Fractales: the ending (and rules)

Flora held the Critter Keeper up to her eyes, shook the cage, and clucked softly. “Li’l feller’s kinda cute.”

“Not a chance,” said Bob. He peeled back the foil from his Big Mac and polished off the burger in five bites.

In the Critter Keeper, only a pink smudge remained.

“You can try again,” said Flora.

He patted his hands against his belly. “Yeah, better luck next time. So, Skinny — how would you like to make love to a fat man?”

Her mouth twitched into a smile. “You mean it?”

“I’ve been itching to see you in that Cat Woman outfit for the last three weeks.”

“You got a deal, Doughboy,” Flora said, and plastered him with sloppy kisses.

In case anyone’s curious, these are the last 119 words of my short story “Sprouts,” which hasn’t sold, and is currently not out for consideration. I reserve the right to publish my own version of the story, which I completed in February 2005.

1. Read the whole story chain before deciding how you wish to continue the story backwards.

2. Write however many words you please describing what happens before this snippet. I recommend 150 words or less.

3. Post your contribution on your blog. At the end of your contribution, write “Read what happens next!” (or something similar) and hyperlink it to this blog entry.

4. Cut and paste these rules to the end of your blog entry. It’s that easy!

For those of you who are coming on board at the very beginning, rule #1 is irrelevant. If you’ve read this far, you’ve read the whole story.

You’ll notice I’m not tagging anyone, nor am I giving you a “tag so-many people” rule. If this is a crappy idea, I’d like it to die a natural death, without me flogging it along. Besides, if other folks think this idea is fun, it should take off on its own power — like the blonde joke.

Ready, set, go!

D.

Fractales: here’s the idea.

Image produced using DavW’s fractal tree generator — cool toy!

Remember that dumb blonde joke? It led me to realize the power of the internet*. As blog memes go, the blonde joke possessed humor, originality, and minimal sting to its host — all you had to do was post a bloody link, for heaven’s sake, and rave about the joke. Easy**. Consequently, like any catchy meme, it spread like wildfire.

But what did that meme produce? A single joke. I thought: you know, with a little extra effort, we might have had our own version of the Aristocrats gag, but it wouldn’t have been one joke — it would have been hundreds of them. Thousands.

What we ought to do is tell a story. Tell a million of ’em. It will be just like a story chain, only we need to start at the end, not the beginning. If you think about that fractal tree image, you’ll see the logic in this, since folks will want to follow the story forwards, not backwards. If we (the writers) work backwards, your audience will get to read the story forwards.

Of course, some of them will want to add to the story, and they will do so by continuing the backwards writing process.

I’m going to call this a fractale. Catchy, eh?*** This meme may die a cold, lonely death, but what do we have to lose? Go on, do it! Leave your mark on the tree.

Above, I will post the end of the story and the rules of the game. The rest is up to you.

D.

*No, really. Why must you always assume I’m joking?

**Not like some memes that ask you to name one hundred things you want to do before you die, your one hundred most favoritest songs, and so forth. “Item 99: I would like to finish this meme before I die.”

***A cursory google tells me that ‘fractale’ is French for ‘fractal.’ I don’t see anyone else using the term in this fashion.

Sheila gets medieval on my . . .

Blog. What did you think I was going to say?

Thanks to PBW’s liberal use of pliers and a blow torch, I hunkered down and did a good bit of editing today. I’m one chapter away from finishing the edit on book one, but that sounds like I’m closer than I really am.

I still have the task of turning this into a stand-alone novel. That means either adding scenes or tweaking scenes to give book one at least a partial sense of closure. And that means finding resonance at every opportunity, and loading it into my final chapters.

In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein devotes a whole chapter to resonance. He doesn’t provide much of a definition:

Resonance is a term borrowed from the world of music, where it means a prolonged response attributable to vibration. In writing it has come to mean an aura of significance beyond the components of a story.

Stein gives examples of different ways of giving your work resonance:

. . . by names, by reference to religious sources, by naming the parts of a book, by the use of aphorisms and epigraphs, and ideally by the writing itself, by the writer’s skillful use of similes and metaphors.

Perhaps I’m using the term incorrectly, but for me, resonance is an echo. Something in the novel makes me resonate — perhaps by the techniques Stein lists, but more often through the author’s use of repetition. Thoughts, dreams, lines of dialogue, and imagery introduced in the novel’s earliest scenes reappear near the end, horribly, tragically altered*. For example, John le Carre used it to great effect in Absolute Friends.

In the chapter I edited today (book one’s penultimate chapter), I used a myth to achieve resonance (I hope). The night is a dome of blinding white light, but we see only darkness, for the sky is full of the shadows of those who came before us. Starlight peeks through between their crowded forms.

Only on a moonless, windless night, can you hear their wings rustling**. My character has heard this all his life from his mother and father, but he never believed it. When tragedy befalls him, everything changes:

Flying eastwards, he fought to keep his eyes open. Every time he closed them, the rustling noise built to a furious crescendo.

Mother, Father? I hear them now. I hear their wings.

You were wrong about the night sky. Any darkness will do.

Chokes me up every time. Remains to be seen what it will do to the rest of you.

Resonance by repetition may be a magic trick, but it’s charged with power. Closure by return. If I do a respectable job of it, my readers will feel that sense of completeness even when faced with one whopping great cliffhanger.

D.

*That assumes you are writing tragedy. Comedy need not work so hard, but those of you who read Terry Pratchett might agree with me that his strongest novels are the ones which harbor, if not a grain of tragedy, then at least a bushel of poignancy: Night Watch, Feet of Clay . . .

**These characters are intelligent black birds. Guess I should have mentioned that earlier, eh?