6 ms·

In summary, resorted: 1. Rags to riches: RISE 2. Riches to rags: FALL -- 3. Icarus: RISE, FALL 6. Man in a hole: FALL, RISE -- 4. Oedipus: FALL, RISE, FA

In summary, resorted: 1. Rags to riches: RISE 2. Riches to rags: FALL -- 3. Icarus: RISE, FALL 6. Man in a hole: FALL, RISE -- 4. Oedipus: FALL, RISE, FALL 5. Cinderella: RISE, FALL, RISE -- So every story can be framed by putting brackets somewhere in this sequence: RISE, FALL, RISE, FALL Now....what to do with this highly-abstracted level of information...? It's like saying all music in the world consists of some form of "lower note, higher note, lower note, higher note"

voisin 3y ago
> So every story can be framed by putting brackets somewhere in this sequence: RISE, FALL, RISE, FALL Even more abstract: CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT, … Perhaps any story not rooted in conflicts would be horribly boring and so not re-told?
- randall 3y ago
  You can make a really boring series of events interesting, but without a payoff it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. Example: I woke up this morning really really early… I checked my charging Apple Watch and noticed it was 2:15. I got up and noticed how quiet it was… like incredibly quiet. I put on my shoes and walked toward the stairs, and it was eerie how little sound there was. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, it was still even quieter. —- This is literally what happened this morning, but the mention of “quiet” puts a question in your head: why is the author mentioning how quiet it is!? Isn’t it always quiet at 2am?? That will get you to invest in the story and there’s no conflict. But then if the ending was “yeah it’s just always quiet” you wouldn’t have learned anything new, and there’s no reason to share / recommend / reread the story. Basically this is why JJ abrahms movies are fun to watch until they’re over.
  - kqr 3y ago
    Your episode does have an implicit conflict, though, and it's precisely the one you're saying: you have set up an implicit conflict between your auditory perception and expectation. (Actually, there's another implicit conflict in there which I would argue is perhaps even more important: why did you wake up so early, and why did you choose to go down the stairs instead of back to sleep?)
  - yamrzou 3y ago
    So what makes the story interesting here is the encounter of something unexpected. Reminds me of That's interesting! (1971) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36156400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36156400)
  - voisin 3y ago
    If you carried on this story though, without any conflict (note: I agree with sibling comment that there is actually implicit conflict between actual vs expectations), wouldn’t it be incredibly boring or lead to a “so why are you retelling this?” response?
- tshaddox 3y ago
  > Even more abstract: CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT, … How about this: alternating sequences of THINGS CHANGING and THINGS NOT CHANGING.
Aerroon 3y ago
Another way to explain it is that popular stories are a chain of buildups and payoffs for the reader. The core of it is that unlikeable characters get misfortune and likeable characters get fortune. Amateur authors and stories based on real life events can break the mold. I think that's why both can be quite popular.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Explain don quixote then.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > The core of it is that unlikeable characters get misfortune and likeable characters get fortune. I don't think that's really true, though. Tragedies are a very popular type of story. Indeed - a big part of the reason for the success of "A Game of Thrones" is because they violated genre tropes and killed off likable main characters.
  - function_seven 3y ago
    And to reinforce your point, the later seasons suffered (in part!) due to the plot armor that suddenly enveloped the main characters. Among other reasons.
crazygringo 3y ago
Yup, and these are certainly not "plots" by any definition of the word. They're one aspect of story, along with a hundred others. > Now....what to do with this highly-abstracted level of information...? If you're a reader/watcher, nothing. If you're a writer... ensure that it's clear. So much of writing is about showing your draft to a friend/teacher/etc., finding out that they didn't "get it" because what you wrote was confusing, and rewriting to make the thing clearer. If somebody reads your script and they're like, well the protagonist clearly FELL but then the only KINDA ROSE but KINDA STAYED THERE and I don't get what the point is? Are you trying to say their efforts were worthwhile or futile? And then the writer is going to do much better if they change the story to become clearly either "FALL" or "FALL, RISE" -- instead of a muddy in-between. Also: this pattern is fractal. Every scene is generally either a FALL or RISE for the main characters in it (if one character rises, the other falls). And then, depending on how you define them, each act is similarly a reversal (especially e.g. in a 5-act TV episode). This is what keeps story interesting. But over the course of all of these ups and downs, the author needs to decide what the biggest pattern is going to be.
- tobr 3y ago
  Are you a writer or are you guessing? Craig Mazin and John August have often argued on Scriptnotes[1] that this type of structural perspective can be useful for analysis, but not when writing. For example, you can often think of a movie as having three acts, but knowing that doesn’t help you write the movie. It’s more a symptom of good writing than a recipe. 1: https://scriptnotes.net/ https://scriptnotes.net/
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    I'm adjacent to it. One of the first things you usually do as part of planning a season of a dramatic TV show is to figure out the arc of each character, up or down. You can't get anywhere unless you know where you're going. And then yes, it's similarly an extremely conscious part of the writing process at the episode level, act level, and scene level. It's very much "recipe" in that sense -- but that's not to take away from any of the creativity. It's just the basic structure for creativity, the frame. Now, of course, it's recipe because of lots of trial and error in writing stories and seeing what stories worked and which didn't. If you're writing something shorter like a movie, you may very well implement the pattern on your own through intuition. But you also may very well not, and the script will have problems, and rewriting will be a lot more successful if you're aware of structure and not just relying on intuition.
bigbillheck 3y ago
> It's like saying all music in the world consists of some form of "lower note, higher note, lower note, higher note" Tell it to John Cage.
- blowski 3y ago
  John Cage is not all the music in the world.
  - bigbillheck 3y ago
    I think you're mixing up your universal and existential qualifiers.
jerf 3y ago
It's a fractal. You don't have complete freedom across the entire space of "stories" to just pick one; most such randomly selected stories would be just random things that happen for no in-story reason, then the putative story simply ends. A top-level RISE/FALL/RISE structure can add interest to the story. But then within that there is a fractal of other options, because if that's literally all your story has, once again it's not really that interesting. You can keep descending down gather up more and more detail. Sometimes someone discovers a little undiscovered tributary, or does a really good job with something like Memento. On the one hand, there is order to the space more than just "things happen, then they stop". On the other hand, like a good fractal, you really can't classify the whole space of stories with metaphorical rectangles on the diagram. No matter what rectangle you draw around romance, you're going to get every other genre mixed in at least a little bit, and so on for all the other things you can try to draw. As one gets more experienced with stories, one's interest tends to "zoom in". A kid may be satisfied with a simple hero story. As you get older, the hero story itself may be of little interest, but you are more interested in the fractal bits within it; the quality of the characterization, twists, plays on expectation. Later you may find interest in underlying philosophical themes and so on. Or, you can miss these finer details and become exhausted with stories believing you've seen them all, which despite how it may sound like I'm characterizing it here, isn't necessarily the worst thing ever. There's all sorts of things in the world and you can't become master connoisseurs of them all.
iicc 3y ago
>It's like saying all music in the world consists of some form of "lower note, higher note, lower note, higher note" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code
- madcaptenor 3y ago
  OK, but that's actually useful for information retrieval.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

