Calibrating possibility

This essay establishes a link between skills associated with creative writing and the generation of possibilities across other domains. While the essay is written mostly in first person (by Kim), these ideas would not be possible for me to articulate without extended conversation with the rest of the WhatIF Lab team, Helen and Lisa, who are rightly named as co-authors on this work. I would like to tell you that the cognitive estrangement of a multi-author essay written in first person is a deliberate strategy to unsettle the reader into a space of greater possibility; the facts are simply that research is generated and owned in a range of ways that are not always easy to articulate, no matter how fond the academy is of neat edges. Think of what is written here as the team’s ideas, refracted through the lens of an individual’s creative practice; none of which could have reached full maturation without the generative power of long-standing research relationships.

The link between creative writing and possibility generation is substantially (though not entirely) managed through the craft of plot, that is the things that happen in a story (Marshall et al., 2023, p. 6) In literary circles, plot is sometimes underrated. The term ‘plot-driven’ is used to indicated sub-par writing, as opposed to ‘character-driven’, which is associated with empathy and psychological depth (Fischer, 2017, p. 439). ‘Setting-driven’ completes the trifecta, though it has rarely been named as such. Fantasy stories and historical stories may be described this way (Wilkins, 2016, p. 202). Plot, character, and setting (broadly conceived) come together to form a story’s premise, although they are not neatly separable from each other. I will add more detail below about how plot points are always limited, resisted, enhanced, accelerated and so on by character and setting.

Imagine you are writing a novel. Your protagonist’s name is Miranda, it’s the 1950s and she is a shy, fearful, fifteen-year-old girl who has arrived at St Swithins, the same boarding school where her recently deceased mother was mistreated by a cruel headmistress thirty years earlier. Let’s make the boarding school a gothic pile, with crumbling spires, a dim flickering light in a tower window, and a locked door to the East Wing that Miranda is warned never to open. The very same cruel headmistress, now an ancient, almost monstrous, creature, is there to greet her, and remind Miranda that she hopes the daughter is less trouble than the mother. Miranda’s roommates all appear to be diffident, but when the lights go out, one by one they climb out the window to go to what they call ‘the summoning’. ‘You aren’t invited, new girl’.

Now you stand at a plot node. You must make a choice.

If this were a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ style story, the reader would be able to choose Miranda’s next move off a list of pre-generated possibilities, but as the writer you must generate the possibilities yourself. From this node, you must work with motivation, sorting and selection, and movement. Once you’ve moved, you will be standing at a new plot node: new possibilities have opened up and others have been denied on account of the previous choice, so there may be potential adjustment of motivation, further sorting and selection, further movement and so on. (The potential adjustments of motivation, by the by, add up to what is often referred to as a character arc; by the end of the story Miranda may not be quite so shy and fearful, for example).

Standing at a plot node, then, requires the writer to rapidly generate and sort possibilities. Miranda demands the girls take her to the summoning (no, she is too shy and fearful). She goes back to bed and tries to forget it (no, that is not interesting). She decides to tell the headmistress (no, the headmistress is a figure too monstrous to approach). And so on. Miranda may choose to follow the girls at a distance, perhaps by a different route, to observe what they do. This choice is plausible, it opens up new possibilities that are interesting (what if she is discovered, what if the headmistress is at the summoning, what if she gets lost in the dense woods around the school?), and it would allow the writer to establish the key conflict of the story (what is the summoning, who are they summoning, and why?).

I want to use the rest of this essay to drill down into that process of possibility generation and sorting. First, by explaining the difference between, and the uses of, the probable, the possible, and the implausible. Then I want to explore the calibration of possibility through four lenses: fitness for purpose, scope and scale, agency and choice, and the distorting lens of the implausible. While this exploration will be drawn from my own creative writing practice (because it would be foolish to assume how my colleagues write), the final section of the essay will exemplify just one of the ways our team transfers this process to other contexts in order to build this possibility-generating capacity in non-writers, for the real-world purposes of foresight, planning, risk mitigation, and resource management.

The probable

We are wired for pattern recognition both biologically (to survive: see Duchaine et al., 2001, p. 225) and culturally (through the Western episteme: see Stiller, 2021, p. 7). That is, it’s hard to think of what might be possible, when the probable is always so close to hand. The writer’s biggest stumbling block in this regard is, paradoxically, their training. Most writers serve a long apprenticeship as readers, and many gain pleasure from particular genres and their conventions. The example above of the gothic boarding school is firmly generic, and the genre cannot help but influence possibilities for plot choices. I did not suggest, for example, that Miranda decide to start building a weaponised spaceship; though one can see if she did, the story would have taken an interesting, though less plausible, turn.

