My loves.

Rest.

I’ll be back soon…

I’m making these interviews public and only my paid subs get the full interviews. There will be no writing exercises attached to these interviews.

“Then I Saw What He Did and Thought, ‘That Wasn’t That Hard!’”

Age: 32 · Day-job: Arts Administrator · Marital Status: Domestic Bliss · Own or Rent: Rents apartment · Partner’s Job: Actor/Writer · # of Kids: 0 · Avg. Income: 42-46k · Education: MFA in Book Arts and Visual and Curatorial Studies · City: Los Angeles, CA [details as of the original interview]

“That was the one and only time I got an accountant to do my taxes. I didn’t know what to do. Then I saw what he did and thought, ‘That wasn’t that hard!’”

https://www.elysavoshell.com/

What do you consider your profession to be?

I feel like every time I file my taxes I put something a little bit different. I usually just consider myself an artist [and an] Arts Administrator, which has been my day-job since finishing college.

Is there an ideal?

In my bio I say that I’m an artist, curator and writer. Or sometimes artist, curator, writer and arts administrator. Sometimes it depends on the context, if it’s the artist bio or the professional bio or whatever.

Could you put a finer point on “artist” for yourself?

In fact since moving to LA I have to say “Visual Artist” since there are so many actors. I’m mostly a book artist and print maker.

This is interesting that you have a dual definition of success: your personal art and being involved with art progressing forward. When you started your artistic career what was your definition of success then?

I think my definition of success when I was in my early twenties was: being paid to make my work and being able to make my work full-time. I spent a lot of time applying to residencies, and I did a couple and really just thought that was the model. Opening that space to make my work as many hours as possible; as full-time as possible. Traveling around and working in different spaces and traveling around and meeting different artist’s residency communities. And as I’ve gotten older it’s less possible and less interesting to uproot my life every couple months. That hasn’t been what I see as a viable model for myself moving forward. I would like to do residencies in the future but not as my [main] mode.

What is your process from conception to selling?

Most of my books are hand-printed and hand-bound limited edition copies, and most of the time it’s 25 copies. […] Most of the time they are letterpress printed, I do a lot of screen printing, photographic based, and writing…so usually the concept starts with the written part or the images. And then I work on structural ideas...

Physical structure?

Physical structural ideas, because it is very much about the form of the book being an element of telling the story. So it is a very conscious decision about binding verses other [decisions]. Then I’ll make mock ups and then once I’m finalized on how it will look, I will go into production. And I try to get really “Ford” with it. Like an assembly line. I will do all of one step 25 times and that eliminates mistakes. I’ve gotten very good at (because of the day-jobs) taking [a] pretty complex process and breaking it down into a manageable one and two hours chunks so I can do a little bit tonight and little bit tomorrow and a little bit on my lunch break because I don’t have a lot of eight hours days I can devote to it. If I can do two hours a night then I can still feel like I’m getting a lot of studio work done. And then once a book is finished, maybe not all 25 copies, but once it’s finished enough that I can photograph it, I photograph it, and then I put that into materials that are marketed. On my website, a catalog of my books, and then I’ve done a lot of research on collections...

Sorry...let me jump in here...definitions of “collections” as well?

Sure. Collections are mostly libraries, and museums, and university libraries that are collectors of rare books.

And they purchase them?

And they purchase them. So it’s a combination of approaching the collection curators and librarians who are able to make the decision to purchase, exhibiting in shows where people can purchase. But most of the time you do a show and no one buys!

After 10 years do you know who to approach right away?

Yes and no...I’ve been making work for 10 years, and I’ve definitely been selling work, but its only in the last few years that I’ve made a database of all the collections I want to approach and that’s a living creature. Before that I was showing in fairs, and exhibitions, and that kinda of thing. I’ve kind of taken steps to be more business like about my art business.

That started when?

It started after grad school […] We had a good professional development [course] as part of our curriculum. And that helped us think of it more as a business and less as a hobby. Which was, in some ways, how I was operating with it before grad school. I’d been applying for grants, and [been] in shows, but in terms of the nuts and bolts of business: getting a DBA[^1], or opening business checking account, or keeping your personal and business finances separate…any of those things did not occur to me to do, even filing a schedule C![^2]

Is there a story why it became important?

Well, I got a grant for 2,000 and I was going to have to pay taxes on it. But it was all a reimbursement for materials. I needed to write it off. So that was the one and only time I got an accountant to do my taxes. I didn’t know what to do. Then I saw what he did and thought, “That wasn’t that hard!”

It sounds like you have a lot of projects that have a very long life in terms of conceptualization to completion...this is the magic question...how do you keep track of them?

I have files!

You do the physical file bit...

I do the old physical file bit, and usually there are two files for each project: one is creative/planning, one is budget/business stuff. I also use “Things[^3]” which is a program and also an iPhone app. It’s the best to-do list ever...you can organize it by project and you can tag things in various ways. I have all of my various book projects in their various forms of completion, or in-completion, and all of the steps broken out so that I can say, “Bind one more copy of this,” and that will be in there 25 times because I really like checking things off! [E Laughs]

How do you choose what you work on next?

In the conceptual creative phase of things it’s what’s interesting me...in the production phase it’s what’s ready. It’s what’s far enough along. I usually have several projects in various stages and so whichever one gets to the finish line first is the one that goes into production.

Obviously grants come up time and time again, was grant writing part of your training?

No. My big pet peeve with art education, I’ve seen so few art schools that have any kind of professional development at the undergraduate level. I think a lot of people get out of art school, especially BFAs, but MFAs too and they can’t write about their work. Maybe they’ve written an artist statement for their final show but they’re not teaching writing nearly enough in terms of how to write about your work, how to approach galleries, how to approach applying for exhibitions, how to put together a project proposal that you are sending for funding, how to apply for residency, any of that. How to write a press release, how to get people out to see [your work]! How to photograph your work if you’re not a photographer. […] There’s way more of a history of craftspeople being small business people, and most BFA programs don’t think like that. It’s just not there.

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Where do you find your grants? How do you dig them up?

Bunch of different websites. NYFA.org. They have a great listing for jobs in the arts, they have open calls for artists or opportunities for artists. […] It is a giant database of residences, and grants for artists and all of that kind of stuff.

Is there a fee?

No. It’s totally free. Just join and look at it. So often grants are kind of based on where you are physically. I am doing grant writing at an organization, you kind of get to know the field of funders who are around.

So that’s a benefit to the ‘day-job’.

[…] I’m this clearing house for grants and I’ll send them to my friends if I see one. If this isn’t a good opportunity for me, and even if it was I’d share it anyway. Some people get really secretive about stuff like that...I think that’s silly.

For individual artists, sometimes they hear the word “grant” and they think, “Oh, I’m not an organization, I can’t apply” and that’s not true, is it?

It depends on the funder. A lot of funders will only give to a 501(c)(3)[^4], but there are funders for individual artists...that’s what they do. It’s a matter of searching them out. Calendaring when those apps are due. I have a friend whose a successful artist, working mom, she’s great, she teaches at a university; that’s her day-job. She sits down like in December/January figures out what her projects are that year, the things she’s going to apply to grant and residency-wise and says, “Okay...this project here, here, and here. This one...here, here and here.” Which I think is a really smart way of approaching it. Being able to apply for a lot of things without having to re-invent the wheel every time!

Any other grant sources?

[…] At the Santa Monica Library[^5] you can get onto these databases that otherwise you would need to subscribe to. And you can search for specific funders that will give to individual artists.

What are the benefits of being an arts admin while being an artist?

You’re in a community of people who are interested in art and are not surprised or fazed when you tell them you are an artist, they expect you to be an artist. […] There is something really nice about being in a field where being an artist is expected and it’s not in conflict with your day-job. It can conflict in terms of time and that sort of thing, but I feel like they complement one another. […] I’ve met a lot of people through working in arts admin that [are] able to help me in my artistic career.

In what way?

We had an exhibition at the gallery that I manage and [the artist] brought some curators from the Getty[^6] to see the show, and I met them, and they found out I make books, and they work in the Research Institute and they were like, “You should come and show me your stuff!” So that relationship [happened] because they were in my workspace. It was like magic! They were so nice and approachable. I don’t think that would happen if I worked in a different field. I’m definitely an advocate for working in the arts if you want to be an artist; it will put you in a position to meet people who are in your field. You certainly don’t have to, but it seems to help.

