Ramblings - A Dancing World

This is a note for me. Ignore it if you're not into the slightly beer-fueled ramblings of a very tired writer...

Given that most people say the middle is the most difficult part of a novel, what about a novel that features only beginnings and endings? Arguably Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller... could be kind of interpreted in this way. Obviously, everything needs to tie into some kind of metanarrative, but the sheer scope for play is immmense.

There would need to be some kind of metanarrative. Calvino does a wonderful rolling story, almost like moving through paintings that each contain a painting of another painting and there's this controlled regression that is just lovely. Plus the marvellous thing with the chapter titles.

In the UK, though? It'd have to be hidden somehow. Any structure that could be looked at as at all pretentious isn't going to fly in UK publishing.

Unless... Hmmm... Reread Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books. That kind of jumping, that kind of flow, that kind of, what thee fuck to call it, burst fiction? You could do a cut-up in a Burroughs way and it would still all link together and make sense as narrative.

Perhaps even do this online and have a randomised chapter functionality, and a constantly growing and expanding narrative. Perhaps this is the point of an online novel. The novel, not as form but as function. Of course, everything's been done already, people have been doing hypertext novels for years, but this would be a progressively growing dumping-ground for little fragments that don't fit anywhere else.

Start with 70-80000 words ready. Push it up as a whole bunch of linked chunks, allow randomised readings, allow people to log in to keep track of what they've read before. Allow a temporally locked reading. Constantly update. The fact is, you start with 80000 words and add, say, five thousand words a month, you're up to 60000 words a year, and you run it for ten years you've got an almost 700000 word behemoth in place.

Fuck it, run it as a collaborative, open-source fiction and get a couple of hundred decent, comitted contributors and you're up to millions of words for an on-line world. Fan-fiction in the service of something completely original. A novel so large and sprawling you can never finish it. You'd need powerful search tools – someone wants characters A and G to feature in their latest contribution and they search every appearance of those characters, do the research and get the gist of who this person is.

This would, by definition, have to be a world where both spatial and temporal geographies are, to put it politely, loose. A Dancing world, for want of a better term...

At which point the original core starts to look more like a rulebook, a skeleton on which everything else hangs. The definition of what few absolutes exist in this fictional world.

Obviously there would be characters with the same name. There would have to be some way to differentiate this.

But a fictional world. Fictional reviews of cultural objects, architectural blueprints, crimes reports, statistics, political rallies, sermons, prescriptions, animals, lovers and fighters and all the blown-out blend of this world.

But how would something like this retain it's readability? How do you moderate this kind of thing? Even a fictional world without ownership needs to maintain some level of quality.

Although I do love the idea of opening my e-mail every morning to find a screed of what a load of creative people have been making in the last twenty-four hours...

S.