A Writer's Notebook, One-Thousand-Eight-Hundred-And-Fifty-One

As I have been mentioning, I sorted of started approaching writing stories with this idea of letting the characters exist with an awareness of their fictionality and with the ability to respond to the story itself.  In large part this is just a way to jump start stories, or at least that is what started me in this direction, and I have to acknowledge that many of the stories I am writing at the moment have come together for me precisely because I used that approach to break me from not knowing what to do.  To be honest, part of what works about this as a tactic for getting into a story is recognizing that I always have someplace to go in such a story.  For one thing, if I really have no idea what I want to do in the story, I can have a character make a comment about things, can acknowledge the situation directly inside the story.  For another, I am also able to have the characters say things that respond to story elements, and thus it is possible for the story to critique itself in a way, and that means that I can notice something I've done which seems like a bad idea for the story and have a character say that.  The point is, for me at least, letting the characters be responsive to the story as a story in which they are characters offers me a lot of freedom and options, so I don't worry so much that I know what to do with the story.  This, in turn, seems to be allowing me to explore the idea more deeply by writing a lot of stories that build from that central approach.  I know that most of it is probably not all that interesting, or I suspect, at the very least, that the stories I have so far are too similar in terms of the way that they work, though it is hard for me to explain just what that means.  It is possible that the quality I think is so similar doesn't come across that way to other readers, but even if I am correct and these stories aren't really that interesting at this point, I do feel as if they are getting far more interesting and allowing me to do things in fiction that I hadn't considered before.

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