Eventfulness vs. 'Special People' in Protocol Fiction

Participants: suspencer_nit, drevius., cameronisok, sn37, sachbenny, randylubin, rafa_0x, jdbb

The ProtFiSIG group convened to discuss how William Sewell's concept of 'Eventfulness' from his essay 'Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology' could be applied to protocol fiction—a genre that deliberately avoids relying on 'special people' as narrative drivers. The central challenge discussed was how to create spectacle-rich, propulsive narratives while adhering to this genre constraint.

Participants explored the relationship between narrative scale and eventfulness, noting that events gain significance depending on whether they're viewed through the lens of individual biography or historical era. The discussion surfaced a key tension: traditional short story form emphasizes a pivotal day in a single person's life, which may not naturally accommodate larger historical movements. The group considered whether authors could solve this by embedding 'contextually/historically/eventfully dense nuggets' that immediately convey broader context to readers, allowing the narrative to proceed with human-scale storytelling.

References to literary examples like Michael Kohlhaas and narrative techniques such as 'flight forward' and Voltaire-style rapidity were cited as models of eventful writing. The meeting concluded with suspencer_nit noting this as an interesting creative challenge: finding or creating stories that successfully integrate historical eventfulness with intimate human-scale narratives.

• Protocol fiction aims to ground narratives in 'strange rules, not special people,' requiring alternative mechanisms like eventfulness to create compelling, propulsive plots.
• Eventfulness operates across multiple temporal and historical scales—the significance of events depends on the zoom level of analysis, from individual lives to entire historical eras.
• Short stories traditionally focus on pivotal single days in individual lives, but eventfulness may require embedding contextually dense material to convey larger historical movements within that form.
• Techniques like 'flight forward' and Voltaire-style rapidity can generate eventfulness in narrative, offering models for protocol fiction writers.

View discussion in Discord →