Pixar Storyboard Artist Emma Coats has 22 Rules of Storytelling (as told by David Price, via Joshua Cohen). Here is my spin on nine of those rules: 1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
VV, playing “house” at 4 years oldis not “porn”. Porn involves passively watching someone elseengage in activities instead of doing them yourself. Engaging inthose activities yourself is the opposite of porn.
Watching sports is more like porn thanplaying house is.
The original Star Trek had a black gorgeous woman on the bridge of a star ship. This greatly impacted how I saw women, how I saw beauty, and how I saw blacks.
Are you saying that you would have been a misogynist and a racist if it wasn't for Star Trek? Amazing...
In 1970s Long Island, for middle class whites such as myself, blacks were not as smart as us, not leaders. Women were not generally professional of any sort. Beautiful women were sex kittens
Uhura was essentially a glorified telephone operator and the show resident Miss Fanservice. In the first episodes the writers actually went to lengths to avoid leaving her as the highest ranking officer on the bridge because they didn't want to have a black woman taking the helm.
I'd say she is a model of black woman emancipation as much as Spock is a model of rationality.
And what of contemplating a society without money?
Yeah, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Where did I hear that?
And what of contemplating other intelligent races who might differ from us, but whos differences might be provide some advantages as well as advantages?
Which are, of course, stereotypical metaphors of real-life nations.In Star Trek, race, culture, nationality and government are pretty much the same thing.
@ec7554020635931bec47ed0aac177b01:disqus I think virtually all stories have piles of unreality in them. In some sense, the most dangerous, in the sense you cite, unreality of a "non-fiction" story is that the things it gets wrong come in with a lot of strength having been wrapped in such a respectable package. Of course I can't be 100% sure than any particular item I have "learned" from porn is "true." I put learned and true in quotes because a lot of what I "learn" from porn is what I like or might like. I know much more about what it would be like to have sex with a transgendered or a DD or a group or a variety of races and nationalities, or various positions and orifices than I would without porn. The information is far from 100% reliable but it is way beyond the 100% lack of "information" I had before. So no, it is not 100% reliable, but NO story gives you 100% reliable information. Even stories purporting to give you 100% reliability, and THOSE are the ones I am more concerned about misleading people. Do you know I didn't even realize the New York Times was biased before I traveled to Israel myself at the age of 21? Even with its biases, I knew a whole lot more having read the NYT than I would have without reading it.ALL human information is imperfect, tentative. Porn is not even the extreme end of that, IMHO, lacking unicorns and time-travel as it generally does.
@VV:disqus Star trek is "most certainly just nerd porn"??? I hope people don't calibrate your reliability based on that statement! The original Star Trek had a black gorgeous woman on the bridge of a star ship. This greatly impacted how I saw women, how I saw beauty, and how I saw blacks. In 1970s Long Island, for middle class whites such as myself, blacks were not as smart as us, not leaders. Women were not generally professional of any sort. Beautiful women were sex kittens, And what of contemplating a society without money?And what of contemplating other intelligent races who might differ from us, but whos differences might be provide some advantages as well as advantages? And what of a vision of a politically united humanity without optional poverty and disease?
Sure, Star Trek helped me get my nerd freak on. So did Physics class.
How can you tell if what you are "learning" from porn is true or false?
The real danger in unrealistic stories, is that we "learn" things that are false and then have a false and distorted idea of what reality is like.
The problem is that what we learn is automatic. Learning doesn't occur at the level of consciousness, it occurs at a deeper level that we have no control over. If you are exposed to unrealistic situations, our brains start to interpret those unrealistic situations as "normal"and start to react to real situations as if the unrealistic situations were normal.
I have tried all sorts of things I learned about in porn.
Porn is generally considered rather unrealistic, but if you still managed to learn from it, well, good for you.
Anyway, what can you learn from Twilight?
Is playing house just porn for 4 year old girls? Do they learn nothing from it?
They do learn from it.
Is science fiction just porn for nerdboys? Do we learn nothing from it?
Works like Star Trek are most certainly just nerd porn. Works like Atlas Shrugged, in addition to being nerd porn, teach you wrong things. A few sci-fi stories might have valuable content (I can think of Lem's Solaris discussion of epistemology and scientific research dynamics).
Indeed, if Darwin has anything to say about it, you would expect that the stories which are most useful to us are the ones that are the most attractive.
Actually no. Thinking that any feature of an organism must be directly adaptive is a popular misconception about biological evolution.
"That is, we like stories where someone is thrown into a difficult situation. We don’t care much about what caused that situation. We care more about admiring the way they handle the situation than if their approach works."
