In a previous post, I argued that a rigid outline isn’t viable for every writer. While there have been some great books and movies written beat-by-beat according to Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey, there are plenty of other great works throughout history that were written by other methods. Speaking to other writers, it’s evident that when left to their own devices, people will settle on a great variety of processes that would be disastrous for some other writer.
As William Blake put it, “One law for lion and ox is oppression.”
While some degree of outlining may work for certain people, I found it stifled me, and contributed to me quitting writing altogether for a number of years. I had to find a different structure. That’s what an outline is, after all: a skeletal frame filled in with a story. But as I pointed out in my previous post, that structure betrays a preference for the mechanical. Houses and machines are built by frame, then filled in, and at last granted life. Organic systems are whole and living at every stage of the process. Is there a way to grow a story in the same way you might plant a seed, water it, nourish it, move it into the garden, and watch it thrive?
My inspiration came from not from some creativity guru, but a physicist. Stephen Wolfram made his name with a software program called Wolfram Mathematica, which according to the Great Troll of Internet Wisdom, allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network and time series analyses, and algorithm implementation, among other things. He did write a nonfiction book, but other than that, I’m not aware of any dedicate work on his part with regards to plotting a story.
It was in that book, A New Kind of Science, that I found what I didn’t know I was looking for. To violently reduce a very subtle and powerful set of arguments, the book centered around computational irreducibility—systems that can’t be modeled with anything less complicated than the system itself—and experiments with cellular automata. That latter term refers to, for example, starting with a grid of cells, either gray, white, or black, and setting forth a simple set of rules—maybe just six rules—for how they change color, depending on the color of their neighbors.
Wolfram ran many thousands of these rulesets. Some of them collapsed into a single color after a few iterations, or became stuck in a simple pattern. Some formed a repeating pattern, or fell apart into random noise. Others became nested patterns of shapes, sometimes repeating, sometimes not. The most interesting, to me, created beautiful and ever-evolving geometric patterns against a background of random static which never became stuck in a rut or repeated an earlier version of itself, but seemed to flow with intelligence and memory.
Wolfram’s hypothesis is that our universe, as unfathomably complicated as it is, could have started as something very simple that changed in simple ways according to a handful of simple rules. Let loose to do its own thing, an immense complexity emerged, including the conditions for life itself.
He emphasizes that even if you know the starting conditions and the rules of a cellular automaton, it’s impossible to predict what it will turn out like, even as broadly as whether or not it will repeat.
It struck me that we can say the same for the events in our lives. Nothing can model, from birth, where you will end up at your death and what will happen along the way in any sort of detail. We just have to run it and see. Imagine how it would feel if instead, you were given a printout—an outline. At key intervals in life, you had to meet certain criteria in certain places, and I don’t just mean “go to school.” If your interests and hatreds were plotted, your triumphs and failures. Maybe your friends and enemies would be predetermined, and no matter what forces tried to steer you one way, you had to fight with everything you had to hit your marks. That’s essentially what we do when we outline a story to the nth degree before the protagonist utters the first word.
What if your printout said you had to: be born into a loving family, develop an early fascination with the outdoors and especially birds, fall of a horse and break your arm at age seven, lose your father at age nine, suffer a few painful relocations as your mother bounced between jobs to support you and your siblings, play basketball and run track, find and marry a childhood sweetheart, work a series of demeaning wage jobs before going back to school a nursing credential, have one child, get divorced at thiry-two, travel repeatedly to Eastern Canada for pleasure, develop lactose intolerance, date guardedly, and remarry before your fortieth birthday, etc.? Good luck!
What’s more, the cellular automata experiments gave me the confidence to say that not everything that grows to its own beat turns into random drivel. Some of it does, as we see with the solid colors or random noise. Some if it becomes highly stereotyped, as in genre novels. But there’s the possibility for something more complex and wonderful than anyone can deliberately put forth in advance. In theory, when we write like this, the story exists as a whole at all times in the same sense that my life is a whole even though I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, because it’s founded upon a dimly remembered past and an experienced present, full of future possibility. This stage turns into the next one, then the next, rather than filling in predefined blanks.
I never have one and only one course I have to take. At each moment, I have a past which gives me certain skills and inclinations, a personality that colors my experience, and a number of options for the near future—far from infinite, though. All of these factors lead me to make choices, which are incorporated into my past and personality, which leads to more choices as a consequence. Many of them will be what people expect, but sometimes, there will be surprises that completely change my direction. Sometimes, external events will force me out of my familiar track. Fate, rather than being a plot point decided in advance, becomes the inevitable confluence of many actions taken with agency by myself and others. It’s there, but the oracle isn’t telling.
I call it the Wolfram Method. The biggest advantage over traditional outlining, in my experience, is that it doesn’t demand that the writer be an omniscient god who knows everything in advance. I can—and often am—surprised. Instead of enforcing a writer’s objective, the story flows according to its own momentum. There are still plenty of decisions for the writer to make. Not everything has to “happen” on the page. What parts are told, and the way they’re put, are what make or break the work.
If we admit that some things are computationally irreducible—unfathomable to our limited brains—we allow ourselves to find the wisdom in standing back and watching something unfold like a little universe that we understand just well enough to participate in, but not so much to wind the cosmic watch.
I’m sure there are many ways to practice even this one method. Here’s how I do it.
