plotting the novel…by coordinates

I discovered a fascinating discussion at Making Light (a blog hosted by Teresa & Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editors at Tor) called Graphing the Novel. Graphing the Novel may have started as tongue-and-cheek, and maybe it ended that way and I am just susceptible to mental masturbation, but I can’t stop thinking about this.

Jim McDonald claims all novels can be plotted in 3D-space along the axes

x: True to Beautiful
y: Realistic to Symbolic
z: Dinosaurian to Sodomistic.

First off, let me explain the last scale. “Dinosaurian to sodomistic” refers to the poles of comic and tragic, or happy and somber. As an LGBT identified rabble-rouser, I was a little disturbed by what “sodomistic” meant, but it apparently arose from a Clarion workshop, wherein the creative instructor was finding a writer’s story to be “angsty and sodomistic” and said it needed more dinosaurs. When the writer came back with too much fluff, the instructor said it needed more sodomy. See?

Now, that explained, the comments at the blog were enlightening. Okay, challenging. Okay, I felt smarter after I read them and think they’re all pretentious — and I say that because they were way more clever than me. I could never have come up with such speculations, let alone understand half the ones they offered. They speculated on the notion that there could be a mathematically perfect novel, questions about how Truth and Beauty could be opposite poles when science often equates them, that editors might one day have formulas based in coordinates for each genre:

Thank you for submitting your manuscript. Unfortunately, Tor only publishes books which fall within 0.1 units of (-0.8, 0.5, 0.2) on the Macdonald Scale. Our test readers classified your novel as (-0.26, 0.11, 0.9). If you wish to resubmit, please make your story a) less beautiful b) more symbolic c) more saurian. (ajay)

Hank came up a system already out there based on how people perceive in the first place:

evaluative (Good-Bad)
potency (Strong-Weak)
activity (Active-Passive)

Stephen expanded on Mike to address novels like Myers-Briggs addresses personality:

A story can be plotted in 4-space over where it sits in these dimensions[Conventional/Subversive] [allegorical/realistic] [epic/intimate] [True/Beautiful]. This is independent of genre, quality, or value. It’s simply a way of describing fundamental characteristics of a story. Like Myers/Briggs is a simple way of categorizing personality types. You may prefer subversive/allegorical/epic/true stories (not my personal choice), but there is nothing wrong with any extremes or midpoints for that matter.

As someone fascinated with theory and generally any sort of meta-analysis, I’ve been just drawing out graphs all morning wondering how one might plot a novel this way and if the subjectivity of each category is such that a mathematical analysis is no more objective than a review. Meaning, I may think of my own stories as ranking high in the Symbolic, like a -100, but others may not and rank me say around 0, smack in the middle of Realistic/Symbolic.

Well, I suggest you go read the post and comments, because you’ll probably get so much more from their back-and-forth. After all, my personality may be an INFJ but my blog is just so SRIT…