On Canon

"Wait stop! That's a load bearing 'I don't know!'"

As I avoided my work today, a lonely thought came my way. It came to me as if to say, "deep thought-ed sir, might I stay?" I found could not cast it far away, so I kept it here with me today. - Vagabond Thoughts, by Alexander McEvoy

Today I explained to a friend a world building concept that's been not only living rent free in my head for a while but also wrecking the place up recently. One thought led to another, and I was then thinking, alone in my own head, about the concepts behind my own world building.

Naturally, I wanted to understand how it worked, so pulled back the curtain as far as I could to better understand my own cognitive metatext. All of which is a profoundly pompous way of saying, I sat down and did some philosophy about it. Here's what I realized.

I took the fictional government structure to which I had alluded in that conversation and explained it to the best of my ability. I then began questioning said structure's connection to surrounding structures, and as I found connections, I supplied justifications for those connections. Not to say I thought deeply on them, but rather I was telling myself a story and discovering it the way I discover all of them, one step at a time.

It was different to the kind of story I typically tell in that it had no perspective character. My mind's eye flew between what appeared to be self-assembling towers of data and minute connections. Were I to steer into any one of them, they would resolve themselves into lore. Into Canon.

And that is my focus today, canon and what I realized about it.

Of course, it should go without saying that I make no firm declarations on how art is made. When I speak of the craft, it is only in my application of it that I can claim any true knowledge. Outlines are a valuable and elevating tool for many, and an anchor around my creative neck, for example.

It follows that canon, in ways I will explain, can likewise be an anchor. I have learned that canon can be a valuable thing, it helps to guide a thought to sea like float-out launching a ship from drydock. But it only serves a function in the narrative.

Might I not say that it is canon that the Kingdom of Zarda employs no combat aircraft out of cost-considerations and instead relies on SAM systems dispersed through the country both on foot and mechanized? And that is true, yet what good is that to you? It is merely canon from a theoretical sequel to a book not yet written.

So much so obvious. And entirely from the reader's perspective.

The perspective of a writer, and this one in particular, is more nebulous. Any thread I start to pull will take me down a narrative path to explore it eventually. In many ways, that is much like the Echoes from my short story Holy Terra, eventually it always claims me.

Holy Terra itself is a near perfect example. I could ask myself a question the reader might want to know, such as "what are the echoes" and I could answer it. Assuming I told a story wherein the answer matters. Similarly, the captain's training before her ill-fated piracy, if the story had justified its exploration, I would have explored it.

The matter stands, however, that I have no idea about either thing. The Echoes are "because speed of light makes things weird and fictional," and the training simply happened. Further detail was not required for either narrative piece and so it was soundly ignored.

Similarly, my short story The Call of the Void has a lot of threads that might be well-worth plucking at if I ever return to Hector's torment. The comfort units alone, created by the Pygmalion Corporation are so integral a part of the narrative that I continue to labour on "Plastic Love," a story in progress where those robots are explored conceptually.

Golden Thread Corporation, however, are the ones who built the space station on which Hector lives. And they do not matter. Beyond their role in building the station, employing Hector, and nebulous evil not yet solidified, nothing about them matters. I cannot tell you any relevant details about them, except that they exist.

I have no idea when any character's birthday is. I do not know their star signs, their favourite food, animal, or colour. Overwhelmingly what the reader knows is what I know, and what easter eggs I bury are my secret game with myself. But in general, beyond the sheen, I don't know.

And that brings me to my quote from the start of this article. "Wait stop! That's a load bearing 'I don't know!'" Because there are things in some of my fictions that I do not understand in the least, but they hold up other parts of the narrative.

For Hector, I have absolutely no idea if what's haunting/hunting him is real. But neither does he, and that was one reason I believe I was able to capture his fear so well. I had absolutely no idea what if anything was there simply because the narrative had not yet decided that I should know.

Knowing as I do that that was infuriatingly esoteric, allow me to attempt an explanation. I am playing chess against chaos and can only predict two to four potential moves ahead because I'm not good at chess. Knowing if Hector is alone or not is a problem I will solve later in the game, but first I need to get to the point where I can see its ultimate role in the narrative.

Chaos is what I call my own internal creativity because it is not inclined to behave. Unlike the rest of me, it is unruly and highly forgetful. It has a bad habit of getting distracted and running off on me while I'm in the middle of highly emotional writing.

There are times I can get it back, and times when I have to topple my king and let it go. But I come back to the stories. I always come back. And the chaos is aways waiting for me.

In essence that is what I mean by the limits of canon. Were I a more structured author, undoubtedly I would adore it. But I must wrangle my stories from a chaos of ideas with a creativity that wanders off at random, and it can be a hinderance.

The load bearing I don't know is simply a piece of lore that is implied to exist, or implied directly but never stated, that I cannot in good conscience canonize because it might break something. It is a pieces of amorphous narrative contrivance left alone to bubble away in the dark so that everything else works.

An exaggerated dialogue of this concept would look something like this:

"Who are this character's parents?"

"No idea, but he had a flashback to going to the zoo with them as a kid and there were two so from this we can infer several things. Firstly, we're going to take this piece of dialogue and extract from it..."

Versus the one where the "no idea" is load bearing.

"Who are this character's parents?"

"No idea."

"That's it?"

"Yep."

"Does he know?"

"Sure."

"But who are they?"

"Look, if I know who they are, I'll have to give them backstory and lore. I'd have to decide that his mom when to Windsor and her dad became an electrician through Algonquin. He grew up in York and had a... no no no! I'm not doing this. It doesn't matter, I don't know, and if I do figure it all out then it's going to totally ruin the romantic ending I have cooking. So no. You don't get to know, and I don't get to know."

As I said, it was exaggerated. But anyway, I hope that explains some of how my brain works and how I look at story telling. Just for fun, what is the worst piece of writing advice you've ever personally been given?