The implausible

Why is it less plausible for Miranda to build a weaponised spaceship? Because plausibility relies on what we already know about her and her context. It’s the 1950s, she’s 15, and she’s shy. This raises a potentially prohibitive amount of doubt about where she would acquire the materials, develop the expertise, articulate her motivation, and engage with the plot as it has been presented. At first glance, it is not plausible as it violates the internal logic of the story. However, sidling right up against the implausible is a good way to generate new possibilities: perhaps Miranda develops some other weapon, perhaps the ‘summoning’ involves aliens, and so on.

The possible

So for a writer, the possible is our playground: pushing away from the probable (because it isn’t interesting) and flirting with the implausible (while being careful that the internal logic holds: on which, more below). As you can imagine, if we ply our trade between probable and implausible, there are multiple gradations of possibility when writing a story. Not all possibilities are equal, and writers have well-honed expertise in which gradation will work where, and for whom. I call this calibrating possibility. There are many stories that cleave closely to the probable, and I am not interested to read them, no matter how beautiful people tell me the prose is. Conversely, a story where every plot choice pushes right out against the implausible would be exhausting for me. Writers can achieve certain effects by playing with the gradations of the possible in chains of cause and effect to manage narrative tension: they can add sudden escalations, unexpected external threats from the flanks, or focus down on nuanced incremental shifts to create a ‘slow burn’ effect. I will now take a more granular view of some aspects of writing craft that influence the gradations of the possible, and how they may be applied beyond the creative writing context, to calibrate possibility in different fields of thought.

Fitness for purpose

In fiction, a possibility must be fit for purpose. Its purpose is to extrapolate events, explore the relationship between the character and the plot further, and to be interesting, usually by creating tension or supplying key information the reader needs. Writers like myself, who plan chapters and scenes in advance, are keenly aware of the importance of fitness for purpose, building it into ideas so that every scene is optimised. Writers who write more intuitively find fitness for purpose in revision, clarifying and harmonising motivation and choice with the benefit of hindsight. The first allows for efficiency; the second for exploration. Ideally, writers use a blend of both techniques. ¹

In other contexts, then, it is useful to keep this idea of fitness for purpose in mind. If a team is generating possibilities around a scenario, those possibilities should be fit for extrapolation and exploration, and positioned well to spark ideas about further possibilities. Moving between opening up and narrowing down what fitness for purpose might mean in the context will allow for different kinds of possibilities to be sorted through: whether that purpose is to create the knowledge they seek to mitigate and resource, or simply to understand the potential future of a system.

Scope and scale

Possibilities in fiction are chosen to suit a range of times and places. Some stories take place over 24 hr, some over lifetimes, some over millennia. Some stay local, some range across worlds. Epic fantasy and far-future science fiction need to generate possibilities a long way from the probable. Possibilities in such stories need to pay attention to the limits and affordances of a storyworld, or setting. Generating these limits and affordances themselves is a challenge to the imagination. Where I live, we are 10 years away from hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and a lot of public energy is focussed on imagining the local, 10 years from now. While this challenge is manageable, asking stakeholders to imagine a 50-year scenario, perhaps for a less familiar city, is quite a different proposition (Zaidi, 2019, p. 17). For writers, the technique is to work with the cause-and-effect logic of plotting – this leads to that leads to the other over time—while being mindful that increments in possibility are never even.

In terms of translating this to other domains, we work with the familiar notion of tipping points, where small accretions add up to large shifts that we cannot reverse. Moreover, increments of possibility are also at the mercy of unknown unknowns: those surprises from the flanks that cannot be predicted or controlled for. Any work on generating possibilities in other fields should pay due attention not only to cause-and-effect chains, but also to imagining tipping points and black swan events. These are easier to generate by building out storyworlds at different scopes and scales than the ones that we currently inhabit, and that requires work in worldbuilding. For example, the STEEPLE list (social, technical, economic, environmental, political, legal, and ethical aspects) (Nicholas, 2021) that is often used to analyse scenarios can be repurposed as a list of items to imagine anew (Marshall et al., 2023, p. 9).

Agency and choice

Possibilities in fiction are also always governed by the motivations of the characters, and those motivations are in turn shaped by a range of factors: their histories, their value systems, and their current status. If we return to our gothic boarding school story, we understand that Miranda, with her recently dead mother, her desire to keep to herself, and her fresh arrival in a new environment will make certain choices with the possibilities presented to her, as would we all in her shoes. Fiction writers like to add duress, because duress forces people to make choices. Conflict is the creator of forward motion in fiction, so the more duress Miranda is under, the further along the continuum of possibility her choices may creep or leap.

