storymaking
it started out as simply as a way of playing. "okay, you be the mother and I'll be the father, but it's a day I don't have to go to work." and I think it was innocent too. what do grownups do if suddenly they are robbed of gottados? we were young enough that we hadn't noticed that they never do. they don't play. grownups never just play! so what do they do? I don't remember us ever solving that puzzle. later we would set up cowboys and robbers like the beginning of a movie. when I got a room of my own, and my mother took away my books (she knew about hiding one under the pillow!) and turned off the lights, I became a soldier back in the time of the Trojan war, or a pirate in the Caribbean, or a cowboy on a trail drive when his boss and the foreman suddenly disappeared. these were the beginnings. much later, in 1994, I closed a science fiction anthology annoyed, and declared "I can do better than those!" I've been writing stories since then. are they better? I don't know. they satisfy me. they satisfy the few friends I've tried them out on. I haven't tried them out on editors. but it's not the interactions required for getting published that I claim to appreciate. I appreciate the storymaking: setting up the problem, choosing a narrator and a point of view, misdirection, developing characters, describing the action, letting them work out a solution, and writing an ending that does not wrap up too much. I write stories I can believe, about a world I can trust, where people are glad of partial solutions, sometimes of anything that feels like a solution at all. I not only appreciate storymaking, I love it.
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