DAY 025 – DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY

Consume Stories

 We need to expose ourselves to many forms of narrative. It’s natural to have one form you resonate strongly with (Disney-philes, I don’t understand you, but dammit I love you), but we can’t leave it there. This isn’t just for the narrative forms we pick on for being unsophisticated, but plenty of others. 

For instance, if you are a playwright and you exclusively read Pynchon novels like Gravity’s Rainbow, you’re only going to produce dense, unintelligible 14-hour, allusive, elusive, self-consuming plays heavily featuring feces. If that was as far as we ever got as storytellers, we are just recycling those same narratives, chopped and formed into something resembling something palatable and nourishing but ultimately being nil.

Rather, we need to read Peter Pan and Pynchon, Ishiguro and the Sears catalog. What happens when you combine Cormac McCarthy and the Hardy Boys? Matt Tibbs apparently. Diversity of narrative is one of the things that makes our voices different, and good thing. What a boring, monotone world it would be without that eclectic, seductive blend arising from our libraries, our theatres, our movie houses, our music halls, and our museums. We are in the business of new creation: pairing, combining, splitting, splicing, grafting and lashing together whatever we can to create meaning.