THE GAME WITHIN - HOW READERS WIN, HOW WRITERS LOSE
Part IV of Our Narrative Games Series
In our Games Within series, I’ve been going off on what I call narrative games, but the truth is one could easily ignore all of my instigations and still write beautiful stories. After all, if you learn the fundamentals of storytelling, chances are you will produce all our aforementioned narrative games organically, naively, intuitively, as a consequence of those fundamentals. The way many people speak a language beautifully without any formal knowledge of its grammar.
I just happen to be one of those people who likes to know the grammar of things — who believes insight always helps, never harms. When I was at graduate school I knew writers who rejected any speck of theory for fear it might somehow damage their work. To each their own, for real, but I’m writing these entries for folks like me, who prefer to err on the side of knowing more, always.
If, in the fields of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind — I’m convinced the same holds true of creativity.
Anyway...to refresh:
The idea here is to improve our storytelling fluency by improving our storytelling grammar.
The idea here is re-orient our creative and critical perspective in order to embrace narrative games more intentionally.
The idea here is that by playing with narrative games we will better understand what our stories most need to connect with readers.
2
To address the question that inevitably follows how does one play this game:
How does one win this game?
How does one win the game within?
Depends who you ask.
3
Please understand: most games — chess, poker, football, etc — tend to be structured with an eye towards fairness, designed to give both sides an equal chance to win — are, in other words, symmetrical. Not so the narrative games played by writer and the reader.
Narrative games — no matter what their orientation — are all highly asymmetrical.