Quantum Storytelling

Most people can string two sentences together. And if prodded, they can string another two sentences, and another. They can tie those sentences into a paragraph, and those paragraphs into a page. Many believe these are the baby steps that produce a book. And at some point, they inevitably do. What’s the old saying about monkeys and typewriters?

Writing doesn’t make a good story. Neither does editing, although it can certainly make a good story great. Just because we’ve written a bunch of characters doing a bunch of stuff across 200 pages doesn’t mean we’ve got a decent story. That requires a whole different skill from just hammering away at the keys. It is an exercise of the mind to work out times, places and events. It is a more difficult exercise to make those things believable and logical.

The job of the storyteller is that of Coherer — bringer of coherence. To me it adequately describes what the writer does; taking incoherent bits and pieces and making them coherent with the overall facts and progression of the story.

When somebody mentions writer’s block, I’m often reminded that it means something different to each of us. For some people writer’s block occurs in the literal sense of the term; They simply can’t write. They can’t sit down and put words on the page.

The other kind of writer’s block is one where the writer can sit down and hammer away at the keys, but come away feeling no better, no further along in story, no more progress than the previous day. I happen to fall into this camp. I can write, and write, and write. I can be downright hypergraphic at times. But it does me no good if my story isn’t going where I want it to. I’m writing in vain. My pages are a waste. Throw them all out!

My block is a block of ideas. It is a block from forming the proper connections between two parts of a story, which leads me to a another class of blocked writers. I believe there are some writers who believe their block is of the first kind. They sit down and stare at the blank page, and think “I can’t write! I just can’t get the words out!” This is usually because they don’t have a story to tell. It hasn’t fully formed yet. Something is missing. Something essential, that once in place, makes writing easy. Because when you’ve got something to say, and you’re excited and passionate about it, the words just flow, don’t they?

That’s because writing is easy. Storytelling is hard.