This reminds me of something William Goldman said: "Art needs to be both surprising, and inevitable."
Just needing tension and conflict doesn't explain wanting characters who are admired, needing a "reason to root for the character", seeking a "belief burning within you that your story feeds off of" nor why characters need strong opinions.
How did you conclude that neither men nor women learn anything from porn? The fact that we enjoy porn for reasons other than learning is no more evidence that it is not educational than is the fact that we enjoy sex for reasons other than reproduction evidence that sex is not reproductive.
I have tried all sorts of things I learned about in porn. I would suspect that the penetration (pun possibly intended) of something even as simple as oral sex into current culture is something our culture has learned largely through porn.
I have highly evolved my own opinion about what I find attractive through porn. Would I have learned more by having real sexual experiences with 100s of women, a tiny fraction of the women I have had imaginary experiences with? Sure. But guess what, for a small number of men that does happen in real life, for most of us it does not.
Is playing house just porn for 4 year old girls? Do they learn nothing from it?
Is science fiction just porn for nerdboys? Do we learn nothing from it?
The fact that some form of story triggers the crap out of our pleasure center means that story doesn't help us learn is not proven. Indeed, if Darwin has anything to say about it, you would expect that the stories which are most useful to us are the ones that are the most attractive.
If you know in advance what the climax is, you can build up tension to the climax, and make sure that the climax discharges it. Otherwise, you have plot threads that don't go anywhere, and then the climax arrives out of left field.
All of this sounds like very standard writing advice to me, and most of it has to do with the mechanics of tension and conflict in very straightforward and obvious ways; the alternate interpretations seem more far-fetched. The advice to focus on the character "trying" is because this is where the conflict occurs and where most of the pages are written. Other writing advice says "Every scene must end in disaster" and this is not because people don't care about whether characters succeed, it's because readers *do* care and so by having every scene end in disaster you can thereby maintain a state of uncertainty and tension in the reader, which is mandatory. And so on.
All stuff in the content are extremely very beautiful and awesome. These list of story rules are great and will sure take into consideration.
@ec7554020635931bec47ed0aac177b01:disqus
VV, playing “house” at 4 years oldis not “porn”.
That wasn't my claim.
VV, playing “house” at 4 years oldis not “porn”. Porn involves passively watching someone elseengage in activities instead of doing them yourself. Engaging inthose activities yourself is the opposite of porn.
Watching sports is more like porn thanplaying house is.
@google-fa2409635636c550711adbcf33bd5864:disqus
The original Star Trek had a black gorgeous woman on the bridge of a star ship. This greatly impacted how I saw women, how I saw beauty, and how I saw blacks.
Are you saying that you would have been a misogynist and a racist if it wasn't for Star Trek? Amazing...
In 1970s Long Island, for middle class whites such as myself, blacks were not as smart as us, not leaders. Women were not generally professional of any sort. Beautiful women were sex kittens
Uhura was essentially a glorified telephone operator and the show resident Miss Fanservice. In the first episodes the writers actually went to lengths to avoid leaving her as the highest ranking officer on the bridge because they didn't want to have a black woman taking the helm.
I'd say she is a model of black woman emancipation as much as Spock is a model of rationality.
And what of contemplating a society without money?
Yeah, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Where did I hear that?
And what of contemplating other intelligent races who might differ from us, but whos differences might be provide some advantages as well as advantages?
Which are, of course, stereotypical metaphors of real-life nations.In Star Trek, race, culture, nationality and government are pretty much the same thing.
@ec7554020635931bec47ed0aac177b01:disqus I think virtually all stories have piles of unreality in them. In some sense, the most dangerous, in the sense you cite, unreality of a "non-fiction" story is that the things it gets wrong come in with a lot of strength having been wrapped in such a respectable package. Of course I can't be 100% sure than any particular item I have "learned" from porn is "true." I put learned and true in quotes because a lot of what I "learn" from porn is what I like or might like. I know much more about what it would be like to have sex with a transgendered or a DD or a group or a variety of races and nationalities, or various positions and orifices than I would without porn. The information is far from 100% reliable but it is way beyond the 100% lack of "information" I had before. So no, it is not 100% reliable, but NO story gives you 100% reliable information. Even stories purporting to give you 100% reliability, and THOSE are the ones I am more concerned about misleading people. Do you know I didn't even realize the New York Times was biased before I traveled to Israel myself at the age of 21? Even with its biases, I knew a whole lot more having read the NYT than I would have without reading it.ALL human information is imperfect, tentative. Porn is not even the extreme end of that, IMHO, lacking unicorns and time-travel as it generally does.
