Writing Stories to Explore Possible Worlds

 My next writing project, which I mentioned in last month's post, is - Writing Stories to Explore Possible Worlds. I decided this in late March 2021 and started getting underway in early April 2021. I currently am at the "Organizing My Thoughts" stage. While I am not one of those writers who outlines their work in detail, I do like to have a general idea of the structure and content of a piece of work before I dive into it in earnest. So, at this stage, the project is on the back burner, as they say. I will think about various ideas, approaches, content and perhaps cover art. I don't have a checklist and I tend to work on whatever I feel like working on. But, I do have some ideas which I thought I would share as the project shapes up.

First, I need to make an argument explaining why writing stories to explore possible worlds is a legitimate and important role for stories. I will do this by examining two questions: Why do we read stories and Why do we write stories. These will be the topics of my next two blog posts and eventually will be early chapters in the book. Obviously, I intended to add "To Explore Possible Worlds" to both sets of reasons. That will create a willing suspension of disbelief which will, in turn, allow readers to buy into the basic idea behind the book. People with highly developed imaginations will immediately see the possibilities. Those with slightly less imagination will need a little encouragement and coaxing.

Along the way, I will have to clarify the term "possible world". One could argue that every story, even the most bizarre fantasy stories are about possible worlds. But, I have to explain that I am focusing on a more specific kind of possible world that might better be called possible futures. So, why don't I just use the term "possible futures" ? There are two reasons for this. First, it does not help clarify. As I explained in my book Predicting the Future, one of the biggest barriers to predicting the future is the vagueness of the term - future. The second problem is that my focus is not only on predicting the future, but in helping us make better moral decisions about things that affect our future. So, I am interested in stories that help us make better predictions about the future as well as stories that help us make better moral decisions. Actually, moral decisions are usually about the future. But, as the future we are talking about is further out and the difference between that future and today is greater, the consequences of today's decisions become of greater moral significance and more difficult to anticipate.

One could argue that we already have stories that predict the future (H. G. Wells Time Machine for example) and stories that focus on moral outcomes (George Orwell's 1984). I can't dispute that and could easily make the lists of examples much longer. However, I would dispute that we have enough stories like those as we face increasingly more change in the future and the challenges brought on by those changes. I would also point out that writing stories to explore possible worlds is not the same as just writing stories. And understanding the differences will make it easier for more people to chime into the debates about the future. This will also be expanded upon in upcoming posts and further expanded in the book when it comes out.

For this project, I have many, many books on writing which I have read or plan to read. I will map their general suggestions into more specific ideas for the topic at hand. For example, generic advice about plots, characters and dialog needs to be made more specific to explore possible worlds. A more specific example can be found in the character arc. Usually, although not always, main characters confront a challenge or conflict in the story and how they respond to that conflict will determine how the character at the end of the story differs from that same character at the beginning of the story. This rule does not always apply. In most detective stories, the detective does not undergo a transformation over the course of the story. In fact, it is often the consistency of the detective's character which draws readers to these stories. In stories written to explore possible worlds, the character of the protagonist is more like the detective than it is like the hero or heroine in a great work of literature.

I also have a collection of notes from a class I taught some years go on Writing Stories to Explore the Ethics of Technology. The topic of this book is a broadening of that idea. So, the notes will come in handy. This is not to discount the work involved in reading, rewriting, rereading and reworking existing material. But, it still makes it easier than starting with whole cloth. 

(Made from Whole Cloth is a very interesting expression and I am very tempted to go off on a tangent. But, I will spare the reader. Wool gathering is another relevant textile metaphor which is also relevant to the early stages of a project. I will spare you that digression as well. Sorry, but this is how my mind works. No wonder nobody will have coffee with me.)