What would you currently say is your greatest artistic struggle and what are you doing to overcome it?

I think my greatest struggle right now is that juggling and how to really carve out enough time and space for my own artistic practice as a priority. I feel like in some ways it tipped a little bit towards [day-job] work...work has been so busy and so demanding. I’m trying to readjust the focus a little bit so that I can still be excelling at the day-job, but shift back some of the energy to my own practice.

Interesting that you chose the word “excelling.” It’s not good enough that you do a good enough job, you have to excel at the day-job?

I definitely want to. At some point in the last maybe five years something shifted in my thinking about the day-job as [just] the thing just pays the bills. And it’s actually...you spend a lot of time there It effects your mental state generally and I want to be able to be creative, and make decisions, and make things happen in that space as well. And I don’t want it to be this thing where I go and it’s just about making money.

The career path for artists is so unclear.

Or you don’t know what that path is...even for artists you admire, there’s so much you don’t know about how they got there, or their process. When I worked at ICA[^7] I got to meet Kiki Smith[^8] who’s a well-known visual artist, shows in major museums, had a show at the MOMA[^9]--she’s huge. She told me that she makes prints at her kitchen table! It kinda blew my mind! Even Kiki Smith is working in her kitchen in New York, which has to be tiny! Even big apartments in New York have tiny kitchens. You have no idea what someone’s creative situation is.

And sometimes you can’t even follow that person’s path. And there are lampposts along the way…I tend to be envious of the “normal people” career path. There’s a constantly illuminated path in front of them. And with artists there just isn’t. For some artists the goal is to try to phase out the career or day-job and let the art take over. Not for everybody, though. It’s okay to watch them both evolve in parallel or in a symbiotic relationship. There’s a private shame about the day-job...

Sometimes a public shame! I’ve been publicly shamed by people before. One time I was at this [gallery] opening and this person publicly shamed me! It was about working in development. Working in grant writing.

This artist felt you were “monetizing” something?

She was like, “Uhhh, don’t do that for too long!”

I feel like that’s part of what keeps artists from talking about this kind of stuff. It’s the unspoken rule: you’re either a starving artist, or you’re a millionaire and you don’t deserve it. And there’s all of us in between...let’s have a conversation about what it takes to survive and do this, and what it takes to make the fucking thing work. And I think everyone is carving it out in a different manner.

There’s this kind of internalized status anxiety which is detailed in Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. There’s this kind of internalized status anxiety where if you’re not making art full time there’s something wrong with you and your career. It’s hard enough to juggle it and make things work...and feel bad about when you’re not doing! You’re auditioning, or applying for things...it’s a life of constant rejection...really putting your heart into things, and having a very high percentage of them come back and are like, “Meh. No.”

You’re a collaborative worker you ever turn projects down?

Yeah, maybe four years ago my new year’s resolution was to learn how to say, “No.” That was a really good one that year ‘cause I was just spread way too thin. I think there’s a tendency among artists, and anyone to take on any opportunity that comes your way. But if you do that you won’t have the space to take on the great opportunity that’s going to come your way in a month because you’ve completely overextended yourself. So for me, it’s helpful to [apply a] critical eye before signing on for a particular [project.]

Any particular process that you use...a smell test?

It really depends on the project. I’ve turned down work for hire that would’ve been you know, probably, somewhat prestigious, could’ve made some money off of it, but it was too much work, and I didn’t have the time! And it would’ve distracted from what I was already working on. And I had the luxury of turning it down because I had a day-job and I didn’t need the money. And I actually referred that particular client to a colleague. It depends on what is going on.

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[^1]: Doing Business As may also be called: fictitious business name; trade name; assumed name. This must be filled as the business name of the company as opposed to the legal name of the company. (This is only in the US.)

[^2]: A schedule C is a tax document for self-employed folk to report how much you made that year. (Again for US residents only.)

[^3]: culturedcode.com/things/

[^4]: The IRS tax sign/code for tax-exempt non-profit organizations. (Yup, you guessed it, in the US only.)

[^5]: smpl.org

[^6]: The Getty Museum, part of the Getty center. www.getty.edu

[^7]: Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia icaphila.org

[^8]: Sculptor, printmaker, etc. art21.org/artist/kiki-smith

[^9]: Museum of Modern Art…HEY! Some people don’t know…pipe down, you.

Please RSVP here!

​

I’d like to invite you to PROMPT: Narrative Resistance V, an open space technology gathering on Zoom August 21st: 10am PST; 12pm CST; 1pm EST; 6pm GMT; 7pm CET; 3am AEDT (22nd). The gathering will last as long as it needs and people want it to (but expect 3-4 hours).

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(I’ll be asking for a 5$/£/€ donation to offset some costs.)

Storytellers, rebels, and visionaries, PROMPT: Narrative Resistance is here! It is time to leave behind the stale conventions that have limited our imaginations for far too long. We’re not just challenging the domination of conflict-driven plots, the restrictive confines of three-act structures, and the worn-out hero’s journey—we’re transcending them. This is your call to creation in the revolution of narrative, where we’re forging a new path towards “visionary fiction” that bends the arc of storytelling towards justice and liberation. We welcome all pioneers doing the work and those ready to unshackle their creativity and reimagine worlds where healing trumps conflict, where new voices rise, and where the strength of our relationships fuel change. At PROMPT, we’re not just rewriting stories; we’re reauthoring reality itself. Remember, the stories we tell shape who we become—so let’s craft tales that birth cultural innovators, not cautionary cool. It’s time to challenge our imaginations, unleash limitless liberation, walk and share countless paths—please join us in reshaping the narrative landscape.

Here are the initial provocations for PROMPT:

Intro/Brief: Jenifer Toksvig

Discussing her process “The Copenhagen Interpretation”
And why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Provocations: ‘How is/does agency affect narrative?’

And, as always, ‘How can we get past conflict as the central narrative driver in the West?’
The floor is open for other provocations and not limited to the above.

Please RSVP here!

Jenifer Toksvig
For our 20 minute opener: the amazing contributor to this community (and the human I always get feedback like, “I’m so glad I met/talked to her! after every PROMPT) is the fantastic
Jen Toksvig who will discuss her process The Copenhagen Interpretation and why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Bio:

Jenifer Toksvig gathers ideas and people, and crafts story worlds and artefacts. She believes that access support needs are situational, and that barriers to access are more complex and far broader than the typically considered disability conditions. Her theatre making process, The Copenhagen Interpretation, is therefore designed to be responsive to the individual, and from moment to moment. Her work manifests as theatre, games, novels, and handcrafted objects.

Overview of Open Space Tech (OST):

OST is fueled by the participants. The participants are asked to answer: What is the conversation you need to have now around the topic/issue?
That can be phrased as a question, topic, challenge, invitation to explore... or you can wait for all the offerings to be offered and head to which conversation you can learn or contribute to. And, most importantly, OST does not stand on the idea of the politeness of staying put. Once you’re done learning or contributing, head to the next conversation where you can… at any time.

The last piece of structure: if you propose a topic you are responsible for recording information for a summary, some key insights, and some action items (if any arise). If you decide to leave the convo that you started you need to hand this role off to someone before you invoke the Law of Mobility.

Open Space Technology/Principles are:
...WHOEVER COMES ARE THE RIGHT PEOPLE
...WHATEVER HAPPENS IS THE ONLY THING THAT COULD HAVE
...WHENEVER IT STARTS IS THE RIGHT TIME
...WHENEVER IT’S OVER, IT’S OVER

It is governed by one law: THE LAW OF MOBILITY

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF SOMEPLACE YOU AREN’T LEARNING OR CONTRIBUTING, MOVE SOMEWHERE YOU CAN

For an overview please click here.

“Plant a seed… sacred things are on their way.”

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I’d be honored to see you there and experience any version of your participation that you wish to give.

If we haven’t met yet, I either follow your work or someone I love and trust rec’d you for this event.

Here’s my bio to get an overview of me:
Christopher Morrison is a multi-talented writer, director, and educator whose work spans over 200 projects across immersive theater, VR, video games, film, and live performance. With a career that has taken him across five continents, he has collaborated with AAA game studios, Cirque du Soleil, and major brands like P&G on groundbreaking metaverse gaming activations. He is passionate about pushing the boundaries of storytelling, creating experiences that blend emerging technology with deep, human-centered narratives.

