storytelling – Ridley Park

1–2 minutes

John Hartness, from Falstaff Books, recently noted that not all books translate well to audio. He’s right, and this isn’t a fan letter, just a nod to the truth of it. Every format has its own physics. Some stories bend beautifully. Others snap.

Video: John Hartness discusses the ins and outs of audiobooks.

Propensity is one of the snappers. It doesn’t behave on Kindle, either. That’s less a fault of the text than the medium. Its structure and typography do a lot of the storytelling, and when those are flattened to fit an algorithmic page template, something human is lost. I include the visual material as a PDF for the curious, but the audiobook can only gesture at what’s missing. No amount of verbal description replaces the architecture of the page.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

I listen to audiobooks constantly – commuting used to be my second job – but there’s a difference between hearing a story and parsing a spreadsheet by ear. Nonfiction especially suffers: tables, diagrams, anything spatially meaningful. Description isn’t substitution; it’s triage.

Musicians met this problem decades ago. When the Beatles stopped touring in 1966, it wasn’t vanity; it was liberation. They no longer had to replicate their studio work on stage. Garbage later flipped that logic: they engineered songs to survive live. The same divide holds for writers. Some build books that breathe on paper. Others craft ones that perform well through speakers. Neither camp is wrong.

When I produced records, my job was to capture the best possible experience – not the most ‘authentic’ performance. Now, with digital tools, some artists never play their own songs from start to finish until tour rehearsals. The copy-paste perfection of ProTools turns spontaneity into ornament. E-books and AI summaries do the same for text—efficient, portable, bloodless.

So, yes, formats matter. They always have. Paper isn’t just nostalgia; it’s part of the meaning. And while I’m happy to share Propensity however readers find it, I know where it breathes best: between real pages, under real light, in the one format that doesn’t pretend to be frictionless.

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Ridley Park

You’ll hear it a thousand times in creative writing circles, often whispered with the reverence of sacred doctrine: character is king. Give your protagonist an arc, they say. Make them grow. Show them change. Rinse. Resolve. Repeat.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Forgive me, but I’m not here for that workshop claptrap.

“I don’t build arcs. I drop people into a world and let them drown, float, or disappear.”

My writing isn’t character-driven in the conventional sense. I don’t sculpt protagonists to take heroic journeys or undergo epiphanic transformations. I’m not interested in plumbing the depths of their souls or bandaging their inner wounds with moral insight. My primary concern is the world—the philosophical or sociological structure—through which characters drift, orbit, or plummet. Sometimes they leave a mark. Often, they don’t.

Because real life isn’t narrative. It doesn’t arc. It drifts. And most of us don’t develop. We adapt. We cope. We muddle through.

“From a narrative perspective, we start somewhere in the middle and end somewhere else in the middle.”

Resolution, in most stories, is a parlour trick—narrative taxidermy dressed as transcendence. In reality, most encounters don’t resolve. They expire. People come and go. You cross paths with strangers who change your life—or don’t—and then vanish back into the abyss of statistical anonymity.

One of my recent manuscripts begins with a woman named Sena discovering a body by the roadside. She reports it, the authorities arrive, and the narrative follows them—until it doesn’t. It dissipates. No tidy resolution, no tight bow. Just the unfurling tedium of systemic procedure and human irrelevance. It’s not a mystery story. It’s a story with mystery in it. Big difference.

We like to pretend we’re central to our own story, each of us a protagonist in a universe scripted for personal development. But sometimes, we’re not even side characters. Sometimes, we’re scenery. Camus’ Meursault had it right: the sun matters more than your feelings, and death shows up whether you’ve had your arc or not.

“Psychologically, we like to assume we have agency. That’s why we tell stories with resolution—because it flatters us to imagine things make sense.”

Yes, some readers crave grandiosity—heroes, villains, the Great Man Theory dressed in narrative drag. Napoleon didn’t just wage war; he “struggled with destiny.” Stalin wasn’t just a paranoid bureaucrat; he was “a force of history.” These are characters written by history with the same myth-making brush that writes fiction. Convenient, cathartic, utterly inaccurate.

But I don’t write demigods. I write witnesses, floaters, participants without insight. They’re often not even granted the courtesy of closure. They move through a world that refuses to acknowledge their significance. And why should it? The cosmos doesn’t care if your backstory is tragic or if your girlfriend left you on page forty-two.

Sometimes the character who seems central is merely catalytic. Other times, they’re inert—filler between philosophies. If someone changes, maybe it’s society, not them. Maybe the reader. Or maybe no one.

So no, I don’t build arcs. I don’t force characters to evolve like Pokémon just because Act III demands it. I drop them into a world and watch what happens—often, nothing. Because that, more than any tidy redemption tale, is how life actually works.

“In my stories, characters are pawns—how I envisage others: merely players, perhaps trying to make sense of the world they’ve been thrown into.”

That’s the work. Not myth-making. Not therapy. Observation. Dissection. Not a ladder to transcendence but a mirror, tilted just so.

Welcome to Ridley Park. Watch your footing. There are no arcs—only echoes.

Tag: storytelling

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