Since I have a lot of open time while my thoughts about this book are coming together I am filling it with other projects related to my writing. For example, I have been learning skills related to cover art to make my book covers more attractive. So far, they are attractive but a bit bland and I am learning things that will help me to improve their appearance. I am also learning to draw, which is a HUGE challenge, as I want to draw illustrations for a series that I have planned for the future. That may prove to be a bit too ambitious. I also created a YouTube Channel called "retiredprofessor" where I can post content from my books in order to promote them. So far, all I have is 17 minute narrated PowerPoint which explains what I plan to add over the next year. If you would like to have a look, you can find it at:

Retired Professor Intro

But, to get back on track, a really cool idea occurred to me regarding this project and my blog. (I started to explain this idea but drifted away.) I thought I would post ideas in progress from the book on the blog. Some examples of this can be found in earlier paragraphs of this post which provide teasers for upcoming posts. These upcoming posts, in turn, will provide teasers for chapters in the book. This serves two purposes. (I always like ideas that have multiple purposes. It is hardly worthwhile to have an idea that is only good for one thing.) First, writing helps me organize my thinking. So, writing blog posts containing ideas that I am working on for the book will help me clarify them for the book. Second, people often think that ideas and even books spring from the author's head in final form as Venus sprang fully formed from the head of Jupiter. I am pretty sure that this did not happen to Venus and I am confident that it never happens in writing. This is something aspiring writers should know.

I will try this out with my next two posts which will be entitled Why We Read and Why We Write. If that works, I will follow up with the other two posts mentioned above. If that also seems to work out OK, I will continue sporadically with more ideas from the upcoming book. I hope to have this book finished by the end of the year which is six or seven months away. If this idea turns out to be a dud then only two of those months will be taken up. If the idea works out great it may be four, five, or even more. We'll see. 

This post is a bit disjointed which is exactly how I feel as I begin this new project.

Thinking More Broadly About Why We Read Fiction

 In my post, at the beginning of March, entitled Why We Read Fiction, I mentioned two reasons, offered by Lisa Zunshine, which were: to improve our mind reading skills and to improve our theory of mind. I agreed that these are both legitimate reasons for reading fiction and went on to say "We also read fiction to learn values and vicariously experience situations." This idea about why we read fiction got stuck in my mind as I began to expand the question. What are the various reasons why people read fiction? What are the reasons why people write fiction? Do the two overlap? If a writer writes a piece of fiction for one reason, will the reader read it for the same reason or a different one? You might ask why anyone would think of such questions and all I can say is that is how my mind works. I don't really have a choice. But, for the moment, I am going to put a bookmark on this line of thinking so that I can explore another idea and then bring them back together.

I just finished my third non-fiction Kindle book entitled The Ghost of Socrates: Exploring Philosophical Issues in Information Systems. It examines questions such as "Is there really any knowledge in knowledge management systems", "do we really have a 'right' to privacy", "can machines be intelligent", "how does technology influence the distribution of social power" and so on. It is available at the Kindle Store on the Amazon website. I only have it available as an e-book for now as I need to learn a few things in order to make it available in paperback. Having finished that project, I began pondering my next project.  I actually have plans for several books. But, I do not necessarily do them in order.  I usually wait until I finish one and then try to decide what I feel like doing next. 

[While plugging my books, I should also mention the recent publication of my first fiction work called Identity. It is available on Amazon in the Kindle Store as well.]

I decided on "How to Write Stories to Explore Possible Worlds" which has a long history of not being written but for which the time has now come. Back in the mid 1990's, I was interested in Computer Ethics. I had the realization that the biggest problem in computer ethics was that we were trying to assess the moral quality of certain ideas in the context of the present rather than in the context of the world that the technology would bring about. I tell a story in my book Predicting the Future about a class of MBA students from around this time who totally rejected my claim that in the future you will carry your phone around with you and the network will find you. They thought this was a terrible idea. They came up with some very predictable reasons why this would never happen. And, yet, it did. How could such bright, promising young students be so wrong? The answer is fairly simple. They were evaluating the claim that I had made based on present conditions and not on conditions that lie in the future which are brought about by the technology.

