aron
@aronshelton
@aronshelton
Storytelling and Media Studies
I think maps and recipes are often good comparative structures.
A good map highlights where you’d want to go. You’ve seen the image of the peak of a trail and along the way it might highlight things worth seeing. Thus, it invites the hiker towards the destination. Simultaneously, it’s not as they say the “territory” itself. While some of us do enjoy just browsing Google Maps for fun, it’s not a replacement for the journey. Surprise is still necessary for a good and enjoyable hike.
A bad map doesn’t drag you in to explore it. It can also be too dense.
A great recipe shows you the food which is the end of your planned narrative. The ingredients are partly visible in it and the journey takes you through the process. A poor recipe is unable to foreshadow what you might eat and leaves out gaps in preparation such that the logic or plot of the preparation leaves you frustrated or lost (resulting in an undercooked mess).
Sometimes, a recipe might show you something that’s unattainable for an average cook, in the same way that a map might deceptively lure you into a direction with information and visuals that don’t match reality.
So, great (direct or indirect) foreshadowing and non-linear storytelling relies on:
Setting a novel, realistic, and clear future event
which from the setup of ingredients available at the start
leaves a viewer surprised in how the start gets to the unique end.
I'm so thankful that I'm an addict and that I'm an alcoholic, because I have these people. And without that addiction and alcoholism and without coming to the point where I could admit that, I don't know that I would have ever had a bond with such an amazing group of people as this. And it's awesome because it's not just here. It's not just in the
... See moreWhen a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.
If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.
What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]
What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]
“What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow.
“Communication is not what has been said. It is what it is possible to say— and that is guarded by the implicit messages inherent in the relationships.” - Nora Bateson, Combining
“The change before the change suggests that perhaps indescribability is, in itself, an evolutionary condition, a built-in extra budget of possibility for unfamiliar formations. I suspect it is, and this indescribability offers the challenge of how to communicate this unseen, submerged process. One is to accentuate the lateness of responding to "eme
... See moreDo ideas really occur in chains, or is the lineal structure imposed on them by scholars and philosophers? How is the world of logic, which eschews “circular argument” related to a world in which circular trains of causation are the rule rather than the expectation? (G. Bateson, 2002, p.18)