"This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell"
About this Quote
“Keeping many trails open at once” reads like a design philosophy smuggled in as craft advice: don’t march the reader down a single corridor, build a landscape. Nelson’s wording borrows from the logic of problem-solving, where you preserve multiple hypotheses until the constraints snap one into place. The subtext is a quiet distrust of authorial over-control. If you “announce” the plot, you’re not inviting discovery; you’re issuing instructions.
Calling the structure “parallel” is telling. In math and computing, parallelism isn’t just doing more at once; it’s managing dependency, timing, and revelation so that separate processes occasionally synchronize into meaning. Applied to narrative (and especially to interactive storytelling, where Nelson’s influence looms), it argues for a world that feels live: threads can advance independently, collide unexpectedly, or remain tantalizingly unresolved until the player/reader earns the connection.
“Discovered rather than announced” is the aesthetic thesis. It privileges inference over exposition, pattern-recognition over proclamation. The famous “show, don’t tell” lands here not as a slogan but as a contract: the author’s job is to arrange evidence, not deliver verdicts. You let the audience do the satisfying cognitive work of assembling the plot from clues, consequences, and contradictions.
Contextually, this is advice from someone trained to respect systems. A mathematician knows that elegant solutions aren’t narrated into existence; they emerge from structure. Nelson is pushing writers to build that kind of structure - one where plot is not a lecture, but an experiment the audience gets to run.
Calling the structure “parallel” is telling. In math and computing, parallelism isn’t just doing more at once; it’s managing dependency, timing, and revelation so that separate processes occasionally synchronize into meaning. Applied to narrative (and especially to interactive storytelling, where Nelson’s influence looms), it argues for a world that feels live: threads can advance independently, collide unexpectedly, or remain tantalizingly unresolved until the player/reader earns the connection.
“Discovered rather than announced” is the aesthetic thesis. It privileges inference over exposition, pattern-recognition over proclamation. The famous “show, don’t tell” lands here not as a slogan but as a contract: the author’s job is to arrange evidence, not deliver verdicts. You let the audience do the satisfying cognitive work of assembling the plot from clues, consequences, and contradictions.
Contextually, this is advice from someone trained to respect systems. A mathematician knows that elegant solutions aren’t narrated into existence; they emerge from structure. Nelson is pushing writers to build that kind of structure - one where plot is not a lecture, but an experiment the audience gets to run.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Graham
Add to List