It occurred to me that in order to make a less biased assessment one would have to write a story or perhaps several stories about a future world in which this claim was true. I wrote several papers on the role of stories in computer ethics and eventually ran out of steam. The main barrier to this idea that I saw was that most people in the computer field who knew enough about the issues simply did not know how to write stories. So, I decided to develop a method for writing stories and developed a course in writing stories to explore the ethics of technology. I taught the class for six or seven years and planned to eventually write a book based on the material I had gathered and things I had learned from the class. But, I held off because I felt the idea was still not quite complete.

As I was writing Predicting the Future I talked a lot about how one must use their imagination to come up with possible outcomes and then assess those outcomes in terms of likelihood and impact. At the time, I did not see any connection between the stories book and the predicting book. But, eventually it clicked and I realized that stories can be used to gather knowledge about possible futures for the purposes of ethical analysis, policy making, and decision making. So, the book was re-titled Writing Stories to Explore Possible Worlds. People often ask writers where they get their ideas from. This is one of the ways, but only one of many, and most are just as complicated to explain. This is why writers, when asked such a question, often shrug and say something evasive.

To tie this back to the original topic of this post (which was why do we read fiction), we can add to the list of reasons why writers write and why readers read is to explore possible worlds. But, in fairness, I must admit that exploring possible worlds, along with mind reading,  are perhaps at the more arcane end of the list. So, in my next couple of posts I will compile a list of more common and more pragmatic reasons for reading and writing.But, before I go, I would like to point out that as the future comes at us faster and faster our need to understand what is coming, along with its implications, will grow. And as that happens, the need to explore possible worlds will grow as well.

Writing Well is Like Cooking Well

 Let's say that you are a more than adequate cook. By more than adequate I mean that you cook several times a week and, when you serve your cooking to family or friends, it is rare that anyone leaves much, if any, on their plate. Perhaps you go to a pot luck dinner, now and then, where there is rarely anything left of the dish you brought for your to take home. Maybe people will ask you specifically to bring a particular dish. You are confident in your abilities and nobody is ever worried when they are asked to come over to your place for dinner.

Based on your reputation and proven performance a friend, who has limited experience with cooking, approaches you saying that they want to learn how to cook and thought you would be a good place to start. You are deeply flattered and suggest that they begin with some simple recipes such as macaroni and cheese or pot roast and gradually work their way up to more difficult dishes. At this point your friend apologizes for being unclear and says they were not really interested in basic cooking. They have after all, invested a lot of money in high end cooking equipment and just want to know how to use it.

But, wait! It gets worse! They want to develop some great new recipes so they can open their own restaurant. What do you tell them? Personally, I would say "well good luck with that", and walk away. But most people are a little nicer than I am. However, the question remains - what do you tell them?

The problem here is that there is no easy answer. What they want to do requires a lot of knowledge and experience most of which will be acquired slowly over time and as the result of endless mistakes. High quality cooking does not come about easily and quickly through some sort of magic. You have to work hard and build up to it. 

I use this cooking example because, in many ways, cooking is like writing but the experience of cooking is much more concrete. Having to scrape a burnt roux out of the bottom of an expensive cast iron skillet so that you don't have to throw it away is an experience one is not likely to forget. However, throwing away a story that just wasn't working is an experience that one might very well forget.  

All too often people will start with the objective of writing and publishing the Great American Novel. This does happen from time to time. Just recently, Delia Owens wrote and published Where the Crawdads Sing, a wonderful coming of age novel, which became a best seller. It was her first book and she worked on it for ten years. And, she is not only talented but very lucky as having a success like that is very rare. 

