Humanity

In my Screenwriting class, we've been talking about all of the things that go into writing a screenplay: story, character, plot, dialogue, etc.  One of the things that's been mentioned a couple times as a necessary element is humanity.  I think it's interesting that humanity is something people consider a necessary element of a screenplay.  And not just of a screenplay, but of any story, really.  Every story contains humanity.

The idea has been floating around in the back of my mind for years now to try to write a story that's completely devoid of humanity.  Maybe a story about planets orbiting stars in a completely uninhabited part of the universe.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if I wrote this story about these planets, I'd basically be turning them into characters.  I'd be humanizing them.  I'd be injecting humanity into this supposedly humanity-less story.

So I thought maybe if I told it without any sort of emotion.  It would just be a dry presentation of the facts.  Sort of like an astronomy text, I suppose.  But, leaving aside the question of whether or not that would even constitute a story, there would still be some element of humanity in it.  It would be told in a human language.  By a human.  It is impossible for us to produce anything that doesn't have some element of humanity in it, because everything we produce is produced by a human.  Even if we were to produce a computer that could write a story.  The computer would be the product of humanity, and thus, so would the story.

So I've concluded that it's impossible to write a story devoid of humanity.

Instead, I think I'm going to write a story about a writer who tries to write a story that's devoid of humanity.