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

I would like to offer a bit more of an explanation about what I mean when I speak about context without content, as I explored last night.  As I said, this not an easy thing to really convey, but it is about the idea of a relationship, a pattern.  If one thinks about a pattern, it can often be made without regard for what is in the pattern.  One can make stripes using many types of objects, and still they are seen as stripes.  If I lay out paperclips from my desk in a pattern and you do the same with rubber bands, we will be able to see if our lines are in the same pattern, regardless of the supplies we each utilized.  But, what if we could find a way to communicate the stripe with no object, without anything but the concept of the stripe, of the pattern.  This may sound silly, but consider the idea of telling someone how to make the pattern, how it might be that you could describe the construction of the exact pattern, and you could have them do it with any object they have on hand, or even any bunch of random, different objects.  By describing the relationships between the elements, the person can be allowed to see the pattern, but made of whatever things they want.  That seems clear, when one discusses it in terms of a visual pattern, but how can a similar processes be described for the pattern of a story?  I don't really know, but I feel that having such a metaphor, having a bit of a way to describe it, may be a significant step.  I may need to consider more about the elements of the pattern itself, the story, or I might need to consider what the instructions would be, or it may even be that some hidden condition or aspect.  I don't yet know.  That is, I think, a large part of the point, of why I want to write about it tonight.  I am struggling to see it more clearly, and I have to believe that this small step towards communicating the idea with greater clarity is important.  It certainly is a step towards clarity in my thinking, in how I can conceive this, but it is not yet grounded into the right framework, at least not fully.  Maybe I must build out the metaphor itself.  Consider that one could vary aspects of color or brightness by shifting the density of the placement of objects.  Tell them to put objects here closer together, to fit more in this space than that, and it will alter what it looks like from afar, will allow more nuance in the pattern.  While it may be that the pattern, overall, can be made of any random set of things, certain properties are put to use when present.  The objects placed could be sorted, given functions, roles, specific placements to reflect their qualities, even if they were not my chosen objects.  To unpack that, it is possible to point towards types of content, towards how certain content fits into the context.  It can be content the person filling in the pattern has brought, has chosen, but it can still be guided to a certain framework.  I am not certain, yet, how all this would work in terms of a written piece, but this does give me a better sense that it might be possible, or is at least worth considering more than I have already.  I hope that soon I might have a better sense of this in a technical way, not just as an idea to contemplate.

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