Back in the early 1960's Harper Lee wrote and published To Kill a Mockingbird which not only became a massive best seller, but won a Pulitzer Prize as well. She didn't publish another book for 45 years. Yes, it does happen that somebody gets lucky and hits a home run out of the park on their first pitch. But, it doesn't happen very often. And when it does happen, it is very common that it is their last success. There are numerous authors who had an amazing success with marginal successors. I could list several off the top of my head. But, that would be unkind.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the runaway bestseller Eat, Pray, Love has written about, and even done a TED talk on, the challenges of writing after a huge success. You have to admire her spirit because, as hard as it may be to pay your dues of daily writing practice when you don't know if it will ever mount up to anything, it is a thousand times harder to go back to paying dues once you have had a major success. Yet Gilbert says that you must just keep writing. I agree with that and admire her for saying it, because it is something writers need to hear.

We'll go back to the cooking analogy for an example. Let's say you find a great recipe and try it out for your friends. Let's say further that it turned out perfectly, your friends raved, and everybody thinks you are a talented chef. But, then they come back, another night, for burnt roast and watery soup, and your reputation evaporates. What do you do? Well, if you want to learn how to cook, you keep cooking, try to figure out what you did wrong, and work on correcting it.

We can carry this analogy to other pursuits. If you want to learn how to play a musical instrument, it takes endless practice before you can play anything that anyone else can stand to listen to. But, it isn't just lofty pursuits. If you want to replace the faucet in your kitchen sink, and you have never done it before, it is very likely that you will land up calling a plumber and then try to clean up all the water before the plumber gets there.

Back to cooking and writing. What is the writing equivalent of scrambled eggs?  Scrambled eggs are easy to make and you can easily make them more interesting by adding some grated cheese or diced ham. If you make scrambled eggs every day and tinker with them, over time you will get really good at it. A parallel to scrambled eggs in writing is sending email to friends. Start sending more email to your friends and try to make each email a little more interesting. If something interesting happened that you wish to tell someone about, try using more descriptive language to convey how you felt about or reacted to the event. See if you can convey not just the events but the experience. If a series of events occurred, turn it into a story. And don't make it like a newspaper story. Make it something they can experience. Add some humor and perhaps a moral. Some people may not care for this and might comment about it. For them you should cut back to just the facts. Others might comment that your emails are getting more interesting. For them you can push the boundaries a bit. 

This is only the first step in a very long journey. But, as Confucius said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Don't wait to be teleported to your destination. Take that first step. It may be way short of your expectations and your final goal. But do you want to get there by dumb luck or through hard work? If you balk at this question consider this - dumb luck is almost impossible to repeat, but hard work is not.

Why We Read Fiction

 I seem to be on a roll here with the fourth book on the foundations of storytelling. This was not intentional. And, I hope to give you a break after this one. But, I stumbled onto a book entitled Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. The author is Lisa Zunshine. In the previous post I made a distinction between scholarship and research. This book is an instance of scholarship, using that dichotomy, and falls within a general area called critical studies. Personally, I prefer research to scholarship and should also mention along the way that I am not a fan of critical studies. So, this book is very much at the end of the spectrum that I prefer to avoid. It can be considered a part of critical studies, literary studies, literary criticism and perhaps other similarly titled areas of study. Yet, there was something about the book that caught my attention. I have read some good stuff from this end of end of the spectrum and I do try to be fair. So, I thought I would give it a shot.

In order to explain what this book is about, I have to introduce two terms - mind reading and theory of mind - which are real phenomena in the field of psychology. First "In psychology, mind-reading is when we try to infer what is going on in someone’s mind without asking them to clarify." [1]

We do this all the time. For example, perhaps your significant other is acting oddly and you try to ascertain what the problem is without actually asking them.  Or, alternatively, a home service provider (such as a plumber or repair person) is claiming that you need something expensive and you try to determine their motives. Are they acting in your best interests or are they just trying to earn a juicy fee or commission? The better your mind reading skills, the better you can function socially. So, developing good mind reading skills is in your best interest. The term "mind reading" is unfortunate as it conjures up a charlatan in a turban with an Eastern European accent who is mysteriously reading your thoughts.