The Wolfram Method
1. Starting conditions
Wolfram’s cells start out one of a few colors. The starting conditions, what we can see right here and now, are well-defined. In a story, these conditions are what you know about the characters and world before the first scene (not where they’re going). They can include biographical details, personality traits, wants, locations, current events, etc.
Take your protagonist, for example. What details leap out to you about that person? When we give up outlining, that meticulous inclination may try to find an outlet in building tremendously-detailed backstories. I recommend treating each character as their own little universe, instead. Give them only enough detail to begin writing. You might know a name, a basic look, a few key personality traits, and a couple of details about their past. Ready, set, go. Your characters will become much more complex over time, mostly from what they say and do. But they will also give you important details of their backstory as those become relevant. Don’t rush them.
2. Rules of Transformation
The cells in the automata change colors based on what color-combinations of cells they border. In the same way, our characters and their circumstances change according to what they encounter, based on their personalities, desires, and capabilities. Given what I know about this person, how would they handle this event?
This is also where the rules of the universe act. Are the physics identical to the real world, or are there fantastical elements? People behave differently in a comedy versus a drama. Certain genres have their own inertia that must be respected. Become familiar with all of the elements in the story and outside of it that affect the way it unfolds.
3. Listening
I won’t blame you if the first thing that comes to your mind when I advise, in all seriousness, to listen to your characters and your story, is a diagnosis of schizophrenia. But I believe this is the key difference between the Wolfram Method and traditional outlining, and without it, the method becomes little more than an outline by the seat-of-your-pants.
Be quiet and listen to your characters. To an extent, this means keeping in mind at all times where they came from and how they think and feel and act from their point of view, not from what you think would be cool, or easy to write. It can also mean quieting your thoughts, bringing the circumstances of the scene to your attention, and waiting for a little tug of intuition. It may be a snatch of dialogue, or a hunch, or a pull towards certain actions. It could be a mood, or a thought that isn’t your own.
What is it that speaks? I don’t claim to know. But if I accept that this little world is beyond my ability to predict in advance, maybe what I’m doing is paying attention to the forces at work and picking up on the prevailing momentum.
Forces at Work
Though I don’t outline the future, I do outline the past, in a way. Often I write the words “forces at work” on a blank page. Then, I make bulleted lists of anything moving the action. I’ll list each significant character, and sometimes broader categories like world events, weather, local political turmoil, or any non-human forces that influence the characters. Under each, I will keep a running list of only the active details.
These may include things like wants and fears, recent commitments (promises made or broken, bridges burned, etc), rumors, important objects in their possession, beliefs (true or false), emotions, and strong intentions. I don’t have to know how any of these will pan out, only that they’re on the character’s mind. For example, I can give a character a meaningful object without myself knowing the purpose or destination of that object. It’s available, and that’s all I need.
It’s easy to get swept up in what we, the authors, want to happen. These lists keep the momentum of the story at the forefront. When I’m ready to write the next scene, I just look at where everyone stands and where they want to go. Often, I notice that two characters’ driving forces spell an unexpected conflict at some point in the future, or may give them an opportunity to collaborate. I see futility and an inescapable circumstance, or hope and many roads from which to choose. These are things I never would have thought of had I not simply looked at the inertia of the different parts of the story.
From there, I just listen to whatever asserts itself. This may only get me the next line, or I may have a hunch for something several chapters down the road. In the latter case, I won’t commit, only note a possibility and remain ready to abandon it if something better comes up. After each chapter, I go through and clean out old threads that already paid off, updating the forces at work with new details that have come to light. Sometimes an item stays on the list indefinitely, never expiring or paying off. Old intuitions are qualified, or replaced.
The Element of Surprise
The beauty of these evolving forces is that they clash in ways that both cannot be anticipated, and yet feel more natural than anything I could have come up with. While I often felt trapped when writing to an outline, I now enjoy the writing process because I’m finding out what happens next almost as if I were a reader. The most important aspect of the Wolfram Method is to allow yourself to be surprised.
I’ve been in the middle of scene that I thought I had nailed down going in. I knew what the characters would say and do, and how everyone would come out of it. Then I heard a still, small voice—or sometimes, a loud, brash one—saying something I never expected. A number of the most important characters in my fantasy series Chronicles of the Ancient Sea Kings were never supposed to be there. They were a bit part, with a stereotyped personality, that I intended to write out after one scene, maybe a chapter at best. But I heard them coming through with a different voice, a different look, a different essence, demanding otherwise. When you’re used to outlines, it can be frightening to go off the path.
In those moments, I recommend following the thread. You can always go back and rewrite it if you hate it. I can honestly say that I have never had to do that. The characters and scenes that forced themselves on me remain some of my favorites. I find myself praying it will happen again, because tracking forces and trusting intuition inevitably gives me more interesting material that whatever I squeeze from the bottom of the toothpaste tube of my mind.
The Wolfram Method doesn’t guarantee good writing. That’s on me, and on you. At its best, it gives us the germ of a story that contains within its utter simplicity a future beyond imagination. It saves us from having to be wise with its innate wisdom. All we have to do is tend it and let it breathe. In doing so, the storyteller acts in service of the story, not as the taskmaster. The reward is probably similar to that of a parent, who knows the young adult they send into the world is not exactly their creation, but flourished under their roof.