Time Travel: Doesn't Have to be a Paradox

I have one blog tag under the subject 'time travel' so I may be rehashing some things I brought up before, but I'm fairly certain that one mostly covered its introduction in the UnQuadrilogy. Although I want to assume this is going to be going in a different direction.

Let's start off by my admittance that I wouldn't claim to be deep in the logic holes of time travel as a possibility or not. I rather like the concept of a multiverse, a sort of tragic twist to the Quantum Leap idea where you might be able to return to a version of your world CLOSE to the one you leapt from, but it's very likely that the pioneers of 'time travel' will never truly get to dial into their EXACT point of departure ever again. Not enough to create a gaping butterfly effect in what you knew, but it would be a thorn in the paw sort of difference-- if everything seems right, but your brown-eyed sister is blue-eyed instead. It would either be something you could reconcile with or you'd always wonder if the people you'd really left behind were mourning somewhere.

There are so many emotional aspects to the logical that there's hardly a reason to feel constrained by any logic string you build from. It might be interesting to dive into conspiracy or sci-fi forums dedicated to mulling it over or it might be a little too deep-web for some people. If you wanted to wing it a bit, I could see it very well developing somewhere in between the branches of a character tree and the stacking of a timeline format. If that sounds confusing, let's just use the conceptual vocabulary here. Time travel, as a character, is essentially a choose-your-own-adventure build. From each possibility that exists, they would be a set of consequences. Some people find the sheer amount of choices staggering, so to make it simpler to you, I might suggest maybe drawing up 3-4 scenarios to outline. Keep in mind, each of these would branch to represent a direction you want the affected characters to develop in. This would keep it from feeling too rigid, but if you accept that it would be pretty tough for anyone to follow your exact creative logic, then you might have a single path already carved out with a distant second to represent another choice they didn't take (the presence of a doubt for a path they might have chosen).

Coders are probably following me well enough but I'll give you a choice tree picture to better illustrate the verbiage here.

Yes, you've probably seen funny memes just like this on social media, actually...

So, don't be confused by this, which resembles an asset map for a rigged 3D model in animation. You really don't need to read it to understand the concept of an organized planning tree.

The first example is the simplest- a sort of yes/no binary whereas the second contains branches that connect many assets, more along the lines of a choose your own adventure book. I say this because if you were trying for 'all of the endings', you sometimes noticed how you'd arrive at the same path when you diverged at some point before. It might have been mildly frustrating to reread it, but you could at least note that you were finishing the two possible choices in that scenario at least and if you ran into a third time? Time to start over or backtrack, right?

Assume your time travel does not have the luxury of flipping back like turning a page (although the movie Butterfly Effect did illustrate how you might think you were doing so just to make it increasingly worse and alien). Are there certain conditions to be met to proceed? Blue key for the blue door? Okay, that was patronizing since I know everyone can do better plotting than that (although let's never rule that out in a comedic satire). 

In Quantum Leap, Sam had to fulfill the purpose of the body he leapt into until Al could figure out where he was going next. It was largely comedic but there was an emotional element in that each connection with these human beings seemed to disconnect him further from who he actually was and returning to himself whole seemed slimmer. Some of the people he became were pure and even weak in a way he'd never had to deal with as himself (and yes, I do mean women because historically and even now, we're not exactly in a place to overpower men physically) and some were morally bankrupt, which gave him the troubled conscience of whether he should or could help them at all at what cost to himself.

I loved that that show could dive into deep emotional aspects, in a way that female writers might tackle it as well-- a mix of action, comedy and emotion that was neither too masculine or feminine, simply the human struggle. However, rather than fangirl all over it, we'll move on.

Once you use a sort of tree to map the developmental aspect, you can move into a more linear assortment to choose the path, rather than strictly a chronology as you would with a normal timeline. This is more to map the path of your story, but if you want to mark specific departures, then stacking time lines to mark those as 'scenes' would work too. You get the benefit of the linear path with the flexibility of multiple branches.

Again, a purely visual example of the explanation.

