[Found at Basic Instructions]
[Warning to those of you who haven’t already read chapter 4 (“The Room”) in the Propagational Library series: this post contains a spoiler or two.]
As you may know, I’m sort of creating my Propagational Library series on the fly. Which means, among other things: failures — things overlooked in the rush of creation and a quick follow-up editing pass — will be immediately obvious to a dispassionate reader. While working on Saturday’s installment, which involves the effects of a weird high-tech chamber upon a person sitting within, I had what struck me as a cool idea. This is captured in the following passage:
Dolly Burghar, nee Magaziner, sat down on a vinyl-covered stool inside a steel-toothed box… Her husband Matthew flipped a switch, turned a knob, whatever. Two minutes later, the steel box was empty.
Cool! The lady vanishes! But this cool idea presented me with a problem (unseen at the time). Later in the same installment, my protagonist, Gabriel Naude, had to undergo a brief demonstration of the box (which he calls “the room,” in quotes). Even though it was a scaled-down, non-full-power demonstration, I could not afford for him to vanish. Because even later, in an upcoming chapter, he will need to be both inside and outside the box, simultaneously, during a full-scale, sustained use of “the room.” Fixing my problem will involve one and/or two courses of action, when and if I turn this into a real honest-to-gods (and hypothetically) publishable story:
- I can tinker with the “Dolly Burghar Magaziner” scene, so that she doesn’t disappear (probably by having her “just” die); OR
- I can figure out some alternative to the later planned scene, with Gabe and Gabe-Prime (let’s call him), so that the one inside the box also disappears.
(From another perspective, you may observe, both of these are Band-Aids — attacking symptoms rather than underlying causes. If I made up my mind to outline the entire story at once, or at least the next few chapters in advance, then possibly I could avoid such lapses. Practically speaking, the likelihood of such a decision on my part approaches zero.)
I’m thinking of this little glitch as evidence of more than just a continuity mistake. It’s a continuity trap: getting snagged on, and dazzled by, some shiny little detail thrown into the pathway by one’s devious subconscious — sufficiently snagged that I lost the thread of what had to happen. It’s like suddenly finding yourself in a room of your home and wondering how you got there… then looking down to see you’ve got an unrecognized ball of aluminum foil crumpled up in your hand. You want to go, Wait wait wait WAIT a damned minute! and start the last three minutes all over again.
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P.S. After writing the above, I searched for “continuity trap” to see if I’d invented a new phrase. Fat chance! E.g., this (on continuity traps in film shots). Or this (on continuity traps in comics). Etc., etc.
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
two opinions – related on this subject that you may…or may not want to consult: Robert Zemeckis (can you say Back to the Future?) and your NW Jersey Brother-in-Law who had lots of opinion/theory on this subject about said movie, if my memory serves.. It may have even involved Goeddel/Escher/Bach, but it was WAY back in the ’80s when I still had brain cells to stretch.
John says
Thanks. I think. (Ha.) Actually I’ve got a reasonably good handle on how this would work in this story’s version of the world. The best thing about it? I cleverly chose to do that chapter in Gabe’s voice — which relieves me of the burden of having to explain (or even understand) it myself. :)
Froog says
It didn’t strike me as a problem. Dolly disappeared because she’d gone “all the way”.
Gabe’s first experience was a very low-power demo, so it obviously might feel produce very different and less dramatic phenomena.
The issues you’ve raised for story construction – it seems to me – are: a) is Dolly still “out there” somewhere, and possibly to be later reincorporated into the story? and b) what are they doing to Gabe that takes so much more power (Dolly didn’t go all the way? there’s further to go?)?
John says
Thank you!
For what it’s worth: Gabe will have the exact experience that Dolly had, the extra power required simply to keep it running longer. And because I need to have him at once both physically inside the booth and “consciously” outside it, looking in at himself, I need to adjust what happened to Dolly to match what will happen to him.
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
btw, I agree with Froog, here. Really didn’t see a “trap” issue except for the fact that you thought that you had one.
Froog says
I don’t get the “running longer” thing. Surely it has to be a one-time transformation, Gabe projected ‘out of body’ permanently to become The Librarian? It can’t be simply a temporary state, sustained by the machinery for a certain period – because the machinery is all going to cease to exist.
Also, I quite like the sense of mystery in having a person just disappear, and not having any way to know exactly what happened to them. You’re not sure if it’s maybe something like the Star Trek transporter technology – has the physical body been reconstituted somewhere else, or has it been permanently transformed into another state?
And I fear it might get kind of messy having the physical body remain behind after the soul/consciousness is permanently removed from it… leaving it with autonomic function only, a vegetable? There’s an Asimov story that conceives of something like this as an ultimate weapon (the consciousness is not projected outside the body, but is imprisoned in a body over which it no longer has any control). Dolly remained alive as an empty vessel?? Awkward.
Jayne says
Later I will get to chapter 4, but, quickly, wanted to say that you can invoke superpowers in the edit. You are in the act of creating, dammit, no need to get caught up in traps.
And nobody did Wait wait wait WAIT a damned minute! better than Jimmy Stewart. Until JES came along. ;)
John says
Superpowers, she says. Sheesh. Nothing like a good old Deus ex machina, eh?
I’d forgotten all about that Jimmy Stewart remonstrance. Great connection! ;)
marta says
Here’s what I notice when it comes to readers/viewers/fans of a story. There are people who will look at machines that make people disappear, time machines, magic wands, et al, and take them apart and find the flaws (or traps) and then announce their findings in reviews, on blogposts, to a roomful of friends trying to enjoy the show.
Then are people who will look at those same machines and whatnot and say, “Cool!”
I don’t know that I would’ve seen a trap. I just would’ve seen another possibility. And if I did have any doubt or question, I would trust the writer to give me some kind of answer by the end.