The Uses of Boxes in Writing
Greetings, Timmy! Welcome to another edition of “Ramblings with Professor Wulf.” Please, no, sit down; it’s just you and me here. Neophyte has ventured off to attend to his own pursuits. Today, let’s deviate from our usual discussions on the craft of writing. Instead, I’ll indulge in a bit of organized rambling. You see, I’ve developed a monumental concern regarding the craft, or more precisely, its practitioners.
This issue might be a recent trend or, more accurately, a contemporary habit we’ve acquired. The internet, a marvelous tool that I extensively utilized in my journey of self-learning, has revealed something to me as I took charge of my own modules. Many individuals seem to be fervently chasing checkboxes.
As I’ve mentioned before and reiterate now, writing indeed has rules, conventions, and established methods. However, these guidelines are hardly set in stone, Timmy; they’re far from being fixed in place.
Yet, every aspiring author, novelist, or literary enthusiast attempting to make a living these days treats the craft as if it were a set of rigid rules guaranteeing specific results. Consider statements like “avoid these ten characters in a detective novel.” Where do I even begin with such notions? Let’s use that as an example.
Tell me, Timmy, can you predict the type of person you’ll encounter on the road of life? No? Of course not. While you can expect to meet certain individuals based on your surroundings, you can only make educated guesses and might not always be correct. For a story to feel alive, a vital random factor must be present.
Certainly, there are archetypes, conventions, and elements that audiences anticipate, expect an want. However, they are not rulers and lords of your work; they cannot control you or dictate your actions. Writing is a creative process, requiring the author’s input to fulfill the creative aspect of the process.
I hold a particular disdain for the sticky note method. Not because it’s an invalid technique, Timmy; it has its merits, and it’s not inherently wrong for people to use it. My qualm lies in the resemblance to something I used to do at the age of seven—writing down sequences that essentially boiled down to “and then, and then, and then.” This approach results in bad writing. Why? Because it reduces characters to mere reactors to narrative input, devoid of agency or control over their actions, with motivations reduced to nil as things just happen. The sticky note method of outlining a story feels akin to constructing a flowchart and inserting characters into it—it doesn’t feel organic or natural to me. However, every teacher has their own book in any subject.
Now, if you manage to create an actually good story based on that concept, or even a competent one, then you can make it work. Need an example? Consider “The Tomorrow War,” a film about present-day individuals conscripted to fight a future war. Don’t attempt to wrap your head around it; it’s strange and weird, even by science fiction standards. It’s not an exceptionally deep story, though it attempts to be at times. For our discussion, what matters is that many things go very wrong all the time—a classic “and then.” However, it works here because it has logic; it works because it isn’t an off-the-wall, unhinged concept that is impossible to happen within the confines of the setting and story, specially because the protagonists are, for all intents and purposes, alien to the time they are in.
A narrative is crafted through refinement; you can’t simply check boxes for the sake of completion. No matter how obsessive you might be, there are things you’ll cut—things that lead nowhere, things that aren’t necessary but removing them might harm what is necessary. The craft is far from clear and straightforward, with no safety net other than your own gut feeling and experience, gained only through actual practice and making mistakes.
If you’re pursuing this with the intent for success, you must accept that with conceptual tools and methods, you can’t control the process; you can only execute it.
Until next time.
