Cron’s book sounds a lot like Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling. I haven't read Story Genius and hadn't heard of it till reading this piece. But what Cron refers to as the character’s wound, Storr calls The Sacred Flaw. Now, Storr’s book came out five years after Cron’s, which makes me wonder if he had been influenced by Cron. I have a copy of TSoS, so I should look through the sources and see if he cites her work.
Long comment inbound...It's just, yeah, I took the ending of your piece as creating an occasion for laying some things out, grappling with some thoughts. I'd obviously welcome thoughts, but we're also all busy; the question I'm left with I articulate all the way at the end, so everything else could be skipped to that point.
This was, for me, a clarifying read. I've started multiple projects since I was in my early 20s (I'm now just over 35, so, yeah...) and I've never finished even one of them. One issue I can see now is that, yeah, while I had imagined vividly a number of scenes and characters and whatnot, I hadn't figured out the _specific_ "third rail" of the main character(s), which meant I never knew how the rest of the story had to be unfolded and structured. Because, yeah, the books I've found most compelling (Ender's Game (especially Ender's Game), Brideshead Revisited, even, at least on a communal level, the first two books of Asimov's Foundation trilogy and others) have run on just that. So hey, maybe I can get something done, now...
I do wonder if a certain amount of self-knowledge is necessary/helpful around third rails--and, subsequently, which stories to attack and which to place on the mental back-burner? Like, I've got one story where I think I a) have the third rail sufficiently figured out and b) have enough experience and insight, and have gotten past the relevant life-stages where I can see where things can or should go.
Uh, the following paragraph is just me laying out the story idea around the third rail I think I most get, understand, and can realize. I do love it, and I think it's the one thing I could realize well, but...it is long, and it can very well be skipped for time...
For instance, the one story I have in mind (which I've mentioned to you over in Twitterland, and which I've started multiple times and...never gotten far with) centers around a teenage boy who, on one level, wants nothing more than complete independence while on a deeper level, despite himself, wants--and needs--connection--although his life has so far taught him that he cannot trust anyone. That is his third rail: he's seeking complete independence, but this seeking means fighting his deeper wants and needs--deeper wants and needs those around him, despite what he wants, would meet because love is worth it, and he is loved. (I think: gotta think of this still.) He's the one surviving member of his cohort artificially conceived and heavily modified from conception on for the purposes of meeting intra- and extra-galactic threats; his cohort, including his one friend, was, quite literally, liquidated in their sim pods when implant integration wasn't quite happening rightly; he gets out because he's the one the base pod engineer is able to free. So yeah, he's alive but also not not messed up from the experience of just losing someone like that--and also formed by training that militates against personal connection, and not-quite-right pod integration that kind of impedes the healthiest psychological functioning. The engineer is able to get the kid to a colony of Byzantines (yeah, _a_ form of Christianity survives 5k years in the future; I'm interested in how being Christian in a hyper technologically advanced and interstellar human community, and the sort of society-wide isolation that will entail, would work out) who have a viable plan to flee the Milky Way, which seems like the only pathway open to the MC that doesn't involve premature death. So, we jump ahead a bit, the colony (because, yeah, there's discontent elsewhere, and they have connections and sympathizers in different places) has commandeered one of the faster, more advanced large ships in service and is fleeing toward a stable singularity inside the Milky Way through which an expedition went successfully ~50 years ago. Well, the MC never fit in with that community. They have taken him in, sheltered him, given him food and clothing and care because that's what a Christian does, but they neither trust him nor like him: he's a mod, which is contrary to Church teaching as it's developed and something that makes him a continued existential threat to them (if the MC decided to turn on them, given how his mods give him easy access and use of all contemporary military technology, they would be dead, especially in flight). So, what is the MC doing? Well, he hates the reigning government that they're all fleeing, and government agents would be under orders to kill him anyway if they got him (he's defective), so trying to rejoin them is out, and he also dislikes, looks down on, and wants freedom from, the people around him (while longing to be an actual, integrated member of such a community, which longing he pushes down), so he's hard at work causing trouble, asserting his freedom in various ways, and working on an AI that could replace an entire ship's crew: once they're free and set up somewhere, he could take a ship and go off on his own, completely independent. Well, causing trouble gets the MC locked in his workroom by someone he had gotten to help him on the code of the AI but then a little more than slightly betrayed, and that when the ship they're on is sabotaged as they're beginning their approach to the singularity/wormhole. They can't do anything but abandon ship (there's no time to fix the thing and correct course with a large enough margin of error), so everyone abandons ship while the MC can't get out in time; once he gets the room unlocked, it's either get the ship through the singularity or die. So, he installs the AI, and, with its help, gets through. The MC is subsequently alive but in an entirely different galaxy all by himself. It would then seem like he's achieved his primary goal, but that quickly turns out not to be the case: something happened in that passage through the singularity, and the AI is no longer an AI--or, rather, something has taken its place but influenced by the matter of the AI; it, like the MC, wants connection (it sees the MC as something like a father), but it also refuses to be simply subservient to the whims of the MC--who created it precisely for that purpose. The need to survive, and the problems that arise from being on a severely damaged ship in a completely alien place with things afoot (the expedition that successfully went through ~50 years ago (which we know because they reported back for the first year or so) stopped reporting abruptly not because their gear just broke down), forces things to a crisis, and the MC is able to set aside his longing for independence and allow what he actually most deeply wants and needs to take its place--which results in him becoming an unexpectedly valued member of the community he had been separated from. Or so I am thinking.