As you attempt to read a person's mind, you employ numerous rules and heuristics that you have learned over the years. Some people lie. People often behave in their self interest. When your significant other is quiet, they are usually withholding information from you. If they are being nice as well, they are withholding something really big. And so on.  You may have dozens, if not hundreds, of these little rules of thumb that help guide you in the mind reading process. The collection of these rules is your theory of mind and it helps you read minds more effectively. So, when your significant other is uncharacteristically dressed up with cologne and claiming to be going to the library to do some research on property taxes, you may not take it at face value.

The more refined your theory of mind, the better your mind reading will be. Unfortunately, you cannot tell the people around you that you are trying to refine your theory of mind so you would appreciate it if they would be completely honest with you about their feelings and motives so that you can evaluate the accuracy of your determinations. That would certainly inhibit your ability to function socially, not to mention decrease the number of friends you have on Facebook. So, what is one to do?

According to Zunshine (and I agree) this is one of the reasons why people read fiction. We attempt to mind read fictional characters and, in doing so, refine our theory of mind. I would point out that this is far from the only reason that we read fiction. We also read fiction to learn values and vicariously experience situations. The same way that puppies play fight to prepare themselves for the real thing, should it actually arise, we experience conflicts in stories to prepare ourselves for those conflicts should they actually arise. And, if you were to list of all the dozens of reasons why people read fiction, refining their theories of mind and hence their mind reading would easily be in the top ten, if not in the top five.

To be fair to Zunshine, I should also mention one of the central cognitive phenomena that she explores in great depth in the book. Consider the following example. Sally tells Martha that she thinks her (Sally's) boyfriend (Bob) is cheating on her. Martha tells me that Bob cannot be trusted. I ask Bob what is going on between him and Sally. Bob says nothing is going on and everything is fine but now is worried because he thinks Sally may be unhappy in the relationship. What is going on here? Who do we believe? How do we unpack this? Your theory of mind has lots of tentative information complicated even further by recursive assertions. This is why you need to develop and refine your theory of mind. And this is one of the things that fiction can help you with. 

Here is an example that I came across recently. Many fans of the TV series LOST believe that the island was purgatory. One of the pieces of evidence that they provide is the episode(s) where characters are saying "We are all dead".  If you take that at face value, then it is pretty strong evidence for the purgatory claim. However, what if this claim is not a statement of fact? What if this is a fear about the future? Or, better yet, what if the writers are intentionally misdirecting the audience? This is not such a far fetched idea, as writers of mystery and detective stories misdirect the readers all the time. Zunshine used examples from Mrs. Dalloway. But, I felt the more people saw LOST than read Mrs. Dalloway.

In real life you may never figure out what is going on. Maybe Sally had a fling with Walter and is feeling guilty so she blames Bob in order to provide some justification for her behavior. Maybe Walter told Sally that Bob was having an affair in order to make his seduction of Sally a little easier. Maybe there is no Walter but Sally's girlfriend Janet told Sally that Bob was having an affair in order to hurt her because Janet's boyfriend flirted with Sally. Maybe Bob is disappearing a couple of nights a week taking cooking classes which he has not told Sally about because he wants to surprise her with a candle light dinner and some dishes neither of them can pronounce. We could go on and on with possibilities. But, you will probably never know the whole story. One might even say that the essence of the human condition is never knowing the whole story.

But, in fiction, we often do get the whole story. And in those cases where the story ends without revealing the whole story we still get way more of the story than we ever get in real life. For those loose ends we can always join a book club and hash out the possibilities with other readers. So, fiction helps us improve our mind reading and helps us refine our theory of mind. While those may not be the only reasons that we read fiction. They are certainly near the top of the list.

Maps of Meaning

 Many of you may already be aware of Jordan Peterson due to his runaway best seller 12 Rules for Life. However, Peterson wrote an earlier book entitled Maps of Meaning which is as brilliant as it is difficult to get through. Nonetheless, I wanted to offer a quote from that book which ties in nicely with this developing thread. 

