For most of TWOLD’s development, I’ve leaned toward storytelling that is less dreamlike and less fanciful than the first book.
Part of the motivation is as my writing style and sensibilities have matured, I’ve been concerned that too much fantasy can be a distraction.
Along those lines, I’ve increasingly become impressed with how ordinary things are underappreciated. I want my art to respect the ordinary more.
However, occasionally I’ve considered ratcheting up the dreaminess. Every now and then I’ll watch some dreamlike bit of a movie or show and it will captivate me. That kind of story telling resonates with me, yet it is usually a tease.
I would love to continue refining the art of satisfying wonder. Wonder in most media dissipates when the audience gets too close. But that doesn’t have to always be the case. It can be satisfying, it is just hard to do, and is a problem domain I’ve never seen others formalize.
I’m not saying I’ve explored that domain more than others, but my attempts to formalize it are the only recorded documents I have on the subject.
I think part of the issue is separating fantasy and dreams.
I still gravitate toward fantasy, but have been weened a little from it. Part of the cause is I’m increasingly reacting to this age’s over-reliance on fantastic spectacles. Mainstream fantasy has become cheapened. There’s no subtlety. Everything is SUPER!!!
What I really like is surrealism. That can be ordinary—a composition of ordinary elements in an unnatural configuration.
The other thing I’ve never liked is when the dream or fantasy is an illusion. That always leaves me dissatisfied. When I’m watching a fantasy movie, I want the fantasy to be real.
I guess technically Alice in Wonderland does this, but the reality parts are such thin bookends that the context of an outer reality practically feels non-consequential to me.
I can think of several other cases like this: The movie version of the Princess Bride comes to mind. When I think about that movie, I tend to forget it even has a narration plot thread. The book didn’t have that.
Regardless, I’d rather Marloth books not even have that hint.
I want Marloth books to have dream reality. They are in a dream, but the dream is real. Characters wake up from dreams, but they wake up in another dream.
Which is subtly but crucially different from storylines where characters wake up from a dream, and then discover they are still dreaming.
The whole tension with that and some of the other related storytelling approaches I’m trying to avoid, is it is draws attention to the question of what is a dream and what is real. Marloth stories aren’t about that. They don’t raise that question. They occasionally depict characters wrestling with that question, but the narrative itself puts little weight on it.
<aside> 💡 The real question the narrative asks is, “Who’s dream is it?”
</aside>
The first part of the first Marloth may look like the question of reality is important, but what I at least tried to do is gradually deconstruct that sentiment over the course of the story, so that by the end the audience has a sense of pattern where it doesn’t really matter which reality or dream they are in, the themes and issues are consistent. As the raven says, “Details change. Names change. But the underlying reality stays the same!”