HYPERDIEGESIS
You know those instances in a narrative that intimate there is more to the storyworld than is on the page or the screen?
Classic example: in the original Star Wars, Obi Wan Kenobi mentions the Clone Wars. In 1977 no one knew what the hell the Clone Wars were, wouldn’t know for another 25 years. Or, when in The Hobbit Bilbo declares: "Tell me what you want done, and I will try it, if I have to walk from here to the East of East and fight the wild Were-worms in the Last Desert." Or, when Gandalf spends seventeen years researching the Ring in The Lord of the Rings — or, any mention of the Watcher Council in the first seasons of Buffy. Again, the audience has no idea, nor are we given any hint as to what were-worms are or where exactly the Last Desert is located — or what exactly Gandalf was up to — or the composition of the Watcher Council.
But what all these tantalizing gaps and allusions imply is that there is far more to Star Wars, Middle-Earth, and the Buffyverse than what we first see in Star Wars, Tolkien’s novels, or those early Buffy episodes.
These are all examples of what Matt Hills calls hyperdiegesis, “the creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nonetheless appears to operate according to principles of internal logic and extension.”1
Or as Paul Booth puts it: Hyperdiegesis is a sense in the narrative “that there is more world than can be experienced in any one text.”2
Lestat revealing that he has the Blood of Akasha in him in Season 2 of Interview with the Vampire?
References to Bran the Builder and the Long Night in A Song of Ice and Fire?
The Eugenic Wars in the original Star Trek series?
The Off-world colonies of Blade Runner?
Beauxbatons Academy of Magic in Harry Potter?
All examples of hyperdiegesis.
As a worldbuilding strategy hyperdiegesis can lend vital narrative density to an imaginary world, imparting an illusion of depth, of precedence — can even imbue the imagined worlds with something of authority. Realistic stories almost always benefit from a reality dividend — added authority based on their supposed connection to the Real. Stories set in constructed worlds have to secure this dividend another way and believe it or not, nickel-dime hyperdiegesis, when done right, when done with restraint, can help solve the million dollar problem of selling an entirely fabricated secondary world to an audience.
Better still, good hyperdiegesis has the superpowerful ability to excite participation from the audience, acting as tantalizing mysteries that stimulate “creative speculation”3 and conjecture. If your hyperdiegetic narrative is convincing enough, readers and viewers will want to fill in the gaps — will want to play with the silences — and become, if only in their own heads, collaborators, co-creators — an engagement that helps render these constructed worlds all the more real.
Good hyperdiegesis creates belief, authority and investment. Bad hyperdiegesis — too much of it in the wrong places — creates to confusion and disbelief.
I’m not going to launch hardbody into worldbuilding until we’ve finished our Story Series (the Big Three of Character + Conflict + Context) but I thought it important we have this concept in our tool box. Plus I’d like to emphasize that hyperdiegesis, vital for designing convincing secondary worlds, is also pivotal for character creation. I’ve mentioned a number of times that convincing compelling characters need to gesture to a life beyond the confines of the story, need to have life aspects that have nothing to do with the plot or the writer’s plan. It’s this excess — what I call elsewhere Liberty — that helps convince readers that our characters had lives before the story began, that they are, in fact, real and independent beings and not just authorial instruments.
In other words, convincing compelling characters tend to contain hyperdiegesis.
Matt Hills, Fan Cultures, 2002
Paul Booth, Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games, 2015
Matt Hills, Fan Cultures, 2002
I love the concept of "reality dividend."
Thank you Junot!
I’m printing out this one as well. I love the idea that compelling characters need to give a nod to their lives outside the confines of the story or novel, something that convinces the reader they are real. It’s something that I think we do intuitively as we create and edit our way forward into our work but even as I write this, I’m thinking of my Australian painter in residence at the Renoir Museum in the south of France who needs more than the right Aussie expressions and lingo to make him real. We need a glimpse into the rest of his life.
I love these lessons of yours!
Kate