I will have the intensive for Story Roots for Sustainable Futures next week, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to develop the brief in-universe story around which my project revolves; getting to work intensively on the story and consider how it might be delivered in an unfamiliar (oral) format will hopefully open up some interesting directions for it. To prepare, I wanted to do some brainstorming and have a rough outline of the story ready for the intensive (with the hope and intention that it will change as I work on it).
Key structural elements and functions of the story in my piece:
- This story embodies the protagonist and reader’s journey of learning to envision futures, with AI/technology
- The story is partially destroyed, then re/constructed
- The scholar engages with it over the course of a lifetime (really, more than a lifetime)
- Relatedly, the story has a folkloric tone; it’s existed for a long time before the scholar’s birth, and holds sway over them in the particular way of folktales and mythology
- The story is the object of study, but also has some sort of agency in creating new meanings and steering the direction of the overarching narrative (this connects to the idea of doing research on vs. doing research with, which feels important when considering non-human agency, intelligence, and the negotiation of the boundaries of the human self)
Themes of the project, which could be reflected in the internal story:
- Creation and creativity
- Autonomy
- Destruction and regrowth
- Selfhood; boundaries of the self
- Relationship with technology and place
- Evolution, iteration
- Envisioning futures; hopeful futures
- Nonlinearity, non-inevitability
- Respect for / agency of non-human beings
Based on these elements, I developed a potential direction for the story:
- The main character is a stone who’s best friends with the moon, but the moon — always waxing and waning — forgets her each month.
- The stone decides one day to step forward in time (which is something stones in those days could do) to find out whether the moon will always keep forgetting her, or whether there’s hope for a more stable relationship.
- On her first step forward in time, the stone finds herself in the midst of singing, dancing, and music-making — things that she’s never done before, that no stone has ever done before. She sings and dances until nightfall, wanting to share her joy with the moon. But the moon smiles and says nothing.
- On her second step, the stone is enthroned or enshrined. It’s nominally a position of respect, but it means the stone is locked away from the world. Every day, a portraitist who’s spent their life painting stones comes and paints her portrait, and the portraits are put up all around her shrine until she can’t even see the walls beneath the endless portraits of herself, which are far more unsettling than mirrors because their only movement is the wind rustling the endless paper sheets.
- On her third and final step, the stone finds she’s been broken up into tiny pieces. With her self scattered all over the world, the stone wishes she could step back in time, because she realizes now that she’s skipped parts of her life in her eagerness to look ahead, and she’ll never even know what they were. But stones have never been able to step back, only forward.
- Now the stone is like the moon. There are big parts of her life that she can’t grasp, and her selfhood is constantly shifting as the pieces of her are moved around — shoveled as gravel, washed down a river. But she finds that she can still look up at the moon with every single piece of herself, and the moon looks back and offers her friendship even though the stone is unrecognizable to how she used to look.
- After that, the stone and the moon started telling each other stories — about the things they remember, the things they don’t remember, the things they hope to one day remember — and that’s what they’ve continued to do to this day.
Given that I intend for the story to evolve over the course of the overall piece, I also brainstormed some ideas for focal points for evolution that felt thematically resonant:
- Setup
- Could introduce a prophecy that shapes the stone’s direction
- The stone’s experiences during her first and second steps forward in time (the first two bring slightly absurd encounters, but not heartbreak; the third step is always when the stone is shattered)
- For the first time, the stone finds herself surrounded by other stones
- Or, the stone finds herself someplace where she thinks she’s among other stones, but it turns out it was an illusion somehow (perhaps connected to a maze or funhouse mirror room or another place where it’s easy to lose oneself)
- An endless tumble/fall down a slope, or even a place with no gravity
- A shorter version where the first two steps through time are cut out
- Ending
- Link to the external world by adding an explanation of a natural phenomenon — e.g., that’s why stones shine so brightly silver in the moonlight
- Make it a sad ending — the stone can still look up at the moon with every part of herself, but her broken-up pieces are so small that the moon no longer notices her; the stone finds her memories leaking out of her now that her body is broken up, and eventually forgets the moon; the stone’s pieces are moved/shoveled/washed into a cave or another place where she can’t see the moon
- Add explicit moral or thematic reflection — e.g., about how every moment is actually a step forward in time but the stone got too impatient
- Introduce more seemingly “random” or surreal occurrences, or events that don’t seem to follow causally from one another
- Language-level variations
- The stone and moon have a certain formulaic interaction (hopefully something a bit odd and surreal) that they repeat upon every encounter; this could change from telling to telling
- Descriptions of the characters: quantity/length, tenor, implied moral judgment, anthropomorphization, stylization
- Tone of the story overall
- Implied audience: does the storyteller directly address the audience or ask questions of them? Is it explicitly geared toward kids? Is it intended for oral or written form?
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