What if a story knew it was a story?
And what would happen if the characters found out?
I've lately been pondering that a story is a strange kind of agreement between a writer and a reader. The writer creates a world that doesn't really exist and the reader agrees to believe in it for a while. Somewhere between those two things, something quite remarkable happens. People who never existed can make you laugh, frighten you, make you angry or leave you feeling strangely sad when you close the book.
We all know they're fictional, and yet, while we're reading, we behave as though they're real. We worry about what’s going to happen to them, shout at them for making obviously terrible decisions. We become suspicious of people they trust and sometimes find ourselves thinking about them when we're not reading the book at all.
That then got me thinking. The characters don't know they're fictional. At least, they're not supposed to. But what if one of them did?
The rules of the story
Every story has rules, even if the writer never writes them down. Characters have a past. They live somewhere. They have relationships, habits and memories. Things happen to them for reasons that make sense within the world of the novel. If the story is well written, you stop thinking about those rules because the fictional world begins to feel natural.
You don't usually question why the character happens to exist at exactly the moment when the story begins. You don't complain that nobody ever seems to go to the toilet or that the main character can somehow afford to spend three weeks investigating a murder without going to work.
You just accept it. That's what fiction asks us to do.
But imagine being one of the characters and suddenly becoming aware of those rules. Imagine noticing that every time something important happens, you happen to be there. You realise that people disappear from your life when the story no longer needs them. Imagine discovering that the world you live in seems to become much more detailed when somebody is paying attention to you and strangely vague when they aren't.
And then imagine the worst possibility of all. What if you realise that someone was writing your life?
Would you want to know?
At first, it might seem like an extraordinary gift. If you knew you were inside a story, perhaps you could work out how the story was supposed to end. You could look for clues and identify the villain before everyone else. Maybe you could avoid the obvious mistakes and if you were clever enough, perhaps even manipulate the plot.
And, perhaps most importantly, you might know that stories generally don't allow their main characters to have ordinary, uneventful lives. It would be terrifying because if your life is a story someone else gets to decide what happens next.
The author has the advantage
A fictional character can only know what exists within their world. The writer knows more. A character can believe that their childhood was happy, only for the writer to reveal something that changes their understanding of it. They can trust someone who turns out to be dangerous, or believe they've escaped a situation, only to discover that the escape was part of the trap.
The character experiences events one moment at a time but the writer sees the whole shape. That difference is one of the things that makes stories work.
But what happens if the character starts to see the shape too and the story fights back?
This is where my imagination starts making things unnecessarily complicated. Suppose a character realises they're in a story and decides to escape the plot. Perhaps they refuse to investigate the mysterious noise upstairs, or they don't answer the phone. Maybe they take a completely different road home, or when the suspicious stranger appears, they simply walk away.
The writer has a problem because who is then controlling the writer?
Stories inside stories
We already play with this idea in fiction. Characters discover books, diaries, recordings or documents that describe events happening around them. Writers put fictional authors inside their novels. Stories contain other stories, and sometimes the boundary between the two becomes deliberately blurred.
It's a wonderful trick because it makes us question where the story actually exists. Is it in the book, the writer's imagination or the reader's head?
Perhaps it's all three.
A book sitting unopened on a shelf is just an object. Once somebody reads it, an entire world appears in their imagination. The characters suddenly have faces and voices. Places acquire smells and textures. Events that never happened begin to feel emotionally real.
And then the reader closes the book the world disappears.
Or does it?
The characters remain in your memory. You might think about them years later. You might remember a fictional place more vividly than somewhere you've actually visited or even change your behaviour because something a fictional character experienced made you think differently about your own life.
That's a strange amount of power for an imaginary story to have.
So, what about us?
Of course, we know we're not fictional characters, at least, I'm fairly confident we do. BUt do we know for sure? Are we characters in someone elses story?
I think that's where this idea stops being just a playful thought experiment and starts becoming something more interesting. Stories are built from perception. A character experiences the world from inside their own head, exactly as we do. They don't have access to the full picture. They make assumptions, misunderstand people and remember things imperfectly. They decide what matters and what doesn't.
In other words, they experience life in much the same way we do. We never see the whole story, only our part of it.
We don't know what other people are thinking or what happened before we arrived. We don't know what will happen tomorrow. We construct explanations from the information available to us and then spend an enormous amount of time trying to work out whether those explanations are correct.
What would you do?
If you discovered tomorrow that your life was a story, what would you do differently? Would you try to find the writer? Try to work out the plot? Would you search for clues about what was going to happen or maybe do something deliberately unexpected, just to see whether the story could cope with it?
How do you know what is real?
And that's where The Other Story began
This was one of the thoughts that eventually became the starting point for The Other Story. I became interested in the idea that if a character could somehow become aware of their story, they might start looking for the boundaries of it. They might begin to question the world around them, the people in it and, eventually, themselves.
If they could write their own story, are they the character or the writer?
That was the thought that really grabbed me. Perhaps that is what stories do at their best. They take something we think we understand, turn it slightly, and ask us to look at it again. Sometimes the thing on the other side is a monster or it's a different version of ourselves.
And sometimes, perhaps, it's another story.
Comments