voisin 3y ago

> So every story can be framed by putting brackets somewhere in this sequence: RISE, FALL, RISE, FALL Even more abstract: CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT, … Perhaps any story not rooted in conflicts would be horribly boring and so not re-told?

randall 3y ago
You can make a really boring series of events interesting, but without a payoff it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. Example: I woke up this morning really really early… I checked my charging Apple Watch and noticed it was 2:15. I got up and noticed how quiet it was… like incredibly quiet. I put on my shoes and walked toward the stairs, and it was eerie how little sound there was. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, it was still even quieter. —- This is literally what happened this morning, but the mention of “quiet” puts a question in your head: why is the author mentioning how quiet it is!? Isn’t it always quiet at 2am?? That will get you to invest in the story and there’s no conflict. But then if the ending was “yeah it’s just always quiet” you wouldn’t have learned anything new, and there’s no reason to share / recommend / reread the story. Basically this is why JJ abrahms movies are fun to watch until they’re over.
- kqr 3y ago
  Your episode does have an implicit conflict, though, and it's precisely the one you're saying: you have set up an implicit conflict between your auditory perception and expectation. (Actually, there's another implicit conflict in there which I would argue is perhaps even more important: why did you wake up so early, and why did you choose to go down the stairs instead of back to sleep?)
- yamrzou 3y ago
  So what makes the story interesting here is the encounter of something unexpected. Reminds me of That's interesting! (1971) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36156400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36156400)
- voisin 3y ago
  If you carried on this story though, without any conflict (note: I agree with sibling comment that there is actually implicit conflict between actual vs expectations), wouldn’t it be incredibly boring or lead to a “so why are you retelling this?” response?
tshaddox 3y ago
> Even more abstract: CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT, … How about this: alternating sequences of THINGS CHANGING and THINGS NOT CHANGING.