"The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place for things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however - myth, literature and drama - portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the objective world - what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the later is the world of value - what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action." [Maps of Meaning, pg. xxi]

Let's unpack this a bit. The most obvious point being made here is that we understand the world through two different lenses. One asks the question - what is out there? This mode of understanding is what has become known as science. The other mode asks - what does it mean and what should we do? This mode of understanding is what has become known as literature. We can simplify this with a succinct sound byte: Mythos vs. Logos. Mythos is stories and Logos is logical reasoning. I did not coin this dichotomy. You can Google "Mythos vs Logos" and find out a lot more about it.

The World of Logos is the world of science, although technically speaking it is quite a bit more. Science focuses on empirical observations and a method for discovering properties of the material world. Mathematics, on the other hand, is rational rather than empirical but is a big part of the World of Logos. So is logic and critical thinking. So, science is really one of several components of the World of Logos. But, for the sake of simplicity, we tend to group all the components together and call them science. There is much more to be said about this, but I will spare you the details.

The World of Mythos is the world of stories, although technically speaking again, it is quite a bit more as well. As Peterson points out it includes "myth, literature, and drama". But it includes jokes, persuasion, propaganda, and  culture as well. We don't have a single word to describe it as we do in the previous case. So, again, for the sake of simplicity we will group it all together and refer to it as the World of Mythos.

Notice the similarity between this idea and previous posts. The September post discussed two schools of thought on writing. We can think, generally, of the Technical/Teleological School as the Logos School and the Expressive/Inspirational School as the Mythos School. This dichotomy is not perfect for reasons I will explain shortly. But, it does help us to simplify things in order to understand them better.

The October post was on Narrative vs Logical Reasoning and is fairly obvious in how it fits the dichotomy. 

The November post (actually dated October 31) asserts two independent consciousnesses, the consciousness of the Neo-cortex and the consciousness of the limbic system. We can think of the Neo-cortex as the Logos brain and the limbic system as the Mythos brain. 

As I said earlier, this dichotomy is not perfect as the two brains work together "somewhat" but not perfectly. I can explain this best with some examples. 

There are endless stories in science which reveal how we use mythos to justify logos. For example, we have the story of Copernicus bravely using science to fight back ignorance. We have a similar story for Galileo. August Kekulé who discovered the ring structure of benzene tells a story about a dream he had in which a snake was swallowing its own tail. This story is particularly interesting because the snake swallowing its own tail is a symbol in ancient mythology representing renewal, among other things. It is the Ouroboros and is one of the most fundamental ideas in the World of Mythos. Stories inform scientific exploration by providing motivation to go into the unknown. We have stories about scientists who were ridiculed for years until their crackpot ideas turned out to be true. Two examples that come to mind are the theory of tectonic plates and the theory of dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago. These are both fascinating stories along with many others which are, unfortunately, way beyond the scope of this post. So, the World of Mythos plays a role in the World of Logos. But, does it work the other way?

Does the World of Logos have a role in the World of Mythos? Is there a science of story telling? Wait! That sounds familiar. Isn't that what the January 2020 post was about. Yes, indeed it was! And I pointed out that a lot of recent research has been done in this area. But, the work that led up to that goes back way further. In order to explain this I need to make a distinction between scholarship and research. The nature of this dichotomy is not universally agreed upon. So, I will take some liberty here. Scholarship tends to be critical and interpretive. So, when one studies documents or books, it tends to be scholarship. When one gathers empirical data about the material world, organizes it and tests it to advance our understanding of the material world it tends to be research. 

So, scholarly study of the World of Mythos begins in the early 20th century with the rise of a field of critical studies called Narratology. As our understanding of brain function advanced, some of that work moved into what we now call the Science of Storytelling. An intermediate stage in this evolution can be seen the December 2020 post on The 7 Plots. It is an exciting time to be interested in storytelling as our knowledge of it will continue to grow faster and faster as we integrate Mythos and Logos in our understanding of stories.

