My husband brought me a copy of On the Origin of PCs, the printed prequel to my favorite webcomic, The Order of the Stick. It was fun learning a little backstory about the characters, though none of the strips made me laugh outloud as much as this recent one did.

Honestly, my favorite bit of the book was in the preface, presumably written by one of the supporting characters in the story, Redcloak. After explaining exactly what PC and NPC means, for those readers who aren’t familiar with gaming terminology, he makes this hard-to-argue observation:

Heck, as far as I’m concerned, the presence of players is a necessary evil at best. I think most gamemasters will agree that their world functions significantly more smoothly before the PCs ever show up.

Truer words were never spoken!

I started reading Order of the Stick because of the roleplaying jokes, but I have found the story that has developed over the past 450+ strips to be quite intriguing, and the commentary the author, Rich Burlew, provides in the printed volumes is useful and enlightening, from a storyteller’s point of view. I wish I had No Cure for the Paladin Blues, the second collection, on hand to quote some of the more interesting passages, but alas my mate has taken it off to Indiana with him. I’ll have to try to get back to it another time.

In the meantime, here’s an interesting link to a blog post with some thoughts about creating and fulfilling reader (or viewer) desires in narrative, the main point being that it is the job of the storyteller to defer satisfaction, which not only keeps the audience intent but makes it all the more satisfying in the end.

I feel much the same way as Gregory Maguire when it comes to sharing the magic of reading with my children. These past weeks, I’ve been reading them the Chronicles of Narnia and loving every minute of it, and we’ll go see the movie for the second time tomorrow. The best part is when I overhear them working Narnia into their play, or when Anna confesses to me, “Yesterday, I looked in the back of my closet to see if I could get into Narnia.” See, I did the same thing when I was a kid. I love being able to share that magic with them.

Unsurprisingly, there is much in the media these days about C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia. Personally, I am thrilled with anticipation at the impending theatrical release of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, even if it is Disney, and even though I know should maintain at least a small degree of cynicism about potential changes the filmmakers might have made to what has been one of my favorite stories since I first read it in the fourth grade. Look what Hollywood did to Earthsea, after all. But I can’t help being excited, if only because in the trailers everything looks so splendid and I can’t wait to fall into that magic again, like Digory and Polly falling into the pools in the Wood Between Worlds.

The media seems to be concentrating on two themes. One is Narnia vs. Harry Potter. Personally, I think the Narnia movie will tromp all over the fourth HP movie this season, if only because with it’s PG-13 rating many younger kids won’t get to see Goblet of Fire. On top of that, Narnia is fresh, cinematically, and has been aggregating fans for 50 years, most of whom will be as ga-ga as I am about seeing it on screen, especially if it’s told as faithfully and as well as its cousin, The Lord of the Rings. As an extra bonus, Narnia has the potential to draw in the Christian audience that condems the “occultist” tendencies of Harry Potter, and likes to glorify the Christian allegories present in the Narnia books. That, of course, is the second major theme the media is focusing on — how much emphasis one can or should place upon the Christian elements of the Chronicles of Narnia.

By far, the most interesting article on the subject I’ve come across is Adam Gopnik’s “Prisoner of Narnia: How C.S. Lewis Escaped” over at The New Yorker, which tries to understand Lewis, his faith, and his creation without extolling Lewis as a paragon of Christian morality, nor condemning him for being…well, a paragon of Christian morality. What comes across most clearly is that Lewis was someone who was caught between fantasy and faith, wanting them very much to be the same thing all the while knowing that they were not and could never be.

As a member of the Inklings, Lewis is rightly hailed as one of the founding fathers of the modern mythopoeic arts, which brings me to the heart of why I am writing about this article at all. I know, personally, that Lewis inspired my first forays into mythopoeia — my first novel, co-authored with my best friend when I was 10, had many elements directly derived from the world of Narnia — and I’m certain he’s inspired many other authors as well. Gopnik’s article provides some brief insight into the workings of the mythopoet’s mind, starting with a quote from Lewis’s work of literary criticism, “The Allegory of Love”, which identifies three worlds available to the writer: the actual world of experience (it’s true because you can see it), the world of religious belief (you believe it to be true), and the world of the marvelous (you know it’s not true). Gopnik’s summary of Lewis’ observations is a succint “rule to live by” for any aspiring mythopoet:

“When we sit down to write a romance, then, we make up elves and ghosts and wraiths and wizards, in whom we don’t believe but in whom we enclose our most urgent feelings, and we demand that the world they inhabit be consistent and serious.”

This also goes a long way towards explaining why the Narnia books continue to be of such importance to Christians and non-Christians alike. It doesn’t matter that the tales happen to contain a message that is compatible with the Christian faith. The mythology contained within the books sustains itself without any external references at all, and its Truths are revealed through honest storytelling — actions, reactions, and emotion — not through didatic exposition or otherwise telling us what we should be learning. If Christians recognize similarities between their own beliefs and the mythology of Narnia, that’s fine, but even non-believers can take pleasure — Lewis’ “joy” — in a sojourn to a magical realm that emerges so completely from the page that even today, more than 50 years after it was written, kids are still poking around in the backs of closets, hoping to find a way in.

I’ve got a few interesting links to post today.

First, from A List Apart, a journal for people who make websites, are a couple articles on building narrative into websites. Not necessarily websites that are intended as narratives, but just about anything: online stores, company sites, news sites, etc. In Beyond Usability: The Narrative Web Mark Bernstein writes:

We want to see narrative everywhere. Stories are fun, exciting, comforting. This isn’t just a matter of bedtime stories and art. The saga of the Great Browser War, the Open Source tales, the stories of Bill (Gates) and Steve (Jobs), populate our work life and our weblogs. So, too, do tales of Rise and Fall – of individuals, companies, and websites.

