Task: Narrative & Games.

Chris Crawford on Storytelling

Stories must have a strong structure, they must satisfy tight structural requirements to be acceptable. A good example of this is described below, with the Itsy Bitsy Spider.

- Protagonist is the Spider.
- Conflict is the Rain.
- Struggle is being Washed down the Drain.
- Resolution is Crawling back up the Drain.
- Moral is Perseverance.

Crawford goes on to give six lessons in storytelling.

Lesson #1: Stories are complex structures that must meet many hard-to-specify requirements.

- Stories are about People, not Things.
- Sometimes the reference to people is Indirect or Symbolic.  An example of this is the Lord of the Rings, the story is not about the ring, but Frodo's struggle.
- Games fail at storytelling because games are about Things and not People.

Lesson #2: Stories are about the most fascinating thing in the universe, People.

- All stories have conflict.
- Sometimes conflict is direct and violent, or social and symbolic.
- There's ALWAYS conflict.
- Games have many types of conflict, like violence, but lack other forms, like social conflict.
- Stories are not Puzzles, Puzzles can often form a part of stories.
- Stories always contain problems or challenges, how is the protagonist to resolve the conflict of the story.

Lesson #3: Puzzles are not a necessary component of stories.

- Stories contain choices that characters have to make.
- Stories build up to revolve around a key decision.
- Stories contain spectacle, and provide a novel experience.
- Spectacle is not a necessary component of story.

Lesson #4: Spectacle does not make stories.

- Visual thinking.
- Culture is increasing dominated by the visual image.
- Does a visual representation describe more than the writing itself?

Lesson #5: Visual thinking should not dominate storytelling.

- Spatial thinking.
- Spatial reasoning is one of the brain's greatest achievements.
- Spatial factors are not included in literature, but can it be?
- Within a story, spatial relationships can seem unimportant.

Lesson #6: Stories take place on stages, not maps.

- Temporal Discontinuity.
- Actors are shown to embark on a journey and reach the destination, the time the journey itself takes is skipped over.
- Dramatic time doesn't behave like physical time; it follows whatever course the story requires.

This article greatly helped me in my creative writing, and has spurred and intent to write more than I may have  in the past.