I’m very interested in time as a concept. Some of this is owing to my personal issues with time management; some of this ties into events of my early high school years, which put me in the angst-fueled state of mind where I needed some indirect antagonist to rail against. (And, since I more often than not seemed to be working against time, it became the natural pick.) But it mostly has to do with the way my brain works. I analyze big, abstract things by breaking them apart into smaller concepts. And, as a writer, I love to put names, faces, and personalities to concepts.
I rationalize the abstract thing, Time, by using it as a character: the Clockwinder, whom I have been using in projects since roughly sophomore year of high school. At one point he would have been the catalyst for a larger story, but I found him way more interesting than anything else about the story, so from there I’ve been developing him on his own. He, the Starscribe, and the Truthseeker are the three central characters in my personal mythos, representing Time, Space, and Knowledge*. To clarify a few things about them. I incorporated certain details of their stories here, but they are largely referential and extraneous to the overall story at this point, and the versions ultimately presented in this piece might be a different canon than my current one. Still, be sure to click around and find those little details! I’m proud of my work with those characters, and hopefully I’ll get to explore them further, be it in a later version of this piece or in more traditional literature.
But back to Time as a concept. Like I said, I like breaking things apart, and it’s easy to do that with time: past, present, future. For a Twine story, that gave me three main paths to work with by default. But I think those are still a little bit too big to comfortably handle. Past, present, and future are very multifaceted. Taking the past as an example: you have the past as memories, both good and bad, and how we present the past in history. Good memories, then, have the nostalgia filter on them; bad memories, which-for me- are largely regrets, distract us from the present. We get lost in the ideas of what once was and what could have been done better, replay those memories over and over, and sometimes we let that consume us. The feeling of regret was most relevant to my high school experiences, so that was the direction I chose for the Theater. The “things not fixed” scenario is the only one that can be fully explored right now.
And, yes, those are mostly my own memories… albeit, somewhat fictionalized versions, except where I could not think of anything to say but the truth. This piece is a bit more autobiographical than I would like to be, but I do hope readers can connect to it.
The present is the path I’m working on at… well, at present. The present is the scariest idea for me to tackle, somehow; you can never have a full sense of it, truly. And, to be honest, I spend a lot of the present distracting myself from the present. I incorporated a lot of ideas of mindfulness into that one; the idea of being fully in the moment, especially as means to some kind of personal enlightenment. I had written out some dialogue for the player character and the Clockwinder, but did not get a chance to include much of it. I have most of it planned out, so at very least, I’ll upload those webs separately.
*I had Time and Space and needed a third one for the set, so I typed in “Time, Space, and” into Google to see what would come up. Knowledge was the best hit I got; “Time, Space, and Knowledge” is apparently a book. I mention this to disclose that, no, I have not read it.