How dimensional are you?

[Hypoxia]

Dimensional, not delusional. Do you write 2D or 3D settings? Does everything happen on the surface or do we climb slopes and descend canyons, submerge, tunnel, or balloon? How high and low do you go? Not counting Otis elevators.

 

[ElectricBlue]

My stories are always grounded in a known geography. Whether or not that comes across in the narrative, I don't know. But I can always precisely picture the scene when I write it, whether it be a room, outside, in a car, wherever. I know its size and shape, and whatever colours are there. I don't always write it, but I rely on it for veracity.

 

[mynameisben]

I write in accordance with a Sierpinski gasket, which has a fractal dimension of log(3)/log(2), which is approximately equal to 1.5849. That is, I write in a non-integer dimension that is a little bit more than halfway between a line and a plane.

An interesting result of my writing style is that my characters exhibit the property of Self-similarity. That is, an arbitrarily chosen subset of any character will contain all the physical features of the character as a whole. Thus, a crime scene sleuth who finds so little as a single toenail of the suspected assailant will immediately know what the suspect looks like merely by examining the toenail.

 

[Handley_Page]

I write in accordance with a Sierpinski gasket, which has a fractal dimension of log(3)/log(2), which is approximately equal to 1.5849. That is, I write in a non-integer dimension that is a little bit more than halfway between a line and a plane.
.

Would that be natural logs or something else, please?

 

[Voboy]

I write in accordance with a Sierpinski gasket, which has a fractal dimension of log(3)/log(2), which is approximately equal to 1.5849. That is, I write in a non-integer dimension that is a little bit more than halfway between a line and a plane.

An interesting result of my writing style is that my characters exhibit the property of Self-similarity. That is, an arbitrarily chosen subset of any character will contain all the physical features of the character as a whole. Thus, a crime scene sleuth who finds so little as a single toenail of the suspected assailant will immediately know what the suspect looks like merely by examining the toenail.

The sleuth’s name? Detective Mandelbrot?

 

[Bramblethorn]

Would that be natural logs or something else, please?

As long as you're using the same base for both, it doesn't matter.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Natural logs come out light, fluffy, and float in the bowl.

Unnatural logs usually are created by a wicked vindaloo...

And I prefer Schindler elevators.

 

[SimonDoom]

Buckaroo Banzai managed to get across 8 dimensions, and I aspire to that. Usually, I fall short by a few dimensions, but I don't beat myself up about it.

"Wherever you go, there you are."

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I don't know... I try to write my stories in the real world, even some of my Sci-Fi stuff is in the real world. But I grew up in the midwest where it's flat as a pancake.

 

[KeithD]

Dimension is just that--many directions. It isn't isolated to one issue or line of action or thought. If you write here in more than one category, you're being multidimensional in that sector. If you write in more than one time period, you are. If you use more than one basic plotline, you are. If you write both first and third person you are. I don't find the OP topic particularly useful.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

how dimensional am i?

Currenly three, I reckon. Though someone could make an argument for four, as there's that whole time element thing.

And I'd've accepted an accusation of two dimensionality a little while ago when my, "I'm just gonna lay my head back, stare out the window and think about this story I'm working on" turned into a nap. When you get woken up by your cat snoring, it's fair to say that you're at least temporarily two dimensional.

 

[mynameisben]

The sleuth’s name? Detective Mandelbrot?

Give that man a cee-gar!

 

[L_Snow]

Landscape Of The Soul

I'm all about dimensionality of the mind, maaaaan...

 

[Hypoxia]

My OP question (tapped on my phone just before falling asleep) was entirely physical, not metaphoric. And not a 32D electro-sound space (*). My question was triggered by theTvTropes' 2D Space Trope where almost all dramatic action happens near a plane, and a note I saw somewhere (sorry I can't cite it) that even fantasy undersea civilizations rarely include 3D aspects. I've not yet written underwater nor skyscraper scenes but I've put players down in mines and tunnels, climbing cliffs and rockpiles, winding through and over hills and ranges.

So, another dab in a corner of my oxygen-starved mind: think dimensionally. Motervate players above and below the grid. I needn't inhabit The Matrix, merely flit around more.
_____

(*) 32D sound space: When I upgraded my old PC-AT's AdLib sound card for a SoundBlaster with up to 32 factors for any single note and wrote a composition robot that played within a 32D space. The music output was no better than AI-written fiction but hey, gotta start somewhere.

What, 32 dimensions? A dimension is anything you can measure. A 4D point in space-time (x,y,z, and t coordinates) may also have a temperature, pressure, charge, whatever. We venture into expanded dimensions when we write of scent, color, taste, any senses. But here I only suggest more vertical motion. Up, down, up down, ooh, ooh... climb that pile of naked bodies!

 

[SynSlave]

Well... my first story had a ladder in the title AND a physical ladder was used in the plot. Plus, you know... stairs.

