100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl is about theater and writing plays and motherhood, but I’m finding a lot of wisdom in Ruhl’s essays for my own work as a fiction writer.

One of the essays I read today, #37. “Conflict as drama?” proposes that it is actually dialectic — “a need for opposites that undermine each other” — that makes drama, not conflict.

I really like this idea. Ruhl also wonders why improvisation is all about agreeing (“yes and” is the rule of Improv and being a good Game Master), but with drama we say there must be conflict.

This quote on page 82 really made me reevaluate how I write fiction and tell stories:

“What if we borrowed from improvisation a proliferation of assent? A form of storytelling that used surprise as a tool rather than bickering.”

Storytelling as surprise. How can I say “yes and” in my creation of situations and stories? What would that change in my novels?