thread: 2006-01-31 : An Awesome Line of Thought
On 2006-02-01, Walt Freitag wrote:
I'm not so excited by this. As Borges's Library of Bablyon reveals, saying everything is exactly the same as saying nothing. Story creation is expression by instantiation. Expression by enumeration of a bunch of possibilities can only be a weaker form. (And Rashomon isn't a counterexample. Rashomon is one story, which is about multiple stories. If it were itself multiple stories, there would be one version where all the witnesses agree with one another.)
Not that there aren't usable techniques involving story mutability or multiplicity. Retakes, retroactive flashbacks, unreliable narrators (note that an unreliable narrator isn't the same as an unreliable author), ambiguities ("is he really just dreaming all this?"), and multiple points of view all have their potential, especially when used as techniques for arriving at a better story. But too much allowance for mutability or multiplicity in the outcome itself won't free participants to better achieve thematic self-expression through play (= creative agenda), but will instead free participants from doing so.
"A could of stories which are all equally true" is a better description of an author's starting point than of a desirable end result. The exception is metastories along the lines of Rashomon, The Lady or the Tiger, Calvino's If On A Winters Night A Traveler, and so forth. But all metastories all the time would get pretty dull pretty quickly.
This makes misuba go "A story is not a game."
This makes BL go "Word up"
This makes LP go "Agree on Roshomon."
I thought it was a cop out that there was an actual What Really Happened in that movie.
