"Finding Marea" -- story notes
Jul. 27th, 2006 12:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfalling---------------------------------------------
Finding Marea: Story Notes
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"Finding Marea" is a story with four sources.
1. The first source -- the basis for it all -- actually has very little to do with the story as it currently exists. However, it's the foundation of the world within which the story occurs. When I was much younger, I used to walk my dog in the rain and watch the way water collected into tiny streams that ran along the sides of streets in my neighborhood. For some reason I can't remember, I named several of those streams and created an imaginary kingdom around them, called 'Small,' because they were, after all, small streams in a small neighborhood.
I could go on for pages about Small, but the important thing is that I eventually sat down and drew a map of the country, which included some important realizations. First, the country was bounded by two rivers, which joined to create the Great Mother River. Second, Small was a mountain country. Third, the Doran Empire lay northwest of Small, and the lands of the Jenjani lay northeast. Fourth, this whole area was in the southern hemisphere.
Small doesn't show up at all in "Finding Marea," except indirectly as one of the lands of the 'southern pagans.' The Jenjani, likewise, appear only indirectly. The Doran Empire, on the other hand, is the setting of the story.
2. The second source was a dream I had in high school, which left me with a title and a vague series of images. The title was "The Dancing Girl of Zidee Aezah," and it was about a young woman who danced for a pagan, goddess-centered religion, and was put to death as a human sacrifice. I was aware that she was a convert to this religion, and that the city was vaguely Middle Eastern. It seemed reasonable to me that it might be part of the Doran Empire, or on the border between the empire and the dry plains of the Jenjani.
Somewhere along the line, I kidnapped Zidee Aezah into a different world for nefarious purposes (really, I just needed a place name for a poem), and I renamed the dancing girl's city as Ochre Varos. (Incidentally, this is pronounced O-ker Vah-ros, accent on the first syllable of each word. I don't usually care much about how readers pronounce things in my stories -- if I do care, I make sure to use a consistent spelling system -- but I thought I'd tell you, just for the heck of it.)
That was Marea's origin.
3. The third source was a book I read in 2001, about how the introduction of writing tends to codify rituals in previously oral-based societies. That fascinated me, and I immediately wondered what might happen in a culture or religion where they noticed that effect and decided that it was actively dangerous. This would have to be a society that embraced change. Since oral cultures tend not to notice that their stories change (the repetition inherent in their stories and rituals tends to slow the changes enough that they're not readily apparent, especially since there is no 'authoritative' written text to use as a comparison point), this culture would have to have previous knowledge of writing.
That idea was the spark behind the Circle of Kemar. The Circle, of course, includes a lot of other things -- scraps of Buddhism, bits and pieces of Christianity (as well as a lot of my objections to various strains of Christian theology), earth mother traditions, etcetera -- but the concept of deliberately embraced change is the heart of it.
4. The fourth source crept in when I realized that my conception of the Circle had made it impossible to write a definitive version of Marea's story. I stepped back from Marea and found Laila, who was originally supposed to convert to the Circle, dance a Great Rite, and die. As you can tell, she had other ideas. After a while, I noticed that my omniscient narrator seemed to be an actual person rather than a simple authorial stand-in; this took me another step back, and I found Harai.
My simple story about a dancing girl had become a multi-layered monster, about faith, choices, changes, and the nature of stories and truth. In other words, I was pouring out all sorts of things that had been stewing around in the back of my mind for years, and simple narrative got a bit lost along the way. I was a good 5,000 words into it before I had the faintest idea of how all the various threads might pull back together, and it took me another 5,000 words before I was sure that I was on the right track.
I suppose, to give this source a name, I'd call it the collected influence of a childhood growing up Unitarian Universalist, of groping toward my own religious understanding, and of reading Ursula Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and many other writers who ask big moral questions and try to answer them.
I tried damn hard to keep "Finding Marea" in my own voice, but I don't think I did nearly as good a job as I would have liked.
---------------------------------------------
In any case, I started seriously trying to write this story back in 2001. By autumn of 2005, I had about 3,500 words, and nothing but faith that it would eventually pull together instead of spinning off into a tangle of divergent plot threads. Nevertheless, I offered "Finding Marea" to Cat as one of the options for her holiday gift, and she said it sounded interesting.
It's seven months late, but I hope the finished story fulfills her expectations.
---------------------------------------------
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Story Notes
---------------------------------------------
ETA, 7/28/06: Something funny just occurred to me. Fanfiction is, in a way, playing with a certain authoritative source and manipulating it to do things that may or may not be in line with the original intentions of the author/s. Not all fanfiction writers do more than just add on to the original story -- for various reasons, we don't tend to radically reimagine the source text/film/game/whatever -- but all fanfiction relies on the existence of a canon that readers are already familiar with.
"Finding Marea" is, to some degree, me playing textual games with the Bible. It's not fanfiction in the strict sense, but I am absolutely relying on readers having some basic familiarity with Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, and both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. (I figure this is a safe assumption to make about Cat. Other people... well, let's just say that in high school English classes, I tended to have a wider/deeper knowledge of Biblical stories and Christian symbolism than a fair number of actual Christians in my classes, which is kind of depressing.)
Anyway, I've always liked taking old stories and histories, and ringing changes on them. I retell fairy-tales. I use the standard forms of fairy-tales to write new stories. I have one fictional world in which a vaguely African group of people invades and conquers a vaguely Eurasian continent, and in which there is an ethnic conflict rather heavily influenced by Northern Ireland. I am constantly taking bits and pieces from here and there and rethreading them into new patterns.
And I write fanfiction.
