Balancing a timeline across multiple viewpoints and storylines, and deciding how the viewpoints will be sequenced and presented is all the nonlinearity most stories will necessitate or support. But there are stories where it is appropriate to do something more creative and imaginative.
Teaching Fundamentals
At its best, teaching must be a dynamic process. Just like storytelling, even in the written form, is a dialogue between author and reader, teaching is a dialogue between teacher and student, instructor and learner.
Creating Room for Creativity
When we are willing to disrupt the status quo, we create space for something new.
Complexity and Entropy – Two Sides of a Coin?
In the functional information hypothesis, high complexity is not the opposite of high entropy, but more of a different way of looking at the probability or phase space of a system to describe its entropic states.
Lengths and Forms
Working within those forms is part of managing reader expectations, which is a key component of making a story appeal to a given reader, but the expectations we have around form and length of stories are not derived from some optimization method synchronized with humanity’s ability to interact with literature.
Reading Series
I wonder if perhaps this whole debate is somewhat missing the real point, which is obfuscated by the forms in which we happen to package stories.
Speeches as Poetry
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a short speech at a large event. Maybe it could have been more distinctive if I’d had this thought before the speech, instead of about two hours later: I should have treated the speech like poetry.
Clarity of Vision – Opacity of Writing
In a substantial way, the very clarity of my vision for the story undermined my ability to write that story so someone else could understand it.
Writing in the “Real” World
Writing a story associated with the real world is complicated, and it becomes more complicated the more closely associated with the present real world it is.
An Oblique Approach to Reality
Thinking of poetry as an oblique approach to reality reframes my understanding of poems and helps explain why I’ve always struggled with writing original poems, but it doesn’t mean I can suddenly write poetry.
IGC Publishing 