Conversation

If you write fiction, you have to choose names for characters and places even if they are not critical to the story. If you do engineering, you have to choose names for variables, and details like shaft diameters even if specific bindings don’t matter. Therein lies a rhyme.
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There are 3 types of details required to define a work well enough to actually create it: Essential details: which determine the nature of the thing Influential details: which meaningfully shape that nature Interchangeable details: which are necessary but not uniquely so.
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The terminology is stolen from the Dictator’s Handbook (aka Selectorate Theory), which uses the terms essentials, influentials and interchangeables to model people involved in a governance system regardless of formal type (democracy or dictatorship). amzn.to/380jzCA
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We’re talking selectorate theory for creative work, where instead of people/citizens/voters we’re talking about the hundreds or thousands of details that go into individual works by individual creators. Goes up to millions or billions for group works like movies.
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The thing that fiction and engineering share is that they are like democracies. There is a HUGE group of interchangeables. Details that don’t really matter by default, but can occasionally matter as a function of strategy or chance. Eg: color of a wheel, drink the hero drinks.
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Replying to
Yeah. That’s very close to where Barthes is. He doesn’t think this inessential detail brings a text closer to actual reality. He just thinks it’s what makes readers refer to it as “realistic”.
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