Story structure theory is NOT actually helpful for coming up with or writing stories. It's only helpful for troubleshooting and rewriting. The 0-to-1 draft is your problem. Campbell will help you get from 1st draft to nth final version.
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Most of the storywriting advice I've seen that's actually helpful tends to be tactical bag-of-tricks stuff orthogonal to structure. Tropes basically. Like: 2 characters hate each other and need to like each other by the end of the act. What to do? Give them a shared challenge.
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You need to be familiar with 100s or 1000s of such tropes through consumption of enough examples. It's like a kind of machine learning. Training your pattern generator. Until that's charged up, you can't go 0 to 1.
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The stuff that I *haven't* seen properly described anywhere outside of briefly in Johnstone is that there's something like a procedural-generator within you that you need to spin up. It feeds on tropes pattern generation upstream, and is edited by story-structure downstream.
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Tropes/patterns is like cotton bolls. Story structure is like tailoring garments. But the hardest, least documented part is the spinning of yarn and the weaving of fabric that comes in between those 2 extremes.
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Campbellian structure is not always easy to recognize and you have to make tweaks for different genres, but it's not apophenia. It's really there. Harder to spot in comedy sometimes.
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Replying to @kevinmarks
Groundhog Day is classically Campbellian if you interpret it correctly. See Steve Kaplan's reading in The Comic Hero's Journey. creativescreenwriting.com/the-comic-hero
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Fiction is way more intellectual-capital intensive than non-fiction. Like calculus vs geometry. You can figure out a lot of geometry via trial-and-error with a compass and straight edge and a few prompts. With calculus, that's very unlikely without a text.
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Assuming basic arithmetic and algebra as foundation of math literacy, there are branches like probability and geometry which possess an intuitive beginner game (dice/coins/cards, compass/straight-edge construction problems) and ones that don't (calculus, statistics)
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Challenge with fiction is that following the "make 100 pots to make 1 good pot" trial-and-error agile learning model is very hard, because there's no small, simple iteration unit. The smaller units (jokes, very short stories) are actually harder to execute than long.
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Replying to
Improv has this. Back when I was an improv coach, I’d have teams do “layups” as one exercise between warmups and scenes: one person establishes a scene & character, then a second person enters and brings inciting action. Then next pair.
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