Conversation

A thing I’ve learned this year is that story and writing are orthogonal skills. Still haven’t figured out what the core activity of story is. I don’t mean structure/plot/character. I mean something like: If writing is stringing words together, story is stringing ______ together?

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Mar 31, 2021

Obviously writing is just one versatile way to do story. You could do wordless cartoon stories, mime stories, and at a stretch non-lyrical music that has story like structure. So obviously writing ≠ story at an intellectual level. But what _is_ story qua story. A strong if what?

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Mar 31, 2021

Yeah, it’s events of some sort at the microstructure level that can be analogized to words at the atomic level. But what kinds of events?

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Reclusive Wizard

@ReclusiveWizard

· Mar 31, 2021

Replying to @vgr

story is finding the right fictional events to most forcefully make a normative moral argument?

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Mar 31, 2021

riffing off the top of my head: stories are about causality. the events have to have clear causal relationships to each other (so that the "moral" can be understood)

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Mar 31, 2021

I went down that bunny trail a bit, this a pseudomath theory of it, I’d be curious to hear your take on it

slideshare.net

Zemblanity and Serendipity in Guardian and Trader Narratives

Zemblanity and Serendipity in Narrative Rationality Venkatesh Rao vgr@ribbonfarm.com Refactor Camp, March 7, 2015

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

Replying to

@vgr

this was an interesting read, thanks. i skimmed real quick and probably understood less than 10% of it but i liked the phrase "meaningful agency" and also the distinction between stories that close possibilities at the end and stories that keep them open (if i understood you)

12:02 AM · Apr 1, 2021Twitter Web App

Replying to

I meant to go down the tessellation metaphor bunnytrail... there’s a mathematization of intersecting spaces or something I’m sensing there. And a folk probability theory too. I’m basically convinced storytelling is more math than language.