Some people can get away with mostly verbal trees but if you know your way around design programs or spreadsheets, you can generate the given examples with little hassle. Table it or even go the style-sheet route-- these aids for complex ideas are for YOU to navigate optimally so they don't really have to make much sense to anyone else if they work for you.

And yes-- NaNoWriMo is around the corner, so I'm doing a bit of this planning myself while working on UnSung. I'd probably be further on it, but I like to use these blog breaks to ruminate on the creative processes I'm using. About 6K shy of 200K! I'm hoping to pop the 200K mark by the end of the week or blast well past it.

For my fellow stat geeks though...

Ha, I'm clearly not very 'professional', jumping around like this, but who can resist sticking it to every fuckstick manager that ever accused me of that?

You'll run into contradictions here and there. You might need a helpful nerd or two to dig through your blind spots. Some might be rigid pains-in-the-ass and hate your logic, but it's still good practice to be thankful for being critical or passionate enough to irritate you and go with your gut if you are ever more certain that's what you want for your story. If you're rejecting EVERY suggestion, you are very likely wasting the point of having anyone look at it at all. Be honest with yourself beforehand-- were you just hoping they'd worship your ideas or were you really open to having it picked apart and tested?

That's a decent chunk to let you mull over. If you feel confident I might be able to help you, feel free to request some of my time. I can't promise I can be immediately available but I am sincere about helping when I can.

To finish, as promised, I'm digging out Dinsch's hair/eye color for today's color-porn fun. This one might be a little challenging because of it's deceptive simplicity. The white I chose is actually a very light shade of green, making it a tad cooler than a cream with its yellow-orange base. Why did I want a green-tinted white? The natural complement of a red is a green! Although true red and green are nauseating (I like forest green/burgundy for the Christmas season), you can definitely get the right complements for them with saturation and hue adjustments. As for the red, rather than roll this one around, I took to the HTML preset of firebrick, a bright red reminiscent of fleshly oxidized blood, which is essentially what unpigmented red eyes get their color from. Ocular fluid being clear would only reflect light to give it a brighter base color.

Like most albinos, they aren't naturally adapted to blend and even in community-minded animals, they are generally regarded in the same vein as the old or sick-- the ones that must sometimes be sacrificed to preserve the stronger ones. Rabbits may choose to join burrows to create a warren but don't exactly prefer to be communal. They're just the hippies of the animal world and are just okay with it. When threatened, it's every rabbit for itself.

However, Bryfolk are neither human nor rabbit and their identity is not solely one of their animal ancestors' instincts anymore than humans are bound to a general mindset. Bryfolk tend to embrace communal living and are very social, libertines with relaxed social interactions though tensed for flight at signs of danger.

Next post: Ashe. He's a human character, one of the last remaining survivors of his tattooed tribe. His history is one of the grittiest and tragic, but I'll go into that a bit more then.

Do you use any animal hybrid themes in your writing? It can be a very niche one. I actually find it laughable that people could watch Shape of Water and think 'bestiality' to be honest. Like anything different from our little niche of hairless monkey is somehow less-than or wildly different. While I'm personally not into the furrier side of the spectrum (I still prefer to hybridize the face and body as more human in order to justify the human lifespan and stabilize the addition of animal characteristics), I wouldn't see something that structurally human and assume that they weren't more like us than animals. The entire point of the movie, communicated through Elisa herself, was that she could relate to 'the asset', being treated as stupid or lesser simply for being mute. It was also clear that, not socialized, he had wild aspects as well, but again, not different from an isolated human.

This was actually reaffirming towards my own logic of humans that might have grown from something other than monkeys. I specifically use rabbits, birds, big cats, and foxes in my series. Since they evolved very specifically into separate humanoid races/identities, going crazy with dog/wolf, reptile, etc. might have needed many, many more books to integrate.

In any case, if you'd like to share your own human-animal combinations (and yes, dragonkin count), feel free to comment below! Totally understand the hesitation to divulge on a current work, but you can nod your head and name your combo at least. Thanks for reading!

Confession

While it's probably not a writerly thing to do, I want to make a confession. I say it's not very writerly because it's supposedly bad form to give people a potential bias against your work. However, I think examination is more valuable than preserving a reputation so I'm going for it.