But the ladder was also metaphoric. So, let that blow your mind I guess?

Perhaps all stories are created in the fourth dimension. Because last I checked imagination wasn't a factor in three dimensional Euclidean space. Maybe we can incorporate imagination into time and rework relative physics.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Ok, so a pre - sleep thought bubble of yours.

One of my characters was pushing a car up a hill and fell down face first into a cow pat.

Another, in a different story, looked out over her backyard where she had to walk down three flights of stairs to get to the pool.

That sort of thing?

 

[BelleCanzuto]

My second story, I think it was second, features the two characters walking through a park, and then riding up the elevator an unspecified number of floors to her apartment. Because she's strung up (sort of) in the floor to ceiling windows of her apartment, a lot of her internal monologue centers on her view of the city around and below her.

Another story centers around a guy hiking in the mountains, but all of the action happens in one house.

I mean, really, since humans are only so tall, unless your story needs to feature a lot of vertical movement, why would it even get mentioned? A story set on a plane is basically going to take place in the horizontal plane of the, um, aircraft. Unless you're talking about the Vomit Comet, and the swooping up and down to simulate weightlessness is integral to the story... (ok, maybe that's a plot bunny for someone with better areonautical knowledge than me)

 

[Hypoxia]

I mean, really, since humans are only so tall, unless your story needs to feature a lot of vertical movement, why would it even get mentioned?

Aeronauts, aquanauts, mountain climbers, cave crawlers, and skydivers fuck, sometimes while changing elevation. Tales in the vertical mining towns of Bisbee or Jerome Arizona, or Zacatecas or Guanajuato Mexico, or on Italy's Amalfi coast or Guatemala's Lake Atitlan, are necessarily vertical if anyone ventures outside a bedroom. San Francisco, too. I've set stories in several of those locales. I didn't *plan* spatial 3D action then but now I'm sensitizing myself to think in 3D. YMMV.

 

[Voboy]

My SF stories feature space travel, starship maneuvers, etc. I found I had real difficulty avoiding repetitive phrases and pedantic explanations during a passage where I had to describe precision maneuvers like a rendezvous, a docking, etc. it’s space. There’s no up, down, etc, just relative movement.

In the end, I scrapped most of that, did one of these,

* * *,

and just skipped ahead so that a few characters could discuss the aftermath. It seemed to work.

 

[Blind_Justice]

I'm still bound to the Prime Material plane, but I might one day tear open a portal and send my characters to a knockoff version of Sigil, the city at the center of the Multiverse.

 

[oggbashan]

I'm not sure I fully understand the OP, but there are references and meanings behind some of my stories that aren't immediately obvious.

Some of them are so obscure that I don't expect most people to be aware of them.

Some are blatant:

The Casbah is a reference to the Movie 'Casablanca'

Some are not so:

Durante The Dog was influenced by 'The Riddle of the Sands', the WW1 Secret port of Richborough and the WW2 Dutch Resistance use of their modern telephone system to communicate without the Germans being aware.

Some I wrote intentionally; some crept in from my subconscious.

 

[Jada59]

I write 3-D.

 

[ElectricBlue]

In fact, I dislike the other perspectives so much that I throw away almost all 3rd-person narratives and reserve the 2nd person only for choose-your-own-adventure books.

How odd to disregard the bulk of the world's literature merely because it's written in third person. That's a strange prejudice.

 

[UsuallyPresent]

My OP question (tapped on my phone just before falling asleep) was entirely physical, not metaphoric. And not a 32D electro-sound space (*). My question was triggered by theTvTropes' 2D Space Trope where almost all dramatic action happens near a plane, and a note I saw somewhere (sorry I can't cite it) that even fantasy undersea civilizations rarely include 3D aspects. I've not yet written underwater nor skyscraper scenes but I've put players down in mines and tunnels, climbing cliffs and rockpiles, winding through and over hills and ranges.

-snippity-

I've designed aquatic races that are truly 3d, to include combat, mating, feeding, and construction. Then again, I've also written up 2d scenes where appropriate. I've TRIED writing multi-d ( >3 ) stories but they've yet to gel and work.

 

[UsuallyPresent]

-snip-
2nd-person feels and sounds artificial to me, 3rd-person feels and sounds jarring and impersonal, and only Deadpool can break the 4th wall naturally. So, I’m really only left with first-person perspective.
-snip-

HEY NOW! Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side have both successfully shattered the Fourth Wall, as did Looney Tunes! Deadpool is derivative of their innovation!


OK, so Gertie the Dinosaur may have been the first to truly break the 4th wall, but then again, there are plenty of stage shows from before that which rely on optical tomfoolery along similar lines. Hell, Puck addresses the audience in Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance off the top of my head, and Puck's been in ink a whoooole lot longer than Gertie.