From Chaos, Order

I've been reading early parts of Dragon Ball and One Piece lately, as well as the first couple books of Discworld. They all have something in common - they're all pretty crazy and wild and fast compared to what would come later. Things are way more in flux, you never quite know what happens next, there's not as much structure or narrative expectations yet. But there would be.



It's hardly unusual: few stories know what they want to be from the very start, and they tend to flounder about a bit and need to search for their own voice and style. From there on things begin to grow more coherent, as recurring characters and character motivations and personalities pop out of the primordial slime of creation, and as the setting itself begins to manifest and hold itself together. You get more involving storylines, more drama and tension, more call-backs, more structure, more order.

There's a lot to like in this kind of growth, and more often than not a story cannot survive if it does not take this step. But still, one often comes to miss those early wild days. The age of chaos and Sword & Sorcery in Discworld, when the realm was more dominated by strange magical landscapes and high adventure, before it was tamed and brought low by realism; the sheer quick pace of Dragon Ball, before the story demanded to slow things down for the sake of building things up; all the goofy sidetrip islands and their characters in One Piece, before the plot got kicked in such a high gear that we no longer could spare the time for such.

I hope it will never come to that for me. I hope to always keep a little bit of the essential Chaos in my works.