His VR project The Werewolf Experience was one of only three immersive pieces to play at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. It has since captivated audiences across four continents and became the number one attraction at Tokyo’s NEUU Space for three months.

Christopher’s expertise extends to live and hybrid performances, where he is redefining accessibility in the arts. As the Digital Experience Director and Narrative Designer for How the Light Gets In, a metaverse/musical hybrid, he is pioneering ways to integrate digital and physical audiences. This radically accessible musical allows audiences to curate their own immersive experience in a virtual space while engaging with a multi-camera live performance. His work ensures that digital storytelling remains inclusive, interactive, and deeply engaging.

His feature film The Bellwether was released in 2019 and has been viewed over 80,000 times. He has written and directed 360° films, been commissioned for screenplays and plays alike, and has multiple credits as a voiceover director in both entertainment and corporate spaces. As a narrative designer, he has contributed to video games ranging from indie passion projects to blockbuster AAA titles.

Christopher is also a sought-after speaker and educator. He has addressed the UK House of Lords on the future of storytelling, spoken at major film, XR, and video game conferences, and serves as an XR mentor for SXSW. As an Adjunct Professor at the California College of the Arts, he taught immersive storytelling, helping students navigate the evolving landscape of narrative-driven technology. With over 20 years of experience teaching he is committed to empowering creators at all levels.

Cirque du Soleil has called him “a huge asset to the creative process,” and his work continues to challenge, innovate, and redefine what’s possible in storytelling across digital and physical worlds. Whether through film, theater, VR, or the metaverse, Christopher Morrison is honored to be part of shaping the future of immersive entertainment—one groundbreaking experience at a time.

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WARNING: there is a description of animal violence below (invoked by this goofus so it is an example of goofery in action).

Now. Full story here. I read this very early on in what I call my Personal MFA (it’s number 30 on the famous spreadsheet-of-shit-to-cover-on-the-stack). And even that early… oh, man-o-man-o.

Boy does this thing ever have an electric prod firing directly unto my buttons and my last damn nerve. And, of course, it’s a fuckin’ best seller. One of the main reasons for the trampolining on that very last nerve is it bases most of its arguments on a lot of what was covered two weeks ago here about the “scientific” assumptions/misreadings/reproducibility crisis.

So buckle up. Again.

First, The Grudging Part

I’m not a monster.

Storr can write. Storr can teach. And parts of this book is genuinely useful, so let’s get that on the table before I set fire to the rest of it.

The change-as-attention-engine material holds up. Lowenstein’s four flavors of curiosity is a real working tool. “We see with our pasts” is a lovely, useful phrase. And — credit where it’s due — he’s one of the only craft writers who will straight-up call the mechanism manipulation instead of dressing it up as communion or magic or some other bullshit.

And other little bon-mots are useful like: We use around one metaphor for every ten seconds of speech or written word^[1]. Our sense of self is organized by an unreliable narrator. A fun drill down he brings in from Alexander Mackendrick: “What does A think B is thinking about A?” Great, fun writing stuff there. (Not created by him.) He’ll even, rarely, bring in some of the disagreements out there around this material such as: Some neuroscientists argue that metaphor is the fundamental way that the brain understands abstract concepts like love, society, etc… thus smartly hedging his bets.

He even can straight up acknowledge some things that are key to dismantling his own arguments: other culture’s writing (he pathetically tries to explain Kishōtenketsu), see the above we’re an unreliable narrator to ourselves, on page 199 he actually articulates getting it: “I sometimes switch off the TV or movie 15 minutes before the end, so obvious will the closing events be. I wonder if the requirement [my emphasis, cause he’s a doofus and even calls it a requirement] for a final ‘battle’ is sometimes taken too serioiusly. ”

He’s incapable of extrapolating any of that to any kind of solution that isn’t already the bog-standard ones.

What he can’t do is acknowledge the usual white dude shit: misogyny, patriarchy, or, ya know, Capitalism.

All are missing from his “science”.

Whoops. I started already.

Sorry.

Now.

His Actual Thesis (Which Is Not the One on the Tin)

Storr states, eventually, that he wrote a book about conrol.

Its acquisition, its threat, its restoration, its flawed theories thereof. It’s on damn near every page once you see it and once you see it you cannot unsee it[^1]:

• The protagonist has a “flawed theory of control” (the whole spine of the thing)

• The plot event exists to test that theory

• The new realm the character enters is hostile and alien

• The theory gets tested “to the breaking point and beyond”

• And the money shot, pg. 189: a character who isn’t reacting, deciding, choosing, and trying to impose CONTROL on the chaos isn’t truly a protagonist

Truly.

That adverb is doing colonial work, my dearies.

That’s not “isn’t a Hollywood protagonist.” That’s not “won’t get you a general at A24.”

That truly is reaching across every storytelling tradition on the entire planet and quietly disqualifying every single one that doesn’t run on one willful individual bending circumstance to his theory of himself.

And why is the new realm hostile? Why can’t the character be welcomed? Why can’t they be met there by somebody offering a partnership, a bag of berries, and a place by the fire?

Because then he’d have to write a different book.

Go back and look at pg. 58 while you’re at it: good stories are about characters who have to BATTLE the events on the surface of the drama.

Battle. Always battle. A man arrives somewhere. The somewhere is hostile. He fights it. He is changed by fighting it.

That’s not the science of storytelling. That’s ONE story, told with tremendous confidence, wearing a lab coat.

(And yes — this is the exact thing the last Pledge post was about. Conflict = drama. Conflict = growth. Dominance as nature. He’s built a psychology-flavored superstructure on top of the same rotten foundation. See also: my forthcoming rant on how conflict doesn’t create change, it creates trauma.)

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Two Horseshitiest Arguments

Right. To the chimps!

HORSESHIT THE FIRST: chimps being violent as proof we’re violent.

I covered the actual science two weeks ago so I’m not re-litigating it here — go read it — but I want to nail down something specific and delicious about how Storr does it, because it’s worse than I thought when I first read the thing.

He doesn’t cite a study. He cites Frans de Waal.

The primatologist who coined the term “veneer theory” — his own name for the Hobbesian nonsense that morality is a thin cultural film over an otherwise selfish and brutish nature — and who then spent his entire goddamn career demolishing it.[^2]

Storr very disingenuously tells his own version of a Jane Goodall account (not citing her for some reason) of a viciously violent story about how chimps, our ancestors, can tear each other apart… and he does so in graphic detail down to the “the warriors gulping down the gushing blood” (he’s learned his lessons well from good ole’ Western structures^[2].)

Storr then loops in de Waal to support his claims, BUT it’s de Waal who actually, explicitly, separates human warfare from ape aggression on the grounds that armies require command structures and indoctrination that apes flatly do not have.

De Waal is warning you off the exact inference Storr is making.

De Waal’s most-quoted line, while we’re here, is a counterfactual to Storr anyway: if we had found the bonobo first and the chimpanzee later, or never, the whole conversation about human evolution would have organized itself around empathy, sexuality, caring and cooperation instead of violence and male dominance. Creating a different intellectual landscape entirely.

Which is my whole damn argument about narrative, arriving from a completely unrelated discipline. The first thing we happened to look at became the universal. Everything that contradicts it became the exotic special case.

Or, to steal from myself in the Boal post: what survives gets mistaken for what matters.

HORSESHIT THE SECOND: The Birth of a Nation and Jud Süß depicting sexual violence against women as backup evidence for chimp territorial dominance behavior. Pg. 161–162.

No.

NO.

That is not chimp nature showing through the celluloid. That is the documented, deliberate, institutional grammar of racist propaganda, constructed by specific people with specific political aims, drawing on centuries of misogyny that has an actual history you can go and read in actual books. Griffith and Goebbels were not channeling their inner primate. They were making POLICY ARGUMENTS with a camera using low-hanging Patriarchal fruit.

Reaching past all of that for a monkey isn’t science.

It’s an alibi.

And it’s the tell of the entire book: whenever the answer is “patriarchy, propaganda, and choice,” Storr goes and gets a chimp.

OH FUCK, The Tribal Thing

Okay. Deep breath. Here’s the one that sets my hair on fire ‘cause we should be past it.

Pg. 163: our primitive tribal impulses.

In print. In a best-selling craft book.

In 2019.

