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Aug. 31st, 2006 01:30 amIf only there were a manual, we say sometimes. How suspicious we'd be if there were, though.
We wouldn't buy that any one person could have come up with these answers, and would be rightly alarmed if the guide were the product of an organization...downright paranoid, were it anonymous.
It would have to be disguised as a non-manual. How distributed? Not door-to-door, a la Planethood. It would have to lure us somehow, have the trappings of leisure reading. Some entertainment or compendium of colorful facts.
Until we're sucked in, it'll have to avoid making us think it's out to advise or improve us. Best to distract us entirely for a little while with novelties and flux, then lead us along some path, so slowly we think we're blazing it ourselves as we wander at some distant brightening thing.
Complications should be sudden, accidents, surprising us into thoughts of what we would do if they happened to us. These unguarded thoughts the book would have to know. It would have to know and answer these in their exact order, but each time as if by chance, in response to parallel musings of a voice in the book. It will need to be a story, then, to have both surprises and this voice of innocence.
At some point the pretense could be dropped. No announcement would be made that the book was now a guide to life, but life itself would gradually claim the focus. Time and thought invested in the journey there would render the reader tolerant of the wilds you're set to lose her in.
What you have to say you'd say here. If it could all be kept to one path, in sequential connection of whatever fashion, that might be best of all. Your clues would be left here and there at the sides, further accidents. Little staged path-losings, doublings-back and doubts and transformations would keep it tense, fast, important. Some other prize than home is offered, here. Fear and hope join lust, in full involvement.
If it could be kept to all one path...but life doesn't work that way. Our time alive is all one stream, but ours is not one motion, floating down it. Moods and modes make for different floors and rooms, in the life house. The half-selves we split into must each be appointed a voice and a path in the story. And the strange things that happen with us when those selves meet or recombine must be echoed here somehow. True others will be needed too, since others are so crucial in our lives. Characters, then, will have to be of several kinds. Some spread deck of not-quite-us to not-us is required.
Each path must have its end, once its weight, shape and color all feel right, and in that end the information must be finally, entirely imparted. Even here some subtlety will help. Have it be said, but not directly. Said by another, or said not quite, or in parts that the reader must combine. Or whispered by the reader to herself, as words somehow spelled by the events recorded: words from different words.
Deep enough in the forest other things become possible. I have heard of pools where things are told below exactly as they seem above. I'm told of fruits that, years after their ingestion, do something to the colors of the eyes.
We wouldn't buy that any one person could have come up with these answers, and would be rightly alarmed if the guide were the product of an organization...downright paranoid, were it anonymous.
It would have to be disguised as a non-manual. How distributed? Not door-to-door, a la Planethood. It would have to lure us somehow, have the trappings of leisure reading. Some entertainment or compendium of colorful facts.
Until we're sucked in, it'll have to avoid making us think it's out to advise or improve us. Best to distract us entirely for a little while with novelties and flux, then lead us along some path, so slowly we think we're blazing it ourselves as we wander at some distant brightening thing.
Complications should be sudden, accidents, surprising us into thoughts of what we would do if they happened to us. These unguarded thoughts the book would have to know. It would have to know and answer these in their exact order, but each time as if by chance, in response to parallel musings of a voice in the book. It will need to be a story, then, to have both surprises and this voice of innocence.
At some point the pretense could be dropped. No announcement would be made that the book was now a guide to life, but life itself would gradually claim the focus. Time and thought invested in the journey there would render the reader tolerant of the wilds you're set to lose her in.
What you have to say you'd say here. If it could all be kept to one path, in sequential connection of whatever fashion, that might be best of all. Your clues would be left here and there at the sides, further accidents. Little staged path-losings, doublings-back and doubts and transformations would keep it tense, fast, important. Some other prize than home is offered, here. Fear and hope join lust, in full involvement.
If it could be kept to all one path...but life doesn't work that way. Our time alive is all one stream, but ours is not one motion, floating down it. Moods and modes make for different floors and rooms, in the life house. The half-selves we split into must each be appointed a voice and a path in the story. And the strange things that happen with us when those selves meet or recombine must be echoed here somehow. True others will be needed too, since others are so crucial in our lives. Characters, then, will have to be of several kinds. Some spread deck of not-quite-us to not-us is required.
Each path must have its end, once its weight, shape and color all feel right, and in that end the information must be finally, entirely imparted. Even here some subtlety will help. Have it be said, but not directly. Said by another, or said not quite, or in parts that the reader must combine. Or whispered by the reader to herself, as words somehow spelled by the events recorded: words from different words.
Deep enough in the forest other things become possible. I have heard of pools where things are told below exactly as they seem above. I'm told of fruits that, years after their ingestion, do something to the colors of the eyes.
