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stories and towers
Jul. 5th, 2011 04:32 pmI had a bit of a burst of inspiration at work today about how writing works for me. All my life i've been fascinated by how things work, and how pieces fit together to make a whole. That applies to machines, buildings, stories, and even people. Which makes sense, considering my Myers-Briggs personality thingy is Architect. I tend to see the world as a set of ordered systems, and I want to understand how those systems operate.
A story is a system too. I visualise it as a tower, mainly because i'm rather fond of tall things and high places. But if a story is a tower, but words on a piece of paper or a computer screen are only a blueprint. Stories can only properly exist in the minds of people who can understand them.
Before i can write a story (or sometimes at the same time) i have to build it in my own mind. This is the prototype of the tower, so it's bound to be a slow, difficult process. I have to develop characters, order events and line up plot points so that the whole thing fits together neatly and solidly, keeping a careful eye out for cracks and faults. When i get stuck writing, i find its usually either because i'm missing the next piece, in which case i need to do more of the mental building stage before i can continue, or there's some flaw in the structure i've built, in which case it needs repair work or, sometimes, to be discarded entirely and started over. Usually in those cases i can at least recycle many of the characters and ideas for raw material for future work.
Once you've finished building your story and created the blueprint, that's only half the process. 99% of the work, but only half the process. Each person who reads your blueprint attempts to reconstruct a story in their own mind according to it. Each mind is different, therefore each story based on the blueprint will be slightly different, though the same in essence. Badly-constructed stories often fall to pieces in critically keen minds, and overly complex stories may crumble in simple or distracted ones. Really well-made stories, though, can generally be built up properly in most any mind.
Anyway, there's your laboured analogy for the week. I've written two chapters of Cremation, and i've got most of it built up in my head, so i should be able to get more written fairly soon. I just need to fill in the cracks as i go along.
A story is a system too. I visualise it as a tower, mainly because i'm rather fond of tall things and high places. But if a story is a tower, but words on a piece of paper or a computer screen are only a blueprint. Stories can only properly exist in the minds of people who can understand them.
Before i can write a story (or sometimes at the same time) i have to build it in my own mind. This is the prototype of the tower, so it's bound to be a slow, difficult process. I have to develop characters, order events and line up plot points so that the whole thing fits together neatly and solidly, keeping a careful eye out for cracks and faults. When i get stuck writing, i find its usually either because i'm missing the next piece, in which case i need to do more of the mental building stage before i can continue, or there's some flaw in the structure i've built, in which case it needs repair work or, sometimes, to be discarded entirely and started over. Usually in those cases i can at least recycle many of the characters and ideas for raw material for future work.
Once you've finished building your story and created the blueprint, that's only half the process. 99% of the work, but only half the process. Each person who reads your blueprint attempts to reconstruct a story in their own mind according to it. Each mind is different, therefore each story based on the blueprint will be slightly different, though the same in essence. Badly-constructed stories often fall to pieces in critically keen minds, and overly complex stories may crumble in simple or distracted ones. Really well-made stories, though, can generally be built up properly in most any mind.
Anyway, there's your laboured analogy for the week. I've written two chapters of Cremation, and i've got most of it built up in my head, so i should be able to get more written fairly soon. I just need to fill in the cracks as i go along.
