Separating my storytelling from the story problem

writing
#1

I’ve been trying to come up with a storyform for an idea. I felt good about everything but the OS in Physics because I couldn’t figure out what the Gistified version was. I tried various things like “living in the haunted house” or “dealing with ghosts” or whatever. They all fit, but only just a little bit. Nothing Seemed to really encompass the entirety of the inequity. I had just about decided it was because “living in the haunted house” was to Physics what “Activity” is to Physics–that is, a gist that only lends itself to a small slice of all that is allowed within Physics. No problem, I figured. Just use an inadequate gist and know that I can throw in Physics problems wherever I need them.

Anyway, getting to the point, after trying to encode the rest of the throughline and not being able to see how the rest of my gists were problematic I eventually realized that the haunted house wasn’t the source of the OS problem. It might have been the problem (as in “Physics is a problem because of ghosts”) or might have just been storytelling around the problem. Anyway, I finally landed on “starting a new life” as a gist that felt like it fully encompassed what I was going for and from there was able to re-encode the rest of the throughline and easily see why each item was problematic.

The lesson here is that I’m pretty sure I was trying to encode the storytelling (haunted house stuff) as the source of the problem and that kept me from seeing what the source really needed to be.

After re-encoding everything from Domain down to Benchmark, I left the haunted house stuff in the Sign Post encodings and it seems to work really well now. So anyway, the moral here seems to be Don’t mix your storytelling or plot elements up with the source of inequity. Probably a basic issue that I should have figured out long ago. But I didn’t. Hopefully sharing it will be useful to some other person having a similar issue.

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#2

@Gregolas , I hear ya. I’m just not sure I’d have been so insightful as to be able to tell them apart.If you’d pm me what you had and what you changed it to, I’d really appreciate it.

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#3

Absolutely. Just sent it.

yes you would have. you’ll probably see what I mean when you read what I sent. It probably should have been obvious to me what I was doing wrong all along. The only reason I think I figured out what I was doing wrong is because I just recently really figured out how to properly separate throughlines into four individual parts of a story rather than just four imcomplete individual parts of one tale.

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#4

@Gregolas

About point 1: This is very helpful because I was coming across something similar and wasn’t quite sure what to do. When you say to separate the plot elements and storytelling from the source of inequity, now I know what’s going wrong in my structure. I can also see the usefulness of the abstract terms (e.g. Future, obtaining) over quite specific gists. So, thank you!

About point 2: I’m curious about how you figured out how to make the throughlines all complete separate threads as opposed to incomplete threads. Was it in the Armando book or trial and error?

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#5

@whitepaws Glad you found it helpful!

It was mostly me discovering my own problem, but Armando’s book, and several of Jim and Melanie’s articles, helped as well.

I think the idea of the Storymind exploring a single problem from different perspectives had me trying to tie all of my throughlines to the same problem. It’d be easier to see, I think, in a tale everyone’s already familiar with, so imagine trying to write Little Red Riding Hood as a complete story. If you put OS in Universe and say everyone experiences troubles from the situation of a man-eating wolf on the loose, and then put the MC in Physics and say that Red experiences problems from being hunted by a wolf, then Red really has the same problem everyone else has-that is, there is a man-eating wolf on the loose. Technically, she could be the only one being hunted, but I’m assuming that what makes a man-eating wolf on the loose problematic is that it is hunting people to eat. If you then try to put the Wolf in the IC spot as he plays the role of Grandma, you have once again made the source of the issue to be the man-eating wolf on the loose.

To have four true throughlines from four different perspectives, it really seems that the sources of inequity need to be further separated than that. Figuring out how to make four separate throughlines was just a matter of seeing that in my own work.