Stories: Who Owns Them?

Rachel Griffin in the Foothills of Heaven by Codex of TiaT — seemed appropriate

In my lesson on tropes, I deal with the Logic of Characters and the Landscape of the Human Heart—the landscape where stories take place. I try to explain how this landscape has a real topography—not just an arbitrary set of Legos that can be interchanged in any configuration. And in my article on wishfic, I touch on stories that are true to the spirit of the muse inspiring them vs. those that are muse deaf.

Both of these issues are subsets of the hotly debated issue of who decides what is canon in any given story.

Recently, I read the following extremely interesting, related comments by Paolo Munoz, aka GameDiviner. He wrote:

I've been having philosophical and metaphysical discussions with friends over the nature of stories and storytelling. The person asked the question, "Who gives people the right to come into our culture and destroy our beloved stories?"

At first, I wanted to see if he could resolve the dilemma he proposed by first asserting that the IP owner is the one who has the right. He disagreed that the IP owner can take a beloved story and change fundamental aspects of the story and its inner logic. He said that the original author has the right.

So then I asked him if George Lucas had the right to introduce "mitochlorians" in Episode I? Even Lucas, the supposed "owner" of the IP, knew he stepped in the wrong direction and transgressed on the "spirit of Star Wars" when he had a scientific explanation for a mystical entity. The audience told him, and he quietly admitted to his error by letting it slide into the background.

My friend agreed that Lucas overstepped his bounds, so I then asked, "If the IP doesn't belong to the audience, and the IP isn't at the sole whim of the IP owner and even the original author can transgress against the 'spirit of the story'... What exactly are they transgressing?"

I postulated that the Greeks had it right when they spoke of "Muses" and how the Muse bestows the story upon a writer or creator. The writer or creator is merely a custodian of the story to which they must communicate to the world to the best of their ability. There are clear transgressions against the "spirit of the story" that they are bound not to cross. Canon, internal logic, and other things exist within the "spirit of the story" and any act against it is an act of sacrilege. "Sacrilege" is the right word because that is how everyone acts when we know something terrible has gone wrong in the telling. That is how the audience acts when they see "heresy" or "sacrilege". The writer/shaman/high priest isn't the dictator of the story.

The metaphysical reality of the story as a "thing in and of itself" is the only explanation for how to properly treat a story or IP. The IP owner is merely the societally accepted "custodian" of the story and they can transgress against the spirit of the story itself to dire consequences.

This is why John and I speak about the Divine Muse. As John is fond of saying, the muses make as much sense as the idea that our personal subconscious somehow knows more than we do about the story we are writing and doles it out to us in bits and pieces. More sense, probably.

I often think of writers as divers in a diving suit...they seem to be alone—swimming through the wonders of the deeps—but they are not alone. There is an entire boat with a crew up top, lowering them down on a line, making sure they have enough life-giving oxygen. In this analogy, the writer is the diver, and the Divine Muse is the crew and support staff making it possible.

What is this Divine Muse? We may not know this side of forever, but…

I have heard people who have had visions of Heaven describe coming into a room where—I think they were angels, I can't quite remember—were writing, and they were told that those in the room were writing the books that would later be written on earth. I have also heard such people say that there is a museum in Heaven where one can see every work of art ever painted on Earth as it was meant to be, including the parts that the artist failed to translate to the page.

So there may actually be a troop (or a troupe?) of angels supporting each of us, working out the twists and turns of plot, the intricacies of character. If so, maybe there is a divine version of every story, too.

In which case, there really is a canon—ie. things that fit in the story and things that really don’t.

And the owner of each and every story is the same one writing ours.