http://randompaul.blogspot.com A Tribute
"As a part of my job, I tell stories and teach people how to tell stories. So I thought I would share two main tips for creating a solid, entertaining and clear story.
Tip Number One
The structure of a story really hasn’t changed since the times of the Greeks when Aristotle came up with a format that he named after himself; The Aristotelian Structure. Image two axes, the one going up and down which we will call “Dramatic Action” and the horizontal one is “Time”.
Now Aristotle started the dramatic action low and it rises through time. He called this “Conflict”. At the peak, something happens. He called this “Crisis”. Then there is a downward slope which the French decided to call “Dénouement” because they were far too pretentious just to say “wrapping things up”.
Of course, not all stories follow this shape. Becket’s Waiting For Godot, about two guys waiting for another guy called Godot, who never arrives, is a flat line. Nothing happens!
Kafka’s Metamorphosis, about a dull accountant who wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a cockroach, starts low on the dramatic action axis and just keeps dropping as his life gets worse.
However, the classic story, say the story of our Lord, follows Aristotle’s laws. Jesus is having trouble with the Jews, with the Pharisees and with the Romans (conflict), they arrest him and nail him to a cross (crisis) and his friends wait around pretty sad then he comes back, gives man self-determination which kind of negates God (Dénouement) leaving the rest of us to kind of wait around for the second coming, a bit like Becket’s characters. Of course, if we were Buddhists, we may have the opportunity to come back as a cockroach.
I wonder which Buddhist came up with the laws of reincarnation. According to them, after we die we get reborn as another sentient being, their definition of sentient being being something that can think other than computers, robots and those weird things that tell you when your turkey is cooked. So we could come back as a cockroach but not a saltine cracker. If you came back as a cockroach you obviously did something bad in your previous life. To come back as say Tom Cruise, you would have to have been pretty good in your previous life which would piss the Scientologists up no end.
What if you could come back as a non-sentient thing, like a saltine cracker, what would you have to do in your life as a saltine cracker to improve your lot?
I figure if you were smeared with come tasty Tasmanian Brie and willingly woofed down at a party in Darlinghurst with a nice Chablis, you may come back as a mango or a fairly attractive turnip. If you were crushed up and sprinkled between the sheets in some high school camp prank then your next life would be as beer mat or a sanitary napkin (as opposed to a non-sanitary napkin?). If, by some odd chance, you were the first solid food that a 18 month old Rwandan child had had in 6 months, then you might crack it to a minor sentient being like a tape worm of a cockroach.
I think at this point we can be fairly sure that Kafka’s accountant was not a particularly nice person.
Tip Number Two
Try not to get side-tracked."
Paul Tolton.
Tip Number One
The structure of a story really hasn’t changed since the times of the Greeks when Aristotle came up with a format that he named after himself; The Aristotelian Structure. Image two axes, the one going up and down which we will call “Dramatic Action” and the horizontal one is “Time”.
Now Aristotle started the dramatic action low and it rises through time. He called this “Conflict”. At the peak, something happens. He called this “Crisis”. Then there is a downward slope which the French decided to call “Dénouement” because they were far too pretentious just to say “wrapping things up”.
Of course, not all stories follow this shape. Becket’s Waiting For Godot, about two guys waiting for another guy called Godot, who never arrives, is a flat line. Nothing happens!
Kafka’s Metamorphosis, about a dull accountant who wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a cockroach, starts low on the dramatic action axis and just keeps dropping as his life gets worse.
However, the classic story, say the story of our Lord, follows Aristotle’s laws. Jesus is having trouble with the Jews, with the Pharisees and with the Romans (conflict), they arrest him and nail him to a cross (crisis) and his friends wait around pretty sad then he comes back, gives man self-determination which kind of negates God (Dénouement) leaving the rest of us to kind of wait around for the second coming, a bit like Becket’s characters. Of course, if we were Buddhists, we may have the opportunity to come back as a cockroach.
I wonder which Buddhist came up with the laws of reincarnation. According to them, after we die we get reborn as another sentient being, their definition of sentient being being something that can think other than computers, robots and those weird things that tell you when your turkey is cooked. So we could come back as a cockroach but not a saltine cracker. If you came back as a cockroach you obviously did something bad in your previous life. To come back as say Tom Cruise, you would have to have been pretty good in your previous life which would piss the Scientologists up no end.
What if you could come back as a non-sentient thing, like a saltine cracker, what would you have to do in your life as a saltine cracker to improve your lot?
I figure if you were smeared with come tasty Tasmanian Brie and willingly woofed down at a party in Darlinghurst with a nice Chablis, you may come back as a mango or a fairly attractive turnip. If you were crushed up and sprinkled between the sheets in some high school camp prank then your next life would be as beer mat or a sanitary napkin (as opposed to a non-sanitary napkin?). If, by some odd chance, you were the first solid food that a 18 month old Rwandan child had had in 6 months, then you might crack it to a minor sentient being like a tape worm of a cockroach.
I think at this point we can be fairly sure that Kafka’s accountant was not a particularly nice person.
Tip Number Two
Try not to get side-tracked."
Paul Tolton.
posted by Julian Fairfax Mayhem at 8:51 AM
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