On Writing: Creating a World vs Telling a Story
On my journey to try and write a complete story, I found it incredibly satisfying creating my story's universe. Mostly characters, relevant parties, and cause and effect. So after a few months of creating, I end up with a decent amount of details and a fair chunk of my story plot filled in.
But I haven't written a story. In fact, I haven't even completed a single scene in it's entirety.
Strange.
These "details", feel so integral to the story. I feel like I'm creating the story. And yet when I google "how to writing", everything is dead focused on the scene: making the perfect scene, the build-up of scenes, scene dialogue, etc.
It seems like our focuses are different.
Anyways, without going into how modern writing is too presentation focused, let me lay out these two contrasting features which constitute a story.
A World
The world of a story is its own characters, and their thoughts, interactions, histories, and details.
And a timeline of events with explanation of cause and effect.
To me as a writer, a world is already the story. Creating the locations, characters, and happenings. Just like how facts and forensic evidence can tell a story, the existence of this separate world, it's characters and events makes it a story to me.
Telling a Story
However, there is another huge element in stories. That is, how we convey them.
When we talk about a good writer, we often applaud their gripping text, captivating storylines. A good part of that is the art of presentation. The first implication of presentation is that of selection. Not every fact and character's thought reaches the reader's eyes, and certainly not every cause and effect is layed out.
A story consists of a series of scenes which convey the journey, and also bring the reader through the build-up and through the climax of the story.
Beyond that, a story has description, which helps the reader to imagine the scene and put them there.
A scene can have a mood, which immerses the player. It's possible to like a scene just for it's mood. Note this mood is a very subjective thing which is both conveyed and imagined. A mood might also might suggest something about the character's lines of thoughts, or it might connect to the punch line of the scene.
A narrator can use different tones, which achieve similar effect to a mood. For example, the ironic tone in the narration of the post apocalyptic world SukaSuka encourages us to grin painfully as we hear about curious history and the downfall of foolish parties, deserving and tragic alike. A caustic tone in another post-apocalyptic story could be emphasizing to the reader that human lives matters little here. Of course, the writer could offer up these ideas directly, but a tone or mood simply hints at them.
Mostly what these things contribute to is to bestow an experience to the player. This is a subjective experience which is distinct from the world that the author created. Before you think I'm saying "objective rulz", I note that it is possible for a story's universe to have certain emotions or ideas that permeate through it, which the author was trying to convey in the first place.
I guess this is why they talk about stories often having an over-arching message. I personally am not a big fan of stories having a primary message, though that it is definitely something which can be done. However, even without having a message, stories usually end up effectively talking about something. This is because they inspire us to think about the phenomena/conflict that they depict.
In closing, my fellow VN readers, I leave you with this. Think about a story you've read or are writing.
Does the world exist for the sake of the telling, or does the telling exist on behalf of conveying the world?
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