I think these impulses are more similar than a lot of people think.
Finding Marea: Story Notes
---------------------------------------------
"Finding Marea" is a story with four sources.
1. The first source -- the basis for it all -- actually has very little to do with the story as it currently exists. However, it's the foundation of the world within which the story occurs. When I was much younger, I used to walk my dog in the rain and watch the way water collected into tiny streams that ran along the sides of streets in my neighborhood. For some reason I can't remember, I named several of those streams and created an imaginary kingdom around them, called 'Small,' because they were, after all, small streams in a small neighborhood.
I could go on for pages about Small, but the important thing is that I eventually sat down and drew a map of the country, which included some important realizations. First, the country was bounded by two rivers, which joined to create the Great Mother River. Second, Small was a mountain country. Third, the Doran Empire lay northwest of Small, and the lands of the Jenjani lay northeast. Fourth, this whole area was in the southern hemisphere.
Small doesn't show up at all in "Finding Marea," except indirectly as one of the lands of the 'southern pagans.' The Jenjani, likewise, appear only indirectly. The Doran Empire, on the other hand, is the setting of the story.
2. The second source was a dream I had in high school, which left me with a title and a vague series of images. The title was "The Dancing Girl of Zidee Aezah," and it was about a young woman who danced for a pagan, goddess-centered religion, and was put to death as a human sacrifice. I was aware that she was a convert to this religion, and that the city was vaguely Middle Eastern. It seemed reasonable to me that it might be part of the Doran Empire, or on the border between the empire and the dry plains of the Jenjani.
Somewhere along the line, I kidnapped Zidee Aezah into a different world for nefarious purposes (really, I just needed a place name for a poem), and I renamed the dancing girl's city as Ochre Varos. (Incidentally, this is pronounced O-ker Vah-ros, accent on the first syllable of each word. I don't usually care much about how readers pronounce things in my stories -- if I do care, I make sure to use a consistent spelling system -- but I thought I'd tell you, just for the heck of it.)
That was Marea's origin.
3. The third source was a book I read in 2001, about how the introduction of writing tends to codify rituals in previously oral-based societies. That fascinated me, and I immediately wondered what might happen in a culture or religion where they noticed that effect and decided that it was actively dangerous. This would have to be a society that embraced change. Since oral cultures tend not to notice that their stories change (the repetition inherent in their stories and rituals tends to slow the changes enough that they're not readily apparent, especially since there is no 'authoritative' written text to use as a comparison point), this culture would have to have previous knowledge of writing.
That idea was the spark behind the Circle of Kemar. The Circle, of course, includes a lot of other things -- scraps of Buddhism, bits and pieces of Christianity (as well as a lot of my objections to various strains of Christian theology), earth mother traditions, etcetera -- but the concept of deliberately embraced change is the heart of it.
4. The fourth source crept in when I realized that my conception of the Circle had made it impossible to write a definitive version of Marea's story. I stepped back from Marea and found Laila, who was originally supposed to convert to the Circle, dance a Great Rite, and die. As you can tell, she had other ideas. After a while, I noticed that my omniscient narrator seemed to be an actual person rather than a simple authorial stand-in; this took me another step back, and I found Harai.
My simple story about a dancing girl had become a multi-layered monster, about faith, choices, changes, and the nature of stories and truth. In other words, I was pouring out all sorts of things that had been stewing around in the back of my mind for years, and simple narrative got a bit lost along the way. I was a good 5,000 words into it before I had the faintest idea of how all the various threads might pull back together, and it took me another 5,000 words before I was sure that I was on the right track.
I suppose, to give this source a name, I'd call it the collected influence of a childhood growing up Unitarian Universalist, of groping toward my own religious understanding, and of reading Ursula Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, Neil Gaiman, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and many other writers who ask big moral questions and try to answer them.
I tried damn hard to keep "Finding Marea" in my own voice, but I don't think I did nearly as good a job as I would have liked.
---------------------------------------------
In any case, I started seriously trying to write this story back in 2001. By autumn of 2005, I had about 3,500 words, and nothing but faith that it would eventually pull together instead of spinning off into a tangle of divergent plot threads. Nevertheless, I offered "Finding Marea" to Cat as one of the options for her holiday gift, and she said it sounded interesting.
It's seven months late, but I hope the finished story fulfills her expectations.
---------------------------------------------
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Story Notes
---------------------------------------------
ETA, 7/28/06: Something funny just occurred to me. Fanfiction is, in a way, playing with a certain authoritative source and manipulating it to do things that may or may not be in line with the original intentions of the author/s. Not all fanfiction writers do more than just add on to the original story -- for various reasons, we don't tend to radically reimagine the source text/film/game/whatever -- but all fanfiction relies on the existence of a canon that readers are already familiar with.
"Finding Marea" is, to some degree, me playing textual games with the Bible. It's not fanfiction in the strict sense, but I am absolutely relying on readers having some basic familiarity with Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, and both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. (I figure this is a safe assumption to make about Cat. Other people... well, let's just say that in high school English classes, I tended to have a wider/deeper knowledge of Biblical stories and Christian symbolism than a fair number of actual Christians in my classes, which is kind of depressing.)
Anyway, I've always liked taking old stories and histories, and ringing changes on them. I retell fairy-tales. I use the standard forms of fairy-tales to write new stories. I have one fictional world in which a vaguely African group of people invades and conquers a vaguely Eurasian continent, and in which there is an ethnic conflict rather heavily influenced by Northern Ireland. I am constantly taking bits and pieces from here and there and rethreading them into new patterns.
And I write fanfiction.
I think these impulses are more similar than a lot of people think.