Throughout this thing, “tribal” means pre-logical. “Tribal” means base. “Tribal” means the not-yet-improved part of us, the bit the rational individual is supposed to transcend.

It is never neutral and it is never a compliment.

And note — go check me on this — he never once applies the word to any group HE belongs to.

Nationalism isn’t tribal.
Professional-class solidarity isn’t tribal.
British publishing isn’t tribal.
Craft-book orthodoxy isn’t tribal.

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The word is reserved exclusively for a mode of belonging he considers beneath the rational individual.

Which is to say: for everybody else.

And now let me hand you the single most perfect thing in this entire review, which is the Bartlett business on pg. 48, and I promise you it is worth the wait.

Storr uses the famous 1932 “War of the Ghosts” experiment to illustrate the brain turning “the confusing and random” into comprehensible story. He also cheerfully describes the source material as an “Indian” war party story.

Confusing.

Random.

The story is Kathlamet Chinook, lifted from Boas’s Kathlamet Texts (1901).

It is not confusing and it is not random. It is entirely coherent within its own tradition, with its own supernatural logic and its own relationship to causality.

What Bartlett actually demonstrated — the FINDING, the reason anybody remembers the experiment — is that his Cambridge undergraduates couldn’t hold it.

They assimilated canoes into boats and seal-hunting into fishing. They flattened whatever they found strange. They imposed causal connections that were never in the original.

Bartlett’s finding was about the schemas of the readers.

Then Storr relocates the deficiency into the story, not the culture the subjects were raised in.

AND — I swear to god — Bartlett had already published a whole book nine years earlier, Psychology and Primitive Culture (1923), explicitly refuting Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of “primitive mentality.”[^3]

So Storr reaches for Bartlett’s experiment, commits precisely the error Bartlett wrote a book to demolish, and then seven chapters later gives us “primitive tribal impulses.”

HORSESHIT.

Complete, chef’s-kiss, 200-proof, uncut horseshit.

He Sees It. He Just Won’t Do Anything About It.

And here’s the thing that turns this from irritating into genuinely maddening.

HE KNOWS. (as I briefly covered above)

Pg. 33: “We’ve been a social species whose survival depended on cooperation for hundreds of thousands of years, and those social instincts have been sharpened and strengthened over the last thousand generations.”

YES. CORRECT. GOLD STAR.

Pg. 163: “We gleefully accept simplistic narratives that cast us as moral hero and the other as two-dimensional villain, and reality is rarely so simple.”

CORRECT AGAIN.

So. SO.

WHY AREN’T WE WRITING THOSE STORIES?

(Or, more importantly to this post…)

WHY DIDN’T HE WRITE A BOOK ABOUT THOSE STORIES?

Where’s the chapter on that? Where’s the craft apparatus for cooperation? Where’s the structural toolkit for a story whose engine is mutual aid, or repair, or endurance, or the slow accretion of trust between people who need each other?

Cooperation has mattered more to our evolution than competition — the evidence runs from psychology and economics through anthropology and evolutionary biology, and we out-cooperate every other species precisely because we can do it in finer grain. But he spends zero time on the science of that, just the “science” of his terror we’re a war-like shitbag species “science”.[^4]

He actually diagnoses the disease across three hundred pages and then hands you a prescription for more of the disease: conflict, control, protagonists imposing order on hostile realms, the close-up on the face registering change.

He sees the cage and sells you a slightly nicer cage.

He even name-checks kishotenketsu. He does! It’s in there! And then a hundred pages later he defines it clean out of existence by declaring that a protagonist not imposing control isn’t truly a protagonist.

You cannot have both, sir. Pick one.

Paris, Texas, Or: The Boomer Absolution Machine

Pg. 200. It’s amazing when the horseshit of the past meets the horseshit of today.

Storr reads the ending of Paris, Texas as Travis’s moment of moral clarity — the flawed man who finally understands he cannot be fixed and nobly removes himself so as not to poison his wife and child. He drives off. Curtains. Profound. Beautiful. “Devastating”^[3].

I’ve despised this film since I saw it and went in a rage over 25 years ago and I despise this reading approximately eleventy times more.

Here is what ACTUALLY happens.

A man who abandoned his family for four years reappears, stages exactly one confessional scene through one-way glass in a peep show booth, hands his son back to a woman he abandoned and terrorized, and then leaves AGAIN — this time with the narrative’s full blessing and a Ry Cooder slide guitar cue.

He punts every practical, daily, unglamorous, non-cinematic obligation of parenthood onto Jane. The film scores it like an ascension.

The son gets a mother he does not know. Jane gets a child she is unprepared for and a man who will not stay and help.

Travis gets “absolution” and the open road and ZERO RESPONSIBILITES.

It is toxic-masculine boomer theology in its purest distilled form: I’m too broken to be repaired, BUT I have articulated my brokenness beautifully, THEREFORE I am to be praised and loved and released.

Self-knowledge substituting for responsibility.

Confession substituting for change.

The heroic gesture is the exit.

And Storr can only read this as a man doing the right thing because his framework requires him to. Look at it: if story is a man testing a flawed theory of control against a hostile world, then a man who has acquired an ACCURATE theory of his own flaw has completed the arc.

Structure satisfied.

What he does afterward is beside the point — it’s epilogue, it’s admin, it’s somebody else’s problem.

That’s the tell.

A framework that can call this ending noble has a hole in it exactly the shape of care work.

Of staying. Of the unheroic, unphotogenic, decades-long labor of repair.

And Finally the Last of the Horseshit: The Imaginary Censor Coming for Your Story

Pg. 210. And THERE IT IS, right on schedule, like a train: the anxious little note that they only want us to tell our own stories.

I would very much like to know who they are.

‘cause I’ve had this fuckin’ “conversation” with so many people.

Because out here in the actual world, Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward has been in print since 2005 from Aqueduct Press, and it exists for exactly one reason: at the 1992 Clarion West workshop a student said it was a mistake to write characters of other ethnicities because you might get it horribly, offensively wrong — and Shawl thought that was taking the easy way out.

The book is a rebuttal to the position Storr is frightened of.

Its subtitle is A Practical Approach. It is a craft manual for writing outside your own experience with research, attention, humility, and skill. The workshop built on it has been running for two decades. It is out there RIGHT NOW teaching people to do the exact thing Storr says they’re forbidden to do.

And the cherry: the current class list includes Henry Lien’s course on non-Western narrative structures.[^5]

So the organization cast as enforcer of the identity ghetto is simultaneously teaching writers (a) how to write across difference and (b) how to escape the three-act Anglo-American default that Storr spent three hundred pages universalizing.

The demand was never “only tell your own stories.”

The demand was DO THE WORK.

And “do the work” is unbearable to a framework where the protagonist’s job is to impose control on a hostile realm — because doing the work means the realm isn’t hostile, isn’t yours to control, and knows a hell of a lot more about itself than you do.

Storr wrote a semi-decent book about the psychology of ONE narrative tradition and called it

The Science of Storytelling.
The title is the thesis.
The title is the problem.

This dude a’int selling you science…he’s selling you a culture… the usual suspect of culture:
White, hetero-normativity, American middle-class patriarchal view of the world nonsense as “universal truths” backed up by “SCIENCE^[4]”.

For. Fuck’s. Sake.

Let’s do better, shall we?

Exercises after a widdle we-mind-wer…

REMINDER: PROMPT IS COMING

This is your personal invite to this highly engaged storytelling space that’s been going for almost a year and a half. Truly the last four gatherings have been eye-opening and such a wonderful space for writers and all versions of storytellers to ask serious questions, share stories, and feel in community. I certainly appreciate that you are a busy/working human, and I promise if I didn’t think it would be worth your time I wouldn’t hit up your inbox again this week.

Please RSVP here!

​

I’d like to invite you to PROMPT: Narrative Resistance V, an open space technology gathering on Zoom August 21st: 10am PST; 12pm CST; 1pm EST; 6pm GMT; 7pm CET; 3am AEDT (22nd). The gathering will last as long as it needs and people want it to (but expect 3-4 hours).

(I’ll be asking for a 5$/£/€ donation to offset some costs.)

