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I think we both speak of the same thing, but I come from dramaturgy background. Story is story, no matter the genre or medium. At its core, story is always abou

I think we both speak of the same thing, but I come from dramaturgy background. Story is story, no matter the genre or medium. At its core, story is always about change in the character through dramatic arc. If there is none, it's journalism, for lack of better words. Mechanics are vastly different through media. For example, in screenplays you get to write only what you hear and what you see. Essay form is allowed only to explain to the creators of ultimate form what you mean. When you shed all the layers of genres, when you come down to the basic principles of dramaturgy, you're left with the core of storytelling that's in all stories ever told. From Plato's Cave to Aristotelian unities onwards to Star Wars and Seinfeld, there are certain core principles which hold true in form and structure. Form, not formula. In dramatic arc and story structure there are elements which morph and trade places and these, along with psychological and visual motifs make a genre. It's probably valid approach to view/interpret this on a whole other level, and that's the beauty of it. This is just my viewpoint based on some experience and background in dramaturgy. It's a view on abstract principles of storytelling where you get to manipulate form and structure itself before you materialise it into particularities. Kind of like virtual functions, or better yet a class diagram of a story before you write it down. Dramatic theory is not competing with literary theory - it complements it, specializes it. I took dramatic theory as a heavy weapon which I find extremely useful in my work, but I didn't dwell much further into literary theory. I took some bits and pieces that I find useful for my work, like intertextuality (esp. biblical - which is tropey as it gets, Star Wars for example and Hero's Journey, but most modern literature as well)... etc. I have colleagues which are far more well-versed in literature theory than I am for when I need insight. I'm more concerned with dramatic mechanics and structure, because that's what I do and what interests me. What I'm saying is that behind all of the layers of a genre, there is a common subset to all stories. If you start with that and build towards a genre, you get to see the specifics of how it modulates that core structure. SF, in that regard, is always heavily biased towards internal-driven change with accentuated wants and needs switch[1] where character is in an extreme psychological situation driven by an extreme physical situation flared by science. Character is driven into a corner where he/she has to act on his core flaw in order to achieve the need in order to change. Whereas fantasy has a character on a journey both physical and psychological through which he/she overcomes the flaw in his character in order to act on it when third act kicks in. It's a bit of an abstract way of thinking, but I don't know how else to put it without first explaining all of the intro to dramatic theory, hah. [1] Wants vs needs is the epitome of character arc mechanics. There's something character wants that drives his story arc, only to be exposed to his actual needs (what he really wants). Shedding his wants and fulfilling that need he discovered he overcomes his major flaw and thus changes his character. Now, if you view through prism of that mechanics (core one though) and go back to genre structures you can clearly see where most differ (not all, there are blurry ones!). For example, if you look at Star Wars or Conan which are fantasy (one with SF theme and one with fantasy theme) - there's a clear flaw in the character that gets replaced by a need and fulfilled on the journey (actual one). Be it Force training vs Dagobah cave or Sword training vs Valeria. It's an actual quest! Now look at a clear-cut SF, for example Inconstant Moon episode from Outer Limits (check that out if you haven't!) or any of the more fabled STNG or DS9 episodes. In Inconstant Moon, main character realises this might be the final night of his (and everyone's life - Sun has gone Nova on the other side of the Earth (it's nighttime), and he notices Moon is exceptionally bright because of it... so he calls up his ex girlfriend (wants) and he becomes more open and free (needs).. or in DS9 Pale Moonlight (Moon, again!) where cptn. Sisko wants an action attack plan or whatever only to need to become vile and dirty character in order to win, thus overcoming his flaw (being a good guy)... no quest. When we return to Dune, that's where lines get blurred and there's an endless debate. I mean, I could go on forever and we all could probably be right to most extents. This is just my way of thinking. Flair on top of all of that is of least concern, but is the most visible in a genre. By that I mean spaceships vs swords or whatever. It's just a motif. Hence why people commonly confuse Star Wars as an SF - which it isn't at all. Also a reason why new Star Trek movies aren't really SF. It's a fantasy or in ST case action story with an SF theme on top. I'm really passionate about this subject (storytelling) and we have debates like these almost on a daily basis because we all love it. We all agree on one thing and that's that everything lies in character development and arc and grows from there, so excuse my elaborate intro to debating the topic!

