Why write?
Writing as crystallized thought, a way of expressing the labyrinth of interconnected, messy, and many time incoherent ideas in my mind. It is a form of knowledge distillation.
It is a form of lossiness as mutation, a way to re-interpret and adapt the thoughts into a new form – to breathe it new life. Whether networked or linear, molding it into new forms through language and terminology can give it a new perspective. A mental unflattening.
It is the form almost universally understood by all, a sort of contact language that enables people from vastly different backgrounds and contexts to build shared fictions.
It is the contribution of the radical intellectual, a sort of gift and offering. From David Graeber, ‘Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology’:
One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that: to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities — as gifts […] Such a project would have to have two aspects: one ethnographic, one utopian, suspended in a constant dialogue.
# Creative Writing
- Common misconceptions
- Creative writing is about creating ’literature’ and not genre stories: it is more so a question of quality than content
- Writing is an innate talent: writing is a tool that can be honed and practiced
- No real world application for creative writing: almost all conversations, media, arguments, involve some form of convincing the other side! what better way to do that than through story telling
- The riddle of storytelling
- Imagine two groups of early humans competing for the same resources who lived pretty much the same
- The first group gossiped and told stories during their leisure time while the second group continued working
- We know the first group survived because that’s us! So why is story telling so evolutionarily beneficial? It’s a form of simulation (see also: behaviourist approaches to consciousness)
- Classic Story Structures
- Freytag’s Pyramid
- Exposition
- Rising Action
- Climax
- Falling Action
- Denouement
- Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories
- Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” (story wheel)
- Character is in a zone of comfort
- But they want something
- They enter an unfamiliar situation
- Adapt to it
- Get what they wanted
- Pay a heavy price for it
- Then return to their familiar situation
- Having changed
- Three Act Structure
- Act I: Get your guy up a tree
- Act II: Throw rocks at him
- Act III: Get him outta the tree
- Freytag’s Pyramid
- McGuffin: an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself.
- The universal grammar for stories: character + conflict = change