Conversation

A thing I’ve learned this year is that story and writing are orthogonal skills. Still haven’t figured out what the core activity of story is. I don’t mean structure/plot/character. I mean something like: If writing is stringing words together, story is stringing ______ together?
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Obviously writing is just one versatile way to do story. You could do wordless cartoon stories, mime stories, and at a stretch non-lyrical music that has story like structure. So obviously writing ≠ story at an intellectual level. But what _is_ story qua story. A strong if what?
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this was an interesting read, thanks. i skimmed real quick and probably understood less than 10% of it but i liked the phrase "meaningful agency" and also the distinction between stories that close possibilities at the end and stories that keep them open (if i understood you)
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I meant to go down the tessellation metaphor bunnytrail... there’s a mathematization of intersecting spaces or something I’m sensing there. And a folk probability theory too. I’m basically convinced storytelling is more math than language.