Now that the 'story' has been told, I can take you behind the scenes and explain what I was going for here. It may not make your jaw drop, but maybe a little insight will reveal that I wasn't just trying to avoid boredom; There was a message or two in this, after all.
At this point, if you haven't read the entire story, you really need to do so if you want this to make any sense. Here are the posts, in order:
- River of tears
- River of Honey
- The Trash Barge
- Writing All Wrongs
- Heart it Races
- Full Disclosure (non-fictional interlude)
- Knock, Knock, Knock (written by Jia W.)
- The source of the Nile (written by Mark M.)
As it turns out, at least in the meta-sense, this story was extremely present-tense. Throughout each post, typically any true event listed had actually occurred between the time of the previous post and the creation of a new one. In this way, you actually were viewing my life through a kaliedoscope for the last week and a half or so.
Because of this, all the ideas were fresh and unfiltered, which gives the story the unsettling realism that many people have commented on and at least a few have been fooled by. I wrote the first post originally without any disclaimers beyond a 'fiction' tag, which did result in a couple apologetic emails being sent, me being a bit embarrassed and not realizing how I probably tugged on some heartstrings by accident.
At the time of writing River of tears, I didn't have the idea for a continuous series in mind. I mostly thought that maybe I'd write stuff like that from time to time, in a LiveJournal style fashion to entertain folks. The idea was that drama like that *is* interesting, but it's usually quite unpleasant to look at when it involves real emotions. I figured, I could give people a glimpse of a train wreck without making them feel guilty for taking a macabre interest in the blood, guts, and burning bodies.
Ironically, fooling a few folks is what made me realized maybe there was something deeper here. The second post, River of Honey, was clearly marked fiction, but only at the end. My idea here was that everyone would have to remember the famous saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me"
Surprisingly enough, I did manage to fool some folks twice. This is when I started talking to my friends about maybe expanding the story to prove a point, which I hazily described as a desire to gut-punch the LJX readers until they gasped for an air of truth. Though the sentiments were generally similar among friends, Mark's words of caution stood out the most.
"People tend to believe they own their interactions with people"
Being me, my response was something similar to:
"Fuck them, that's not true. People own their reactions"
With this in mind, the actual motivation behind the LJX project was born. The goal was simple: to make the story mix enough reality and fiction so as to be impervious to analysis. It feels like human nature to try to rationalize other people's feelings and thoughts. It is all too tempting to take something that is said by someone you know and say "Oh, even though she said this, I know this is what she must really be feeling." Though that may feel like the natural approach, this is what permits us to apply our own ego to a situation and come up with a reaction that is appropriate for what *we* conceive the problem to be. My goal with LJX was to create a scenario in which it would be difficult to follow this common social dynamic.
My friends seemed sure that it'd be tough to get anyone to really trust me that any particular event had occurred in the remaining parts of the series, and they had an easy time convincing me of this. Instead, I chose to set up a believable tone, which was that this whole story was some sort of calling out from me, expressing my deep concern for an increasingly chaotic, even delusional, frame of mind. Whether people bought this or not, I think it was at least plausible, and that the effect was sufficient to keep people guessing.
The fourth post, Writing All Wrongs, managed to set this hook in deep. While the previous three posts had been romantic, this post broke down into some highly meta, highly self-doubting commentary. At this point, I realized that this was probably the climax of the work, and wished to put together 3 more posts so that there would be a nice symmetry and then kill the story off.
The fifth post, I had trouble coming up with a topic. I finally asked Jia, who some of you will know (through the kaleidoscope) as Bertha by now, and she told me Valentines Day. This brings us to the point where I got myself into hot water. Though I had been keeping Jia in the loop about this whole thing, and she seemed to be taking it in stride, this "Heart It Races" post I guess succeeded in the gut-punch effect I was going for, but on the wrong person.
We talked about this a lot, and I finally got around to explaining to her what I'm explaining now, which is the motivation for this whole project. Though I'm not quite sure it fixed the problem, giving her a clear sense of what I was doing and allowed her to at least tolerate my strange behaviour. Right now, you might be wondering to what extent this thing was a secret love letter to Jia, held out in the public for all to see. Anyway, Fuck all y'all who want to know that, one thing I'm glad about is now that LJX is finally done, I can keep parts of my reality private, where they belong. :)
However, I couldn't have the lead supporting character in this story fall out from under me, leaving me with nothing but a sad ending, so I asked Jia to write the 6th post. With this kind of arrangement, I knew for sure that I couldn't be blamed for anything sounding too real, or awkward. Without revealing too much, I was pleasantly surprised that she kept the theme of romance.
The original plan was that she'd send me a rough sketch of a post, and that I'd 'voice' it to make it more believable. However, after reading what she wrote, I decided to run it unedited. I thought the juxtapose was wonderful. I'm not sure what the reader's reaction was like, if you've been following this work, please share your thoughts. Nevertheless, I thought it was great to have a subtle shift in POV, which at least in my mind, forces the reader to completely and utterly give up on trying to 'figure me out' through this work. This red herring was a great set up for the final trick, which was to bring Mark into the picture.
Mark is my Go teacher, which somehow makes him my life coach as of late, whether or not he likes it. However, he was in an ideal position to serve as a quasi-independent observer, because he knows both about the goings on in my real life as well as this fictionalized account of it. His last post is a beautiful mockery of the whole thing, managing to continue to use bits of my real experiences and mash them up with other crap and a lot of sarcastic and ironic humor that shows the true spirit of this project.
Now I must admit, I highly doubt I've reached the lofty goal of totally changing your perception of the world. However, if you've gone through this whole thing, I bet you've felt *something*, and that's probably good enough. This was, first and foremost, an attempt at a 'nerd love story' in which the story itself is one big hacking problem. If it manages to make you think about the way you react to events in other people's lives that you witness, then I've really gotten more than I bargained for.
Thanks so much to Mark, Jia, and the several folks who have been giving me tips and ideas as they've read along. I'm actually glad most of that discussion went on outside of this blog, as it added to the shock factor in a number of places, or at least, so I hope.
Now that the story is over, Meta-Metta will now resume its regularly scheduled program of less whimsical persuits.
1 comments:
an interesting real life, i think...
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