Hunt the wild story.
Accustomed to recognizing other-than-human persons (see Animism), the inhabitants of the Fifth World often recognize the personhood of stories, too. After all, we can have intense relationships with our stories. They give us many gifts (entertainment, inspiration, knowledge, moral lessons), and we can give them gifts in turn, like an eloquent retelling or an artistic depiction. They can participate in ceremonies — after all, consider how many ceremonies center on telling a story. And of course, they speak to us.
As persons, we can domesticate stories, and often do. A story that we invent ourselves comes from just one imagination: our own. We can come up with many fine stories this way, but we don’t play the Fifth World to tell those stories. You might write those stories down in writing, or share them with your friends in the mode of a more traditional storyteller — and so release it, letting it run feral, as other imaginations can help it along its way from retelling to retelling. When we play the Fifth World, though, we hunt the wild story, the story as yet uncaught by any human imagination, still running free across the untamed hinterlands of possibility. We will stay on its trail and follow where it leads us. This story doesn’t live inside any of our minds, but in the space between us, among the people gathered around the table, possible only in this space and at this time among these people, and nowhere else. We will hunt it with our imaginations. We will stay on its trail by following where it leads. It may try to throw us off by leading us through boredom or tension, but we’ll stay on its trail nonetheless. We’ll need to avoid the temptation to abandon the hunt in favor of the domesticated stories in our minds, by following how we think the story should go. While we hunt it, it will remain wild, not fully known to any of us. When we finish, each of us who hunted it will know it, and though we can retell it, no one will ever experience it in its wildness again except those of us who hunted it together.
#Principles
All of the principles work together, but each agenda has three in particular that help to advance it. For “Hunt the wild story,” we have: