A Writer's Notebook, Day Eight-Hundred-And--Ninety-Seven

 I often considered various literary forms as organizational mechanics.  For example, I think of stories in this way.  Consider that a series of events are not a story in the world, but become a story through how they are collected into a framework.  A set of events over a span of years might seem disparate and unconnected when seen as just the reality of things that happened, but when some of those events are pulled out and ordered, it can create a specific narrative thread.  The story is not the events that occur, but a method for ordering them, with certain qualities.

To me, this is the essential function of language, to be honest: to organize and process information about the world.  This facilitates communication, of course, but the truth is, it is an internal tool first.  The mind of a child must learn to associate words and ideas with what exists in the world before being able to put that language to use with another.  Various studies show that learning language facilitates the development of certain mental capacities, including those involved with introspection and aspects of self-awareness.  Our first use of language is as a tool for ordering our experiences, not for communicating them.

To me, this opens a lot of possibilities, and a great many questions.  For example, when I think about stories, I have to consider the general structure of a plot and how that functions, and what it is doing as a means of organizing information.  Within a story, the information is expected to be connected.  We do not want to learn about things that are not important, generally, and often will call unneeded details or superfluous events a distraction that drags a story down (though this is not, of course, universal).  I am still not certain of how to explain this in general, to be honest, but that is largely a result of my thinking only being at a start.

One thing I have been considering in this regard is the notion of tension in a story, and the question of how it is defined, what it means, and, especially, what it is to release that tension.  To me, this is to do with partial information, and with interconnected information.  We know enough to be aware, to have certain thoughts about what is happening or about to happen, and the resolution is the point when the information we have is resolved, when we learn that outcome, we are seeing the complex information already presented being simplified.  Their is a movement from the chaos of the climax that unravels and concludes.  That is, to say, it is a movement from chaos to order, which is always a movement towards organization by definition.  Their are other ways stories do get structured, of course, but I think this particular way of seeing a story has something important in it that I need to learn.  Right now, I know I am being quite vague, and I want to be more concrete, but writing this has been a first step, and most of what I learned is how ill equipped I am as of yet to communicate these concepts with clarity.