Simplification is necessary, but that can happen later. I jive with the MC's third rail because I understand it, understand it pretty deeply. And the genre, science fiction, allows for explorations of human isolation and community that makes sense to me out of my own experiences. (I think I see, now, why I've tended to gravitate towards sci-fi: you have people moving around in the vastness of space, which, on one level, foregrounds the smallness of human beings; it also, through contrast with the vastness and coldness of the greater environ, helps bring out human connection when it happens). I just don't gravitate towards other genres because they aren't the genres--as your piece above helps me see--in which my own personal concerns, which I would explore authentically in authentic writing, find a natural home.
Now, the above story is something I think I could manage because I understand the MC's third rail, and I understand his third rail because I've gotten to a point in life where I understand, through experience and reflection, both the shape that kind of set of desires can take and how life can force a working out of it. That is, I know something of the insights and knowledge I have. I also, like anyone, have my own concerns, and those concerns I've brought to explicitness for myself feed into that kind of story. There are other stories I'd like to write, but, as far as I can tell, my knowledge, experience, etc. does not yet allow me to fashion a robust-enough third rail and guide things toward a satisfying working-out: I would love to write a coming-of-age story about a gay teen from a pretty conservative Catholic homeschooling family moving toward a more authentic existence through a relationship with a Daoist teen who prevents the MC from killing himself on one family vacation in a coastal town (the Daoist kid had fallen for the MC when he saw him the previous year but never saw an opportunity to reach out and meet). But yeah, while I really like the above idea, and while I definitely vibe with it, eh, I can't get very far, and I think that's because I can't see my way toward a fully fleshed-out third rail for the MC, which I think is the case because *I* have not gotten to the point where *I've* passed over the relevant hurdles and reflected on the same enough to see how that could be done. So yeah, I guess that'd be my question: writing stories is a great way to work out personal questions and concerns (and help others do the same), which we do by fashioning characters with sufficiently robust third rails; but we can't really do that terribly well until we've achieved that knowledge, insight, maturity we're maybe groping toward by writing--no?
Cron’s book sounds a lot like Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling. I haven't read Story Genius and hadn't heard of it till reading this piece. But what Cron refers to as the character’s wound, Storr calls The Sacred Flaw. Now, Storr’s book came out five years after Cron’s, which makes me wonder if he had been influenced by Cron. I have a copy of TSoS, so I should look through the sources and see if he cites her work.
Interesting read. Thank you.
Long comment inbound...It's just, yeah, I took the ending of your piece as creating an occasion for laying some things out, grappling with some thoughts. I'd obviously welcome thoughts, but we're also all busy; the question I'm left with I articulate all the way at the end, so everything else could be skipped to that point.
This was, for me, a clarifying read. I've started multiple projects since I was in my early 20s (I'm now just over 35, so, yeah...) and I've never finished even one of them. One issue I can see now is that, yeah, while I had imagined vividly a number of scenes and characters and whatnot, I hadn't figured out the _specific_ "third rail" of the main character(s), which meant I never knew how the rest of the story had to be unfolded and structured. Because, yeah, the books I've found most compelling (Ender's Game (especially Ender's Game), Brideshead Revisited, even, at least on a communal level, the first two books of Asimov's Foundation trilogy and others) have run on just that. So hey, maybe I can get something done, now...
I do wonder if a certain amount of self-knowledge is necessary/helpful around third rails--and, subsequently, which stories to attack and which to place on the mental back-burner? Like, I've got one story where I think I a) have the third rail sufficiently figured out and b) have enough experience and insight, and have gotten past the relevant life-stages where I can see where things can or should go.
Uh, the following paragraph is just me laying out the story idea around the third rail I think I most get, understand, and can realize. I do love it, and I think it's the one thing I could realize well, but...it is long, and it can very well be skipped for time...
