A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-And-Forty-Seven

I spoke yesterday about how ideas can appear, how they can develop through small bursts and glimpses, and how it takes trust in this process to see them through. There are times when it can be impossible to even explain an idea, especially if the idea is inherently about a way of using language, or a type of storytelling. It can take a very long time for such things to come together in terms of a technique. I have spoken before about the notion of writing a piece without a clear narrative perspective, ungrounded in first, second, or third person. The first time that I caught a glimpse of this as an idea was during an eighth grade English class. I do not recall the specifics of how the idea came to me, but I recall discussing it with my then teacher. It was not fully formed, but just a thought about the idea that it might be possible to write something in a different way, without the traditional narrative person. It was not until decades later that I found a way to make this work in a story, and, if I am honest, it was spurred into being out of a petty annoyance at a rather terrible workshop leader who was insisting on everyone writing in third person. It can take a spark of that sort to push an idea into gear. Ideas can float around for a long time, only coming into focus when it seems pertinent to make use of them.

At the same time, I also know that it can be important and useful to think through a concept, to consider what is possible, or question how a thing might be done to address a specific consideration. Much of my interest, at least recently, has to do with questions around the dichotomy of content and context. The content, for me, is not always important, and can be problematic in ways I will discuss, while context includes the significant aspects that create meaning. This latter statement may seem strange, but if one considers that a story is a structure, a series of relationships between defined elements, it becomes more sensible. The retelling of an old tale is a familiar concept, and is based upon the recognition that what matters is not the specifics of content, not who, where or what, but the relative roles and interactions. A villain needn't be a literal witch, or even match any particular trait of the original instantiation. The hero can be a completely different individual in a very different world. The specifics of the content can be changed a great deal, so long as the hero's relationship to the villain parallels that in the original. A daughter with a cruel step-mother might become a student who finds there mentor replaced with a new and unkind, school-assigned advisor.

To me, this is a bit like the way a metaphor can be seen to work. The metaphor is about the idea that two things can share the same structure, can be related to an image or idea in a similar way, and are thus the same in some sense. Shifting a story into a new context is creating a metaphor of that original, or, at least, can be considered in that way. That is, the story is really the structure, the context, and the specific elements can mean the same thing even when they are very different. The point of a retelling is not to make the story new, but to make the elements of the telling meaningful through the way they play out the metaphor to the original story, and what this teaches about both the original story and the new context. This, of course, leaves out a great deal else, including the possibility that a new story might take off in order to do something outside the originals scope, even in a modernized or shifted retelling, assuming a direct retelling moved merely to a new setting, with altered characters and other specifics.


For me, though, the real interest is in the question of removing content in order to focus upon a context-only text. I am sure this concept seems absurd to many, and begs the question of why such a thing might even seem worthwhile. The reasons why I am interested in this idea are far easier to explain. First, as I said above, content has issues. For one thing, any element of content is potentially alienating to some person. On the most basic level, consider that just about any bit of sensory detail offered will rely upon an experience that some people do not have due to their physiology. This is most recognizable when discussing a blind or deaf reader's experience with visual or auditory aspects of a text, but their are also those who lack smell and others who have varying degrees of tactile differentiation. That does not even reach towards the larger issue that any particular element might be related to specific sensory experiences within individual experiences. Once I gave a piece of writing to a teacher for their thoughts, and found that they could not read the piece at all, as it contained rats and they are phobic. The work was not graphic, was in fact a sort of farce with the rats as pets, but the mere inclusion of the idea of a rat was too much. Now, of course, it is not all that important, in some absolute sense, that it be rats. I could have changed this and shown the teacher a version with rabbits or mice or bats or any of many other creatures without losing the core point. The content was insignificant to what mattered for the telling. In even more important ways, their is the alienation that can emerge when content is not accessible to a reader. I've had the experience of reading work by a writer who assumes certain ways of thinking or relies upon sensory details that seem to exist outside my particular experience of the world. In some cases, I do not notice that I am missing something at first, but find myself lost at some later point, because the way I interpreted the text was incorrect on a basic level that is no longer plausible. At other times, it is immediately jarring, tossing me out of the story. Content has to ground the work, thus it inevitably limits things to one or another literal interpretation, and a specific rendering of the world itself.


That is to say, any detail is going to be more or less meaningful, depending upon the reader, and is never universal. At the same time, what can be universal are the elements of structure, the contextual relationships between the elements in a text. The specifics are not important here, only the ways that they interconnect. I do not know how to describe this idea well yet, if I am honest. It is the limit, right now, is the place where my mind begins to reach the end of what I consciously can grasp. I can imagine ways it might be done, but they seem too simple. It is not at all clear, but the idea seems important. It may be that I am seeking a way to write a piece that causes the reader to structure a story from the elements of their own experience, to order what they already know and experience into a certain structure, a story that I am hoping to communicate. Is that at all sensible? I don't know, and even if the idea makes sense to anyone else, it does not mean that it is clear how this could be done on a textual level. It is not about lacking in specifics, but in directing the reader to supply all those specifics. In a way, it is like trying to get the reader to put the elements in place for the metaphor by creating the metaphorical structure and pointing the apparatus in a certain direction.  Again, this is not a very good way to explain.

I don't know if any this will make sense, or if I can make these ideas work in the end, but I have to trust that it will, at some point, come into focus for me.  Maybe tomorrow I will sit down and find the way to put this to use, or maybe it will be in my head for a while before it comes into anything.  I hope that writing this will help to propel the idea forward, but I don't know.  In the end, only writing within the framework of such an idea offers that opportunity.  I need to find that practical, technical entry-point to this kind of work, and then find my way forwards.  It feels that such a chance is coming soon and that is why I am wanting to consider the idea here at this moment.  I could be wrong about that, but I have to believe that putting conscious focus towards this will help to move energy in the desired direction.