Go Ahead — Write This Story: anytime, anywhere

[mount_oregano]

Does a story have to be chronological? Of course not. And you knew that. It’s usually easier to tell a tale by the clock, but your story may vary. For example, your story may be not about what the journey through time but the emotional journey, which is never a straight line. Time is relative, too, even at non-light speeds. My friend Pat Bowne discussed that in her blog post here: http://raosyth.com/blog/?p=261 Meanwhile, if you want to tell a story that has its own time, here are a few ideas:

• This military SF story begins with the trial of an officer who had adopted alien tactics to win a war on an alien world, but was condemned as a lawless warlord at home.

• This is a story about a Lunar pioneer who finds archaeological evidence of previous inhabitants and starts to piece together the events that killed them.

• This is a subterficial story (look it up) in which a graphic novelist considers several possible story lines for an upcoming publication.

— Sue Burke

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Time is relative, too, even at non-light speeds.

That's absolutely true, and in our own lives we jump back and forth in time all the time as we remember things, replay them in our heads, imagine the future, and so on (okay, so imagining the future is not quite the same as literally jumping into the future--but practically. Especially as, given that the future depends on the past, any future you jumped into in a literal sense would only be a potential one . . . though I guess lots of literature is based on the notion of a particular future being the ineluctable result of *any* choice you make, and especially of choices made trying to avoid that future). <--hmm, digression.

All right; off to look up subterficial.

[mount-oregano.livejournal.com]

I've heard it said: "The future controls the present, and the present controls the past."

That is, we do things in the present that we believe will bring us the future we want.

And we understand the past in terms of the present. For example, I have a very happy marriage, so I remember my wedding day as a very happy event. If my marriage had turned out horrible, I might remember the day as the high point in my husband's lying cheating hypocritical ways, and a bad day. The exact same things would have happened, but my interpretation of them would be different.