Day: May 19, 2007

Maybe set up a situation–someone walks into a room where someone is dead in a kitchen chair at the table–and generate what might happen next if the character is a detective, or if the character is a twenty-two year old governess who thinks of herself as plain, or if the character is a psychopathic killer, or if the character is a child. I’m very interested in the conventions we have established and in what reader expectations are in these situations, and how we deal with reader expectations. I think that a lot of plot is a tightrope walk between the cliche and the completely unexpected.

The strange side effect of today’s meta-stories is that kids get exposed to the parodies before, or instead of, the originals. My two sons (ages 2 and 5) love The Three Pigs, a storybook by David Wiesner in which the pigs escape the big bad wolf by physically fleeing their story (they fold a page into a paper airplane to fly off in). It’s a gorgeous, fanciful book. It’s also a kind of recursive meta-fiction that I didn’t encounter before reading John Barth in college. Someday the kids will read the original tale and wonder why the stupid straw-house pig doesn’t just hop onto the next bookshelf.

These days, a television tuned to a dead channel is blue: clear skies as far as the eye can see. Our parents lived without faith in machines. We never had the chance.