~~ on the edge of the looking glass

It seems to me that writing fantasy is a lot like doing magic. Even though the possibilities seem limitless, there is a sense of procedure to follow, a sense of -order- to the process. Like there are rules of how to do things and even what sorts of things you can do. It's like... no matter how much freedom you give yourself, in the end, if you don't limit the possibilities, what you get are mistakes or even disasters. Mix the wrong ingredients and they blow up, basically, right?

I guess it's obvious that anything that isn't pure chaos is going to contain some semblance of order, some set of reasons behind its existence. It's a self-defining property of almost anything one can think of as 'existing' that it has a limited set of properties; a limited number of possible behaviors that define it in time and space. I guess that's why it bothers me when people say "it's just fantasy" or "it's just kink" or whatever to explain why they write things that wouldn't happen in "real life" in a zillion years, in terms of pure common sense. Because fantasy it may be, but you can never actually escape reality and remain what you -are- (as a person or a character).

I didn't always have a very good grasp on this concept, myself, which is probably why it's so important to me. In fact, that used to be my number 1 problem in writing-- believability. Oh, I made sense on a personal symbolic level (that is to say, I made sense to myself), but most people had no clue what was going on. I used to go way beyond merely writing people "out of character"-- I'd just use my supposed "characters" as pure personal symbols that meant little outside of the context of my mind. I wasn't even -trying- to communicate my inner world to my supposed readers-- I was just writing pure fantasy in the sense that there -were- no rules. The only rules were those of my subconscious mind, so what I wrote read a lot like snatches from various random dreams.

I still do this, kinda. People tell me I don't often make a lot of sense in this journal. Well, I try, but it's hard. It's not that I'm so smart or anything-- I'm just... isolated. My mind has developed in isolation to a large degree, with my only real link to most people being through their writing. It's not natural for me to think of how people really act, talk and think. It takes conscious effort, which is why I'm so obsessed with the idea of keeping things "in character"; why I study human behavior so closely. I know through personal experience that being "out of character" makes for meaningless stories on one level.

There are degrees of fantasy, I think. Gradations between the (fictional) world we'd immediately recognize and a world with major shifts and mutations of logic. Too much mutation, and it becomes near meaningless. Too little, and it's static and there is no story.

Believing in Harry/Draco in any guise, for instance-- believing in romantic love itself, even, especially in it overcoming all obstacles-- is fantasy of the highest degree already.

What some people don't seem to understand is that fantasy isn't "anything goes" by nature, as a style of writing. It's not equivalent to -fantasizing-, per se. The fantasy of redemption isn't on the same level as the fantasy that people will somehow magically act like sex-crazed 2D dolls-- preprogrammed androids, almost-- which is how a lot of PWPs are written. Which, btw, sounds more like a nightmare than a dream to me.

( And so on. )