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.
Conversation
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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“Puzzles” is a useful narrowing of “problem” because it suggests a mystery element to the solution, and an aha! aspect to the resolution that’s missing in plain problems. Puzzles are problems that call for insight to solve, not merely logic or cranking through a formula.
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I actually like “beats” and “scenes” a lot, but they seem super ambiguous and given 5 theorists you’ll get 7 definitions. The definition I’ve mashed up for myself is that a beat is an action-unexpected-reaction pair. For scene, I like McKee’s idea of a values flip.
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Non-classical storytelling is a category in my head like non-Euclidean geometry. It’s what my talk in the slides was about. Not about clever avant-grade stuff but only about breaking ONE axiomatic element of hero’s journey... the return.
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Endless stories where episode arcs may return, but long arcs do not, resulting in endless change mimicking evolution, “progress,” Rule 110, and other open-ended divergent processes. There are constants in a Ship-of-Theseus sense, but not the usual ones. Are such stories possible?
Tetris without the Z and S pieces would not be a story. You could trivially find spots for every piece and clear rows. I think I saw a paper about the Z, S pieces making Tetris NP-complete.
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And note what the Z and S pieces do: if they drop while you have a flat top row, there is *no* way to position them without creating a gap with overhang in row n-1. Time created! You now *have* to think 2 rows out to solve.
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Here what I mean. Orange piece can trivially be positioned without creating an overhang problem (“row debt”?). Green piece cannot. Green forces you to think and use lateral slides to solve.
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I think I just convinced myself story is technical debt. So the atomic unit is debt balance changes. Or pops/pushes onto stack.
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This fits the debt theory of narrative. It’s why callbacks and Chekhov’s guns are powerful elements. So stack is wrong metaphor. The debt is random access not LIFO or FIFO.
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Replying to @wminshew and @vgr
closest experience to consuming a great story is watching someone live-create a masterpiece (maker tiktok or bob ross). Often they start open-ended, throwing these strokes/words around and your head is like "tf is that.. where is this going"
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🤯
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Replying to @vgr
This is sort of the crux of the Fukuyama end of history argument (that history isn’t Turing complete).
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I’m wary of meaning theories since I think abstract processes like Tetris games fit my idea of story. But there’s something there. A story validates the sense that nothing is meaningless. Even if the meaning is that life is meaningless.
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Replying to @vgr
I think in the simplest formulation story is stringing experiences together to create meaning. That describes the components and basic purpose/achievement.
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This thread is actually a chapter in a story. Will I, the hero, figure out what a story is before I write a first good one, making this a tragedy? 😢
Or will I write a story first and lose this dangerous theorizing compulsion 😇
Theorizing is my ‘refusal of call’ to story 🤣
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Yes! Fractals are generated by recursion equations which involve stacks. They are simple LIFO stack stories. More complex ones have random-access callbacks
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Replying to @wminshew and @vgr
I wonder if something about the fractal nature of the conflict-resolution cycle is important (e.g. a great story often has conflict-resolution cycles playing out over different time-horizons & abstraction levels & ~weaves them all together) twitter.com/vgr/status/137
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This may be a non-fundamental element, but I think debt needs to contain settlement paradoxes. Like 2 debts that cannot both be paid off without introducing new elements. Like Godzilla vs. Kong which I’m watching now has paradox debt.
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Commitment 1: Godzilla is a good guy and king of monsters.
Commitment 2: Kong is a good guy and king of monsters.
Both can’t be true in same world. How to pay off both debts with 1 story?
I read ahead so I know how.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
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SPOLIERS AHEAD....
YOU’VE BEEN WARNED
HERE IT COMES!
They team up against Mechagodzilla!
Both get to win and be co-greatest monsters. Yay!
Same strategy as Batman vs. Superman.
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I do like the MICE framework. Good for macroplotting. Doesn’t help with the “string of x” serualization problem though.
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Replying to @vgr
The mice quotient works on a stack like this. chestateereview.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/sto
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Nearly all books on story offer macro-structural models and templates. Integral form equations. Unfortunately what you need to create a story is differential form equations. Where putting element n in place leads directly to putting element n+1 into place.
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Once you’ve done the plotting with your favorite structural formula, you should be able to adopt pantsing as the way to actually write. This is where most guides fail you. Only exception is Impro, which is a pantsers guide.
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Sidebar DIE MECHAGODZILLA YOU HORRIBLE THING!
Ok where were we. Oh yeah plotters vs pantsers. I’m 100% pantsers, unfortunately the stories I’ve thought of all require significant plotting 😫
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Btw monsterverse is a bad extended universe and you should really not waste your life on it unless you have no better ideas for what to do with it like me. If you must watch, be on the smart team, Team Godzilla. Team Kong is stupid. The monkey sucks.
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Poll: monster team
Show this poll
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I mean Godzilla has nuclear breath. And King needs a special axe to even be competitive... an axe made out of an old dead-godzilla spinal plate. Wtf. Loser money.
#TeamGodzilla
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Well movie kinda done. They ganged up on Mechagodzilla and killed him. Now I feel that’s unfair and I’m kinda pro Mechagodzilla
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This was unsatisfactory. They didn’t give Mechagodzilla much of a shot of a character arc. Most monster movies fail that way. They don’t give the bad monsters much of an arc. See also Indominus Rex in Jurassic World. T. Rex and raptors get arcs as heroes. I. Rex doesn’t.
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Though I’ll admit the final fight where, it’s actually killed by the aquatic Mosasaurus rather than T-Rex+raptors, introduced as a Chekhov gun in the first act, is quite satisfying. Mosasaurus is neither good nor bad. It’s a non-sentient force of nature like a volcano.
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I’ve been weaving in Godzilla comments here partly for fun but they’re also great for demonstrating how storytelling is nonverbal. Most of the important beats are screams and fights.
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Whenever I tweet about story stuff there’s always one reply along the lines of “have you heard of Joseph Campbell?” 🤣
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I’ve concluded the best answer is debt, so stringing debits and credits together.
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2 replies have pointed out interesting tangents, that there are specific American and Japanese forms of story distinct from the European Campbellian base. 🤔
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This Mark Twain essay claims the rambling humorous story, told ‘in character’ (so really a second order story/performance) is uniquely American in origin.
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Replying to @adamgurri and @vgr
Btw have you read Mark Twain on this twain.lib.virginia.edu/onstage/how2te
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This essay claims Japanese narrative is not conflict driven but I guess a sort of cosmic-causation-relevation process? twitter.com/Aelkus/status/
This Tweet is unavailable.
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I’m sympathetic to this idea that there’s culture-specific narrative forms rather than a single hero’s journey. Polymyth over monomyth. Kinda like Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for language. Not a catalog of tropes/basic plots but actual structural variation.
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