Storytelling is natural. Writing is constructed.

Hell of a first post topic, but its what's on my mind, and I wanna pretend its 2007 and this is the LiveJournal I never had.

Writing's been something of a constant companion for me, but I'll be real I've never really been "good" at it.  Not from a 'the words don't sound good' standpoint, but structurally.  I learned from an early age how to write a strong argumentative research paper.  Thanks Mama, I'm not as terrified of my Dissertation as I probably should be, because that's what you had me doing since 4th grade.

But no one taught me how to write narratively.  And part of that might come from where I grew up in the South.  River city, poor on average and full of folks what learned right and wrong on their pappy's knee listening to stories about great great grand someone's trials and accomplishments.  The kind of folks who land in a river city got stories in their blood, 'cause we didn't have much else.  So you gather around the table.  The fire.  The grill.  Tell stories.  Sort'a meander along a topic, and by the end of it the audience came to the conclusion you needed them too.

But that works for entertaining people, for company dinners, for interviews, for cutting silence in line or the elevator.  It doesn't quite make a novel.  At least I never managed to hack it.  I've tried every method in the book.  Every 7 point, 16 beat, 25 step process google could spit out, I tried.  And sure I can see how they map onto other stories I've already read.  And yeah I can rip my story apart into those segments.  Dissect it for the "Call to Action", the "Pinch Part 2", what have you.  But in so doing I lose my story's soul.  Eviscerated on a page, pinned on display like shadowbox butterflies.  And that's where they stay.  Lifeless.

But I also know better than to wing it.  Letting those butterflies make their lazy patterns in the sky, I'll ramble here and there and lose my path as I forget where I'm going.  Forget where I started.  Or remember far too keenly, and struggle to pretend it was different enough to not have to rewrite it so I can change the bits in the middle.  Never finished a manuscript without a direction; but can't bring myself to write an obituary for a story I meticulously planned.

And yes.  I'm writing start to finish.  As senseless as that sounds.  But that's how storytelling works.  You lived it in one direction, and you tell it like you lived it.  Even if "living it" means those scenes in your head during yard work and long drives and before you fade to black on your pillowcase.  I am, indeed, aware that this isn't the suggested way.  And sure I can - and often do - skip sections, or leave myself a [write this when we figure it out later] note.  But the meandering of a story the important part.  The pace it takes, the direction it goes.  That's how you know it's getting where it needs to be.  By watching it as it goes.  Its just the way I'm built.  Its the way my folks told stories, and they way theirs told them, and theirs before.  Its why it's so hard to ignore the changes and the skips - and why what should take a year takes 5 while I go back, start over, hammer something else out. 

No one taught me storytelling as a skillset.  I was raised into storytelling as a social practice, as a means of being understood by the transient who'd pass through my life, by the children who've got a better mind of it than just 'trusting' their elders, by the world at large, that won't acknowledge you unless you spark its humanity enough to remember that you're breathing too - that we're all breathing together.  What I learned, through exposure, repetition, is that there's only one true "formula" for a story, and that's "life".  Its why Tarot cards work as a tool of introspection.  Its why super heroes sell.  Its why people cheered when they discovered a new chapter of Gilgamesh, 4000 years later.  Stories are based on life.  

You try something. -> It doesn't go as planned. -> You figure out how to survive, or how to protect what matters more.

So when you sit down with someone from a storytelling culture, you end up with the whole three-act-play, whether you realize it or not.  Whether the topic seems 'grand enough' or not.  Because that three-act-play was based off of thousands of years of humans trying to survive being human long enough to leave something behind.  Every single person has a time they tried something, something went wrong, and the fought through it anyway.  If they didn't, they wouldn't be there to tell you about it!

So why, then, is it hard to translate this into a novel?  If I've been doing it for decades.  If I've been doing it in this essay?  Because I don't have to convince you to believe a world like this exists.  You already know it does.  I'm telling the truth - enough - that you know I'm talking about the real world.  My grandfather was talking about real places when he showed me pictures of our furthest back ancestors we know of.  My mother told me, when we drove past her childhood home almost daily on the way to get groceries.  The things we tell as lived stories require little back story.  I don't have to convince you there's a city out there, you know what that's like.

But if I tell you there's a planet out there where the people look like gummy candy?  Do you believe me?  More importantly, do I believe it long enough to convince you its worth ignoring what you're already sure is true?

That's where it all breaks down.  I can plan events, I can paint emotions - those I've had decades of practice on.  But what I haven't, and what I've taken for granted, is the world building.  Telling stories in a world that already exists is great.  Even playing field, you don't have to establish anything before hand because the audience has the same core understanding you do.  That's why fanfiction is often less cumbersome to write as well.  Its a handshake, we've agreed upon entry.

But if I want to write something new, I have to build for myself.

And for a long time, world building for me was academic.  A nature documentary of lies.  A scientific research article chronicling a technology that defies the laws of physics.  But this doesn't build a world.  It describes one, sure.  But to build you have to get your hands dirty.  You have to hold the pieces and nail them together.  But its not that direct either.

I had the temerity to take sculpture as part of my engineering degree.  In undergrad it gave me marketable skills and hands-on experience with materials and tools that my contemporaries simply weren't getting by following the rules.  As part of my PhD its given me the words and practical understanding to look at everything from research to teaching from a more metaphorical perspective.  Anything can be symbolic.  Any symbol can be substituted.  (You'd be surprised how getting command of this changes how you start to look at differential equations.)

At its core, sculpture is about space, and volume, and materials, and humanity.  Its about making connections and conveying meaning with a physical object.  Or with the absence of a physical object.  Or the implication that there was at one point a physical object that now only exists in pictures.  Its about whether the urinal or the banana is art due to context, due to intent, or nothing at all.

World building is much the same.  Its not just that the curtains are blue, the same colour as his eyes.  Its setting up situations where those blue curtains are unusual in the first place.  The blue eyes matter.  Why the red apple and the red hair in the Giver are a plot point as much as a symbol for difference.  Red hair has always been contentious.  Gingers get kicked.  Irish were dirty.  Scotts can't speak proper English.  These are all different.  And yes, they're nasty things to say.  Yes they are wrong and vile ways to treat people.  But those associations are still there.  Redheaded girls are feisty, have a tempter.  They don't fit in with polite girls, or pretty girls.  It wasn't just a convenient way to show that the main character of the Giver was losing his societally devised colourblindness, it was a hint that he would be different in a way that defied society.  The mockingjay pin in Hunger Games was an emblem in-universe, and a motif for the reader.

These are materials.  They mean something.  The same way that using re-claimed items in a sculpture implies time and history, or using molded and cast objects made especially for the piece add to the implied value of them.  These are motifs.  These are ways of including concepts without saying them out loud; which is, in and of itself, a way to invite the audience in.  Asking them to interact deeper and further, to adventure through it and find a meaning that relies on their own humanity.  That reminds them that we are all breathing the same air.

When building a story, its not just choosing your favorite character, and writing about them.  Its choosing the character that will hold your audience's hand and lead them through the world, introducing them to your favorite character in the process.  Its creating places and people that feel that feel real, and yet are not so familiar as to be without mystery or interest.  Its making up systems and sciences and cultures that foster a specific issue to stand in the way when events start to play out.  And its constructing a world out of flashes of red, out of mockingjay pins, and stone that feels ancient, and reclaimed objects that bring with them their history into the current setting.

Sometimes its notebooks with lists of information and ideas and motifs and timelines of real world events.  Because storytelling is not just about the life.  Its about the world it happens in.