Thursday, November 1, 2007

1266

Floating paper boats into the ether (is that how that works?)

Taking 100 pages and deciding to insert a double line break roughly every ten pages, just for the rhythm of it. It leads to a sense of fractal geometry. I'm not smart enough to understand the ins and outs of quasi-self-similarity, but I recognize the concept of stochastic processes at work.

A month ago I was thinking about how I was intimidated by the idea that the release of information was determined by a set pattern and if you deviated from it, you'd fall off the mountainside and plunge into darkness. But: no. It's infinite. And, depending on how you think about this word, "random." The eyes are brown, the hair is blonde, because I said so. Boy meets, boy loses, boy gets because I said so. And isn't me saying so essentially random? Governing principal is psychology, storytelling, accepted practice, but aren't those just recognized divots in the snow? We are familiar with the patterns, which is why they're the footprints you can follow. But looked at geometrically, boy meets, boy loses, boy gets is just as likely as anything else.

It turns out what I thought was strength in a unified landscape was actually strenghtened by taking the puzzle pieces apart and looking at each on on its own. Micro-climates. Turning the last line of a paragraph into a cliff-hanger. Unexpected, and ending up fractal: taking a scene into smaller and smaller pieces, where every exchange of dialogue ends up having both its own weight and the cumulative weight of the scene. This is a good surprise. The bow of many small rope bridges rather than the parabola-in-growth-spurts of the jungle chasm-spanner.

I don't know if that has practical value.

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