Storytellers, rebels, and visionaries, PROMPT: Narrative Resistance is here! It is time to leave behind the stale conventions that have limited our imaginations for far too long. We’re not just challenging the domination of conflict-driven plots, the restrictive confines of three-act structures, and the worn-out hero’s journey—we’re transcending them. This is your call to creation in the revolution of narrative, where we’re forging a new path towards “visionary fiction” that bends the arc of storytelling towards justice and liberation. We welcome all pioneers doing the work and those ready to unshackle their creativity and reimagine worlds where healing trumps conflict, where new voices rise, and where the strength of our relationships fuel change. At PROMPT, we’re not just rewriting stories; we’re reauthoring reality itself. Remember, the stories we tell shape who we become—so let’s craft tales that birth cultural innovators, not cautionary cool. It’s time to challenge our imaginations, unleash limitless liberation, walk and share countless paths—please join us in reshaping the narrative landscape.

Here are the initial provocations for PROMPT:

Intro/Brief: Jenifer Toksvig
Discussing her process “The Copenhagen Interpretation”
And why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Provocations: ‘How is/does agency affect narrative?’
And, as always, ‘How can we get past conflict as the central narrative driver in the West?’
The floor is open for other provocations and not limited to the above.

Please RSVP here!

Jenifer Toksvig
For our 20 minute opener: the amazing contributor to this community (and the human I always get feedback like, “I’m so glad I met/talked to her! after every PROMPT) is the fantastic
Jen Toksvig who will discuss her process The Copenhagen Interpretation and why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Bio:

Jenifer Toksvig gathers ideas and people, and crafts story worlds and artefacts. She believes that access support needs are situational, and that barriers to access are more complex and far broader than the typically considered disability conditions. Her theatre making process, The Copenhagen Interpretation, is therefore designed to be responsive to the individual, and from moment to moment. Her work manifests as theatre, games, novels, and handcrafted objects.

EXERCISES

The Welcome, Not the War

Take the last scene you wrote where a character wanted something and hit resistance. Rewrite it so the resistance is replaced by an offer — somebody in that scene extends real help, no strings, no trap, and now the character’s problem is what to do with it. Same length. Same stakes. Notice how much you have to invent to keep it breathing, and notice how much of your training turns out to have been resistance-shaped.

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NOTE: for a more detailed “history” of these interviews head to the bottom of the interview before the exercises for the week (available to all).

NOTE: this series also introduces a new benefit for my paid subs… the full interview! Which is eight pages long each. And, once the series is done, a full copy (digital) of the book itself sent to ya’ll’s inboxes.

Sooooo…

DELONDRA MESA (was Williams at the time of the interview)

Age: 32 · Marital Status: Married · Years of Experience: 10 · Education: BA Theater · Day Job: N/A · Own or Rent:Rents apt · Avg. Yearly Income: 30-40k · # of Kids: 1 · City: Los Angeles, CA [details as of the original interview]

You have the bambino and you’re a screenwriter, some artists are afraid to have a child, it’s almost like a death knell for them in terms of time and energy. Can you take us through the thought process of having kids?

I wanted kids from day one, I really knew for certain that I wanted kids. And Nick[^1] did too, but he was less certain about when we would be able to do that. And it was always a question financially, and then it kinda happened. [both laugh] […] At that point we weren’t making very much money at all, and we didn’t have very much health insurance […] And basically Nick and I had a talk and I told him, “Look, I don’t see me having this child and then putting him in day-care right away.” […] We talked about it, and Nick said he would step up and put aside his auditioning for a while and get a day-job. And that’s the thing if you’re going to be an artist couple, whose going to have the day-job and who isn’t? But I was lucky in that he was willing to do that. […] And probably a month later I started working with my writing partner who introduced me to this company, The Asylum[^2], and we did a number of scripts for them while I was pregnant, and into Judes being a newborn. Around the time Judes turned, like, one, they called me and asked if I wanted to work for them on a regular basis and help them to develop stuff for network. And I was like, “Ummmm, yes!” It was kinda crazy, if I hadn’t gotten pregnant, I wouldn’t have quit my day-job, and if I didn’t quit my day-job I would’ve continued doing the safe thing and then shoving in screenwriting when I could. And because I took that leap of faith with the kid, it worked out! It just worked out.

See? That horrible advice just keeps on giving…follow your dreams!

Follow your dreams…and get knocked up! [C cackles]

I’m really desperate for you to go to a panel, maybe a high school panel and tell them, “Get knocked up, follow your dreams.”

“Get pregnant! It’s not a big deal!” It was funny, because I’d be nursing, I bought a little laptop the Macbook Air, the lightest one I could get, and I’d be nursing and I’d basically have the baby pressed against me, and my knees up and the laptop on my knees, and I’d just be typing. We wrote, like, five movies that way.

That’s awesome practical advice. You wanna a baby and write? Get the lightest laptop you can find.

It’s true! I told the guys at The Asylum, “Listen, I like working with you guys so whenever you want to work together, we will. But my main priority is Jude right now until he’s three or old enough to start doing pre-school. I’m not doing anything that takes me out of the home.” And they created a position based on that. They liked that. They were like, “We like that your head’s on straight, and that we don’t have to pay for an office to support you!”

Artists are so scared to negotiate for that kind of stuff. My whole past is littered with gigs where I was, “Okay I’ll do this and this, but I gotta have this ‘cause it’s the only way for me to deal.” No one’s said no.

I think they like it because you’re not desperate. I think that’s what the main thing is. My main philosophy is that I don’t ever want to come off as the seeker, as the one who’s coming to them and harassing them about stuff. And because I kinda keep it low key and I kinda let them come to me about stuff, they do. I know it’s a really hard, and a shitty piece of advice ‘cause it’s easy for someone to say once they have that little foothold. But as soon as I made that decision, that I was tired of coming off as desperate, that’s when I started getting more interest.

That is something very real, especially for actors, you can not come off as desperate in the room. […] you have to want to do the work, you have to need to do the work, but you can’t let that be the only driving force about your life.

Yeah. They have to have a sense that you have a life.

What does a typical workday look like for you? How do you schedule your day when you’ve got some projects cooking?

I try to mostly work while Jude is asleep so it’s basically around his sleeping schedule. It’s Jude, Jude, Jude during the day, and he takes like an hour and a half nap…the schedule is: he gets in his bed and he knows that I’ll sit in the rocking chair in his room with my laptop and wait for him to fall asleep. So I can get a good two hours [of work done.] And once he goes to bed I can do more. Sometimes that means that I’m up until 4AM working on things. It’s amazing how much you can get done even with just two hours a day set aside. You have this regular [schedule.] Even when it’s just for an hour or two hours you get a lot done. You know? And if I’m really pressed, because sometimes they’ll call and be like, “Listen, we need this right away. This has to be on our desk at like, 6AM.” So then the TV comes on…

When I started writing that was my exact schedule…two hours a day. It’s amazing how that works.

It’s crazy because I’ve worked with people before who are like, “I just wait until I’m inspired and then I sit down and knock it all out.” And I can’t, I’m sorry, I just don’t see good, constant work out of that. I feel like the work ethic, even if it’s just an hour, an hour a day and you sit down and you work. The way that my bosses work is that they do things very quickly. That’s their model, quick and cheap. And so sometimes you have ten days to write a script. Yeah. Which sounds like a lot. Well, if you break it down it’s basically 100 pages, all I have to do is 10 pages a day. 10 pages a day! Sometimes you’re struggling and those pages are hard, sometimes you’re not. Just stick to the schedule 10 pages a day, no more or less, you get it done. I can’t wait until I’m inspired, I’m not that inspired! [both laugh]

Can you take us through how the notes process works over at The Asylum?

It depends, if I’m doing it on my own versus if I’m working with a partner. You have the pitch[^3]. Sometimes the pitch is given to you, and sometimes they’ve even developed it into a treatment[^4], or sometimes they say they’ll need you to start from scratch so it just depends. Then there’s notes all the way through. […] You have to make the partner happy, the development exec happy, and then the three owners happy, and then if you’re doing it for a network, the people at the network have to be happy. They have notes too. Sometimes you have as many as seven people giving you notes.

Turn around time on notes?

