When I am at a movie theater and I become totally locked into the film, I lean forward, holding my chin in my hands, as if to shorten the distance between the screen and myself. The dream is a rope between the screen and the skull. The question of where a dream occurs turns out to not be quite right. The dream can only occur while the audience is actively engaged with the work. Your memories of a movie are not the movie, your thoughts of a book are not the book. The dream ceases to exist when the screen goes dark or the book is closed. But it makes no sense to say that the redness or heat can exist as qualities just as well without me as with me … the sensible only exists as a relation. If there were no thing capable of giving rise to the sensation of redness, there would be no perception of a red thing if there were no real fire, there would be no sensation of burning. You can only create the conditions for that dream to occur.īut does the dream occur wholly within the mind of the audience? That’s not quite right either. The thrill occurs - you close the book - and the book is just paper and ink again. The thrill exists only in the moment of reading. An unread book isn’t thrilling or funny or awe-inspiring. Likewise, a book is not the dream it evokes. But thrust that finger in the fire and a burning occurs. qualities, just as the flame becomes devoid of pain once the finger is removed.Ī fire by itself has no burning in it. Similarly, the melodious beauty of a sonic sequence is not heard by the melody, the luminous color of a painting is not seen by the pigment of the canvas, and so on … remove the observer and the world becomes devoid of these sonorous, visual, olfactory, etc. I do not touch a pain that would be present in the flame like one of it’s properties: the brazier does not burn itself when it burns … the flavour of food is not savored by the food itself and hence does not exist in prior to its indigestion. When I burn myself on a candle, I spontaneously take the sensation of burning to be in my finger, not in the candle. This is from the opening pages of After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux: I’m bending these words to my own ends, so get bent, École Normale Supérieure.) (I want to make clear that I’m grabbing little bits from these books, and what I am taking from the text isn’t anything close to what is intended. Also, I’ve taken to reading modern continental philosophy that I barely understand lately, and it’s pushing my brain into some interesting places. This abstract level of storytelling theory is where my thoughts are these days. There are plenty of people you can find to tell you to use active verbs and avoid prologues, if that’s what you’re looking for. I’m aware that these essays are getting increasingly esoteric. What interests me right now is defining what that dream is. My core artistic belief is that your sole job as a storyteller is to cultivate and partner with your subconscious self to create a work that delivers a “vivid and sustained dream” to its audience. I differentiate between that and what I call the dream, which is the work as experienced by the audience. In general, I refer to the work as the thing that you have created, the literal words on the page or pictures on the screen. In a very real sense, until the words on the page are read by someone who is not the author, the story as we think of it doesn’t exist.Ī quick pause to get the lingo straight: Since my goal is to write about storytelling broadly, including fiction, film, and television, sometimes my words can be imprecise. In fact, I’ll go farther: until a story is read, the story isn’t. Because we all know this even if we don’t say it: a story doesn’t matter until it is read. And worse, the authors who become soaked in bitterness, angry and mystified and lashing out.Īnd at least a part of us is sympathetic because we have at some point in our writing life felt something like this. We know the signs: the desperate pleas, the hustle-gone-wrong and backfiring shills. We’ve all seen the people who have been broke on this particular wheel. When we are unpublished, sometimes we begin to feel something like holy panic that our work is not being read.
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