Writers have their own methods. There are meticulous writers, like Nabakov, who wrote novels one index card at a time, with a meticulous attention to detail; there are more free-form writers, like Jack Kerouac, who wrote On the Road on one scroll of paper inside of three weeks; and, naturally, there are those in the middle. There’s another axis entirely, though: giving up some level of authorial control, and leaving it all up to pure, dumb luck. It’s a much narrower spectrum, of course: if you leave a story completely up to chance, you’re going to get an incomprehensible mess. But, if you let go just a little bit, you might get something far more satisfying—like The Man in the High Castle.
In an interview with the magazine Vertex in 1974, Philip K. Dick explained his method of using the I Ching, a divination tool that uses random numbers to generate a fortune, in writing his novel:
VERTEX: Do you use the I Ching as a plotting device in your work?
DICK: Once. I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book. Like in the end when Juliana Frink is deciding whether or not to tell Hawthorne Abensen that he is the target of assassins, the answer indicated that she should. Now if it had said not to tell him, I would have had her not go there. But I would not do that in any other book.
It’s just a small detail—The characters use the I Ching, and instead of picking the results himself to direct the story intentionally, Dick let the dice (or coins, rather) fall where they may, and let that pick his direction. Turns out it works well for games, too. Continue reading “God Plays Dice: Random Tables, Procedural Generation, and Storytelling” →