Usually when I ask the answer is always, “As soon as possible.” It just depends on where we are in the process. As we get closer to filming it gets even more, you have to have the notes tonight, they have to be done. […] I would say as a piece of advice about notes, nobody wants to hear your arguments, part of a writer’s job, if she has bosses is making them happy, making the product what they want it to be. And it’s funny because I’ve talked to other people who’ve written for Lifetime[^5] who hated the experience because they didn’t understand that. It’s clear to me talking to them they were getting notes and they weren’t following the notes. And it’s really important. These people work really hard to get where they are and they want to be listened to and even if you don’t agree with it sometimes. You know there are occasions where I’ll argue for something a little bit, I try not to make that a regular occurrence, but I’ll do it if it’s something I’ll feel really strongly about, usually it’s because they don’t hear me argue about a lot they’ll let me at least try it first and then tell me whether they think it’s working or not. That’s my biggest piece of advice. I thought it would be something that would be more something across the board that people would do. And I’ve seen people who are younger than me get notes and not take them, and it really shoots them in the foot career-wise.

Absolutely. It’s hard for writers to remember that people who give notes, it’s their job to give notes. It doesn’t seem like it, that they’re only putting barriers in your way, but it’s literally in their job description. A note isn’t an ad hominem attack on your work, they’re just doing their job. And you gotta know what to fight for. When to pick your battles.

[…] To me it’s like if you want to do your own movie, produce your own movie. It’s a gig, a job. You want to try to make everybody happy and make yourself happy at the same time. That is the struggle, that is the juggling act with this work. Here’s the other big piece of advice that you didn’t ask for, which is: It’s very different than playwrighting. Once they give you the paycheck and started filming, that’s the end of your job. That’s it. […] They don’t want you there because now it’s the director’s thing, it was you before, but now it’s the director’s. And when you see the final product it’s not always what you envisioned because time constraints and budget restraints are [paramount] because they’re up against the wall. […] It’s not a play where it’s like [worshippy voice] “The playwright’s vision!” The screenwriter’s vision is not held in particularly high esteem. It’s important while you’re working on it, but once they’ve given you the check they kind of go, “Thank you for your work.” And you have to let it go. Again, I’ve seen people with a little less experience get very upset if they see when it’s not what they wrote. That’s what the job is.

Benefits and the drawbacks of writing with a partner and writing solo?

I enjoy both. There’s pros and cons to both. […] It’s good to have somebody to have to bounce ideas off of, it’s a “two heads are better than one thing.” Plus writing can be lonely sometimes. […] The drawback is that it takes a little more time because the other person has to approve everything, and you have to explain everything too. You have to explain what you’re seeing in your head and the other person might not be on board. Sometimes that’s good too to have that sounding-board. What I like about writing alone is that the process is much quicker. I don’t have to explain it to anybody, I can just do it on my own, it’s just in my head.

Have you folkx developed any kind of workflow?

Usually what happens is we’ll sit down with a treatment and hash out which parts of it speak to either one of us. […] Then we go into our little hidey-holes and work on our stuff, then we send it to the other person, and then the other person will give notes. […] And then we just put it all together. We’ll also read the whole thing a couple times together and make dialogue changes. Then we’ll send it in for the first round of notes.

What if someone’s working on act one and the other on act seven?

Usually we’ll do it closer than that. […] What works for us is, he’ll read everything that I write, but I’ll proof-read everything both of us do. That helps because it makes everything cohesive. I can make sure it sounds like it’s one entity. Keith[^6] is not a proof-reader, so that works out well. Often if you’re working with a partner decide on the person that has final say. And it will differ for us based on the project. It kinda depends on who either got the gig or who sees the project more in their head. We decide that before we even sign a contract. So if you’re not somebody who can work that way, then don’t work with a partner.

A final arbiter is really important.

It also helps you want to be as graceful as the other person. Not all pairs work like that, I know that Keith works with another partner and their rule is that they both have to agree and if they both don’t agree it’s not in there. For me, it’s just kinda quicker to have someone say, “This is how I see it.” Sometimes that’s me and sometimes that’s him.

That’s key to share the power. And as long as it’s clear and everybody plays by the rules.

And it’s good practice. because you’re gonna have to have that when it comes to notes!

Treatment is one of the most amorphous words in film land. Does The Asylum have a treatment form?

They generally start with a title. You generally just pitch a title. Yup. And from there it’s a very short, couple sentence, paragraph what that means. And that’s kinda what you pitch. But if the title isn’t good, they aren’t going to do it. And the title has to basically say what it is. If you don’t get an idea of what it is from the title, then it’s not a good title for them. And then they’ll ask you to do a one-page. To me the one page is the hardest. They don’t mean a page and a half. They mean one page. They want to see the beats and they need to be able to see the structure. It becomes a specialized skill making these one page treatments, because you have to know specifically the kinds of beats their looking for. […] With the treatment, err on the side of less. People say they don’t read, that’s not true it’s not that they don’t read it’s just that there’s so much content. And some people are fast readers and some people aren’t. And if you have three guys sitting at the table and one of them’s a slow reader and you’ve given them a five page treatment it slows everything down. So, the shorter you can do it the better.

As a screenwriter, you have to be flexible, you have to take the note, almost more so than actors in a way.

Oh, yeah. You can not be a diva as a writer, your job as a writer is to come in and fix things for them. Writer’s need to think of themselves always as script doctors. You need to come in with the attitude, “I’m going to make this as painless as possible for you, I’m going to generate it as quickly as possible for you.” Meet your deadlines. It’s crazy now that I can see some of the development, ‘cause I’m in on some of the development meetings now, I can’t tell you how many writers who have the job who don’t turn stuff in on time! […] It’s hard, I know it’s hard, a lot of these writers have day-jobs, but you gotta hit your deadlines, you gotta follow the notes, you gotta suck it up and make things easy for them while you’re there and at the same time you gotta be clever. And you have to have elegant content even when you don’t have a lot of time to do that. And you have to have a certain sense of pride, at the same time that you’re humble.

Anything else to add?

I do! It’s really important when you’re starting out to do things to generate your own content and to generate your own gigs, you can’t wait for things to come to you at first. Eventually they will. I wouldn’t be working at The Asylum if I hadn’t, one: been taking those extension classes on my own, two: if I hadn’t been doing plays on my own, writing them and submitting them and getting them produced. If I hadn’t been doing those two things then there’s no way. I wouldn’t have even met Keith who brought me into The Asylum. […] You just put yourself out there. It is who you know. You just have to keep putting yourself out there. I’m not good at schmoozing, so you can do it. Be nice, work hard.

And that’s the amazing Ms. Mesa!

Okay a brief history of “Working Artists”. This was a series of interviews I did back in the 2010’s as I was sick of artists not having the direct skinny on how to actually live in the US. I interviewed writers, actors, musicians, book artists, you name it! The interviews were originally long form, detailed, and specific… that’s a good and bad thing. It means that some of the info is time and location specific, but a lot of the information is beautifully universal. This series is letting ya’ll in on the good universal stuff! And there’s even MORE good, universal and specific stuff in the full interviews, so become a paid sub today!

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Exercises!

The Nap Window
For the next five working days, give your current project two hours — Delondra’s nap-window, transposed to whatever crack in your day you can find. Set a page count or its equivalent in your discipline (bars, sketches, minutes of footage logged) and hit it, no more or less. At the end of the week, notice which mattered more: the inspiration you felt, or the schedule you kept.

Read more

This is gonna combine things like the Carrier Bag, the Reproducibility Crisis, an intentional, continual misreading of Darwin, and some other shit I’ve probably touched on but can’t be assed to link here, and a whole buncha scorn to be tossed directly at the myth that we’re some “war-like, dominant” species which leads to crap like toxic masculinity, machismo, and the idea that conflict = drama and, worse, conflict = growth in our characters.

So, let’s begin shall we?

Good Enough is Good Enough Even in Science

We shall set sail from the rocky, horseshit-strewn shores of “Survival of the Fittest” and what is the myth and continual massive over-simplification of “Darwinism”.

This is where the Pledge part comes in as one of the greatest shows on the boob-toob right now X-Men ’97 has built an ENTIRE SEASON around this crapola^[1] and literally has had at least two villains (the big bad and another villain o’ the week) spouting this line continually (and acting on it’s misrepresentation).

For the cheap seats (or those who didn’t follow above provided links): “Survival of the Fittest” does NOT mean “the strongest survive” IN FACT it can mean the bloody exact opposite and your little mammalian^[2] ass should be thankful for that. Us mammals were nothing close to the lumbering land leviathans that the dinos were and thus after a certain ELE1 asteroid destroyed most life on la planéte we could scrape and scrounge our way to survival, oui?

