Exchange of Realities

There’s an odd side effect some people get when they’re suspending their disbelief for a while. They finish a book, or they step out of a movie theater, and whatever they were doing is still with them. Get them out of an action movie, they’ll turn taking the trolley home into an adventure. Hit them with some really trippy prose, the next hour of conversation is going to make you wonder if they’re on something. See them walk out of class during the Shakespeare unit, you can bet they’re thinking in iambic pentameter. We know these people—heck, we might even be these people.

And more importantly, we can learn from these people.

What gets them is the feel: the unifying overall impression of the piece that carries on after the credits finish rolling, the book gets put down, or the dice go back into the bag. It is, at the bottom of things, what the piece is about.

When constructing a narrative, the first thing you need to do is figure out what it’s about. Are you going for action? Planning and counterplanning? The triumph of the individual? Big people in a small world? Small people in a big universe? Looking at the world with wonder? A fight against destiny? Small struggles against the inevitable?

Got your idea? Good. Write it down. Keep it under your pillow when you’re going to sleep. Look at it at the beginning of each of your brainstorming sessions. Make a mantra of it. Internalize it.

Then try to implement it.

One way, and perhaps the most obvious, is by picking up the trappings. Every style has a number of things that can be used as elements—explosions, codes, snarky repartee, improbable but nifty architecture, wide empty spaces, you name it. (Ever wonder why people so often say “everything’s better with ninjas/explosions/insert trope here”?) So for your feel, brainstorm a list of things you’d associate with it, and then try to work a few of them into your plans. Three should be a good number.

Another way is word choice. Go ahead, unpack your adjectives. Then choose them carefully. For action, go for short, snappy words and sparse description (particularly during fight scenes, as those need to flow quickly), and dashes of onomatopoeia. If you’re going for something with a strong scientific element (or academic in general, really), grab yourself some jargon; if you want a science nobody’s heard of, invent some. When going for a contrast between the characters and the world, figure out what this contrast is—size, amount of color, erudition, that sort of thing—then figure out where your dividing line is, find words that definitely fall on one side of the line or the other, and use them only on the appropriate side of the line. (The opponent is fierce. The protagonist is scrappy. See the difference?) Heck, choose your words by whether they sound right for your world and your story. This stuff really does make a difference; though your audience may not realize it, their perceptions will likely be shaped by your word choice.

Choose yourself a color scheme, as well—you’d be amazed by how that can change the feel. In darker, grittier settings, focus on the dark colors and grayscale (though feel free to make an exception for red. Makes the blood stand out more). A story that does superheroes will work well with primary colors and jewel tones, particularly as you move more and more towards a Golden Age style. Techie sorts of worlds have metallics all over the place, while someone going for a sense of wonder is probably going to hit everything in the spectrum and come out the other side.

If you’re running a game (or putting together a movie), music can also help. Just make sure the songs fit before you use them.

The most important thing to do is to find a feel and stick to it. There have been a number of stories and movies I’ve gotten into where the images have been all jumbled up, as if the narrative itself had an identity crisis. If the feel you want is “Wtf just happened here?”, that can work, but otherwise it’s not going to help. (One person I played under ran into a problem like this. Wonderful game. Ran like a ‘triumph of the human spirit’ piece for most of it; there were very few deaths, any PC who died went out in a blasted epic manner, and meanwhile we were busily cheating death and ignoring impossibility—and then we hit the end, which was very much a hopeless struggle against the inevitable thematic. The cognitive dissonance was rather jarring.) Thematics are more important than you think; try to keep them lined up.

It’ll all be worth it when you see the reader put his book down, or the gamer bag her dice—when they blink, look around them, and for the next ten minutes you can tell they’re seeing the world around them through your theme. That’s what we’re going for here. Isn’t it beautiful?