March 29, 2005 What is Folding?
Storytelling is not a simple affair, though some would swear it so. To listen to them, what you need is engaging characters that live in an engaging world and proceed through engaging situations. In this way of thinking about writing the game is a matter of selection. Heated arguments continue through this community as to which of these is primary, even generating the others. Dickens, for instance, was said to believe that if you create robust enough characters, they will themselves take the story along on its own energy as a surprise to the writer. Indeed, he would publish the first parts of novels without knowing what the end would be.
Another religion holds that success in writing is a matter of style, either in the language itself, the "tone" or philosophy of the book or both. There are ample examples of this type of writer, and surely there is as big an audience of readers as there are people who live in well decorated spaces of buildings whose architecture is banal.
As long as you are reading this, however, you'll find yourself within an exceedingly large community of artists and thinkers that hold another principle dear, what I'll call "folding." Folding deals with who you are, who the people in the story are and what your relationship to them is. Folding comes in an amazing variety of types, and I think I am the first to collect them in one barrel. But you will see through the examples that they are all variations on the same basic idea.
The trick in writing is to get the reader engaged. (Forgive me here for continuing to address writing rather than the more collaborative art of filmmaking. But you'll see the dynamics are the same.)
It is not enough to create engaging characters or situations, or to develop an engaging style. Sure, you'll need those things, and they might have been sufficient in the past. But you need to sculpt the very shape of the story in such a way that the reader is somehow placed in it.
Consider Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." It consists of a "framing" story about a pilgrimage and characters therein. Once you feel comfortable with them, they start to tell stories to each other, the stories that constitute the bulk of the work and its reason to exist. There are three layers here; the first is the reality of the reader. No matter what an author or filmmaker does, that reader or viewer knows who he or she is, who they were before they encountered the story, who they are as they eat, fidget, converse and conduct perhaps all the events of a full life while absorbing the story. And they'll know who the are when they leave the story and the experience turns into a memory of an experience. The challenge it to "fold" that reality somehow into the story.
Also we have the second reality, the reality of the storyteller in the story, the fellow among the pilgrims. And we have the third reality, the realities of the stories he tells. When he starts telling his stories, in some small way our world folds into his; the reality of the storyworld in which he lives merges in small measure with ours. It is a trick literally as old as the book, probably older.
Another type of folding is to have the characters somehow acknowledge that they are in a book. "Don Quixote" is famous for this, as the namesake character thoroughly examines what it might be like to be in a book, and what books are all about, and whether truth can be in a book and so on. The three layers here are the same so far as the first two, with the third his imagined "truth." Much is made about how real it is, and the more of this folding we have, the more we feel invested in the truth of our own insights as we read the book.
Folding. And on and on, through examples where the characters wink at the reader, the narrator plays tricks or games on the reader, or even where the world of the story wouldn't even exist if we weren't watching.
(XXX Note to self: Scrooge's ghosts)
We have a collection of chapters that categorize different types of folding, all with the intent of getting the imagination of the reader or viewer entangled in the world of the story. This basic idea has a huge base of practitioners and theorists, especially now. Especially in film.
A large number of examples fall under one big category: films about films, or storytelling, or writing or performing. Allow yourself to include sports under the performance category where appropriate and immediately, you'll have thousands of folded films. More complicated are the types of folding that involve noir, parallel realities, untrusted narrators and so on. I've structured the discussion of types and examples starting with the most obvious, so you should be able to see the more complex types in perspective after noodling around them a bit.
As with all ways of looking at things, you'll probably think I'm stretching it here and there; certainly I'll emphasize folding as a primary attribute where someone else would consider it secondary. But my job here is to introduce you to folding. Because good theatrical storytelling is a matter of exaggerating in a way to give the appearance of truth, I hope you'll forgive me for sharpening the focus on this mechanism.
This is an ongoing study for me. I'm finding it extremely useful for how I deal with film. Because film affects how we imagine and dream, these insights are helping me better understand who I am and why. I hope they are useful to you as well. I get lots of my examples and some of my insights from readers, and I encourage you to send me a message about anything along these lines. XXX
