WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SET YOUR STORY IN THE GIVEN WORLD

I recently re-read Samuel R. Delany’s memoir Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love wherein Delany describes his life in a NYC commune during the winter of 68-69. A short superb addendum to Delany’s brilliant memoir The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, but I’m not here to review Heavenly Breakfast (though I highly recommend everyone read it).

The memoir got me thinking about Delany’s use of Setting / Worldbuilding in the text. You would think there would be at least some Worldbuilding given the fact that a commune in NYC in 1968 by almost any measure is another damn world altogether, a Setting that seems like a Wonderland freebie that might have sent thrills of recognition through those familiar with these spaces and thrills of estrangement through those unfamiliar with them, or some pleasurable combination thereof.

But what’s wild is for all the possible rewards that such Worldbuilding might have afforded — the windows into the past it could have opened — the Setting in Heavenly Breakfast is barely there, only inferentially dramatized.

This is not uncommon. Many Stories set in mainstream spaces, in familiar Given Worlds (as I call them in my homebrew), often go light on Setting details.

No surprise, really, as these texts tap people’s collective spatial commonsense to help build their Settings. After all, most folks have generic concepts, mundane archives, of what “familiar” places like New York or France or Atlantic City are at a narrative level.

Stories set in these Given Worlds will often no more than gesture at 1968, at winter, at NYC, at a commune, and the reader will almost automatically fill in the basics of the World — the reader will, in effect, do the heavy lifting for the writer — perhaps not originally or intriguingly but adequately enough.

This is the case with Heavenly Breakfast and a lot of other works set in Given Worlds.

But it’s not just their reader’s co-creational cooperation that these Stories avail themselves of; they also also have have another very useful power on their side, narratively speaking.

The enormous legitimizing power of the Real, of the True.

By the dint of their so-called real-ness these Stories produce belief in their narrative worlds (in the Tolkien sense) — by being set in the Real these Stories these stories are taken by readers as being more real — they, in other words, elicit from their readers what can only be called a Reality Dividend.

A Reality Dividend that grants the Story an extra fillip of believability — a Reality Dividend, that in the case of a text like Heavenly Breakfast, not only does a lot of the work at the Setting level — it an almost stand in for the Setting.

Anyone who writes both fiction and nonfiction understands the usefulness of Reality Dividends, understands that so-called true stories begin at an advantage over fiction, have a claim over a reader by the very fact that they’re true. Fiction has to earn that relevance, has to convince its readers that there is something true about their lies.

Nonfiction, in other words, start with a narrative passport that fiction must earn. Whether nonfiction keeps its passport is another matter altogether, of course.

Stories set in familiar Given Worlds avail themselves of an authorizing legitimacy that Stories set in less familiar Given Worlds (or say in fantasy worlds) need to labor heroically to match. These stories can lean on that legitimacy, on their Reality Dividend, to evoke a Setting, even if the Stories themselves do very little to evoke their worlds on the sentence by sentence level.

Something interesting to contemplate, to play with, to subvert.