Quantum Storytelling

Every story needs a frame of reference. You can write a story told from the perspective of an ant-like alien creature on a far away planet that resembles nothing like our own, but if you can’t find a frame of reference through the familiar, it will hard for people to engage your story.

So what if you do have an ant-like alien creature on a far away planet that doesn’t resemble anything we know?

You do what Pixar does. You anthropomorphize. Surely your alien has hopes and dreams, or wants something tangible enough that a human could understand it? Unless the alien is meant to scare, be a villain, or represent the unknown — but that’s another case entirely. If that’s the case, clearly your alien society is not the frame of reference.

I’m talking about getting your audience to bond with some element of your story. This is harder with genres like sci-fi and fantasy, because in our attempt to be original we create wacky worlds and concepts that make sense to us because we created them, but to the reader may make no sense at all.

Making sense and meaning are the two most important goals to writers. At least they are to me. If the audience doesn’t understand my story or can’t embrace it because the concepts are too far out, then I’ve failed.

It doesn’t mean you can’t do something crazy, just that you have to build a bridge to the familiar. You need a frame of reference, a reference point, some kind of common ground.

Vampire stories work because the mythology of vampires is often layered underneath our everyday reality. A lone man or woman stumbles out of a bar, or a club, on his or her way to their car or to meet some friends. As they pass a dark alley, a vampire comes out of the shadows to feed.

A vampire feeding on nameless faceless victims in the white void prison of THX-1138 makes no sense. It lacks context. What makes the vampire attack meaningful or frightful is because it happens to someone who is going about their ordinary life. This ordinary life, this ordinary world, is a frame of reference through use of the familiar.

Harry Potter is a stronger franchise of books because it takes place in our modern everyday world, and not say, the middle ages.

Likewise if you set a story in the middle ages you need to work extra hard to get a modern audience to understand and embrace that world. This is often why we see mud-caked peasants chasing pigs or wrestling with a basket of crops. Poverty. Strife. These are things universal which we understand whether this is 1200 or 2007.

The most troublesome kind of story is something I call, for lack of a better term, a “dream story.” Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Vanilla Sky, even the much-reviled MTV flash in the pan, The Cell.

These stories are troublesome because they involve dreams, dream-like states, or death and the afterlife. Eternal Sunshine and Vanilla Sky work for me because you get plenty of glimpses of the ordinary world before things go off the rails for the protagonists. The early glimpses of the ordinary world are exactly what roots the audience when things do go off the rails.

What’s troubling about a story like Neil Gaiman’s Mirror Mask, is the ordinary world presented at the beginning is the life of a circus family. They live an extraordinary lifestyle, and the teenage daughter just wants to be normal.

While a teenage girl’s desire to be normal is something we can easily understand, living life as part of a circus isn’t. None of us know what it’s like to live in a circus, and although the story attempts to give us a glimpse of that lifestyle, we’re just getting used to the idea when the story enters dream land and goes completely off the rails.

No sooner have we established a frame of reference, than the story launches us into a disjointed, nonsensical MTV video.

I use these films as examples because they have an advantage that written stories don’t — they have visuals to provide for everything that needs imagining. But they still are in danger of losing the audience.

That’s even more reason to include a frame of reference in a script or a novel. If you’ve done your job well, the person reading should be able to visualize your story because you’ve written it in a visually descriptive way. But that will not communicate a frame of reference where there is none.

Accurately describing something foreign doesn’t make it less foreign. It just makes the foreign element well described. If the concept itself is unintuitive or unknowable to the reader then it doesn’t matter how much you describe it.

Yet, we all know what a pencil is. We all know what a car is. We all know what an ordinary street in an ordinary neighborhood looks like — given the rough approximation of normality.

We know what a suburb looks like, with its perfect lawns and metaphorical or non-metaphorical white-picket fences. It is the Platonic idealization of middle class perfection. This is something that most of us can understand, just as we can understand what a slum might look like, etc.

What’s easy for us sci-fi and fantasy writers to forget, is that these shortcuts serve as an excellent frame of reference to the unique and outlandish.

Do not assume the reader will be engaged in your alien universe, just because you are. In the aspiration to be original, don’t forget your frame of reference to the familiar.