(6) Thu May 31 2007 18:52 Category:Fictional Fictions: I feel a sense of unease whenever I'm revising a story and I change what happens. I feel like there's some residual sense in which A "really" happened and B is a lie to cover it up. But if the story is published, most people will think B "really" happened and A will seem a curiosity if they know about it at all. How do we discuss different kinds of fictional events? Lay some vocabulary on me.
If you leave evidence of A lying around in B on purpose, it's usually called an unreliable narrator, which lately I feel is too broad a term and could use a disambiguation page.
So mm, I don't believe there's a specialised vocabulary for discussing the different types of fiction involved in iterative drafts of a work, but maybe something could be adapted from fanfiction? First-draft-canon becomes canone, second cantwo, etc! Or, er, something.
Posted by Leonard at Sat Jun 02 2007 08:01
Holly, when you said "interactive fiction" I immediately realized that my game Degeneracy is entirely based on this sense of unease.
Posted by Rachel at Sat Jun 02 2007 15:40
My french teacher said that definitive editions of all the classics include their notes with things that were changed in the "final" editions. But I'm not sure that's what you're talking about?
Posted by pedro at Sun Jun 03 2007 00:52
I think that 'palimpsest' should be a kind of monster in nethack. When you kill them their body gets reanimated as a different kind of monster!