The Chaos Machine

What kind of story world are you creating? Never mind genre conventions, this question is deeper than that.

If there’s any one thing universal to all writers, it might be the fear of being caught making stuff up. It’s all we do, ever. Even when our work draws upon our real-life experiences, we’re curating and manipulating those events in the service of our plots.

All fiction is a tissue of contrivances; it’s pure artifice. The art lies in preventing our readers from noticing. So, we try to imitate life’s messy blend of the mundane and the outrageous. We construct our machines and wind them up, and then take notes. We don’t want too much of a predictable, clockwork machine, because that equates to a boring story. It needs some chaos, just not too much. Curated chaos, just the stuff that works to create verisimilitude.

A pinball machine is an interesting metaphor for striking that balance in the writerly creative process. It’s mechanical, yet unpredictable. Different writers favor different models, and different partnerships lend themselves to different approaches to the chaos problem.

Rune Skelley’s story worlds tend toward a lot of regulation. Maybe they’re more Rube Goldberg than pinball, where complexity and indirection give the illusion of chaos. Jen and Kent work together on constructing the outline and finessing all the beats along the way, and they know where it’s going to end up.

Jen’s collaboration with Reggie veered much deeper into chaos mode, perhaps too far for a machine-based metaphor to describe it. They made a game out of trying to trip each other up, but they found a shared voice and vision all the same.

Is your story world a pinball machine? Or is it some other kind of device?