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bhealy's picture

Literary Evolution

Submitted by bhealy on Mon, 05/02/2011 - 9:28am.

This exercise can help us grapple with the Library of Babel idea, how every possible story already exists, and that it is impossible to create something new. I liked this idea at first but now I'm not so sure... I wonder whether this is true in regards to this activity - haven't we made 30-40 completely different stories that all started at the same point? Don't our own experiences, likes/dislikes affect what we wrote? Perhaps we really can create something new and different!

 

When you started your first sentence, how did you want or expect your story to turn out? If you could have written the full story, where would you have taken it? 

 

This ties into our discussion in our section on how the author often loses control of his/her writing once it is in the hands of others. In Adaptation, the idea of control is addressed in a somewhat different way, but the question remains: from the second to the final sentence, how much did your intended story change in the hands of other writers or interpreters?

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Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)

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