The title of this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because if anything, my first supervision meeting pushed me to consider my project from a big-picture perspective — to articulate its themes and throughlines as I’m currently envisioning it — in a way that I haven’t done recently. But, on the more practical side, my supervisor Jane also encouraged me to start thinking of it not just as a story (which, given my experience and inclinations, tends to default to a novel), but rather as a story of 9,000 words, and to use that as a lens for clarifying and narrowing in on the aspects I’m truly interested in. To that end, two noteworthy shifts in my thinking arose.
First, Jane pointed out that my initial idea included two mechanisms for exploring evolution and instability of stories: the “natural” evolution that occurs over years and generations, and the far more acute “artificial” evolution (or damage) caused by the worm. To simplify, I’ve decided to make a few interlinked changes:
- As the piece is set in a heavily digitized future, I will clarify from the outset that people have come to believe that stories can and should remain static; the technology exists to record them with perfect precision, and preserve authoritative versions indefinitely.
- Against this backdrop, my young scholar will encounter a story in digital form (some version of the stone + moon story); they’ll remember hearing and being fascinated by the story as a young childhood — but the version they remember is different. They’ll have to grapple for the first time with the fact that stories are not static.
- The scholar will quickly realize that the changes to the story were caused by the worm, and that the worm is continuing to change and remove pieces of the story. Desperate to preserve what remains, the scholar will make the hasty decision to hybridize with AI…
Then the rest of the story will play out similarly to how I’d envisioned it, but over a condensed timeline of only a few weeks or months, rather than multiple human lifespans.
These changes will not only remove the duplicate thematic devices, but will also make the piece more suited to the YA audience: the fast timeline and hasty judgments will make the entire story feel like one contained, very heightened sequence, with a greater sense of immediacy, while keeping the scholar as an actual young person (rather than a hundreds-of-years-old person in a young body) will be truer to the spirit of a young protagonist. Jane also pointed out that, in a way, interactive fiction emphasizes the present moment, the sense of “now and now and now and…,” so these changes will better align with that.
The second area where we discussed making changes was in the interactive elements. Jane suggested giving the reader the option of aligning themself with the worm, rather than the scholar, through the interactive choices they make — for instance, giving them the option of choosing sections of the story to delete. She also brought up the significance of threes in western storytelling, and I wondered if giving the reader three alignments to choose from would add a resonance to the experience, paralleling the stone + moon story. Beyond the scholar and the worm, I’m not sure what the third possible alignment would be; perhaps it could be no alignment at all, which is to say, conscious refusal to engage in the story’s structures of identification, technological relationships, creation, and destruction. In this case, I would want the “no alignment” choice to be a real choice and explicitly marked as such, rather than simply a default that’s easy for readers to fall into without realizing they’ve made a choice. Jane encouraged me to consider all potential interactive options through the lens of how they support the themes and how they invite readers into the story; I do think this option would link nicely with my themes, but I’m not sure yet if it will make for a satisfying reading experience. I also want to avoid making it feel too much like a video game, where readers choose a character to “play” as — which is not to say that I want to discourage play, or choice, but just that I don’t want the choice to dictate their entire experience of the story, how they identify with it, and through what lens they view it. Perhaps making it an ongoing choice where the reader can freely play with all three alignments is one way to address this.
(Tangentially, on the topic of threes, I’m also wondering if including three modes of interactivity, or three main decision points, would be another way of incorporating this motif.)
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