Today's ponderable

[swan_tower]

I'd like to talk about portal fantasies. Or rather, I'd like you to talk about them.

By that term, I mean the stories where people from this world go into another, more fantastical world. Narnia, for example. Once upon a time, these seem to have been more popular; now, not so much. And if I had to guess, I'd say that's at least in part because of the way a lot of them were transparent wish-fulfillment: Protagonist (who is an emotional stand-in for the author, though only in egregious cases a Mary Sue) goes to Magical Land where things are more colorful and interesting than in the real world. And maybe they stay there, maybe they don't.

Talk to me about the portal fantasies you've read. Which ones stick in your mind? What was your response to them, both as a kid and now? Which ones did the wish-fulfillment thing extra transparently, and how so?

(Yes, I actually have a special interest in the bad examples of this genre. In fact, if you approach this entire question as an academic curiosity of the structural sort paired with a authorly eye toward writing a deconstruction -- not a parody -- of the tropes, you'll be on the right track.)

Portal fantasies. Talk to me about 'em. Good, bad, ugly, laughably naive. What's your take?

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Makes me wonder if you could connect portal fantasies in certain ways to Cinderella-ish fantasies -- the kinds of stories where a lower-class character gets swept up into high society for some contrived reason.

But to do stories of one culture to an entirely foreign one, and to do it entirely within a secondary world, you'd have to build two convincing cultures and get the reader to identify with one of them as the baseline, which is hard.

[xmurphyjacobsx.livejournal.com]

You will NOT plant a plotseed into my head. I'm already ignoring 6 stories right now -- I don't have TIME to ignore another!

That said, if you were doing the whole epic fantasy, yeah, I could see the two culture thing. Might be best, though, as a total immersion, no big history; just a lot of unfolding and assumption. Readers are very accepting if you really make the 'now' of the character very velcro-hooky (don't you LOVE my technical terminology?)

Bah! No! Stop thinking stories! (Pardon, must go have a talk with my muse in the back).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

(Pardon, must go have a talk with my muse in the back).

Why is there a crowbar in your hand?

Readers are very accepting if you really make the 'now' of the character very velcro-hooky (don't you LOVE my technical terminology?)

I do, actually. <g>

[xmurphyjacobsx.livejournal.com]

:D

I'm in the unenviable position currently of having too many WIP going, and absolutely no ability to make myself write on any of them. Stories churn in my head, but want nothing to do with paper at all. It's not even 'writer's block'. It's more like "writer's rather fold laundry than write".

Yeah, crowbar.

I have books and books of proper literary terms. I can't remember any of them when I'm talking story, so I have to make schtuff up.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

If you ever come up with a working solution to the too many stories in your head problem, I'd love to know about it...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

So far as I'm aware, the only solution anybody has found is to make yourself pick one, work on it until it's done, and then pick another.

It helps a little if you make a good list of all the ideas, and then file it away somewhere for looking at after you've finished one.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Okay, well, that's what I'm doing already, so I guess the only fix is more Butt in Chair time. I had to give up on an otherwise very useful online writing group because at the time, being bombarded with story cues that were interesting just meant I had an ever greater backlog of works in progress distracting me from finishing any given existing one. I need fewer hobbies.