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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Btw you cite Rick & Morty as Campbellian, which Harmon emphatically is, but he also did cut his teeth doing like a decade of improv then 5 years doing Channel101 shorts before he was doing 20 min televised comedy.
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If there was ever a platform that made it possible, it’d be a lot like Twitter. Could help to have the ability to assume temporary names and avatars for a thread... I don’t see any reason it fundamentally couldn’t work.
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If you tolerated the ephemeral nature of the performance, twitter’s avatar and assumed name feature could already be used for this.
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Yes I’ve tried that. Not easy. Only did 1 improv session and that was way more organic.
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Yeah, there’s no beating the feedback loop of being in live interaction if live interaction is the thing you’re striving to emulate.