Not strength, pure lucky appropriate system/adaptation in place for survival for that particular circumstance that arose from our wonderful chaotic universe. Then natural selection took its course… or as a phrase I’ve recently acquired and dearly love says:
“Evolution does NOT optimize… it goes for “good enough” and moves on.”

Why?

Because once you hit “good enough” which is equivalent to survival… there’s nothing more to do/see here and it just becomes weird ass and fun variation from then on… until the next absolute survival moment intrudes for your species.

So what’s this mean/why bring it up?

It means that the story we like to tell ourselves that everything evolves for a “reason” or an easily traceable source a’int that. Evolution got to a point of “fair enough”, cleaned its hands of the dirt of the current situation, and fucked right off.

Therefore the dominance of “the strongest survive” has NOTHING to do with the actual science of Darwinism.

Something like mammals come to “dominance” through a huge heaping of luck of being “good enough” to survive long enough until the proverbial world outside the window favorably changes in, well, your favor… and lucky you, you’re off to the races.

Obviously, the mammals had to develop certain favorable traits while being the non-dominant species to survive in order to get to the situation where those traits can be passed on en masse while other entire species full of the opposite (or nearly) traits died off en masse do to the same damn circumstances yes?

But it’s a mind-changing-bender to now re-think about that as this: it’s an adaptation to a crap situation until the crap situation suddenly turns in your favor and now all those “good-enough” traits are the thing that keep your species going during a mass extinction event.

Okay so this misinterpreted version of this very REAL piece of science is the bedrock for most “that’s the way it is” out there manosphere, the “just suck it the fuck up” type outlook when one challenges toxic masculinity, or when one says violence (yes, even and especially State violence) is a fucking choice.

Their defense isn’t real.
It’s based on culture, not “the way the universe works”.
In other words, it’s a fuckin’ CHOICE to keep the status quo of colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy going because it fits THEIR narrative and acts as the perfect excuse for all the above.

For the cheap seats:
“Survival of the Fittest” has NOTHING to do with “The strongest survive”.

So.

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STOP USING IT IN YOUR STORIES.
yes, you X-Men ‘97 (unless you refute it) [which they won’t]2.

Or, more importantly, stop referencing it,
stop using it as some kind of bullshit justification for your villains.

LAZY as shit.

Stop it.
Stop^[3].

Care First, Murder Second

Okey-doke let’s address another wonderfully mis-taught chestnut that gets tossed in to “prove” how the hoomanzies are “violent in nature”.

POP QUIZ!

What were you taught was the first “tool”? Eh?

Yeah, just as in my recent talk linked above for the Develop conference, the answer is some kind of stone weapon:

axe, spear/arrowhead, or knife
(which in and of itself is a classic misremember as it is usually taught to be a knapping stone: a stone used to MAKE those other tools).

More HORSESHIT.

Let’s look at the simple old chestnut “Hunter/Gatherer^[4]” shall we?

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We do so looooooove to spend time at the former part o’ that slash and never the later.

For the “logic3” obsessed out there… what takes more energy?

Getting out ye olde knappin’ stone and get to knappin’ yourself a buncha sharp and pointy bits that then need to be sufficiently lashed to some wooden bits so they are even remotely useful and don’t fall apart by looking at them funny let alone trying to stick them into some creature that don’t wanna be stuck and then leaving everything that’s safe to you (your tribe, your fire, your shelter, your known land) and striking out into the wild to hunt and kill a buncha other evolved shit that’s frankly waaaaaaaay better evolved than you are at the whole survival game (as they don’t have to do the whole knapping thing as evolution kindly got “good enough” by giving them serious murder hands and mouths that we got skipped out on) so youze can do the murder on it WITHOUT it murdering you back then figuring out how to drag it back to said safety without other better evolved scavengers than you stealing it from you to then finally hunker down to dinner?

Or go pick some mutha’fuckin’ berries
put ‘em in a BAG and
bring ‘em on home?

Which, using one’s vaulted “logic” would not only be built first, but socially constructed first (remembering to take into consideration that our teeths are not predator’s teeth but those are pesky, low-totem herbivories) to being with?

You said, “bag”.
And I loves ya for it.

NEXT LOGICAL POP QUIZ

What travels through time better?

A bag made of hide and/or vegetation?

Or a fuckin’ ROCK?

See my recent post on Boal for a further discussion on the accident of surviving time and the survivors then being mistaken for bedrock^[5] fact. Or more pithily:
What survives gets mistaken for what matters.
Or in this case: what mattered.

The fuckin’ rocks don’t make us a “warlike” race which is one of the pillars of this argument… “See the first thing we ever built was a murder machine!”

Nah.

The BAG make us critters who care for each other first.
‘cause you make that bag to go out into the world and feed your people.

Care first.

Murder second… at best… maybe even last.

PS: The effin’ bags help to carry the meat home as well, not for ‘nuthin’.

Where's the War in Mitochondria?

These pernicious thoughts invaded other aspects of our understanding of evolution as well.

Since we are “a warlike race” our examination of evolution has been through that lens, everything in evolution is conceived of in war-like terms, the main culprit being:
A BATTLE FOR RESOURCES.

This, as a prime mover, or major/sole causation is entirely false.

In fact, once again, its exact opposite is actually true.

No evolution happens in isolation.
That isolation is almost impossible to achieve. (We’ll talk about the metaphysics of that a bit later).

We evolve together.
With other organisms and systems.

The prime factor in evolution is:
Co-evolution.

We co-evolve alongside others and inside systems.

Evolution isn’t the story of things and species wiping each other out in some bitter, fierce competition over resources.

Nah. Nope.

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We got here through the possibly incalculable assistance of others.
We have:

In the human eye: two species live specifically on the human face and eyes: Demodex folliculorum (larger, ~0.3–0.4 mm, at the base of the lashes) and Demodex brevis (~0.2–0.3 mm, down in the sebaceous glands).

In the human gut we have: ~38 trillion bacteria to ~30 trillion human cells. Meaning we have just as much bacteria in our guts than we have actual human cells at any given moment.

On yo’ skin right now: Staphylococcus epidermidis lives in the billions on our skin, feeding on dead skin cells and producing bacteriocins that defend against pathogens.

In every fuckin’ cell of your body: exists, say it with me folkx: “the powerhouse of the cell” Mitochondria. Every mitochondrion in every one of your cells is the descendant of a free-living bacterium that entered a symbiosis so deep it literally became a part of us.

Your capacity to produce energy is itself a co-evolved merger.
Where’s the “war” there?
Right, there is none.

Co-evolution.

Cooperation.

These are far greater factors in evolution than any kind of conflict one can imagine.

Hit it with your fav logic stick… let’s assume the chestnut that Homo sapiens (really Cro-Magnons) “wiped out” Neanderthals (a theory also being massively challenged atm) is actually, somehow, true.
A population of 100,000 killing off another population of ~50,000 is really gonna effect the overall course of evolution is a greater way than how we co-evolved with our environment, trillions and trillions of bacteria and viruses, or just about any other species that was far more abundant than early humans (and our dead by-ways)?

C’mon on.
Logic, remember, logic.

And just to be clear because I can’t help it… the newest theory is that was LITERAL absorption not annihilation led to the Neanderthals disappearing…

Sex not War, baby!
This seems to explain why we still carry 1-4% Neanderthal DNA.
Again co-evolution even wins out here.

Okay step one done.

Evolution has been properly re-contextualized away from dominance and onto
co-evolution and cooperation

And

Our anthropological understanding has moved us away from the narrative that we are some kind of “war-like” species as we built tools of caring before tools of death

Bad Science, WEIRDer Subjects

NEXT UP in the Herculean task of clearing out the horseshit^[6] of “war-like” race: psychological “proof” of what shits we are.

Now you can read the reproducibility crisis post linked up above for a deeper dive on this HOWEVER, suffice it to say that most of Western psychology is based on seriously flawed people, and worst of all, flawed science experiments/conclusions.

REMEMBER Science is NOT flawed. These cis-het white dudes running these experiments and their “results” are, in fact, flawed in the extreme.

Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment, Alpha Wolf/Dog4, Two-Marshmallows.

All. Full. Of. Shit.

Cornerstones of Western psychology used to “explain” who and what we are. And invoked time and time again as “proof” of our innate dominance and expressions of war.
Toss ‘em out. Period. Be done with them.
And every time you hear or read anyone posting about “Alphas” and “Betas” know they are the MOST full of shit.