Aerroon 3y ago

Another way to explain it is that popular stories are a chain of buildups and payoffs for the reader. The core of it is that unlikeable characters get misfortune and likeable characters get fortune. Amateur authors and stories based on real life events can break the mold. I think that's why both can be quite popular.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
Explain don quixote then.
nordsieck 3y ago
> The core of it is that unlikeable characters get misfortune and likeable characters get fortune. I don't think that's really true, though. Tragedies are a very popular type of story. Indeed - a big part of the reason for the success of "A Game of Thrones" is because they violated genre tropes and killed off likable main characters.
- function_seven 3y ago
  And to reinforce your point, the later seasons suffered (in part!) due to the plot armor that suddenly enveloped the main characters. Among other reasons.

crazygringo 3y ago

Yup, and these are certainly not "plots" by any definition of the word. They're one aspect of story, along with a hundred others. > Now....what to do with this highly-abstracted level of information...? If you're a reader/watcher, nothing. If you're a writer... ensure that it's clear. So much of writing is about showing your draft to a friend/teacher/etc., finding out that they didn't "get it" because what you wrote was confusing, and rewriting to make the thing clearer. If somebody reads your script and they're like, well the protagonist clearly FELL but then the only KINDA ROSE but KINDA STAYED THERE and I don't get what the point is? Are you trying to say their efforts were worthwhile or futile? And then the writer is going to do much better if they change the story to become clearly either "FALL" or "FALL, RISE" -- instead of a muddy in-between. Also: this pattern is fractal. Every scene is generally either a FALL or RISE for the main characters in it (if one character rises, the other falls). And then, depending on how you define them, each act is similarly a reversal (especially e.g. in a 5-act TV episode). This is what keeps story interesting. But over the course of all of these ups and downs, the author needs to decide what the biggest pattern is going to be.

tobr 3y ago
Are you a writer or are you guessing? Craig Mazin and John August have often argued on Scriptnotes[1] that this type of structural perspective can be useful for analysis, but not when writing. For example, you can often think of a movie as having three acts, but knowing that doesn’t help you write the movie. It’s more a symptom of good writing than a recipe. 1: https://scriptnotes.net/ https://scriptnotes.net/
- crazygringo 3y ago
  I'm adjacent to it. One of the first things you usually do as part of planning a season of a dramatic TV show is to figure out the arc of each character, up or down. You can't get anywhere unless you know where you're going. And then yes, it's similarly an extremely conscious part of the writing process at the episode level, act level, and scene level. It's very much "recipe" in that sense -- but that's not to take away from any of the creativity. It's just the basic structure for creativity, the frame. Now, of course, it's recipe because of lots of trial and error in writing stories and seeing what stories worked and which didn't. If you're writing something shorter like a movie, you may very well implement the pattern on your own through intuition. But you also may very well not, and the script will have problems, and rewriting will be a lot more successful if you're aware of structure and not just relying on intuition.

bigbillheck 3y ago

> It's like saying all music in the world consists of some form of "lower note, higher note, lower note, higher note" Tell it to John Cage.

blowski 3y ago
John Cage is not all the music in the world.
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  I think you're mixing up your universal and existential qualifiers.

jerf 3y ago

It's a fractal. You don't have complete freedom across the entire space of "stories" to just pick one; most such randomly selected stories would be just random things that happen for no in-story reason, then the putative story simply ends. A top-level RISE/FALL/RISE structure can add interest to the story. But then within that there is a fractal of other options, because if that's literally all your story has, once again it's not really that interesting. You can keep descending down gather up more and more detail. Sometimes someone discovers a little undiscovered tributary, or does a really good job with something like Memento. On the one hand, there is order to the space more than just "things happen, then they stop". On the other hand, like a good fractal, you really can't classify the whole space of stories with metaphorical rectangles on the diagram. No matter what rectangle you draw around romance, you're going to get every other genre mixed in at least a little bit, and so on for all the other things you can try to draw. As one gets more experienced with stories, one's interest tends to "zoom in". A kid may be satisfied with a simple hero story. As you get older, the hero story itself may be of little interest, but you are more interested in the fractal bits within it; the quality of the characterization, twists, plays on expectation. Later you may find interest in underlying philosophical themes and so on. Or, you can miss these finer details and become exhausted with stories believing you've seen them all, which despite how it may sound like I'm characterizing it here, isn't necessarily the worst thing ever. There's all sorts of things in the world and you can't become master connoisseurs of them all.

iicc 3y ago

>It's like saying all music in the world consists of some form of "lower note, higher note, lower note, higher note" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code

madcaptenor 3y ago
OK, but that's actually useful for information retrieval.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]