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
It's alright to elaborate, we have the floor anyway. Our conversation is scratching an itch of mine -in fact, a couple of them all at once. You see, for the first part of my life I figured I would most definitely grow up to become a writer: I spent most of my time reading and writing. Things didn't turn out as I expected. For one thing it was just not realistic expecting to make a living out of writing what I really like to write (SF primarily but also Fantasy, particularly horror) in my native language (Greek) and I didn't like the idea of having to "sell out" to make ends meet. Also, I basically burned out during my teens and got a writer's block that is pretty much still holding today- I haven't managed to finish a story for years. But- I got into computers and specialised in AI and I'm always thinking of ways to use my new knowledge to do what you say: tell stories. I agree with you that regardless of the medium, the story is what matters (although I'll also say that what attracted me to writing was my love for words and language, what I refer to as form: the written word as a purpose in and of itself. Most of my knowledge in AI is in natural language processing, particularly tasks like grammar induction and language generation). So, one of the projects I've had in the back of my mind for a long time is some kind of system, or (programming) language, to help writers author their works. In particular, what I would really like to achieve is to create a system with these two capabilities: a) given a story skeleton authored by a human writer, the system should flesh out the skeleton producing a "rough draft" that the writer could then edit further; b) the system should have parameters giving the writer control of such things as theme, style and "voice", so that by adjusting the parameters the writer could turn a horror story to a romance ("Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath, their love everlasting"... though that would probably count as comedy) or, there you go- turn a Fantasy story to an SF story. Suffice to say that this capability is still light years away from our current technology and probably also from our understanding of how a story works and so I haven't really made much progress. One big problem for me is that it is very hard to identify concrete and objective story elements that could constitute the "bones" of a story-skeleton, with enough clarity that an automated system could manipulate in the way I want. It would not be enough to just describe such a set of elements in narrative language- one would need something like a formal grammar, some kind of structure that a computer could use. Some might think that just training a neural network, or some other machine learning algorithm would do the job, as if by magic, but what exactly would one train a model on? If you just hand over a bunch of text to an automatic learner it learns to reproduce the text. The structure language-learning algorithms learn is the structure of the language, not the structure of the story. What one would really need is a big corpus of literary works annotated with the kind of story elements you'd want your algorithm to learn- just as natural language corpora are annotated with syntactic elements in order to allow training language modelling algorithms. Such a literary annotated corpus of course does not exist- and it would be extremely hard to create one, given that, like I say, what constitutes a narrative element is very subjective and there is probably little agreement on that even among people with your background in dramatic and literary theory. So I guess where I'm coming from is that I've tried, and failed, to systematise story authoring, a failure that I attribute to the elusive nature of narrative elements, and that may be partly why I tend to focus so much on superficial elements, tropes, that can be much more easily represented. Of course, I still think that there is value in tropes- because there is a difference in how writers and publishers etc see literary works, and how the general public does. I think sometimes people just want to read, or watch, a thrilling story with spaceships or swords- and they don't really analyse the character's traits, or the plot, very deeply as long as they feel pleased when they put the book down, or exit the screening area.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

It's alright to elaborate, we have the floor anyway. Our conversation is scratching an itch of mine -in fact, a couple of them all at once. You see, for the first part of my life I figured I would most definitely grow up to become a writer: I spent most of my time reading and writing. Things didn't turn out as I expected. For one thing it was just not realistic expecting to make a living out of writing what I really like to write (SF primarily but also Fantasy, particularly horror) in my native language (Greek) and I didn't like the idea of having to "sell out" to make ends meet. Also, I basically burned out during my teens and got a writer's block that is pretty much still holding today- I haven't managed to finish a story for years. But- I got into computers and specialised in AI and I'm always thinking of ways to use my new knowledge to do what you say: tell stories. I agree with you that regardless of the medium, the story is what matters (although I'll also say that what attracted me to writing was my love for words and language, what I refer to as form: the written word as a purpose in and of itself. Most of my knowledge in AI is in natural language processing, particularly tasks like grammar induction and language generation). So, one of the projects I've had in the back of my mind for a long time is some kind of system, or (programming) language, to help writers author their works. In particular, what I would really like to achieve is to create a system with these two capabilities: a) given a story skeleton authored by a human writer, the system should flesh out the skeleton producing a "rough draft" that the writer could then edit further; b) the system should have parameters giving the writer control of such things as theme, style and "voice", so that by adjusting the parameters the writer could turn a horror story to a romance ("Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath, their love everlasting"... though that would probably count as comedy) or, there you go- turn a Fantasy story to an SF story. Suffice to say that this capability is still light years away from our current technology and probably also from our understanding of how a story works and so I haven't really made much progress. One big problem for me is that it is very hard to identify concrete and objective story elements that could constitute the "bones" of a story-skeleton, with enough clarity that an automated system could manipulate in the way I want. It would not be enough to just describe such a set of elements in narrative language- one would need something like a formal grammar, some kind of structure that a computer could use. Some might think that just training a neural network, or some other machine learning algorithm would do the job, as if by magic, but what exactly would one train a model on? If you just hand over a bunch of text to an automatic learner it learns to reproduce the text. The structure language-learning algorithms learn is the structure of the language, not the structure of the story. What one would really need is a big corpus of literary works annotated with the kind of story elements you'd want your algorithm to learn- just as natural language corpora are annotated with syntactic elements in order to allow training language modelling algorithms. Such a literary annotated corpus of course does not exist- and it would be extremely hard to create one, given that, like I say, what constitutes a narrative element is very subjective and there is probably little agreement on that even among people with your background in dramatic and literary theory. So I guess where I'm coming from is that I've tried, and failed, to systematise story authoring, a failure that I attribute to the elusive nature of narrative elements, and that may be partly why I tend to focus so much on superficial elements, tropes, that can be much more easily represented. Of course, I still think that there is value in tropes- because there is a difference in how writers and publishers etc see literary works, and how the general public does. I think sometimes people just want to read, or watch, a thrilling story with spaceships or swords- and they don't really analyse the character's traits, or the plot, very deeply as long as they feel pleased when they put the book down, or exit the screening area.