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Abandoned malls playing old songs
When I started drafting this issue three weeks ago, I had an idea of what I wanted to talk about but much happened in between. First I took some time off on vacations, tried to relax and buried my face in fantasy books. Nearly at the same time, a big games industry scandal broke out and sucked in all my energy, even if as a bystander. And I didn't know what to write about anymore. Although things have been slowly calming and I recovered some of my creative impulse, I still don't know what to say.I have been filling my free hours with joy and friendship, as much as possible. Also reading (Sweden has made me an avid reader again). That lead me to pick up a book by Fernando Pessoa in english, which is a whole experience in itself. Portuguese is a very romantic language, and Pessoa in particular explores it with beautiful prose, so seeing how it translates to another language is good food for a hungry brain. During these weeks I understood that this state of not knowing what to say is also out of fear of hurting others with empty words, to be out of touch or out of place. But it also weakens my own voice, the voice that wishes to claim its valid space as a woman, as part of this community. I still haven't figured out what to do with this. So while this plays out, I share here a bit of Pessoa, in english, an excerpt from the very beginning of The Book of Disquiet: "My soul is a hidden orchestra; I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony."In that paragraph I realized the right stories do not get lost in translation or time - they persist.Good for all of us.-Maíra
As above so below
Have you noticed the past two issues tapped on the subject of limits?I did, but only when I read their titles side by side: No words and No rules, no laws. Funnily enough, today I planned to write about boundaries once more, but this time with a different title. There might be an underlying connection between them all, just let us not read too much into it for now.
No rules, no laws
I have been struggling with idea of story structure lately.For starters, I understand the value of teaching the infamous Hero's Journey to writing students or beginners, to grasp what common elements in great stories made them great. I had a teacher back in film school who always said: "You may find silent movies boring, but if you don't know where you are coming from, you can never break the mold". And yes, he was right. What keeps a wall standing? Once you master the answer to that question, you can start building curved walls. Carve a doorway in it. Anything your mind can conjure, because you know how to keep it standing.And the fact is, in my daily work I barely if ever use conventional existing structures. Quite the opposite, most of the time I am trying to break the mold, looking for a new solution that fits better whatever it is I want to achieve. Which made me realize that learning and taking story structures to heart is not the "harmful" thing in the way we teach storytelling - I mean, I just said on the previous paragraph that I agree it is quite important to know. Learning how to create a solid structure will allow you to experiment with different ways to tell stories.The problem is, they are taught as rules. But here is a fun fact: there are no such things as storytelling rules. There are choices. You can say rules are merely choices you make over and over again. And mind me, I too have taught story structures more than once as some form of rule or guide on how to create a good story, because I believed that back then. Although I do not agree with my past self on that anymore, it is not entirely wrong. You want a safe bet that you can make any story somewhat interesting? Save the freaking cat. Act it out like Syd Field told you to. It will work, but at the end of the day what matters is not the structure itself, but the story that came out of it. It's what you are telling that matters.Years ago I found this image on the depths of the internet that I still keep on my computer to this day, because it is not only good reference but also a genuine reminder that all story structures kind of live under the same roof.
No words
Written communication is my favorite way to... well, communicate. I tend to favor text or speech, text in particular, in my everyday life (you see this is about to get as personal as they come, so bear with me). I also take many notes all the time, not just because ~I am a writer~, but because of how my brain retains information. I learn by muscle memory, physically reproducing an activity, and writing on paper is a physical activity. It helps me remember the information I wrote while also develop ideas and elaborate thoughts. For the purpose of this absolutely non-scientific issue, I will take a leap and say you can see a connection here between how one thinks and how one communicates, and of course this leaks into how we create. So I would argue that, because I favor written communication, I don't usually tell visual stories.Now, video games are visual and aural experiences. Yet I have always struggled to abstract the written component, the text. It seems natural to rely on text, punch up a dialogue, find the right words. And just to make it clear, this here is not a complaint, I use this skill whenever I can. But again, I work on an audiovisual medium and although text is cheap, it is not the most effective every time.So how does one improve in communicating with no words? Is that something that can be taught or is it a natural trait, akin to the way your brain learns? I can't say I have answers, but what I do have is the belief a human being stubborn enough can learn pretty much anything.My first idea was to learn how to draw. And here I'd like to open a parenthesis: everyone knows how to draw. It is usually