Writers and Architects

[KathrynLeighAZ]

I saw Inception again. It’s a grand movie and everyone should watch it.

This second time I watched it, I paid a lot of attention to the storytelling techniques that worked – and in particular, the world building. In the film, there was a character called the architect whose job was to build a dream world that was believable to another person’s subconscious mind. That person’s subconscious populates the dream with its own projections of people or probably animals or whatever. Ellen Page is the dream architect, and tere’s this lovely scene when she's building a world that Leonardo DiCario’s subconscious is populating. Since it’s her first time building, she’s pretty jazzed about all of the possibilities. She’s doing things like folding the landscape in half so that there is no sky, but rather a continuation of the city, just upside down. She moves bridges and mirrors and does all sorts of crazy things, but Leo warns her several times that if she keeps changing things his subconscious will reject the world and seek to destroy her because she’s the foreigner. The projections of his subconscious (they’re people) start glaring at her and bumping her when she walks past, and she says to him that he ought to get his subconscious under control. He reminds her that because it’s his subconscious, he has no control over it. She doesn’t listen, & his projections attack her and eventually stab her…

It’s the same thing with writing.

When an author creates a fictional world, readers populate that world with their own subconscious projections. Those projections aren’t always like the people projections that walk around in the dream, but they are no less important. In fact, they may be more important because writers need their readers to project pieces of the world, like trees and other elements of setting, as well as characters and the way people and things look and how time works and geography and emotions and a million other things that aren’t on the page. A really good writer can lead a reader to the projections she’d like to see in her story… similar to the way the characters in Inception give the dreamer an idea, but get him to take hold of that idea and claim it as his own and make it grow. The problem with writing, though, is exactly the same as the problem with dream building. If the writer starts changing the rules too much… if she starts doing things that a reader’s subconscious rejects, the projections may not jump off the page and attack her, but the real-world critics will, and readers will abandon her. And remember, it isn’t the reader’s fault… he can’t control what his subconscious believes. That means that writers have to build plausible worlds that their readers can believe in.

Interesting, eh?

[Mira]

Yes - this is very interesting. It's a subtle point, but a very, very interesting one. Thank you!

[Claudie]

Okay, I have to say, when I watched Inception and watched the architect build the world, I was amazed at how much it reminded me of my own work. You push the analysis a lot farther, and I think it's awesome. :) I never stopped to consider that all the unnamed, unmentionned characters were, really, projections the reader made. I love it!