In my story 2 tweets above, the problem is that there’s a bomb under the chair of the character, but the problem is a story event that creates time (between now and it being defused or going off) only if you care about the character’s fate.
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Replying to @vgr
Hurdles, if it has to be one word.
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In a way the fact that I’m a decent writer is seriously getting in the way of learning story 😖
I feel I should short-circuit that arrested development trap by practicing storytelling with wordless silent storyboard comics.
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I like this. Puzzle games evoke powerful story momentum for me. Like the Z and N pieces are obviously the villains of Tetris and the I is the hero. L and J are supporting characters. [] and T are B plot. Each row is a chapter. The story has no end.
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Replying to @vgr
did anyone say puzzles?
as in watching somebody else solve puzzles rather than puzzles for you (unless its a videogame)
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“Puzzles” is a useful narrowing of “problem” because it suggests a mystery element to the solution, and an aha! aspect to the resolution that’s missing in plain problems. Puzzles are problems that call for insight to solve, not merely logic or cranking through a formula.
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Replying to @dschorno and @vgr
this may be nonsense i havent worked through it but this is a knee-jerk reaction to "problems" being too general
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I actually like “beats” and “scenes” a lot, but they seem super ambiguous and given 5 theorists you’ll get 7 definitions. The definition I’ve mashed up for myself is that a beat is an action-unexpected-reaction pair. For scene, I like McKee’s idea of a values flip.
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Non-classical storytelling is a category in my head like non-Euclidean geometry. It’s what my talk in the slides was about. Not about clever avant-grade stuff but only about breaking ONE axiomatic element of hero’s journey... the return.
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Endless stories where episode arcs may return, but long arcs do not, resulting in endless change mimicking evolution, “progress,” Rule 110, and other open-ended divergent processes. There are constants in a Ship-of-Theseus sense, but not the usual ones. Are such stories possible?
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Replying to
long-running video games (not series, individual games) may be doing something like this? WoW, fortnite, etc.
Roleplaying games, especially those that have survived for 30+ years, are examples. (By "games" I mean "tables" not "titles.") Hard to study, but fascinating.
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