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I like thinking about hypergraphs that continually rewrite themselves. I've thought about it in terms of literary critique, or in "compiling" a novel. It remind
by tunesmith 2y ago
I like thinking about hypergraphs that continually rewrite themselves. I've thought about it in terms of literary critique, or in "compiling" a novel. It reminds me of petri nets in a sense, where at any given moment, a character has a static model of the world, which can be diagrammed through a causal graph of conclusions and premises. Then, an event happens, which changes their understanding of the world; the hypergraph gets rewritten in response.
I've toyed with this with my own graph software when writing novels. It's of course impossible to fully document every characters' model before and after every event that affects them, but even doing so at key moments can help. I've wished more than once that I could "compile" my novel so it could automatically tell me plot holes or a character's faulty leap in logic (at least, one that would be out of character for them).
I've also tried the more common advice of using a spreadsheet where you have a column for each character, and rows indicating the passage of time. There you're not drawing hypergraphs but in each cell you're just writing raw text describing the state of the character at that time. It's helpful, but it falls apart when you start dealing with flashbacks and the like.