Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27708312-20170202163909/@comment-31166511-20170220175241

Ralphini wrote: Also, I've been reading your story, and I've been enjoying it so far. do you plan to do more of it?

Oh yeah.

There is already a first draft that is ten times longer than the two sections I posted. And as I post, I make more revisions.

A lot of the text of the supposed journal entries are questions about the town of Gravity Falls. I plan on actually answering several of these questions, as if the author had made up a To Do list of investigation and later filled in the answers as his investigations progressed.

This way I can use the nature of the online website to give reader an experience of a journal in the process of being created rather than one one that has been lost or abandoned and is no longer active.

The 'record of events left behind' trope is pretty well worn in fiction. It has the limitation that you KNOW that the author has to survive the events described, otherwise he can't have written them.

Films like "American Beauty" get around this trope by having a narrator address the audience from beyond the grave.

Other stories have another person write the ending, say like the murderer who the protagonist suspected of wanting to kill him.

There was an early story by Robert Bloch, the author of the story that the Hitchcock film "Psycho" was based on, with an author investigating a house that was reputed to have driven several people insane with fear because of some terrible creature of force they saw.

The investigator isn't worried about experiencing anything so scarry that it drives him insane, because:

A) He is personally brave on account of his experience in many dangerous situations.

B) He is blind and deaf, and well as having lost his legs. He has no way to escape any danger. And not much motivation to survive in his current condition anyway. Dying to solve an unsolvable mystery has a great attraction to him after his adventure filled life.

The protagonist has his manservant set up a typewriter in the scary room and leave. Bloch has the challenge of writting a scary story about a guy who has little ability to feel fear. The setup was enormously contrived, but a lot of the development was pretty effective.