the first form of artistic expression a child is introduced to and we learn it before reading and writing. It is a way to assess the world around us and bring our imagination to life. But most of us abandon it when we start to develop self-critique and also learn how to write, because writing is more often used in everyday communication than drawing. So we get very judgmental of our own abilities and turn to what will be of most frequent use to make connections with other people. Despite this notion of text as informal communication being fairly recent in human history, abandoning your abilities in drawing early on is not a new thing at all. After all, this ability to learn the "rules" of good and bad which stops us from making art is something we naturally develop as our knowledge and sense of self mature. I thought that rescuing my drawing abilities would help open my mind to visual storytelling. Which, yes, it does. But it takes time and practice to develop it as a language. Same with visual composition, storyboarding and collage. You can read a great esperanto dictionary from cover to end and still not know how to speak esperanto.So circling back to the reasons why most of us stop drawing as kids, I realized that book-binging was not going to fix what stopped me on the first place. Then there was the one thing I have not thought about: try to tell a story with no words. Nevermind the lack of technique, just try. Think of a scenario or a prompt and challenge yourself to communicate this without using text. It is the most obvious path, and it took me months to realize that it is what I needed. I needed TIME and PRACTICE. Of course, drawing again and having learned more about storyboarding is amazing, but the one way to get where I want to go is to nosedive and turn off the critic inside, at least for a while.Being self-aware is not that fun. I recommend Flowers to Algernon by Daniel Keyes - not a book about drawing, but to reflect on the burden of knowledge. I understand you a little better now, Charlie Gordon.-Maíra
Horses and riders
Any of us who have been introduced to the working world and the monster known as "market" have a good grasp of what ego stands for. Bonus if you work in any creative area - it is most likely you have had first hand encounters with textbook examples of an inflated ego. Ego is your sense of self, but not just that.Let us recap what Freud says about the ego in psychoanalysis. While id is the primal self, the instincts within us, ego is the counterbalance to the id constructed by our social experiences. It is the "reasoning", the sensible part of our self. As Freud himself exemplified, if the id was a horse, the ego would be the person riding it.Ego can too be a great barrier to creativity. Think of how this sense of self, this awareness of social response to your actions, regulates your instincts. You might be driven to create for a pure, instinctive need to say something, but the social component filters what you deem worth of saying. Or good enough, or necessary, whatever funnel those experiences translate to. Of course, ego is also what will regulate what you are saying, transpose it to an intelligible result, edit. It is fuel and it is also a leash.My understanding is that ego is not only beneficial as it is necessary to be a creator. It is what makes the instinct to pass on a message connect to people, to our environment and social circumstances. The ego transforms our primal into sociable. It helps interpreting the language of the animal self, whatever feelings embedded in that creation that turn to thoughts, metaphors, philosophy. And although not every creator seeks recognition in the most common sense of the word, recognition - the awareness, a state of being acknowledged - seems quite attached to creation. Who are we saying something to? A poem is still a poem if no one reads it. It has the form of a poem, but I wonder if it takes someone else's ego to interpret it into what we call poetry.Like the old-question-turned-meme poses: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?-Maíra
Baseline
I bought a plane ticket.Somehow, amid the vast array of normalities I wish to not have lost touch with, I thought buying plane tickets would not make its way there. Yet it felt surreal to make plans, that usual rush of excitement about going somewhere replaced by a hollow of uncertainty in my chest.It is a happy trip. I am planning to see my family, maybe my friends if the situation allows some safety, and yet... Yet.Despite my unnerving positivity and deep faith that normality will be normal again one day, it feels so hard to shake off the feeling that some things will never be the same anymore. Not because they will be life-threatening and dangerous as they are now, but because we will have changed so much that we cannot go back. Some deep entrenched notions of what life is seem to have changed for good, or is it just dread? A fear to never leave this weird social arrangement we adjusted to.Some countries are far more advanced in vaccination now, starting to reopen and reconnect with life as it was. Makes me wonder. If they are back to what they used to do before, are they doing stuff the same way? We say the world changes all the time, but in truth what changes is the people. We change. The world adapts.And now we are more self-aware, more frightened. It has been a hell of a collective disruption and we are not expected to move on as nothing had happened. After big wars and catastrophes, everything shifts. Life-altering events, that is what we call them. The ones who have been through it pass the story on, and who they are at their core is forever changed. War survivors come back to rebuild the world after the dust settles, carrying their learnings and stories with them.The normal shifts. History proves so.We are mid-shifting now. Buckle up.-Maíra
