The Subplot Tree
I just had A lightbulb moment
Subplot
(Subplot/side note/lollipop footpath: remember the underground comic: Dirty Plotte?? lol)
Subplotree. Out on a limb. Versions of events like branches…
In a nutshell (perhaps even imagine a new ‘platform’?):
…to use original memories/stories as seeds to grow trees where the actual (real life) characters, within origin “seed stories”, having caught wind (read it), can join in, “branching off” into their own “version of events”. In essence growing a tree from a “seed story”. So once the tree is adequately branched, a reader of the origin “seed story” can then choose what “branch” they want to explore next (out on a limb, anyone?). Like a tree meets one of those “choose your own adventure” books. But reader not controlling the storyline so much as broadening the scope of experience reading it by way of their subjective choosing which character they want to hear from next. This could work for fiction too, I realize. But for my purposes it would be rock n roll stories to start. This idea just hit me all at once like 10 minutes ago while texting with my X, asking him to recall an incident I experienced by way of a voicemail from late 1990’s(??), while he was on tour with Lemonheads (as drummer), where the recording was Evan Dando and Marilyn Manson tossing a big hotel TV out a window from floors above ground level, in London. God I wish I still had the recording. But anyway, receiving it upon returning to my tiny cottage rental (called The Barnacle Cottage) in Gay Head (Martha’s Vineyard) from a nearby beach, was really almost a surreal experience. But I never asked George to extrapolate or tell me the whole story. And I think BOTH stories, mine and his, could work collaboratively; and imagine if then Marilyn Manson saw it and added his own “branch”… and Evan Dando wrote a branch! The story becomes a TREE.
Branches like a “family tree”; but with the person/character/voice name is a whole new “version of events”; the same story… told from the unique perspective of additional players within it, feel me?
I’d be so interested to explore this kind of coverage, wouldn’t you?? On so many Levels… would it resonate? Feedback please… Is this an interesting idea for collaborative writing/reading??
Bear in mind… I don’t mean like Reddit, etc… there wouldn’t be comments branches… though comments threads could dangle from them. No, I mean, real life characters (or imagined in the case of fiction) could be approved by the origin story “seed writer”, to add a branch by which to explore their “version of events”, their unique experience, their objections or differences from other versions (pre-existing branches), so as to ultimately and finally present the most complete or expansive, universal or collective, versions of events, as a tree wields its fruiting branches… interconnectedness, though individuated by way of individual branches. lol. This is a brand new idea… I am thinking out loud. Because I didn’t want to forget this.