Justification statements

workshop
#1

Hi everyone,

I have been working on the “People need X in order to Y, UNLESS People need A in order to B” technique to better understand the inequities in my story (as elaborated by Jim in his recent articles, and writers room, and as discussed recently on this forum).

My OS is in Activity, so I first did one for that.

Then I tried to do one for Understanding, as that is my first OS signpost, but it proved to be more difficult.

Then I noticed something interesting…

For the Activity justifications, X was kind of related to learning, Y to understanding, A to doing and B to obtaining.

So I tried using the components of Understanding as prompts…

And sure enough, I was able to easily build the Understanding justifications, where X was kind of related to conditioning, Y to instinct, A to senses, and B to interpretation.

I don’t want to share what I came up with, as it will give away the idea of my story! :slight_smile: but I wanted to share the technique in case other people find it helpful.

I know in Jim’s writers room, people have looked at the gists of the relevant story point to help generate ideas, so this is maybe another technique to supplement that.

Kind regards

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#2

That’s awesome @Dral52. I totally understand wanting to safeguard your work. However, I’m having a hard time picturing your technique. Perhaps you could demonstrate it by using different gists or even a different throughline, say Past instead of Understanding.

I’d love to see your technique.

#3

Hi Jassnip,

So for UNDERSTANDING, it would be something along the lines of:

People should understand how the body constrains the soul, in order to enjoy the pleasures of an out of body state (getting high)
UNLESS
People need to understand their sensations are unreliable when intoxicated, in order to avoid misinterpreting their experiences.

so just playing with the components of the quad to get ideas for the competing truths and contexts.

#4

correction: in order to enjoy the instinctive pleasures of an out of body state (getting high)

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#5

That’s an interesting finding.

Have you tried the other signposts, and did you get similar results?

#6

Hi whitepaws,

I’ve done learning with the same technique now.

When I apply the subject matter (addiction) to the storypoint (learning), I get a bunch of ideas. I can structure these ideas with the underlying quad (prereqs, preconditions, strategy and analysis) to get 4 clusters of ideas with which to construct the 4 truths and contexts.

Its not an exact science, and I also look at the gists of the storypoint (learning) for other ideas, but it helps me to think about what I believe to be true regarding the subject matter. The resulting justifications need polishing, of course, to get them to feel like a dilemma, but it’s not a bad way to get going.

For the signposts I’m trying to get a feel for a sequence of competing truths/justifications that describe the plot of the story, so for learning I might also say, what truth might replace a previously held truth as the story progresses.

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