The Science of Storytelling

 In my last post I introduced The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker, a brilliant but difficult work connecting effective storytelling with the workings of the human mind. I revealed a single golden nugget (a list of the 7 plots) to provide evidence of what the gold mine of Jungian analysis can provide. But, I could not recommend that book to anyone, but the more sophisticated readers, as it is a challenging volume. I will provide more nuggets in the future as it sinks in a bit better and begins to tie in with other things I know. In the meantime, I thought I would introduce a far more accessible book on the Science of Storytelling entitled, appropriately, The Science of Storytelling. The author is Will Storr.

Originally, I was planning to provide a post summarizing the key points of the book. But, as I looked back through the bits that I had highlighted, I realized that it would be more fun, and hopefully more interesting, to focus on some of the best points and elaborate on them. Here is a quote from the introduction. Note that the author states this in passing. But it is worth a deeper dive. 

"It's stories that make us human. Recent research suggests language evolved primarily to swap 'social information' back when we were living in Stone Age tribes. In other words, we'd gossip." 

OK, so stories make us human and we like to gossip. Is that it? 

Well, ever since the Enlightenment, scholars, and people in bars, have been arguing over what it is that makes humans different from animals. Prior to the Enlightenment, this was an easy question. Man was made in the image of God and the animals were not. Tough luck for the animals.  But, after the Enlightenment, people felt that a more scientific reason was needed for man's superiority. Here are some of the responses that people came up with.

Homo Faber (man the tool maker). Humans create and use tools which seems to be an important distinction. Yes, I know that chimpanzees use a stick to get termites out of the termite nest. But, a stick does not compare to a modern computer or an automated factory that produces cars. So, there seems to be something to this. And this is indeed the most popular response.

Home Ludens (man the game player). Man is the only animal that responds to imaginary rules. Bernard Suits defined a game as a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Humans attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles whether they are playing a game or trying to return license plates to the DMV. Animals do not. One might point out that puppies play. But, that is just practice to develop survival skills.

Homo Loquitor (man the speaker). In his recent book The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe asserted that when we acquired language we became human. There is something to this claim. But, I will refer you to the book to justify it on your own.

Home Narrator (man the storyteller). Finally, we get to Storr's claim that it is stories that make us human. 

I would argue that all of these things are uniquely human. Yet each is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the human experience. What makes us human is our advanced Neo-cortex which, in turn, allows us to achieve these other distinctions. What allowed us to develop such an advanced Neo-cortex and each of these fine distinctions as well? There are various opinions on this question as you might imagine. However, my favorite is that the development of cooking allowed the advanced Neo-cortex to develop as it is much easier to digest cooked food than raw food. Hence cooking allowed us to consume the vast amount of extra calories needed to support our advance brain. And, since I love to cook, the idea that cooking made us human feels right. But, I am digressing.

 Why does gossip matter? Other primates live in much smaller groups where everybody knows everybody else. Trust is based on knowing the other individuals. Humans live in vastly larger groups where most individuals do not know the other individuals. How do you know if you can trust them? How do you know that they are obeying social norms? How do know they aren't getting away with something? Well, we have intelligence gathering and sharing activities where observed behaviors are shared with other members of the community. We call this intelligence sharing gossip.

How does that get us to stories? As human societies get larger and larger, it becomes difficult to keep track of a lot of details discovered in the intelligence gathering. So, we organize our knowledge into categories called archetypes. Character archetypes organize people (hero, bum, leader, most likely to get stabbed by his own spear). Behavioral archetypes organize actions (fought bravely, discovered new lands, acted selflessly). We then put these character and behavioral archetypes together to form narratives which provide intellectual economy and make the sharing of gossip easier. This in turn leads to social stability in increasingly larger populations. 

Over time people realize that certain narratives tend to produce positive outcomes while other narratives tend to produce negative outcomes. So the people begin sharing generalized versions of the narratives with each other and especially with children. These generalize narratives are what we call stories. And, yes, these stories are a big part of what it means to be human.