Technologists, as one example, can generate and calibrate more possibilities about the future use of technology if they build out richer knowledge about the multiple individuals who may use that technology. A mobile phone in the pocket of a middle-class teenager with a happy upbringing in large, Western city will likely use the phone as designed: to connect, to play games, to create. Under duress, or at least the kind of duress associated with large, Western cities (a missed bus, a stranger following at uncomfortable proximity), they may still use the phone as designed: to summon a cab or a parent or a police officer. The same piece of technology in the pocket of a teenager living in poverty among radicalised people may also use the phone as designed; but under duress (a foreign nation’s occupation, the death of a loved one, an encounter with opportunity), may find a use well beyond the original intention of the technologists who invented it: to organise illegal activity, to spread disinformation, or even to remotely set off an explosive. The people using the possibilities matter.

The distorting mirror of the implausible

In fiction, the implausible isn’t necessarily the impossible. Even in the real world, implausibility and impossibility are not synonymous: let us not forget Donald Trump served a term as President of the United States. What is required to bring a scenario out of the implausible zone and turn it back into a possibility is a change in the internal logic of the story. If we return to Miranda and her plans for weaponised spaceships, for example, the writer could introduce new back story for the character: her mother was a physicist, Miranda has smuggled strange plans she found under her mother’s mattress into her suitcase, St Swithins itself has stockpiled a supply of unique materials in the forbidden East Wing, and Miranda’s mother had long planned a revenge scenario against the monstrous headmistress. All other questions could be adjusted for if necessary, and the relationship between weaponised spaceships could be built into the story over time. That is, the implausible can be made possible with an adjustment of the logic we jointly accept as fixed (and, in this case, that may necessitate a hybridisation or change of genre: something that happens all the time in fiction).

In other domains, then, the word ‘implausible’ should never be invoked without challenge. Instead, we should ask what changes in the system would make the implausible possible? What might stakeholders gain or lose from such changes? This is not to say that there are not impossible things in the world; as my father enjoyed telling me, ‘you can’t strike a match on raspberry jelly’. But implausibility needs to be brought in as a lens to look at problems and challenge the very logics through which we understand them. Doing so may bend implausible ideas into workable possibilities.

Pimp my fork

I’m now going to return this essay to the plural first person. As a team, all of us speculative fiction writers, we run workshops and games to enhance imaginative capability in different disciplines, for example defence, agriculture, health, urban planning, and executive leadership. An exercise we have used multiple times to introduce the idea of calibrating possibility builds from a brainstorming exercise where teams are given a familiar object and asked to rapid-fire generate a list of 20 uses for it. We generally use a fork, and it is interesting to watch groups race to 20. Eating. Launching food at a sibling. Combing hair. Digging in the garden… and then there is a pause as the probable is left behind and the possible opens up. Jewellery. Concealable weapon. Rescue ramp for ants. Musical instrument. It is usually in this second tranche of ideas that implausible ideas start to surface, too. Playground for nanobots. Equipment for new Olympic sport.

Once the list has been generated, we take this exercise a few steps further by asking the teams to cross out the probable uses, and start thinking about the difference between the possible and the implausible uses. Then, we ask them to find one possible use and ‘pimp’ the fork, that is, write an outline of what adjustments could be made to the fork (read: adjustments to the possibility) so that the imagined use materialised. For example, to use a fork as a musical instrument may require the addition of other forks, rubber bands, and some kind of frame to hold them all together. Finally, we ask the teams to choose one implausible use of a fork, and then work out what adjustments could be made to our culture’s internal logic (read: adjustments to the context) to make it possible. For example, an emphasis on sustainability means that every new sport added to the Olympics must now be designed around recycled materials; and thus, Olympic fork-throwing is born.

This exercise works well to precede larger-scale brainstorming exercises, because it demonstrates in practice the differences between probable, possible, and implausible; and challenges participants to understand the gradations between them.

Conclusion

A wholistic perspective that sees how the various parts of a complex problem interrelate (systems thinking) has long been recognised an effective way to analyse problems and generate possibilities for solutions (Jackson, 2010, p. 133). Stories, too, are integrated accounts of problems, and professional storytellers have a range of highly developed skills for envisioning how the possibilities of those systems may play out, how environments may change, and how a range of players may affect those outcomes. Across domains beyond creative writing, these skills can help generate richer possibilities, plot out critical junctures, identify systemic risk, and most importantly, mitigate risk and identify opportunities for building resilience into projects and systems. Play and storytelling as concepts are slowly making their way into the perceived ‘more serious’ domains of STEM and industry research (Küpers, 2017, p. 999). Our aim is for this essay to make a contribution to accelerate that translation, and turn thinkers into better possibility-generating engines.

Miranda built her one-seater weaponised spaceship based on her mother’s plans, failed several times in her test flights, but got it working for the final showdown with the brain-sucking aliens the other girls in her dorm had been summoning. The elderly headmistress was, of course, the chief alien, and had hidden interstellar materials in the East Wing. Miranda made and relied on allies along the way, protected the innocent students of St Swithins, and most importantly, saved the janitor’s cat. Tinkles, long may you live.