I’ve never been a very organized person. Oh, I can act like one, but it’s not what comes naturally to me. It’s certainly not how I want to be and act. Is this why I can’t seem to plan my story-telling? Do my claims about organic, free-handed, self-emergent stories add up to little more than an attempt to hide my penchant for chaos and entropy? Do they provide the smoke screen behind which I rebel against such things like “story structure” and “three act plotting”? I mean, why wouldn’t I want to get my act together, get my thoughts organized, and thus achieve some logical, sensible order in my writing?

Sometimes what we call order may in fact represent how we would prefer to impose our wills on a situation or project. I’ve tried to do this with story-telling—and I’ve failed. I wonder whether I can really impose order as I define it on a story.

Consider how rivers flow out to sea. Would you have planned them that way? If you chose to “order” them according to your definition of optimum water flow, would they drop along the shortest possible route? Would they draw the straightest line? Would you have stuffed them inside plastic pipes to minimize waste? Would you have channeled them through concrete beds to route them away from flood sensitive areas?

Or would you instead, stepping back to observe the self-emergent order they achieved, recognize they water more lands? Would you agree they flow more beautifully? Isn’t it OK that they flow according to unplanned whims? Isn’t it in fact good, both in function and form, that they flow the way they do? Has their meandering in fact created an optimum outcome, even if it’s not the one you would have envisioned?

I think stories are that way. I believe they don’t follow superficially logical courses. Oh, yes, they do have logic, but not necessarily mine. They don’t flow in the most efficient ways, as I would define the word. No, sometimes they meander. On occasion they drop through amazing heights. At first you may scratch your head, but then you see it. Yes, it needed to go there. Yes, that unexpected bend and fall fulfilled a purpose. It built something unanticipated, and yet essential. And that unplanned turn brought beauty, too. It showed us a character for who they truly are. It didn’t rush downhill in pursuit of action and ignore those tumbling downstream with it. Moreover, it found the underlying current that drives it all: what this story is ABOUT.

I’m growing increasingly convinced that if I follow the formulae and structures many how-to books champion—most of them with unrelenting consistency, once you strip their cosmetics—I would end up with a bunch of stories for which only the details change. I’d achieve little more than skeletons more or less identical to one another. Could this explain why readers tell me they’re bored with my beloved thriller genre? Because all the stories fall into the same patterns? Could my reluctance to follow “basic structure” explain why they are [for the most part] favorably surprised (OK, the two or three of them that find me) when they read my stories?

How then can I write a story when I don’t know where it’s going? How can I build my story’s world and direction without giving thought to and building up its structure? If you don’t write it down, how do you know what the story is about, or About, or ABOUT?

These questions make an assumption that seems at first obvious, but in fact suffers from the non sequitur fallacy. The assumption says if you haven’t written that outline and designed the story’s structure, its direction and underpinnings don’t exist. In fact, whether I write them down or not, even if I don’t write the story itself, it all exists. In my subconscious, in my mind’s eye, as I’ve envisioned it—you pick the term or phrase. But it exists. Like a river compelled along by gravity, I only need to discover it. It may well be the case that the outline exists, too, whether I’ve written it or not. Perhaps I’m one of those weird birds that doesn’t need to write it down.