For instance, the one story I have in mind (which I've mentioned to you over in Twitterland, and which I've started multiple times and...never gotten far with) centers around a teenage boy who, on one level, wants nothing more than complete independence while on a deeper level, despite himself, wants--and needs--connection--although his life has so far taught him that he cannot trust anyone. That is his third rail: he's seeking complete independence, but this seeking means fighting his deeper wants and needs--deeper wants and needs those around him, despite what he wants, would meet because love is worth it, and he is loved. (I think: gotta think of this still.) He's the one surviving member of his cohort artificially conceived and heavily modified from conception on for the purposes of meeting intra- and extra-galactic threats; his cohort, including his one friend, was, quite literally, liquidated in their sim pods when implant integration wasn't quite happening rightly; he gets out because he's the one the base pod engineer is able to free. So yeah, he's alive but also not not messed up from the experience of just losing someone like that--and also formed by training that militates against personal connection, and not-quite-right pod integration that kind of impedes the healthiest psychological functioning. The engineer is able to get the kid to a colony of Byzantines (yeah, _a_ form of Christianity survives 5k years in the future; I'm interested in how being Christian in a hyper technologically advanced and interstellar human community, and the sort of society-wide isolation that will entail, would work out) who have a viable plan to flee the Milky Way, which seems like the only pathway open to the MC that doesn't involve premature death. So, we jump ahead a bit, the colony (because, yeah, there's discontent elsewhere, and they have connections and sympathizers in different places) has commandeered one of the faster, more advanced large ships in service and is fleeing toward a stable singularity inside the Milky Way through which an expedition went successfully ~50 years ago. Well, the MC never fit in with that community. They have taken him in, sheltered him, given him food and clothing and care because that's what a Christian does, but they neither trust him nor like him: he's a mod, which is contrary to Church teaching as it's developed and something that makes him a continued existential threat to them (if the MC decided to turn on them, given how his mods give him easy access and use of all contemporary military technology, they would be dead, especially in flight). So, what is the MC doing? Well, he hates the reigning government that they're all fleeing, and government agents would be under orders to kill him anyway if they got him (he's defective), so trying to rejoin them is out, and he also dislikes, looks down on, and wants freedom from, the people around him (while longing to be an actual, integrated member of such a community, which longing he pushes down), so he's hard at work causing trouble, asserting his freedom in various ways, and working on an AI that could replace an entire ship's crew: once they're free and set up somewhere, he could take a ship and go off on his own, completely independent. Well, causing trouble gets the MC locked in his workroom by someone he had gotten to help him on the code of the AI but then a little more than slightly betrayed, and that when the ship they're on is sabotaged as they're beginning their approach to the singularity/wormhole. They can't do anything but abandon ship (there's no time to fix the thing and correct course with a large enough margin of error), so everyone abandons ship while the MC can't get out in time; once he gets the room unlocked, it's either get the ship through the singularity or die. So, he installs the AI, and, with its help, gets through. The MC is subsequently alive but in an entirely different galaxy all by himself. It would then seem like he's achieved his primary goal, but that quickly turns out not to be the case: something happened in that passage through the singularity, and the AI is no longer an AI--or, rather, something has taken its place but influenced by the matter of the AI; it, like the MC, wants connection (it sees the MC as something like a father), but it also refuses to be simply subservient to the whims of the MC--who created it precisely for that purpose. The need to survive, and the problems that arise from being on a severely damaged ship in a completely alien place with things afoot (the expedition that successfully went through ~50 years ago (which we know because they reported back for the first year or so) stopped reporting abruptly not because their gear just broke down), forces things to a crisis, and the MC is able to set aside his longing for independence and allow what he actually most deeply wants and needs to take its place--which results in him becoming an unexpectedly valued member of the community he had been separated from. Or so I am thinking.
Simplification is necessary, but that can happen later. I jive with the MC's third rail because I understand it, understand it pretty deeply. And the genre, science fiction, allows for explorations of human isolation and community that makes sense to me out of my own experiences. (I think I see, now, why I've tended to gravitate towards sci-fi: you have people moving around in the vastness of space, which, on one level, foregrounds the smallness of human beings; it also, through contrast with the vastness and coldness of the greater environ, helps bring out human connection when it happens). I just don't gravitate towards other genres because they aren't the genres--as your piece above helps me see--in which my own personal concerns, which I would explore authentically in authentic writing, find a natural home.
Now, the above story is something I think I could manage because I understand the MC's third rail, and I understand his third rail because I've gotten to a point in life where I understand, through experience and reflection, both the shape that kind of set of desires can take and how life can force a working out of it. That is, I know something of the insights and knowledge I have. I also, like anyone, have my own concerns, and those concerns I've brought to explicitness for myself feed into that kind of story. There are other stories I'd like to write, but, as far as I can tell, my knowledge, experience, etc. does not yet allow me to fashion a robust-enough third rail and guide things toward a satisfying working-out: I would love to write a coming-of-age story about a gay teen from a pretty conservative Catholic homeschooling family moving toward a more authentic existence through a relationship with a Daoist teen who prevents the MC from killing himself on one family vacation in a coastal town (the Daoist kid had fallen for the MC when he saw him the previous year but never saw an opportunity to reach out and meet). But yeah, while I really like the above idea, and while I definitely vibe with it, eh, I can't get very far, and I think that's because I can't see my way toward a fully fleshed-out third rail for the MC, which I think is the case because *I* have not gotten to the point where *I've* passed over the relevant hurdles and reflected on the same enough to see how that could be done. So yeah, I guess that'd be my question: writing stories is a great way to work out personal questions and concerns (and help others do the same), which we do by fashioning characters with sufficiently robust third rails; but we can't really do that terribly well until we've achieved that knowledge, insight, maturity we're maybe groping toward by writing--no?