One Thousand And One

This is the first tale that I will begin to put together on this site.

In this post, I'll be referencing a wealth of works from all sorts of media, as well as tropes, i.e. recurrent patterns in fiction that you've probably seen a million times. . They aren't necessary to understand what I'm talking about, I think, but they help me ground it into pre-existing tradition; there is nothing new under the Sun. I also hope that you'll find the TVTropes articles entertaining. Well then, let's get down to business.



My very first attempt at writing, waaay back in 2007, was a story about a guy who was thrust into a Narrativium-based world, which was kind of like an immense, live Let's Play for the entertainment a bunch of True Fae children (about three centuries old). Gran't Morrison's Action Comics come to mind.


He'd be thrust into different genres as different roles, and he'd have to start thinking vey meta, very fast, if he wanted to survive each story. He also wanted to get the damned show cancelled without giving a bad performance that would give the Showrunner a reason to fire him (literally), leading to many Springtime For Hitler moments, much to his frustration (sort of like the protagonist of Stephen King's Misery, Hideo Kojima and Metal Gear, Hideaki Anno and Evangelion, Sir Arthur Conan Dyle and Sherlock Holmes ... but he also starts to take pride in his work (think Walter White and his blue meth)...


At some point, he'd become aware that the way things made "storytelling sense" rather than "logical sense" also extended to the world outside the game. And then, instead of the usual "nested realities", "am I still in the simulation",Inception kinda thing,








we'd have an Animal Man meets Grant Morrison type of meeting where he gets to complain to ME, personally. That would be the climax. It's only slightly less cliché :P Also, he would notice the readers.








(I swear, back when I read that first time, I spilled my drink all over the desk. If only I could pull off the same kind of mind-blowiness and audience confuzzlement...)


Most of the references I'm making here are retroactive; I had the idea much before I came in contact with them, but they're handy for condensing. Another work I'd compare this to would be GAINAX's Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai; a story where a kid and his "not my girlfriend" fall into one fantasy world after another, each representing a genre of fiction, with them and their immediate neighbors falling into new roles as befits the story-off-the-day, until they figure out the metaphysics of what's going on at the same time as their personal issues. I suppose I could give the main character a recurring supporting cast. Fellow "gladiators"? Or game personnel? Or both? In fact, now that I think of it, it might be better to start the story as an Ontological Mystery, where our hero spends the first arc progressively figuring out where he is and why, instead of having his slavery revealed to him right away as I initially thought.

Anyway, my point here is to say that, almost as soon as I wrote the first chapter, I went on hiatus, because I was keenly aware that I was biting much, much more than I could chew. Even now, I don't think I have remotely what it takes to plan out and pull off such a project. Designing machines is such easy work in comparison; all you need is patience and method.


But, still, some patience and method might be useful here. So, how should one go about planning out a project like this? It's all fun and interesting to play with meta-fiction, but what overall point do I want to drive home? What would be the central theme, the overarching storyline, that informs the entire story from beginning to end, and upon which I can build sub-plots and genre stories? Those are answers I must find on my own, but any pointers would be quite welcome.