I very much like it when a story writes itself. I've played collaborative board games where a series of dice rolls and individual decisions turns into an engrossing story. I set myself a mission in Kerbal Space Program and a series of unfortunate events meant that the best I could do was to use the spacecraft I had with me to jury rig a lander and an orbital relay station. It was fascinating. Neil Gaiman talked about writing Stardust: he said that he already had the idea for the village, but when he saw a shooting star over the desert and realised that it was really just a hot lump of rock, that the story just wrote itself.
I recently came up with a fictional character reflexively.
I borrowed a long ladder and I took it home on the roof rack of my (very little) Fiat Panda. One of my friends said it looked like I was going jousting. Without thinking I said that a black knight in a Toyota Yaris with half a dozen decking boards on the roof had challenged me. I've been thinking about the fictional black knight a lot over the last few days and I'd really like to know more about him.
Richard "Emergent Narrative" B
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