Random tables are a useful tool to which I’ve often turned for finding elusive patterns in a narrative. I’ve mentioned my love for playing table top games like Dungeons & Dragons, a pastime accompanied with an inordinate number of random tables. As any who’ve played know, these games rely on dice to settle or resolve narrative outcomes on the spot at the table among friends. The dice roll is compared against the random table (in some case the oracle) and its related text. The results are sometimes unexpected and more often than not demand you take stock of what’s already happened in the story before the moment of the dice roll and then try to remake or reroute things given the new introduced bit of chaos.
A dice roll on a pre-made random table of options is of course an easy way to derail a narrative, especially if it’s your novel. But if you could somehow target these rolls to the specific truths about your novel or your world (that you’ve constructed in your narrative), would this be helpful? I discovered a blog article about honing a random table of ‘world anchor truths’ in your game. The idea is simple, you choose specific truths before hand, curating a list (say ten things) that corresponds to ideas, characters, themes, motifs, setting, or anything else in your story, and put them in a numbered list. The items should be ‘big’ ideas about your narrative/world, meaning they shouldn’t be scene level ideas. The ideas is to layer and distill the big ideas into the smaller scenes throughout. When you encounter a question, you roll on the pre-made table of truths, and given the number you land on, you connect the dots from there.
In practice while editing a manuscript, these truths would more or less correlate to the ‘major questions’ you’ve outlined before you started your second draft (my lists mentioned above). They might be major dramatic questions you want to consider in your story, or simply themes or elements you don’t want to forget. When you get stuck, or you’re unsure how a certain scene relates to the big picture, you would consult this anchor table to realign your thoughts. This sounds like it should work wonderfully when playing games, but I have yet to test this while editing a manuscript. As a thought experiment, its seems a compelling way to organize the chaos of your mind in the fervor of revision.