@VV:disqus Star trek is "most certainly just nerd porn"??? I hope people don't calibrate your reliability based on that statement! The original Star Trek had a black gorgeous woman on the bridge of a star ship. This greatly impacted how I saw women, how I saw beauty, and how I saw blacks. In 1970s Long Island, for middle class whites such as myself, blacks were not as smart as us, not leaders. Women were not generally professional of any sort. Beautiful women were sex kittens, And what of contemplating a society without money?And what of contemplating other intelligent races who might differ from us, but whos differences might be provide some advantages as well as advantages? And what of a vision of a politically united humanity without optional poverty and disease?
Sure, Star Trek helped me get my nerd freak on. So did Physics class.
How can you tell if what you are "learning" from porn is true or false?
The real danger in unrealistic stories, is that we "learn" things that are false and then have a false and distorted idea of what reality is like.
The problem is that what we learn is automatic. Learning doesn't occur at the level of consciousness, it occurs at a deeper level that we have no control over. If you are exposed to unrealistic situations, our brains start to interpret those unrealistic situations as "normal"and start to react to real situations as if the unrealistic situations were normal.
I have tried all sorts of things I learned about in porn.
Porn is generally considered rather unrealistic, but if you still managed to learn from it, well, good for you.
Anyway, what can you learn from Twilight?
Is playing house just porn for 4 year old girls? Do they learn nothing from it?
They do learn from it.
Is science fiction just porn for nerdboys? Do we learn nothing from it?
Works like Star Trek are most certainly just nerd porn. Works like Atlas Shrugged, in addition to being nerd porn, teach you wrong things. A few sci-fi stories might have valuable content (I can think of Lem's Solaris discussion of epistemology and scientific research dynamics).
Indeed, if Darwin has anything to say about it, you would expect that the stories which are most useful to us are the ones that are the most attractive.
Actually no. Thinking that any feature of an organism must be directly adaptive is a popular misconception about biological evolution.
Make the hero take the most intelligent action at any point. His knowledge may be incorrect, but he should always be acting as if it were.
"That is, we like stories where someone is thrown into a difficult situation. We don’t care much about what caused that situation. We care more about admiring the way they handle the situation than if their approach works."
This reminds me of something William Goldman said: "Art needs to be both surprising, and inevitable."
Just needing tension and conflict doesn't explain wanting characters who are admired, needing a "reason to root for the character", seeking a "belief burning within you that your story feeds off of" nor why characters need strong opinions.
I am puzzled why the bulk of you apply your "deep" concepts of "story rules" - to Today's Common Audience.
You act like this is The Enlightenment and they should suddenly start liking Aeschylus and Shakespeare.
Chick, dude, aliens, fight - explosion.The End.
How did you conclude that neither men nor women learn anything from porn? The fact that we enjoy porn for reasons other than learning is no more evidence that it is not educational than is the fact that we enjoy sex for reasons other than reproduction evidence that sex is not reproductive.
I have tried all sorts of things I learned about in porn. I would suspect that the penetration (pun possibly intended) of something even as simple as oral sex into current culture is something our culture has learned largely through porn.
I have highly evolved my own opinion about what I find attractive through porn. Would I have learned more by having real sexual experiences with 100s of women, a tiny fraction of the women I have had imaginary experiences with? Sure. But guess what, for a small number of men that does happen in real life, for most of us it does not.
Is playing house just porn for 4 year old girls? Do they learn nothing from it?
Is science fiction just porn for nerdboys? Do we learn nothing from it?
The fact that some form of story triggers the crap out of our pleasure center means that story doesn't help us learn is not proven. Indeed, if Darwin has anything to say about it, you would expect that the stories which are most useful to us are the ones that are the most attractive.
If you know in advance what the climax is, you can build up tension to the climax, and make sure that the climax discharges it. Otherwise, you have plot threads that don't go anywhere, and then the climax arrives out of left field.
All of this sounds like very standard writing advice to me, and most of it has to do with the mechanics of tension and conflict in very straightforward and obvious ways; the alternate interpretations seem more far-fetched. The advice to focus on the character "trying" is because this is where the conflict occurs and where most of the pages are written. Other writing advice says "Every scene must end in disaster" and this is not because people don't care about whether characters succeed, it's because readers *do* care and so by having every scene end in disaster you can thereby maintain a state of uncertainty and tension in the reader, which is mandatory. And so on.
A good story is like a good math proof: succinct, inevitable, and unexpected.
For the diminished 21st century, Emma seems to have 'simplified' Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth into matinee blueprints.