Weekly Wattpad Contests

Contest #59

I read Ian Rankin's 'The Flood' last night, a piece of notable Scottish literature birthed from a university publishing-house in the mid-eighties.

It details the intertwined stories of a girl-now-woman named Mary Miller, who, as a child, had a grievous accident which turned her hair white, and, fifteen years later, her son Sandy, a boy in love with a homeless girl and who is widely considered the son of a witch.

This story served to call my attention to a newly developed fascination: While the story is in an intricate formulation of the mother's and the son's, it is also, most certainly, the tale of a town.

Those two braincells in my head have been colluding to dictate this inspiration: The tale of a Town.

Many stories are inexorably linked to the tales of the people in them, and, likewise, the tales of the people are much dictated by the stories of the town through religious, economic and development histories.

In the abovementioned, Carsden is a small coal-mining town facing economic ruin over the period of twenty years, and that reflects in the livelihood and apparent dispositions of its townfolk and, more importantly, the circumstances and motivations which form and define the main characters.

R.L. Stine in his 'Fear Street'novellas defines the main narrative as originating and perpetuating from the circumstances of two families in a small, pioneering American village in the 1800's.

H.P. Lovecraft's novels, 'Shadows Over Innsmouth', 'The Dunwich Horror', 'The Call of Cthulhu' and potentially even 'Polaris' (I have suspicions but not the energy to detail my arguments for the latter), are all based on the circumstances of towns and the histories behind them, in conjunction with the people who populate them.

Stephen King's 'Desperation', 'The Tommy Knockers', 'Needful Things', 'The Colorado Kid', 'Under The Dome', 'Carrie', 'Salem's Lot', 'Revival', 'Delores Claiborne',and'Cycle of the Werewolf'(I'm quite certain I missed a few, and the many short stories also applicable, but whatever) all deal have stories about towns so intricately entwined with the narratives of their characters that it's difficult to discern whether the story is about the community or the people in it.

John Saul's 'Creature', 'Nathaniel', 'Black Lightning',Anne Rice's 'Pandora', 'The Vampire Lestat', 'Violin', American Classic, John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men', South African Classic, Athol Fugard's 'The Road to Mecca', and, to prove a point, I might even go as far as to say that Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' are all stories based and determined by the stories of locations.

What is this point?

There are many points, to be honest: I've spoken about Relevance before, a large contributor to many of these stories' successes. I might have mentioned Character Based Stories and Character Driven Stories before (I know I have, I've made a contest about them), but our main focus here is what I would like to call 'Circumstantial Stories'.

Even today, the stories of characters entwined so tightly with their living environments permeate the media. The only recent ones I could think of (mostly due to my lack of enthusiasm for movies) are 'Dark Shadows' and 'Beautiful Creatures'.

While many of the examples I've named could arguably be considered dark fantasy, gothic literature or supernatural, I don't believe that this application of circumstantial stories is exclusive to these genres.

'Steel Magnolias', 'Erin Brockovich' and my initial example, 'The Flood' are all examples of stories which have this circumstantial element without the supernatural.

So, what actually is this 'circumstantial story'?

It's a term I'd like to think ties in very neatly with the previously discussed topics: Character-Based Stories, Worldbuilding, and Relevance.

Many of these stories are successful for these reasons:

Relevance provides a basis for storytelling drawing on economic, social, and political factors present in contemporary life, which story readers can identify and connect to on a personal level. In the case of The Flood', we recognise economic ruin, but we empathise with the lives of the characters attempting to overcome this economic hardship. We recognise social ostracisation, but we empathise with the emotions and decisions the characters make based on this background.

World-Building pertains more to the indeterminate factors which govern the circumstances of the stories. Ian Rankin phrased it quite nicely in 'The Flood':"There were no witches. All there was was superstition. He had entered a community where such beliefs still lived on. The mines had closed. Who was to blame? Abstracts such as economics and investments? You could not shake your fist them. Better to find a scapegoat instead." What we learn is there is always more to the world, and how deeply (and how well – decidedly distinct from how deeply) we care to interrogate them are left at the discretion of the author and the demands of the narrative.

Character-Based Stories are, once again, stories based on the concepts of characters. Every once in a while, we get that lightning flash of inspiration – for Ian Rankin, his great-aunt had fallen into the waste-water of a coal-mine – that we can look at and say, "Here's an interesting character. I wonder what their story is." These stories are inevitably tied to their backgrounds, living conditions and their relations, but with circumstantial stories, they are linked to these backgrounds.

When we think about them, we can say that these characters are trapped in the time, place and conditions of their narrative world.

In the classic structures, these are the external forces which drive the conflict of the story – we see that in 'The Flood' as Mary Miller being an outcast and called a witch in a town of declining economic renown, and how that affects the life of her child fifteen years later.

Circumstantial Stories work both ways. While the author tells a story about characters, they invariably tell stories about the world around those characters. In a previous contest, we discussed Authoritive Narratives, a narration which gives us a solid and clarified viewpoint on the world in the perspective of characters, which, again, plays into relevance.

This brings us to the heart of today's contest. Construct a story in which the following factors are true:

- The Town in which the story takes place has a life of its own.

- The people who live there have a distinct effect on the town.

- The economic, political and social conditions of the town are influenced by those conditions external from it.

- The people who live there are consequentially affected by those conditions.

- The people who live there who try to adjust to these conditions have, inversely, an effect on the life of the town.

I hope fervently I've made myself as clear as possible here – I'm really trying guys – but, once again, I know that my thoughts are a jumbled mess. With any questions or clarifications you need, I encourage you take artistic liberty, and I look forward to your entries!