The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories

 I just finished a ponderously long tome (700 pages) by Christopher Booker entitled The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. It is, of course, impossible to summarize a book of this length and significance in a single blog post. But, what I will do here is to provide a gross over simplification of why it is important and then provide more insight into it in future posts from time to time.

Most of you probably know that chemistry was preceded by a more primitive field of study called alchemy. For those of you who like word origins, the Ancient Greeks had a field of study called chemia which we would call metallurgy. When this knowledge passed into the Arab world it was referred to as "the chemia" or alchemy. This, in turn, came back into the Latin West along with most Greek knowledge including the works of Plato and Aristotle around the 12th century CE. Alchemy was a combination of mysticism and practice. And it did not make much progress until the 17th century when practitioners began to approach it scientifically. Along the way, fundamental units which we call elements were identified and these elements were organized into the Periodic Table. At this point, advances in chemistry took off like a rocket.  

"What does this have to do with stories?", you might ask. Writing today is a combination of mysticism and practice. You can refer back to the blog post on September 20, 2020 entitled Two Schools of Thought on Writing for a longer explanation of this. The mysticism of writing is the Expressive/Inspirational School which encourages your to find you voice or connect with your muse. The practice of writing is the Technical/Teleological School which encourages you to learn the techniques (or best practices) of writing. But, no where, until just recently, was there a scientific school of storytelling.

Booker's book makes some huge strides toward a more scientific view of writing and the role of stories. But, before I get ahead of myself let me let me get a little more concrete and list the seven basic plots.

1. Overcoming the Monster
2. Rags to Riches
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

Unfortunately, that doesn't help much. However, Booker spends the next 200 pages explaining these plots and providing ample detailed examples. To simplify things, consider the following. Obvious examples of Overcoming the Monster would include stories such as Beowulf, King Kong, Jaws, and Jurassic Park. But, the monster doesn't have to be a large thing that is chasing you. The monster might be someone or a group that is threatening you. It might be a plague or a famine. It could be debt or an addiction. The Overcoming the Monster plot is the archetypal situation in which the peace or predictability of your life is upset by a major threat which you do not understand and do not know how to address. And you need to figure out how to overcome this threat in order to survive and return to a life of peace and predictability. You may or may not be victorious in overcoming the monster, and there is something for the reader of the story to learn either way. You may overcome the monster and not be able to return to your earlier innocence. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to see how the Overcoming the Monster plot represents hundreds, possibly thousands, of variations with different monsters and different outcomes. This is because the plot is a general outline of archetypal human experience and each story is an instantiation of that general outline in a specific circumstance. 

Each of the seven basic plots could be expanded as I just did yielding endless variations and each variation, in turn, could yield endless more variations. This is why they are "basic plots". It is the archetypal nature of these experiences which plays out in the endless variety of situations that we call human experience. But how does the vast variety of stories from comic books to TV shows and films to novels and religious texts fit so neatly into these seven categories? The answer is that archetypes represent the fundamental units of human experience and it was human experience that produced these stories. So, you can think about stories as experiments that advance our understanding of human experience much like the ways that experiments in chemistry advance our understanding of chemistry. 

Yes, I am being a little simplistic here. But, we are very early in our understanding of the science of stories and I am very early in my study of it. So, be patience as I will add more to this as I come to grips with it myself. It took Christopher Booker 35 years to write this book, and it took me dozens and dozens of hours to read it. I suspect it will take months, if not years before it all sinks in. So, I will hop over 700 pages, for now, and close with a quote from the book on page 700.

"One day, I believe, it will eventually be seen that for a long time that one of the most remarkable failures of our scientific approach to understanding the world was not to perceive that our urge to imagine stories is something just as governed by laws which lay it open to scientific investigation as the structure of the atom or the genome."

Thus begins the Scientific School of Storytelling. Stay tuned.