Forms & Functions

Many advertisers think they have to change their own tastes when they see a Geico ad because they believe that’s what sells. But the truth is they began this endeavor because of their own unique perspective. Their own tastes. Which they then think they must abandon to be successful. This is the adman’s folly.

Storytelling.

I think there’s a difference in the way people write stories. Sure, there’s the structure we all share. Some of us use that structure, efficiently, to create really great plots, characters, etc.  Some of us try to break that structure. But I wonder if even in trying to break that structure we still wind up conforming to it. Much like a sentence is still a sentence even with a single word. So what are stories? They 1) convey information, 2) about a person, place or thing, 3) with an included variable of time.  Though a word couldn’t tell a story (however I’m surely no advocate of rules), I wonder what ways there are to convey information about something or someone over a time period in new, or at least interesting, ways. Crowdsourcing comes to mind, but an arbiter is still necessary to weed out the extraneous, superfluous information. The time constraint is an easily and widely used illustrator of an outlet for something new. What about stories about a place? Can a place ever be more than just essential to a story. I’m sure it could as much as an inanimate object could. Is the information conveyed a transfer of ideas, unaffecting to an environment, or a mantra of concrete facts for a person, place or thing delineating its actions. As I struggle with new rules to break and adopt in storytelling, I feel the need to ask these questions, however retroactively impertinent they become. 

Chapter 2: Function is King

We peruse about sometimes with weapons in our pockets. They’re in the form of notebooks, pens, and history. They sometimes stay there in our pockets for longer than we expect. Once we allow them out into the world do they become something different. We are human. We are different. And every personal idea we create has the capacity to be many different things through others perceptions. As I write now, I realize anyone who will read this, if any, may think it’s ridiculous. I wonder sometimes why I should let it out to begin with. Turn out my pockets displaying the fists of conscious air and lint I’ve stuffed into them over the years. It is a fear of interpretation that keeps them their and a personal necessity that let’s them go. 

How are those intangible ideas ever pressed and printed onto others? We try to decide. Maybe it’s fleeting coursework for a movie. Maybe it’s simply free form poetry. And it’s format becomes the onus upon which it is interpreted. Is there such a thing as apropos? Can a great idea shatter the boundaries of a medium and circumstance? I guess the point is that this is moot. A great an idea can travel through medium and circumstance, but doesn’t it still need to be imposed upon it initially and thereafter?  There is no medium without format. They were all created by years of evolution and history. This goes unnoticed mostly. 

And so we adapt to medium. We adapt to circumstance. Regardless of abstractness. We concretize once we present. And this is why Function is the keyhole to the key. Neither really worthwhile with out the other. Everything that’s locked, even your apartment door, leads to the possibilities that may abound once opened, even if only cursory. 

The parameters may be set by the ideas themselves. Our humanness, our modernity, may be what creates them. But there they lie.