Stillness
I had this (not at all freudian) idea to write about stillness in a moment where I could barely pause to write a paragraph whatsoever, with so much going on at the same time. Irony is pretty much a part of who I am at this point, so a week later I got to embrace it and here I am, seizing my precious minutes to finally write again.While busy working, taking care of my home, being a functional human being and managing some ghost version of a social life, I have also been reflecting about myself a lot. We deep, friends. And of recent personal breakthroughs not relevant to this particular piece of writing, my understanding of what calm means has been shifting drastically.Is a ravaging sea calm? Despite the constant movement, the relentless pull of the waves and the clash against the shore, the sand and pebbles and all the living things breathing along with the tide - I see calm. Serenity, some sort of stillness. I came to realize that there is no need for silence or emptiness to be still. The beauty of calm is in embracing your surroundings - and your inner movement too. Quiet is not the same as devoid of life.That got me thinking about stillness in other applications of its meaning. A character can be still, unchanged by their surrounding dramas and conditions, and yet there is movement. There is always something happening, as small or trivial. Picture a leafy tree. Think of the abundance of its greens, the sunlight filtering through them, its ancient branches reaching up to the sky, the trunk so large it would require many to embrace it. A soft breeze shakes the many leaves. They sing their own song, the sound of wind, leaves, branch, bark, birds, grass. It is moving. But it is still.What does calm mean in a story? Not the absence of happenings, but the way we think them. Where there are pauses, where there is only the world, still turning, still moving, even if the plot is not. I will leave this one for you to think about, while I try to find my stillness yet keep moving.-Maíra
Figures of Speech
A metaphor is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, "a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable" (notice the correct use of the word literally, so proud of you Oxford). I like to think Portuguese and Romance languages (languages derived from vulgar latin) have such a recurrence of figures of speech because they often adopt indirect speech and what we could call "implicit subject" (sujeito oculto). Very often we use metaphors in Portuguese to create proper nouns, names and punchlines. English, as a more straight to the point language, adopts metaphors, to my understanding, more often as cautionary tales. Telling you what would happen in a situation without really telling you.My fascination with metaphors and their uses came to fruition by working with games, as a narrative designer in special. Video games run on metaphors. You give the player a controller or some form of input, and tell them to perform an action that will translate to another action or meaning that is not literally applicable to what they did. Press A to jump. Collect stars to upgrade. Do this to simulate that.There is an element of awe to me in games that come up with great metaphors to summarize what are you doing, why are you doing it, what happens if you don't do it. Sometimes they are the whole game, the story in it, and sometimes they are just a small piece of the puzzle, but that fits in there to perfection. Think of a game like Signs of the Sojourner, in itself a metaphor to conversations and social anxiety while playing cards. Or how the twin-stick controllers in Brothers create a metaphor to cooperation while playing alone, and this has a big part on the game's narrative.A big chunk of what I do is this, to make the players understand how they impact the universe of the game and create some mental model of how to act and why. Surprisingly enough, it is very rare the occasion in which I in fact write a metaphor.But more on that and how metaphors function to different purposes in games and communication in general some other day. Right now I should better hit the hay.-Maíra
Revisitations
Here is a real story that happened a couple weeks ago. My grandmother was trying to remember a recipe. Incidentally, her memory has been slipping away for a decade or so, set adrift by the slow and relentless advance of dementia. Sometimes she can’t recall close relatives, let alone how she baked cookies.Alas, she was looking for that recipe in particular. She used to make it all the time when we were kids but now can not recollect anything - no ingredients, no instructions, nothing. Which set my family into some digging duty; someone must have learned how to make those cookies.I tried, a few years ago. One afternoon I sat down with grandma and asked her to teach me her secret. She put together a colorful picture of how it was supposed to look like, but no real recipe. “Some” flour, she said. A “handful” of sugar. A little bit of milk. When I tried baking on my own, I realized that was not the correct recipe. She knew what they were supposed to taste like, but lost the map to get there. Last issue I talked of memory and maps and this little story, about trying to uncover a recipe lost in time, both stirred and completed those thoughts. X marks the spot. So what happens if the X is not in the unknown future, but in the past? When we lose our sense of direction, no compass to guide us, what is it that brings us back to our north?Many stories explored this idea before, of waking up and forgetting who you are, trying to piece together what happened. And sometimes they are not so explicit on this theme; think of detective stories where we know who committed the crime, but now have to trace back the why's and how's to make justice be served. And sometimes these stories are about mistakes. Characters making assumptions to fill in the blanks, believing in truths they created to themselves. So many good stories are built on a lie the character believes, on how they interpret the path to the X.As for the cookies, I gave my family what I had of that version of the recipe, and as an exercise they placed the ingredients in front of grandma and let her do her thing. And it worked, as it seems. I heard word that the baked cookies were good, yet maybe not the same as they once were. A different path, I suppose.-Maíra