The point is not that we should add stories to our sites to ensnare narrative-starved readers. The point is that the reader’s journey through our site is a narrative experience. Our job is to make the narrative satisfying.

He then goes on to describe some high-level methods of doing so.

Then in A Case for Storyteling Curt Cloniger discusses the need for web makers to develop a narrative voice in site design, bridging the gap between style and content.

During the work day, mere data is exchanged. This work-day data exchange might be analogous to a multi-user, Lotus Notes(tm) collaboration. But at night, around the fire, stories are told. It’s the stories that the cowboys will remember after the drive, not the daily exchange of data. Data is denotative. Stories are visceral and emotional. Stories effect our entire beings, not just our minds.

And which stories will be remembered the longest? Which stories will be loved the most? Which stories will “succeed?” For the stories to succeed they first have to be interesting (read: good content). For the stories to succeed, they also have to be told in the native tongue of the listeners (read: no JavaScript errors). And finally, for the stories to succeed, they have to be told well, in a compelling, mature, engaging narrative voice.

He goes on to compare the web with television advertising in the 1950’s, and how commericials have evolved into 60-second narratives that make us laugh, cry, and watch the Super Bowl even though we hate football. And he compares a web development conference to a novel-writing seminar where the bulk of the time is spent on teaching you how to write neatly. But of all the worthwhile points Cloniger makes in this article, the one I find the most relevant personally is this: “The more power a user has to control the narrative himself, the more a user will “own” that narrative.”

Of course, one of my driving interests is interactive narrative, and that’s an important rule to remember. The idea that users - or players, when we start talking about games - want control over the narrative is understood if not overtly stated in the article Foundations of Interactive Storytelling, which discusses methods of allowing true interactive experiences in a gaming experience. The author briefly traces the evolution of interactive storytellling starting with tabletop RPGs and then segues into methods designers can use to add interactivity to a story via plot, characterization, or theme. There are some good basic principals here, with a reasonable balance in the presentation between the artistic and the technical merits of each method.

Finally, here’s a new twist on the granddaddy of all interactive storytelling: Choose Your Own Adventures. Ryan Macklin is putting together a book he calls Choose Your Own Fate, which is really just a collection of endings that maybe could have appeared in the original series.

If you’ve ever read Choose Your Own Adventure books, there were generally a number of ways that you would die or fail. This project is a collection of unconnected short stories in a style that emulates those horrible fates. The idea is that each story is completely contained in two facing pages, so that a reader can flip to a random page in the book, and in that way choose their fate.

Best of all, the proceeds will go to the Red Cross Katrina relief fund, so not only would it be fun, if you choose to submit, but it will be for a good cause.

Minor Magus, an article by Laura Miller in The New Yorker, is a nice overview of the life and writing of Lord Dunsany.

A quote, from a review of James Woods’ essay collection The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel:

What we should value instead, Wood suggests, is story-telling that illuminates in ‘units of character rather than in wattage of style’. The best fiction, in this view, does not tell us what to think; it shows us how its characters think, and so encourages solitary readers to bring other human beings closer within their grasp. In Henry James’s terms, it is the art of being ‘irresponsible’ - of allowing fictional characters the freedom to be as confusing and uncertain as ourselves, and of allowing us to approach them with the same mixture of suspicion and sympathy that dapples our everyday dealings with one another.

Only in this way can the novel shake off the spangled excesses of a Rushdie or a Wolfe and emerge as something stronger and more durable; only by ignoring fashion can a novel ensure that it remains relevant.

…It is this second kind of laughter that especially snags Wood’s attention: moments when the reader becomes aware that he does not know these characters any better than they know themselves, and so responds with that unsettled mixture of distance and involvement described by Gogol as ‘laughter through tears’.”

This struck me as being very similar to the situation in roleplaying. With no one person controlling the story, each character (as portrayed by individual players) acts independantly of any overriding plot or purpose. They are simply themselves, complex beings responding to other complex beings and to events as in ways that they don’t always understand themselves, and cannot be reliably predicted. It makes the story, as it evolves, much more true to life in that way, more reflective in the way Woods is insinuating novels should be.

There’s potential in this medium.

A friend, Eric, has challenged me to come up with a term to capture the multiplayer interactive storytelling experience. “Interactive fiction” has become too associated with one-person experiences, like the old Infocom Games (Zork, forex) or hypertext fiction. “Roleplaying Game” or “RPG” puts too much emphasis on “game”, and not enough on story. He suggested “epic crafting”, which I think is a bit intimidating, and also doesn’t include the multiperson authorship aspect of it. I came up with “Communal fiction” or “CommFic” for short, but he thought the word fiction wasn’t inspirational enough. Ah well, the proper term — catchy without being cheesy, thorough without being erudite — will emerge in due time.

The current Mythic Passages newsletter features an article about author Guy Gavriel Kay. It reminds me very much of an interview I did with Kay myself, The Mythic Heart.

I recall my mother and oldest sister reading The Fionaver Tapestry when I was in my early teens, but I didn’t read it myself then. It was much later, after I had graduated from college and retired from graduate school, that my friend Jane recommended A Song for Arbonne to me. After finishing it, I quickly devoured all the rest of his works available in the public library, and have eagerly anticipated each new book. I should write Jane a letter to say thanks.