A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-Three-Hundred-And-Twenty-Two

I am going to just write some of what I have been considering about stories and hope that it comes together in a way that is useful or interesting.  This is rather disordered and is, I will acknowledge, motivated by my own desire to just explore and consider some of these ideas, so I don't promise it will be anything particularly coherent or applicable at the moment.  It is just my thoughts.

I've long held the notion that story is a method of organizing information about events, and, more particularly, that it is a way of organizing them based on cause and effect.  Accepting this as a framework, the first thing that I think is worth considering is the nature of the relationship between cause and effect in a given piece of work.  In each story, there is a logic for what results from which events and actions, and within that is the core of the stories overall structure.  This is a larger idea, obviously, and trying to consider the ways it can be demonstrated is a larger effort than I am making right here.  At the moment, this is just a basic and superficial consideration of some such elements.

To that end, I think I am also beginning to consider some other questions around this core theme.  For example, I am considering just how the level of clarity between cause and effect is utilized by different authors.  I can certainly think of numerous stories where a specific cause is not revealed until late in the story, in order for the reader, and (at least in some cases) the character to realize something, often when it is too late for it to be rectified.  I can also think of stories that have degrees of randomness, or seeming randomness, in how certain outcomes proceed, or which demonstrate this type of thinking through divergent plotlines or other methods.  The point is, the narration can have a variety of relationships regarding these elements, in a way that is dynamically related to but separate from the actual logic of how causes lead to their effects in the story.

Anyhow, I am imagining that most of this was quite unclear to anyone else, but it was helpful for me and my own thought process, as I often find that writing ideas down helps to catalyze my analytical process.

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