Epic Opening Sentence

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

must… get… out… of… bed…

Chaos to Order

I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their madeup tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

I’ve invented a new form of storytelling

After considerable consideration, I have finalized the plans for a new form of storytelling that is inspired off of Web 2.0 and influenced by LonelyGirl15. I haven’t checked if it has already been invented, and I haven’t given it a name of any sort, but it’s there now. For convenience’s sake, I will call it netfiction for now.

Netfiction is like an epistolary novel in that it is not presented in a clear, linear stream. The story is presented through various media on the internet – social networking profiles, YouTube videos, blogs, e-mail messages, perhaps even forums and such (although I’m not sure if forums would allow a fictional story to take place on a place for real people).

Unlike the original lonelygirl15, however, netfiction does not attempt to convince the viewer that the story occurring is real, much like an epistolary novel will not try to convince that the letters and newspaper articles in the novel are real. Hence, we have what is a new form of storytelling, that takes the Internet as its medium of expression.

The Home Page

There will be one homepage for a work of netfiction, that provides a synopsis of the plot, as well as links to blogs, profiles, videos – all the content of the work, in general. It will serve as something of a contents page and book cover for netfiction.

It will also have a RSS feed to allow users to be updated on new content constantly. This feed will be an aggregation of all of the blog feeds, YouTube channel feeds etc.

If the netfiction is really long, the home page will also help users in knowing who’s who and how the story’s progressing, and most importantly, the home page will help new viewers get accustomed to this new mode of fiction.

Dynamic

Netfiction will be very dynamic, to simulate a sense of reality. Blog posts will be erratic, irregular; videos shaky and unprofessional and so on. Characters will comment on current events happening in the real world; in fact, they may even be affected by these. Since netfiction may occur in real-time, you never know where the story will go next.

It can also be seen as a form of elaborate role-play, with “actors” taking the roles of characters and weaving them to their whim. While in my original concept, there will be a pre-written story (and perhaps a script) and a director, it may also work to take a role-play approach and have the story go as it wills.

Users also interact with these characters in real-time, although this is a choice upto the author. An open netfiction can very closely simulate reality, by having the mass audience comment on the characters and events unfolding; or the author can choose to make comments and “public” input entirely a part of the story.

Actors would definitely be needed for the Flickr photos and YouTube videos though, so it would be very difficult to make a netfiction that involves multiple characters all alone. Unless of course, using netfiction devices (see what I did there?) like explaining that our characters don’t have speedy internet connections, or digital cameras, or are from China and are banned access to Flickr or something.

That’s all I have in mind right now, and pretty much all I think of for this format. I’m not planning on publishing anything yet, and have no real story ideas. If anyone does, contact me and we’ll see if we can make art history.

The Judge of All the Earth

“Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do right?” – Genesis, Chapter 18, Verse 25

One of the movies I’m anticipating along with The Dark Knight and a few others is Watchmen. A fan of the original graphic novel, I was both disappointed and excited by the revelation of the movie. While there is no doubt Zack Snyder can kick ass after making 300, I have a feeling that not even he can do justice to Watchmen.

As Alan Moore himself said, Watchmen the book itself was focused on showcasing how graphic novels are unique in their format – merging the depth and length of a novel with visual cues, subliminal messages and heaploads of layers. I think the novel is one of the finest examples of graphic novel literature, and like the Lord of the Rings, cannot be reasonably transferred to another medium.

Zack released the costumes for the characters and while I love the looks of Nite Owl, the Comedian and of course, Rorshach looks perfect. Ozymandias looks a little weird – I’m not sure if he can do it right.

What I’m keen to see is Dr. Manhattan himself, the ultimate superhero. How will he be portrayed in the movie? Will it have the same amount of nudity the graphic novel had? Will Zack do the graphic novel justice and make a great movie at the same time?

On why I gave up on contemporary fiction

I don’t read contemporary fiction. If there’s anything I enjoy, it’s classic literature, rich in its language, detail and written during the peak of the wealth of the great European languages. Contemporary literature is heavily bastardized with sensational plotlines, uninteresting language and a general aura of disposability.

A lot of contemporary literature I have read contains storylines that look like they have been lifted off a Hollywood (or at the most, a European) flick and stretched and compressed in some parts to suggest its strength as a book. More often than not, I have observed the language being complexified in absolutely unnecessary segments, and only because that is the last shred of dignity left for a modern fiction novel to differentiate itself from pulp fiction or a movie script.

As I read the great books of old, I read Jules Verne, Tolkien, Alexandre Dumas (père), Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron and I notice the beauty with which the wove the language, not to prove their knowledge of vocabulary or lingual devices, but because they could. I find this gone in modern literature, which itself has now become secondary to the might of the television, the movie screen and sooner or later, the video game console.

And so I take recourse in Victorian literature, or pretty much any piece of good literature that is not quite as naked as contemporary fiction. Perhaps the age of the pen has passed, and if it has, then we will be content in knowing that we have read the greatest of its writings.