{"id":393,"date":"2005-06-01T14:36:46","date_gmt":"2005-06-01T19:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/creator\/2005\/06\/01\/393\/"},"modified":"2005-06-01T14:36:46","modified_gmt":"2005-06-01T19:36:46","slug":"393","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/2005\/06\/01\/393\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

I stated in an Anacrusis LJ feed comment-thread, last week, that Memento<\/a> had more structural influence on my writing than basically anything ever. I realized later that that’s not exactly true; it did have a lot of influence, but before I saw Memento I was reading Margaret Atwood. Cat’s Eye<\/a>, The Blind Assassin<\/a>, Oryx and Crake<\/a> and Lady Oracle<\/a> are all shuffle-structured books, although they tend to start at middle \/ beginning and finish at end \/ middle (whereas Memento starts at the beginning \/ end and ends at middle \/ middle). Orson Scott Card does a lot of shuffling within the corpus of The Worthing Saga<\/a>, too; I actually read that in high school, so I guess it was really my first exposure to the style.<\/p>\n

Of course, that’s omitting the randomly jumbled reruns of cartoons I watched as a kid, which seemed to come from different seasons at random–not that Thundercats drove a terribly epic tale, but the cast (to my perception) did expand and shrink on a daily basis. They weren’t doing it on purpose, though.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure what single factor determines my fascination with these stories. My borderline ADD is certainly involved, which doesn’t imply a negative context: there’s something important and powerful about screwing with linearity, about building a narrative out of noncontiguous events. It makes individual elements of a story stronger, for one thing; there’s no room for laziness when every page has to give you something to take back to the larger structure. (Note that this is also one of the big reasons I like word-count fiction so much.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I stated in an Anacrusis LJ feed comment-thread, last week, that Memento had more structural influence on my writing than basically anything ever. I realized later that that’s not exactly true; it did have a lot of influence, but before I saw Memento I was reading Margaret Atwood. Cat’s Eye, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,25,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-connections","category-obsessions","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}