Treasure Map
Time travel, the obsession humans have with going back in time, or lunging to the future. Change what is now done, see what tomorrow holds. A strong will to exert some form of control over what so often seems incontrollable. Chaos is a strong force in our universe, arguably the strongest. We are not and might never be ready to fully admit how much randomness rules our feeble lives. How come Earth, of all places, has life? Why did you meet that one person, that particular day? What are the odds of everything, really?We understand that controlling this chaos is... tricky. Virtually impossible, but we as humankind are not OK with accepting it. So throughout history we searched and searched for answers. Ways to control time and chaos. Gods, odds, luck, destiny. The explanation that clicks better to each one of us.Astrology, the way I see it, is an attempt to take control, to understand why things work the way they work and have a glimpse of what is to come. Control an anxiety over the hopelessness of not being able, not really, to determine our lives. But see, we already have a gift of time travel embedded in our grey matter: memory. We can go back in time, revisit what we lived, revisit what others lived through History, that capital H catalogue of stories lived and remembered. Yet this is not enough. It does not feed the beast that desires agency, the capability of doing things different. Second chances. Memories are not second chances, they are reminders of everything we already went through, joyful or terrifying as they are in a point of space and time that our corporeal forms no longer have access too.I speak and think a lot about memory, about stories carrying the heritage of who we are and what we lived, but lately I've been thinking about the unknown. How good an exercise, not as a storyteller but as human, to try and visualize the future. Our grey matter is also equipped to travel forward in time: the future is a story we create. One we have not accessed yet, but we can use as a target, a map to where we want to go with X marking the spot, but the path still foggy and unknown. And we need that; we need this freedom to imagine things out of their current state so we can reorganize chaos, effectively find patterns in randomness and trace the path to the X marked on the map.We are living, breathing time travel machines. Isn't that cool?-Maíra
Checkpoints
We know places of power from video games. A totem, a healing fountain, a bonfire or wherever your heart fills with determination. Places that hold a special aura, where some sort of magic is possible. In video game magic, it replenishes your HP, provides you the safety of second chances and too gives you a breather. Much like in the Japanese concept of ma, we are taught by fiction that places of power are also places of pause.Stephen King calls his version of them "receiving place", the spot where the chair is comfortable, the light is perfect and the vibe is strong. There is a story about how Emily Dickinson once told her niece that locking her bedroom, the place where she wrote most of her poems in, was "freedom".Up until not long ago, we all had favorite places that could easily refill our life bars. On my list was my home. For whoever has the privilege to have even a nook to call their own, with sweat and care it can become one of those places to heal and inspire. Then a lot changed overnight, as we know. Our homes turned into the only places, whether we loved or loathed them, where everything happens. Work, leisure, time to self, all comprised into those same few squared meters, every nook and cranny.During these strange times, I moved. To a new home, with new nooks, and a different hemisphere, with new places to look for pause. But what is pause in a time that itself feels like pause? I have been wondering. There is a poem I like a lot by American poet Wendell Berry. It speaks of places of power and of finding grace, whatever you choose the word to mean. Poetry recently made its way into my places of power - not a physical place, but close enough.The Peace of Wild ThingsWendel BerryWhen despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free.(Not by any coincidence, Berry is also a farmer.)-Maíra
Man Machine
I thought about having an AI write something for me many times before. Out of curiosity much more than necessity (I am OK with being paid to write, thank you), I wanted to know what an artificial intelligence would say when trying to think my thoughts. Today’s issue was written with the help of an AI. I know, it’s super cool. This AI was not particularly tailored to my needs; it 's based on GPT-3 and trained in creative writing, so generally speaking it will try to write prose and dialogues. So I posed it a challenge just to see what it could do.I told the AI this is a newsletter about storytelling. I wrote this introduction and asked it to write some paragraphs about the subject, picked up from it, then asked for them to write some more, thus building the narrative of this issue itself. Very meta. But it was hard for the AI to keep a line of... thought? Somehow it assumed it had to pose as someone who has written a story and is teaching others how to do the same. Not creepy AT ALL.Some light editing was made for clarity, and the paragraphs written by it are highlighted in italic. Just in case you need to know.