Wrangling your fictional Tesseract
Lionel Davoust's certainty signifier methodology is a game changer for managing the high-octane, hyper-dimensionality of writing fiction and managing writer's block.
I’m new to this authoring thing. I’m young in the ways of creating my own narratives, although I’ve been a voracious story consumer for my 50 years on this planet.
Over the past few years, I’ve taken workshops, studied craft books, watched interviews, etc. And in these classes, forums, etc. far and away, the most common question my fellow preschooler fiction writers ask is: “How can I get ideas?”
This question is always answered by the teacher-y person in an ephemeral, woo-woo quotable that is best summed up as: “Who knows?” And as infuriating as this answer can be when one has shelled out hard-earned money for access to this expert’s advice,
”You have to figure that out for yourself” is the hard and bitter truth.
My take is that “Where do baby ideas come from?” answer we get in these workshops is frustrating because we’re not asking the right question. Pre-school authors like me already have lots of ideas. Our brains are so jammed with interesting and engaging ideas that we are desperate to get them out in a story framework. We just don’t know what to do with these wonderful ideas we have.
What authors are really asking is “How can I raise my chaotic babies to be healthy, responsible, productive adults?”
And this is a reasonable question that I never heard answered.
Until now.
One of the most valuable resources available from Nick Milo’s Linking Your Thinking offering is the collection of masterclass videos. The most meaningful one to me was a three-part set conducted by French author Lionel Davoust.
Davost explains why all methods that work just fine for pure personal knowledge management fail when they are applied to fiction writing. Because writing driven by possibilities is a project that is changing its own identity moment by moment, it is an unclear scale project. The creative conversation that is happening requires constant decision-making between possibility and canon and is happening so fast that it is chaotic to a degree that borders on impossibility.
In other words, your fictional universe is a Tesseract.
I believe that what we traditionally call “writer’s block” is less of a blocking wall and more of a meltdown of the author’s brain to understand (1) the multi-dimensional universe of their story and (2) the universe as an expression of the author’s identity.
The enmeshed identity confusion must be resolved through one’s own personal Jungian shadow work,
but the universe itself is more definable in that it reflects the surface-level possibilities of plot and character arc.
How does a writer wrangle of the constantly-evolving story universe to get their ideas into some kind of process that embraces and directs this absolutely-necessary chaos of story emergence?
Enter certainty signifiers.
There’s no way I could thoroughly explain how the deceptively-simple act of adding emojis to the process of writing fiction changes everything. For more information, I highly recommend joining the WOW writing workshop from
. (Latest update: This will soon be an online course.)Here is a link to my first “live demo” of using certainty signifiers with my work-in-progress Merryman. Because I’m a Pantser/Gardener who discovers the story as I write it, I’ll continue to do these kinds of posts and use my Draft Progress page to show where these “show your work” moments are happening as I “pants” my way through the story (and—hopefully—make lots of useful mistakes along the way).
Here are my certainty signifiers for Merryman:
plot certainty
🕯️- "This might have happened." (1-24% chance)
🧨 - "I can imagine how this happened." (25-75% chance)
💣 - "This surely happened." (76-98% chance)
💥- “This really must have happened.” (99% chance)
🔥 - "I need to clarify the certainty."
🌻 - "This is canon and cannot be changed.”
🌎 - "This is a historical truth."
❌ - "This did not happen."
protagonist character arc certainty
🃏 - "This is my protagonist's truth." (Want, Fear, Misbelief, etc.)
🂡 - "This is a threshold of no return in my protagonist's arc."
🎭 - "This is a crisis choice in my protagonist's arc."
👺 - “This is an Antagonist’s intersection in the protagonist’s arc.”
👼🏼 - “This is a Mentor’s intersection in the protagonist’s arc.”
👍 - “This is a moment where the protagonist moves closer to accepting the theme.”
👎 - “This is a moment where the protagonist moves farther away from accepting the theme.”
theme manifestation certainty
🌱 - "This has life."
🌿 - "This has survived multiple iterations."
🪴 - "This is thriving."
🌲 - "This has proven its worth."