The four points I listed were observations, I did not imply them to be problems.
It was okay that the ideas are scattered all over the place, as long as our system supports it. The document you see is a representation of what I get from the posts and how I mentally organize them. The document you see is an organized mapping of an unorganized discussion. It was an extraction of ideas from a bunch of posts with misunderstandings and misfocused discussions. You would need to click on the links to see from what context the ideas were extracted from.
When I said that the discussion was disorder I was refering to the fact that we never followed through on any high level (catagory 1) topics: We talked about themes, but we did not go through with the discussion; we talked about the types of mysteries, but we did not settle it; We talked about the need to define the type of conflicts and no one expanded on it.
Quote:| It's a very normal pattern of brainstorming, selective culling, and accretion. |
Again, what you see now is an organized mapping of ideas extracted from the posts. It is mapped in a way that resembles the brainstorming process (because it is organized in terms of idea clusters). If you read the actual context of the posts post by post, you will know that we were not brainstorming. That are traits of brainstorming that are non-existent in the thread (in the first 100 posts). The traits include:
1. A topic to brainstorm is declared and clarified, and confirmed by the members;
2. The members would define a selection criteria to evaluate the ideas from brainstorming;
3. The members list the ideas related to the topic in an impartial and uninterrupted manner; the ideas, no matter how different from one another, are documented equally, and the ideas are not explicitely supported or opposed by any members;
4. The members would conclude the brainstorming by using the selected criteria to evaluate the ideas, and select the ones best fit.
Quote:| Essentially the same thing you would see if a single person were creating a story, only slower. |
There are many differences between the story creation process of an individual and of a group that I think you overlooked in this statement. These are the major differences:
1. The role of the subconscious: When you are on your own, you don't need to remind yourself of the vision, assumptions, selection criteria, and it is ok to create a story linking bits of random ideas, because your subconscious holds the high level ideas. All of your ideas come from and are pre-approved by the subconscious, and therefore they are fundamentally relevant and coherent. In a group, the ideas no longer come from the same source, the coherence of the ideas are not inherent.
2. The need to verbalize high level goals: Because the ideas are not from the same source, the group would need to declare the high level assumptions and beliefs. The group needs to clearly define and select a goal for the project. With respect to the GDTCRM, this pertains to the sections of Central Idea and Synopsis under Unconfirmed Global Ideas.
3. The need to clarify: I don't think I need to explain this. In a nutshell you can't assume. You can't assume that the others would understand your idea, nor that you understand the others' idea. Althought this is a very simple concept, we as a group assume a lot.
4. The need to synchronize: When you are on your own and you drift away from an idea, it probably won't harm anything because: if it is important enough, your subconscious would remind you; if it is not, so be it. Synchronization is needed so that the group can come back to topcis there were touched but not settled.
Quote:| What would a significantly more organized creation process be like? Nothing humans would do naturally - the only way you would get a significantly more organized process is if you imposed a system such as a checklist/questionaire, menu, or madlibs-style fill-in-the-blank system on the creative process. |
I have already told you in the the beginning of this thread, and recently several posts up, that we need a top-down approach. It is a logical approach because it is based on a hierarchy of decision making, in which the high level agreements are used to select the brainstormed ideas in the lower levels. I do not know whether you understand the scope of 'systematic method' that I was referring to. In general this method is not a checklist or fill-in-the-blank-method, because (using the checklist analogy), you will not know what checkbox you need until a higher level checkbox is checked. And the way you check the previous box will determine the following types of boxes.
Quote:| It is possible to do this (Dramatica does, for example) but most such systems are very limiting in terms of what sort of output they direct the user to produce, and I don't know of one that would have been at all functional for this project. |
The concepts that the top-down approach deals with is not story elements or plots. What you interpreted as a method reside in a narrower scope than the scope I seek a method for. In other words, I think that you are misunderstanding the scope of the problem that I am describing, and I am trying to know whether you see the difference. What is the Dramatica method for selecting:
- a theme;
- the type of mystery;
- the porportion of romance in the story;
- the meanings of the mysteries;
- whether the history should be part of the mystery;
- the degree of the usage of metaphors;
- the degree of multi-scenario integration;
- the integration between non-romantic mysteries, romantic conflicts, and goal of the PC;
- whether a character or story is deep enough;
- whether an idea is too boring, cliche, overdone, or chessy for the story;
For the last point, there was a side story if you want to understand our attitude differences. Around the middle of this thread, you and me discussed on whether an idea being overdone or cliche is a valid reason to reject it. That discussion end with me listing quotes in which members in this thread rejected an idea based on this very judgement criteria. At that point I asked whether those opinions matter to you, but you did not reply. The point I was making was that I was not the only one opposing ideas based on 'clicheness', but that I was tanking the hits because I happened to be the one applying this criteria on your idea. For a long time I thought that I was the one who started opposing an idea from a member based on clicheness. But I found that it was not. The first occurence happened in
Post45, in which 5M opposed the central idea he assumed from the story idea I suggested in the pervious post. I suggested a story idea, and 5M opposed that idea by saying that the central idea is too cliche (however that missile was a miss because the central idea he perceived was not the one I was presenting, but that was yet another story pertaining to out record of missed attacks.) The point I am trying to make is not that 5M did something wrong and he did it first. What he did was completely okay with me. That was a disagreement/opposition based on a valid, preferential reason (clicheness). After that opposition, I declared the central ideas explicitly, and those central ideas actually did not get any opposition (nor replies as a matter of fact). The arguement on whether clicheness is a valid criteria was probably originated from my opposition against Skew. The questions are: how did the two oppositions differ? and how did s/s and I react differently in face of the same type of opposition?
