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I've read and watched a lot of discussion about good story-writing in the last few months. Now that I've joined Cosmic Voyage, I've thought a lot about what kind of story or stories I might want to tell there. I love to write, but I tend to be very indecisive about the direction and style of my tales, which is why I don't write very often these days.
One pillar of good storytelling, though not a sufficient condition, is that the world of the story has established rules that are not broken. Whatever suppositions the story lays out, those suppositions are honored, and future chapters or sequels follow the same suppositions. Many modern movies and TV shows tend to fail on this front, which warrants plenty of criticism, but that's outside the scope of this log.
This tenet of storytelling has an interesting implication. Our suspension of disbelief prescribes that we take whatever a story is telling us as fact. It then follows that every sentence in the work is itself establishing a fact. Every word supplies a new definition about the world that sets certain possibilities, and certain limitations, in place.
If each sentence of a story establishes a fact, any possible statement that contradicts the established fact is implicitly ruled out as impossible. The possible forms the universe can take, and the forms of the characters inhabiting it, shrinks with each new word. In this way storytelling is a "subtractive" form of art.
Creative writing is not the only art form that can be seen as a process of subtraction. When a painter adds a brush stroke to a canvas, that stroke is now part of what defines that picture. The imagery of that painting is taken for what it is--and that imagery is entirely defined by what is or is not painted at any given spot. Once that color is in place, no other color can exist there, and the presence of that color must be rectified relative to the presence of other colors in other places on the canvas.
This type of thinking in creative pursuits is the essence of sculpting. A starting piece of stone has an amorphous shape, inside of which lies a beautiful sculpture. The job of the sculptor is to take a chisel and extract that sculpture from the rock. Once a piece is removed, it cannot be added back. The sculptor in a way "constrains", "limits" or "distills" the sculpture, restricting possible shapes the rock can take bit by bit, until the final form is completed.
Most people tend to view art as additive or constructive. A blank canvas has nothing on it; an unwritten story contains an empty world. Out of that blankness a new work of art is created, thus manifesting something that didn't exist before. But the inverse is also true: for everything that is created, an infinite number of other prospective creations is whittled away until only one creation remains.
My lack of effort in creative writing stems largely from my indecision in the face of art as a distillation of an infinitude of concepts. I worry that I might get bored by the constraints of the rules I put in place, or that I might not be creative enough to come up with a satisfying payoff given the strictures of previous established facts. Essentially, I worry that if I put down the wrong rules, I won't figure out how to "beat" them, or I'll lose interest.
Writing prompts are often helpful for me in this respect. They lay out a world that has some existing groundwork, but are generally open enough to allow a story to go in many different directions. Maybe I need to read some prompts and adapt them for use as a starting point on Cosmic Voyage. The fact that I can create multiple ships there helps as well--I'm not limited to one and only one world.
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[Last updated: 2022-10-13]