* string of, not strong if, 2 tweets up 😖
I have a theory: it is a string of events that produce time. Literally. Time doesn’t exist in the mind until it is conjured up via special events that manufacture atoms of anticipation to create story. Without story we are blind to time
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Here’s a 2015 talk I did that captures a lot of my thinking. I’m pretty proud of how non-verbal the theory is. Uses a wordless proto-story as the E. coli of narrative structure, and explores an event-stream pseudo-mathematical account of what story is. slideshare.net/vgururao/zembl
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Yeah, problems is partially it, but necessary not sufficient. It’s problems where you *care* about the solution and don’t value all outcomes equally as a result of caring. That’s why you have anticipation — you care about living in one future timeline over another.
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Replying to @vgr
problems
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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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🤔
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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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I like this. The strongest possible story-as-moral-argument must show the character’s solution to the problem as being the only valid or clearly best solution or people fail to suspend disbelief
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I’m not sure moral is the word you want? Surely you don’t mean morality tales that most of us consider bad, preachy examples of didactic pseudo-fiction?
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I do, actually! The Good Place = “Everyone has the ability to get better if they try”, Guardians of the Galaxy = “If you don’t have a family for free you should go make one”, etc etc. The Art of Dramatic Writing claims that a story is just a formal logic argument with narrative.
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Hmm this may be a gaming bias with its more closed-moral-universe aspect. I’d be curious to see your reaction to David Maker’s Three Uses of the Knife where he rants against morality plays as bad non-stories. He’s an important enough thinker on this that I can’t dismiss that.
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