Data-driven writing is boring
This writing advice is for myself, for the future, for when I inevitably forget how to tell a story. I always fall for the same trap. I sit at my desk, open my text editor, and before typing a word I want to have an outline. I want to know who my characters are, what they do, I want to start listing traits. I have a tendency to favor a data-driven writing process.
But that’s never how a story develops. Instead, it goes like this: I imagine a scene, there’s got to be tension or an unknown and a question I need to answer: why?
This can be in reference to anything, which is what makes writing both liberating and daunting— I’m responsible for creating a reliable narrative of plausible circumstances. And there’s an infinite number of ways to do it.
Let’s take the following prompt and develop it into a story:
A man sitting at the computer.
Here’s what a data-driven approach would look like:
A man sits at the computer in a dimly lit room while cigarette smoke hangs around a boxy monitor. Dark shadows hang from his tired eyes, his fingers languidly gracing the surface of his keyboard.
That’s boring. It sounds like the writing of someone exclusively familiar with visual storytelling, likely movies or TV shows, hence the list of clichés, someone whose memory of the story is a list of facts, an entire story diluted to atomic units of object description that abuse visuals and produce no forward movement.
I prefer narrative-driven writing.