What is Retconning?

Imagine you are an artist and you’ve created a beautiful painting, with a green landscape and trees.

This painting is displayed in a museum.

You feel that it’d look better with a desert backdrop.

So you quietly sneak into the museum at night and change the green landscape to a desert landscape.

When the next day, viewers come to see the painting, you confuse them by saying that it was always a desert, that it was never a green landscape.

This is an example of something call “Retconning.”

 

Retconning is short for “Retroactive Continuity.”

It is a storytelling device in which we introduce new information that will rewrite the historical facts and historical elements in the story.

It is mostly used for fixing mistakes, fixing the contradictory parts of the story, or fixing plot holes.

It is also used to create spin-offs and sequels.

For instance, bringing back a character that died in the previous part of the story.

 

It’s just like a train.

Once the train leaves the station, someone quickly changes the track behinds it and then tells you that you always arrived from this track and the original track never existed.

It is consciously creating confusion to rewrite the historical facts and it is a brilliant tool in storytelling.

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10 ways to cultivate a BEGINNER"s MIND

⓵ Read something with a fresh perspective.

Make notes. 

Observe the things you've never observed before. 

⓶ Be curious. Ask a lot of questions about everything - people, world, life. Be a philosopher.

⓷ Do something entirely different. 

If, for example, you feel the writer's block, try doing art journal or something different. Solve a puzzle.

⓸ Strip away cliches and labels from writing and everyday life. Think without any preconceived notions.

⓹ Write from an outsider's perspective.

Observe people and imagine how they'd be thinking, and then write from their perspective.

⓺ Imitate an author's style

⓻ Create a swipe file of your favorite snippets from the internet, books, and life experience

⓼ Write morning pages or brain dump

⓽ Write your own experiences.

⓾ Read Edward De Bono's How to Have Creative Ideas. It has a lot of prompts to get started.

Writer's block and Shoshin, the beginner's mind

 

Once upon a time there was a woodworking master. Let's call him Kenji.

So Kenji had 40 years of experience in creating furniture and all the famous people came to him to create different furniture items.

This time, his goal was to create a table for a temple.

But as he sat in front of the wooden block, his mind went blank.

He couldn't think of the first step, the design, or anything.

Suddenly, a boy from neighborhood came to his workshop and started playing with another wooden block.

This boy had never done woodwork before. But as Kenji watched him carve a design from the block, he became fascinated.

His mind began to open.

He realized it was his own experience and desire for perfection that was stopping him from moving forward.

He was too busy paying attention to the block with his existing knowledge and to all the things that could go wrong that he forgot to pay attention to new possibilities.

The more he thought he knew everything, the more he blocked himself from the childlike magic. As he watched the boy, his magic began to return.

As a writer, it happens many times that I feel blocked, blank or with no idea how to proceed.

Despite notebooks filled with ideas, I can't think of how to proceed forward.

Many writers call this WRITER's BLOCK. In layman terms, it is also called BOREDOM BLOCK.

While it is a block, it actually is a helpful state where the mind is telling you that something has gone stagnant and it needs change. Maybe a way of thinking, a way of writing, a perspective, or something else.

Through this blank state, the mind is pushing you to change something, gather new information, or discover something about your writing or yourself.

In Zen, this is called BEGINNER's MIND. It is the art of approaching a story, idea, character, or a world with absolute curiosity, zero preconceptions, unbiased and fresh perspective.

It's not about having new ideas. It's about looking at the existing ideas with new perspectives. It's preferring possibility over experience, exploration over perfection, and discovery over planning.

Ray Bradbury said, "Self consciousness is the enemy of the soul. To know beforehand is to freeze and kill."

Anne Lamott called it the "messy first drafts."

Natalie Goldberg called it "spontaneous writing."

There are several ways to cultivate a beginner's mind. I will share it in the next post.

Follow this page for more insights on writing, storytelling, and life.

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