right. The audience doesn’t know you yet. You need to tell us who you are in the beginning.” Oh, that totally makes sense, I thought and simply re-ordered some paragraphs. Then, I received another feedback for my second draft. “The order is not still working. The revelation came too early. It needs to stay at where it was. You really need to pull everything apart.” Uh-oh! This is a spaghetti code symptom!
The spaghetti code is a tangled and arbitrary type of program flow. I often think that crafting a story is
similar to programming. Let me explain how.
When you create a system, you set a goal and navigate your system to reach the goal. The tricky part is how
to get there. There are many routes you can take. If your mind takes the “scenic route,” the system will end
up with spaghetti code. When I see spaghetti code, I feel dizzy and my brain freezes. I try to understand
what the system tries to tell me, but the flow is hard to comprehend and follow.
Now, replace “system” with “story” and “I” with “audience.” See? It still makes sense, doesn’t it? Then, how do you untangle the spaghetti code? The best way for me is to deconstruct it and rebuild from scratch. It’s easy to say, but difficult to execute because it requires lots of courage to destroy what you already built as well as free spirits to start with a clean slate without clinging to the original code.
Do you have any spaghetti stories?