The Power of Choice

Having a choice is really important to us in our every day life. We want the freedom to choose what we do, where we go, who our friends are. But when it comes to writing stories, it’s very tempting to sacrifice that power of choice in favor of possibility.

The purpose of creativity is to explore possibilities. When we played as children, this exploration comes naturally. We put on different identities, we pretended to do jobs that we have never experienced before. But as we grow older, life gets in the way. Fear of failure and wasting time can cloud our explorations and put us in decision paralysis. It feels easier to go with instinct, to take what comes because otherwise…

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A Myth about Choice

Myth: If I make a choice, it will lock me in and I can’t get out.

Truth: If you make a conscious choice, it is far easier to retrace your steps and make the other choice. But if you don’t even know when you made a choice, it’s so much harder to root out.

Choices are difficult.

By default, choosing one thing over another cuts off the benefits the unchosen path could have given you. If you decide to go to one university over the other, you lose the ability to have whole different set experiences, go to any number of amazing concerts, festivals or rallies. If you choose not to move out of your neighborhood, you can deepen your current relationships but you lose the opportunity to make a lot of new friends. If you decide to walk home instead take the bus, you might be visited by the TVA and be erased from the Sacred Time Line (Marvel reference. If you get it, you and I will be great friends).

Life doesn’t give us do-overs. Stories, on the other hand, are designed to explore the possibilities. We read stories, and watch movies, to go on adventures and experience other people’s lives. Which makes it really difficult to make bold choices in our own writing.

We create worlds, characters, exciting events (or any combination of these) and follow where they lead. We hope that a good story will sprout from this because it’s a lot simpler than making a choice, then spending hours to backtrack and rewrite. In our results-oriented culture, rewriting feels like the equivalent of failing. But the truth is, even when it doesn’t feel like it, you are making choices, subconsciously, and these choices stem from biases and cliché.

Why is making a choice for a story so difficult?

The first question to ask is What is story? For the topic of this post, I define story this way:

A story is a carefully chosen series of moments that takes the reader on a journey of change.

I want to highlight the phrase “carefully chosen series of moments,” particularly the word “moments.”

Even the most comprehensive story cannot encapsulate what a human goes through in a normal day. You can tell any number stories about yourself: a story about your academic life, about you and your best friend, about your relationship with your family, about how this year’s NHL playoffs had a profound impact on you. The options are endless.

Every day, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of moments that touch upon each of these stories. And in our daily lives, all of these moments carry equal weight. Forgetting a password carries the same importance as choosing what to eat for lunch, which carries as much importance as learning about devastating news on social media. This is why we get overwhelmed, both in real life and in storytelling.

The Power of Choice and Biases

I mentioned earlier that choices made subconsciously perpetuates bias. For example, if you want to create a protagonist who loves fashion. Instantly, your mind is loaded up with all sorts of character traits that you have seen in movies and TV, perhaps even witnessed in your own life; traits like stuck-up, degrading, perfectionistic. By choosing not to examine these biases, even if you have the best of intentions, these traits will sneak into your writing without permission.

Now, I’m not here to strip you or your writing of your biases and make you politically correct. What I want is to help you become aware of how you perceive the world. And one way to do this is to be conscious of the choices you make in your story creation.

Exercise

Here’s an exercise to help you begin taking back your power of choice. We are only exploring our biases, there is no judgment in what you discover.

Step 1: Choose a topic that you want to explore. Some possible topic can include:

• Math class
• Marriage
• Success
• High school graduation
• Disney princess movies
• Diets
• Holiday dinners

Step 2: Write the topic down (in a document, in your notes app, on an actual piece of paper). Set a timer for one minute and write down everything that pops into your mind that’s related to the topic. Don’t think too hard about it, and don’t try to filter it. (Remember, there’s no judgment here. This list is just for you.)

Step 3: Now examine your list, one item at a time. Ask yourself:

If this didn’t exist, would it drastically affect the topic I’m examining?

Example:

If there weren’t songs and dancing, could we still have a Disney Princess movie?

If the protagonist isn’t a strong-willing woman, would we still have a Disney Princess movie?

As you go, mark the items that you answer “yes” to.

Step 4: Now it’s time for you to choose. You can decide what elements from this list you want to include in your story, and which ones you want to discard.

The power is in your hands!

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