I mean, it's not THAT bad...

Characters are not my favorite part of reading and it's my weakest part of writing.

No! I don't listen to gate-keepers!

Before you think I'm saying my characters suck and I should crawl off to a nice boring non-fiction, hear me out. I wouldn't say I'm bad at it. I love observing people and talking to people, but making characters is to my love of storytelling as social media is to actual human interaction. It can be thrilling, it can be emotional, but it just doesn't quite hit the same high feels of a real social interaction. It's the equivalent of a 'you had to be there' or trying to recall nostalgia in a photograph. It can be a great high, reading or writing something great but it's also not a substitute or better. Different, more like.

Story telling and world building is where I get my fix. I'm not going to pretend it's a unique concept. In fact, writers like Tolkien put most of us to shame. I'm not quite dedicated to the point of creating my own language or thousands of years of elfy, dwarfy history but I love the connections and I love the trees. I'm not obsessed with maps but I have a few crude sketches and know my elbow from my asshole.

Prove it? You don't see me trying to lick my asshole, do you?

The trees though... I love how things seemingly unrelated connect. I love seeing old branches spring forth with new buds. I even love when spiders tangle the hopeful new leaves with gossamer and choke them.

At some point, I realized I just don't bear the same confidence with characters. Not for lack of knowledge or authenticity or interest, but more because I kind of just winged it the first time I was able to write anything longer than a college thesis.

Yeah, I remember what my college thesis was about! It was about--

But I wondered if this was really that authentic. I'd over-written characters in the past and lost my way. Namely, I'd written them in so much detail that they just wouldn't fit the story anymore and I wasn't quite patient enough to set them aside and start a new one or edit them as I went. You're probably cringing at that. Edit the character to fit the story? Sacrilege! But yes, I believe that all elements are flexible, most especially the evolution of characters. In that sense, it shouldn't seem so horrible now. It's not unusual that writers claim their character 'misbehaves' or 'refuses to cooperate'. This is just the 'not a hipster' version of that.

Wait, hipster writers, I don't hate you! I'm just not into making disassociative identity disorders look cute and normal!

Removing the crutch of 'overplanning' seemed to be a breakthrough in gaining ground, but I began to wonder-- was it a crutch at all or if I just evolved as a writer without that being the factor? So, out of the blue, I've started a journey of back story, turning each character into their own little trees. Not like a profile or some formal neat arrangement; I just picked up a pen and started scribbling in a notebook. 

I know it's not a new discovery and it's not even new to me. With 'ambition for completion', I just temporarily lost a piece of the joy of just writing something for my stories that wouldn't be seen but still gives me a piece of confidence in my characters I wasn't so sure of with my winging-it approach. Okay, I still kind of wing it, but after I've written a bit about who they are, what they value, their past and their personality, I find it's a lot easier than going back on an edit AFTER I get to know them and constantly dealing with the aggravation of something that they wouldn't really say or do.

Another confession-- even though I did wing it with my first series a lot, I still enjoy the very robust characters throughout. They did go through some refinement in the many edits I did. They still hit all the right notes of being aggravating, beloved, frustrating, disgusting and/or flawed. I still see them as self-aware yet willful, people with demons and angels, some who get more chances than they deserve and some who die the first time they take a risk. I still see how they are trapped in their nature or struggling for discipline in a mind too free to choose who they are.

Starting this blog, I've always wanted it to be grounds for honest discussion. It's because I perceive making characters as my weakness that they might actually benefit from that criticism.  Given a chance, even with my love of the story, I'd still be inclined to talk about my characters in terms of how I would my friends. I'd see their ideals and aspirations at war with their actions and reactions, where their confidence falters and where they beam with their strengths. Sometimes a nicely formatted profile just makes them a nearly faceless job applicant to me. There's something oddly familiar about scribbling about them on paper with the frenzy of a diary entry. This feels like the right place to build that confidence.

In a way that a discovered diary is anything but.

He means the diaries. At least all the ones with hearts and your crushes' names in them.