There is even better, there is a card game (guess what ..in french), with excellent illustrations, called "Il etait une fois" ("once upon a time"). the goal is to build a story, by simply putting down elements of plot and twisting the story to your own will... they even did an extension thanks to its success (Elixir).

youpla :-P

I think there probably is somewhat of a formula for romance novels.

I think Stephen King has a formula too. A guy ends up in quaint, small town. Wierd stuff starts happening. The guy is the only one who knows about it. That''s about it.

Have a look at this page, specially the "plot skeleton" part. I think there is some useful information here!

The types of story ending are useful as well, since they provide an answer to something I''d been thinking about... when do you END a random story?



People might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~

Actually, I looked up all this on about.com and guess what ? they have some excellent articles
I discovered some very ones on screen writers, and the techniques, and I actually found some interesting ideas about a 2 goals drama : the hero goes for something, but on his way discover something else that make him chagne his way for another goal, then he hesitates, and finally commit totally to the new task and accomplish it. it''s called 9 act story, and I liked the idea. THere is more, but I only have 24 hours a day to read all this

http://www.teleport.com/~bjscript/windex.htm

More interesting reading... I''m only just starting to grasp the scope of what we''re trying to achieve.

People might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~

achieve, achieve ... at least we are brainstorming, and that''s a good beginning. It''s funny, when you try to grasp difficult topic like that how quickly all the topics I thought were useless in class seem to suddenly show up (all the state machine stuff that I liked, but also the data management problems, uukh)

I think that these 39 Archetypal themes actually support my statement that it would be incredibly hard and unrewarding to. If indeed there are only 39 core stories in our conciousness, then that means that the difference between one and another is NOT in the skeleton, but in the details.

The mark of a good story is in the details. The tiny little connections that a computer couldn''t efficiently generate "randomly", because they''re fine tuned to a single plotline. Of course, you could make random details, but that would suck. Here''s why:

Take a mystery, let''s say Agatha Christie. If we were making a mystery GAME, you could conceivably have the culprit change every time, because the mystery wrote itself with each playing. Kinda cool. Each time you played the game, there would be one tiny hole in someone''s logic that incriminates the culprit.

Only problem is, without details to govern mood and setting, the story will fall flat on it''s face. You try randomly generating motivation. The stories will FEEL cookie cutter in the gameplay, a simple logic puzzle with no flavor. Who cares?


In order to make random stories work on the level you suggest naz, you''ll have to learn a lot more about what a story is composed of. A simple, non-linear story. Without those componants, how could you possibly classify them in a way that would make a good story from the seperate pieces? No writer on earth is this good.

I''m not saying it can''t be done, I''m saying that I couldn''t do it unless I had several million dollars in budget, plus a team of the best and brightest writers, philosophers and computer-savy folk on the face of the earth.

quote:

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Original post by Landfish

I think that these 39 Archetypal themes actually support my statement that it would be incredibly hard and unrewarding to. If indeed there are only 39 core stories in our conciousness, then that means that the difference between one and another is NOT in the skeleton, but in the details.

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I think this is actually an excellent argument for the simplicity of modularizing plot skeleton generation.

quote:

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In order to make random stories work on the level you suggest naz, you'll have to learn a lot more about what a story is composed of. A simple, non-linear story. Without those componants, how could you possibly classify them in a way that would make a good story from the seperate pieces? No writer on earth is this good.

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that I couldn't do it unless I had several million dollars in budget, plus a team of the best and brightest writers, philosophers and computer-savy folk on the face of the earth.

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Ah, but much of the work has already been done for us. We've never heard about it because the structuralist approach to fiction went out of vogue about 2 decades ago, but the work exists to be collected up and mathematicalized. Anyone looking for a starting place, try here . Vladimir Propp was, as far as I can tell, the first person to start breaking stories down into their component parts.

Much more recently Tomas G. Pavel decided that stories had to be generated by the same kind of transformational generative grammar that every human being uses to generate language. (Pavel, Thomas G. The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama: Theory and History of Literature, Volume Eighteen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.)
(Noam Chomsky invented the concept of transformational generative grammar.)

Also necessary here is the concept of script theory: According to script theory, all memory is organized around primitive categories of personal experience, called “scripts” or, elsewhere, “thematic core concepts”. Specific memories are stored as pointers to scripts, with appropriate specific details appended. Thus, the memory of reading a book would be stored as: (primitive category = I got visual information and put it into long term memory.) + (details = The book was about a white whale; I thought it was really boring.) Scripts allow individuals to make inferences needed for understanding by filling in missing information. Note that only a narrative sequence of events, that is, one event following another related event (e.g. receiving and then storing visual information) can be stored as a script.

In other words, the 36 basic plots are primitive categories.

All this ignores the problem of avoiding cookie-cutterness, but I have the feeling that a complete knowlege of how stories are created would make the solution obvious.

Edited by - sunandshadow on September 12, 2000 11:34:21 PM

S&S, you''re pretty cool.

Landfish - your negativity recently is distressing!

Nobody said anything about not including mood or theme in the generation of stories! You start by picking a mood or theme, or by picking a story skeleton, but both elements have to be performed to know where to go. The "details" can be fleshed out purely randomly, but what fun is that? It could be an interesting experiment, but that would be all. If they are picked according to the mood and theme, they would be much more interesting.


People might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~