempt to resolve whether their relationship will be as family, friends or lovers.

This is a classic topic or at least subtopic of Japanese anime. It is not present in them all, of course, but there is a pretty large number of stories where it is at the front. They vary from the very obvious (in Koi Kaze, a grown man falls in love with his much younger full sister; angst ensues) to the very non-obvious (in Da Capo, the girl is a family member only by adoption). I originally started with a cousin once removed but eventually changed it to half-cousin. This weakens the family bond to little more than an excuse by the local standards here, but Catholics would surely disagree. It is also more realistic: The one generation difference between them is explained by her grandfather (his great-grandfather) marrying again late in life and having a child.

***

Taking away the magic does not just cut down on the exposition. It also hurts the childlike sense of wonder that I often (think I) convey in my fiction. Instead, I have humor. The characters banters like mad, and much like my humble self they will say the craziest things in the most matter of fact tone. Apart from that though, it is not autobiographical at all. I guess writing novels is a lot like psychoanalysis. At first you begin by digging through your own dirty subconscious, before you get through to the collective subconscious and the archetypes and stuff.

Have I mentioned what I call "teacher novels"? I am not sure if this is just here in Norway, but I've seen a few of them. They are written by teachers and the main characters are teachers who are stressed and lustful and repressed and eventually go crazy. It is not actually limited to teachers, of course. Even the world famous philosopher Ken Wilber eventually wrote a novel, in which the main character is a student... named Ken Wilber, whose sexual fantasies crop up every 10 minutes. Whether those fantasies are actually the writer's is not obvious, but the reviews I have read touchingly agree that the book would have benefited greatly from their absence.

But I have written compulsively since I was a little boy. There isn't much of me in anything I write by now. In some stories I insert a few seeds of events from my own life, but the characters themselves are very much not me. I guess one of the points of using science fiction or magic is to convey that distance. "Well, obviously this cannot be him since Magnus Itland cannot make clocks go backward." So perhaps it is a vote of confidence in myself that I can write a story without such trappings?

(That doesn't mean I'm going to finish it, of course. Since when do I ever finish anything?)

***

Oh, and... sexuality plays a role. It is after all a third of the fundamental plot element. But I don't subscribe to the realism of inserting sexual fantasies every 10 minutes. I mean, the readers have their own sexual fantasies, right? So that would be double dosage, and totally unbalance things. So no daydreaming and probably very little nightdreaming either. My main character is surprisingly pure, or "repressed" as liberals would call it. He doesn't even have porn in his room. He is also shy when it comes to such thing. Not uninterested, just shy. In stark contrast, his mother (a widow) and his cousin (once removed) are extremely frank. They are not slutty, just disturbingly honest, which embarrasses the MC no end. The girl is hooked on yaoi (Japanese-style boy on boy porn written by and for women). The mother swears by that miracle of modern technology, the personal vibrator. But these are just facts. We don't see any of them in action. (Nor have I. "Write about what you know" and all that.)

I enjoy the interplay among the characters so far, and their dry humor. I'll be adding more characters from school next, I think, but slowly. I hate it when a lot of characters are introduced at once. It can make me drop an anime or a web comic, if they don't let me get familiar with the characters one at a time. Then again I have a brain deficiency when it comes to remembering people. I have to know them emotionally before I can commit them to long-term memory. Unless they touch my heart in some way, they remain generic faces. "Just shadows in the fog." (I'm like that in the real world too, which probably explains a lot about me.)

So anyway, with time and wrist being limited resources in my world, I hope you accept this excuse in lieu of a real journal entry.