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On March 22, 2025, Kasie and Rex took on the natural limitations of stories as we write them and explore the pros and cons of those limitations. Here are the show notes:

Theme for the day

Limits & Boundaries

Agenda

• Quick Catch Up
• Set-up the limits conversation
• Types of boundaries and their pros and cons
• A few basic infrastructure pieces wouldn’t hurt

Segment 1

So Pixar has released a new show called “Win or Lose” which is about the week leading up to the big game and gets inside the heads of characters surrounding it: the players, their helicopter parents, even the lovesick umpire. It’s from the world of Inside Out which personified emotions into adorable characters to document the experience of a young girl whose family moves to a new place – leaving all of her friends and security behind.

So, Pixar is animating emotions. Which is novel and fun and gives the creators a chance to think about how would you visually represent Anxiety? Anger? Fear? Disgust? And in “Win or Lose” they get creative with the effects of those emotions and the burden of carrying them around.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because today’s topic is limitations and the Pixar show demonstrates how animation provides extensions of the limits of typical real-life-people acting. And it’s not new, we’ve seen everything from The Incredible Hulk to The Mask us special effects and really talented actors to convey a range of emotions. We’ve also seen Looney Tunes use exaggeration and hyperbole to demonstrate emotions.

So what do I mean by the limits and boundaries of stories?

Just this: every story has its parameters and pushing them, bending them, or working within them, are all part of your craft.

Example number two. One of the comp titles Amy submitted for mFaith of Brides and Blood is Dowry of Blood. It’s a first person narrative with a specific audience, “You” and the narrator continually says, “You” did this, did that, were this, were that, and it’s the narrator’s sire she’s addressing and we, as readers, are eavesdropping on this long monologue she’s delivering to him. It’s a unique approach that creates some specific boundaries.

So, today I wanted to talk about the various literary devices that creative boundaries, broadly speaking, and then some specific examples of where authors have had to break convention or twist their creation to get around those boundaries.

Savvy?

Segment 2

Great, let’s do it. We’ll start with the easiest and most obvious: point of view. When you decide on a point of view, you adopt specific boundaries. Here they are:

• First person narrator limitations – limited point of view (readers only know what they know), character bias (readers see everyone through the narrator’s perspective), stunted character development (we rarely see the changes others make, so thinking a first person narrator would see them and acknowledge them in the text is unlikely and lets the writer off the hook), unreliable narrators (they lie, they omit, they misrepresent), lacks off-camera events (when action happens away from the narrator, we have to have someone else tell us about it), no head-hopping (others’ emotional depth is only what the convey and what our narrator picks up on).
• Third person narrator limitations – if it’s “tight” meaning focused on a single character, we still lack the internal experiences of other characters and the limits imposed by whether or not the character was present for the action; head-hopping is a risk here, especially if we’ve established the tight POV character but stray into telling the emotions (internal knowledge) of other characters.

We don’t want to spend the whole episode on POV because we’ve done that show here and here. But suffice it to say, all stories require a POV and that POV comes with its own boundaries and limitations. Here are some examples of stretching or bending the limits of POV:

• Inanimate objects as narrators – the vine in The Floatplane Notebooks
• Animals – as in Life of Pi
• Children – Room which follows the five-year-old boy’s understanding of what’s happening to his mother in the room that is his entire world
• Death – The Book Thief is narrated by death himself, who has come for the girl multiple times and been unable to take her because of her resilient spirit
• Unreliable – Fight Club’s narrator has a split personality, Girl on the Train’s narrator is an alcoholic
• Second Person – You by Caroline Kepnes is told from the perspective of the stalker and puts the reader in the position of prey.

Segment 3

Time and place are also limits and boundaries. We’ll start with time. The story itself has a bounded time frame. We don’t tell stories from beginning to end, those would go on forever. We start the story at a specific time and tell whatever came before as exposition (Episode 277). So the time frame creates some natural boundaries.

What happened before (exposition)

What’s happening now (action)

Other parameters:

• Historical context – what’s happening in the background? How does that affect the story?
• Clock time vs. narrative time – literal hours are long and slow and boring. Stories that harness the literal hours (24) can be exhausting. Narrative time includes time hops, fast-forwarding through the mundane like riding in the car to move from place-to-place.
• Duration – how much time elapses between the story’s beginning and its end? In After December, I wanted to bind the story into the first week without Tony. It’s compact and intense. Michael Crichton’s A Case of Need does the same thing.

Where are we?

Where have we been?

Where are we going?

If the parameter is place we can be bound by the physical limitations thereof. A swimming pool, a beachside town, an outpost on the moon. All places have their limitations. Setting plays a critical role in some stories – Downton Abbey is an entire world bound to a single British country estate and While we were Watching Downton Abbey is a book that takes place in the apartment building’s common room as characters come together and then disperse over a series of gatherings. We’ve talked about (Episode 223) using special events like funerals and weddings to create expectations and parameters.

Some examples of bending the parameters of time and place:

• Epic stories that sweep multiple generations, multiple locations
• Time travel stories that create fish-out-of-water scenarios
• Hero’s journey stories where characters physically move place to place completing steps toward a final confrontation with the big bad
• Stories that use stationary objects as a lens to watch time passing – the house in The Floatplane Notebooks, the film Here most recently

Segment 4

Why do we need parameters and limitations?

If you’re feeling trapped by them what can you do?

Do you have to acknowledge and respect the boundaries?

What happens if you ignore them?

Is there an easy way to catch yourself if you’ve broken the limitations?