(This text was translated into French here / Ce texte a été traduit en Français ici : Matérialisme Narratif)
Ever since trying to figure out a name for this place and accidentally falling on “Narrative Materialism”, I’ve been trying to find out what it exactly means.
There’s a lot of meaning behind it for me, a lot of different interpretations that all seem to converge into something that feels right. This is an attempt at figuring out why. It might not seem relevant to a little place where I talk about tabletop and writing, but it is important for me to build the foundations.
I’ve always loved stories and games, interactive narratives, and the complex and fertile relationship between the story, the storyteller and the means of telling: the context, the place, the how, the why and the when.
Stories are absolutely central to Peoples and their lives, they are not just an external object or a means of carrying information.
Stories are simultaneously how we understand the world, how we explain the world, how that understanding becomes reality, and how we play with (and change) our reality.
Stories are not just a fictional or incomplete representation of reality: to us, they are very much real, they are “made” real, they are really felt and experienced, and they are a way of shaping our own relationship with the world. That “relationship” between us and the world goes both ways.
My Narrative Materialism is both an approach and a wish, an attempt at writing things in a particular way, and at thinking about stories in a particular way.
The main meaning (that made us arrive at this title in the first place)1 is a reference to Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism.
Note: this originally had a few paragraphs summarising Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, but I have since deepened my own understanding of those concepts and I was no longer happy with this simplistic summary. I encourage you to research those two specific topics. I will write something I am happier with at a later date and link to it here.
In writing and tabletop, Historical Materialism can be a method for world-building, fleshing out of the world’s History, overarching currents and meta-scenarios, and Dialectical Materialism can be a method for writing better characters, factions and stories by focusing on their constant contradictions, interconnectedness and change. Each one feeds into the other.
The second meaning of Narrative Materialism is about applying that same approach to the authors and the context behind stories.
Some have this strange idea that writing can be removed from its environment without changing, or that it can say things without them relating strongly to the material world, that stories can be detached from reality.
As they say, everything written is “political”. Every author is a complex part of their interconnected changing context, and everything they write (no matter how trivial) will always, even in small ways, be a reflection of who they are and how they view the world, a reflection of the world, and will influence later writings.
Of course these relations go both ways, and in the Dialectic Materialist sense while an author’s writing is derived from the material world and its conditions, this writing is also part of the process changing that world (thus becoming material) through social practice. The “world” and the “author” are not two distinct elements that can be looked at in a vacuum or with conveniently defined boundaries, they both derive from the other and influence the other, but they also cannot be separated. Fiction is part real world and the real world is part fiction, in varying quantities.
A story carries a lot of little choices, since it is a finite and ultimately limited structure as well as frozen in time. It cannot contain all the ever-changing connections of the material world, so it chooses (voluntarily or not) on which ones to focus. In this way, we shape our perspective of the world, we choose what we care about and what we want, and we change ourselves.
The goal here is to read and understand stories, including the stories we tell in tabletop and RPGs, with this reality in mind. Stories will always carry choices and biases, and understanding them can be enlightening and will improve our writing.
Reconciling how we think of stories with what they really are can allow us to use them willingly, to participate in changing our understanding of the world and in changing ourselves. If we know stories are always carrying choices and reflections, we can make a conscientious effort to analyse these views: maybe we reinforce them and play on how they relate to reality, maybe we find toxic or unhealthy elements and remove them, maybe we unearth contradictions and choose to confront them. If we know stories participate in changing ourselves and the world through social practice, and thus changing material reality, then we can consciously use stories with a certain trajectory in mind.
If the first meaning is about how stories are written, and the second meaning is about who writes them and why, the third and final meaning of Narrative Materialism is about how stories are told.
Stories are alive, and they inhabit material things. They are always shared, transcribed, misremembered and translated. Stories can inhabit much more than just books. They can live in digital data, in memories, in events, in tradition, in rituals, in song and in objects.
It is a more personal meaning, because I have a particular fascination for the interface of stories. Is a story written or is it oral, or both? What form does it take, how is it told, when, how? Do you tell the story during particular moments, as part of specific rituals? How does the context colour it and change it? Is it secret knowledge, is it sacred, is it public and reappropriated at every retelling?
Everything in tabletop is about stories, and stories within stories, and how they interact with each other. How is the same adventure played at different tables, how do players interact with and explore a story’s world, how is that world’s history told? Do they find an old woman telling tales, do they decipher a text on a slab of stone, do they feel it by communing with spirits or simply experience it by seeing its consequences?
I like to write about worlds and stories which themselves explore how stories are told and how they change, and become real. How do we keep or change old tales, how do we remember history, what stories do we choose to write and tell, and for what purpose?
An enormous thank you to my friends and contributors to this piece and these thoughts, in particular Nicola Knight, you are all as much the writers here as I am.