Beyond bad science and interpretations is the still disturbing and looming fact that a bulk of Western psychology was conducted/is on WEIRD subjects – White Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic subjects to the tune of 96% of samples in top psychology journals came from countries holding just 12% of the world’s population, with the U.S. alone supplying nearly 70% of subjects^[7].

So please don’t mistake the study of American college students for universal human workings.

So. Yeah. Time to re-examine your assumptions about what motivates us and what we’re made of.

BOOM.

Anthropology

Psychology

Covered.

Nothing Exists Just As Itself

Time for Metaphysics.5

And, yes, the limits of Western experimental science…

…if you think this is going into some kind of woo-woo/spiritual/New-Agey crapola read my piece on Magical Thinking.

Let’s knock down the West’s obsession with the Cartesian “clock-work” view on the universe which simply states that:

Breaking things into their constituent parts to study them and understand them and then reassembling them (like a clock) will wield the best understanding on the thing itself6.

PROBLEM.

Nothing exists just as itself.
All things exist in relation to.

Understanding the thing (and its parts) in itself may be a good short-term goal, but intentionally removing it from all context and then further removing its parts from their context expels the whole from your analysis… and it expels the system in which it operates from your analysis.

The way the West learns about its own self and the things it exists with is flawed in the extreme.

We must reintroduce context and systems into our understanding to achieve real education.

System Theory and a massive retooling of our understanding of how interconnected and interdependent we and everything in the universe actually is must be given priority for us to move forward with real, grounded information.

Now, along with systems comes an unavoidable core operating principal of the universe:
Chaos.

All systems have and must account for a certain amount of chaos as this chaos is absolutely unavoidable (and why the Scientific Method operates on theories and “accepted fact” not empirical facts).

Another way of phrasing this is that the world in which we live, the universe in which we spin, the reality we swim through is NOT and never has been linear in nature.

Most of human endeavors can be seen in the light of us trying to control/account for/live with/process this fact.

Religion

Science

Art

And, yeah, Storytelling (for some cultures)… and, IMHO, it is time for Western story and Western storytellers to admit to that fact and grow into something that accepts the world as it actually is.

Bust Out the Gloves…

So. Writing Time!

FINALLY

Let’s bring it all back to my favorite punching bag:
The 3-Act Structure and how it’s enforced in today’s writings and how it re-enforces all of the above horseshit.

Readers of this ‘stack will no doubt be well versed that the 3-Act Structure has one primary goal:
To isolate the protagonist as they are the only one that can solve the problem… yeah, yeah, sure even in Heroine’s Journey structure they spread their power but there will still be a thread of conflict reserved only for them to solve… same shit, different Individualism.

All of this, ofc, is predicated on this driving, core concept:
CONFLICT IS THE HEART OF DRAMA AND IS THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE “STORY DRIVER/ENGINE” FOR “GOOD STORYTELLING”.

This ALSO means that only through conflict can you progress:

Plot

or

Character “Growth”

Or as typically taught: Action=/__u/nouveaunarrative.substack.com/Character.%3C/p>

And that action is almost always driven to “overcome” conflict… almost always this “overcoming” is through more dominance, violence, and a good old fashioned beat-down (physically, psychologically, socially).

Sound familiar?

It’s the version of “dominance as evolution,” “we are a war-like race,” Cartesian-based science and thinking written into the very fabric of what the West considers story.

It accounts for zero co-evolution, cooperation, systems, or any kind of useful or real context.

One is taught that “story isn’t real life” so one must compress time itself piling escalating problems and escalating conflict atop one another to keep that pesky “real world” from entering your tale.

Fold space and time in on itself to create an extremely simplified cause and effect world in a linear arrow of events.

No chaos here.

No cooperation or co-evolution here.

None.

The Conclusion?

THE 3-ACT STRUCTURE IS ANTITHETICAL TO NATURE

Let’s over-simplify7 this into a list, shall we?

• Has no place for systems or any real context

• Insists on conflict over cooperation

• Isolates its (usually) Lone Protagonist

• Compresses time

• Pushes linearity (or some close adherent of)

• Pushes the idea that only conflict creates change [there will be a further post on why conflict doesn’t create change only trauma… it made this post extra-too-long so, later, promise!]

• Strips the world of interdependence and collaboration insisting only on independence

• Stirps the world of chaos and chaotic elements

• Continually reinforces the ideas of: war-like race; makes use of bad/disproven WEIRD psychological understandings of humanity; incapable of highlighting co-evolution; Cartesian understanding of parts vs whole; cannot encompass a system’s theory understanding of the world

And a’int we had enough of THAT?

And we haven’t even gotten into the issues that are endemic to the rising conflict of the second act that inevitably create: Plot Armor, False Jeopardy, the Idiot Plot, the Devaluing of Violence (particularly Gun Violence), Only “Male” Traits Being Valued, Violence/Domination as the Only Solution, amongst a whole host of others…

say it with me…

HORSESHIT

Good Lordy-Lord.

Are you still here?
I loves ya if you are.

You’re my fav.

Seriously.

You are.

I love you.

Let’s do better, shall we?

Exercises? Sure. Exercises. After advert below…

PS: Remember, if you like or wanna discuss any of this shit there’s a new PROMPT coming up in August my dearies… see below for how to join us.

I’d like to invite you to PROMPT: Narrative Resistance V, an open space technology gathering on Zoom August 21st: 10am PST; 12pm CST; 1pm EST; 6pm GMT; 7pm CET; 3am AEDT (22nd). The gathering will last as long as it needs and people want it to (but expect 3-4 hours).

(I’ll be asking for a 5$/£/€ donation to offset some costs.)

Storytellers, rebels, and visionaries, PROMPT: Narrative Resistance is here! It is time to leave behind the stale conventions that have limited our imaginations for far too long. We’re not just challenging the domination of conflict-driven plots, the restrictive confines of three-act structures, and the worn-out hero’s journey—we’re transcending them. This is your call to creation in the revolution of narrative, where we’re forging a new path towards “visionary fiction” that bends the arc of storytelling towards justice and liberation. We welcome all pioneers doing the work and those ready to unshackle their creativity and reimagine worlds where healing trumps conflict, where new voices rise, and where the strength of our relationships fuel change. At PROMPT, we’re not just rewriting stories; we’re reauthoring reality itself. Remember, the stories we tell shape who we become—so let’s craft tales that birth cultural innovators, not cautionary cool. It’s time to challenge our imaginations, unleash limitless liberation, walk and share countless paths—please join us in reshaping the narrative landscape.

Here are the initial provocations for PROMPT:

Intro/Brief: Jenifer Toksvig

Discussing her process “The Copenhagen Interpretation”
And why story is the least important thing in storytelling!
Provocations: ‘How is/does agency affect narrative?’
And, as always, ‘How can we get past conflict as the central narrative driver in the West?’
The floor is open for other provocations and not limited to the above.

Please RSVP here!

Jenifer Toksvig
For our 20 minute opener: the amazing contributor to this community (and the human I always get feedback like, “I’m so glad I met/talked to her! after every PROMPT) is the fantastic
Jen Toksvig who will discuss her process The Copenhagen Interpretation and why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Bio:

Jenifer Toksvig gathers ideas and people, and crafts story worlds and artefacts. She believes that access support needs are situational, and that barriers to access are more complex and far broader than the typically considered disability conditions. Her theatre making process, The Copenhagen Interpretation, is therefore designed to be responsive to the individual, and from moment to moment. Her work manifests as theatre, games, novels, and handcrafted objects.

EXERCISES

The Bag, Not the Blade

Write a short scene — 500 words, tops — in which something genuinely changes (a relationship, a situation, a person) with zero conflict. No antagonist. No obstacle to overcome. No stakes-raising threat. The engine has to be care, provision, or gathering: someone going out into the world to bring something back for their people.

The rule: the moment you catch yourself smuggling in danger to “make it matter,” stop, cut it, and find the meaning in the giving instead. Pay attention to how hard your own training fights you on this. That resistance is the exercise.

Read more

Please RSVP here!

​

I’d like to invite you to PROMPT: Narrative Resistance V, an open space technology gathering on Zoom August 21st: 10am PST; 12pm CST; 1pm EST; 6pm GMT; 7pm CET; 3am AEDT (22nd). The gathering will last as long as it needs and people want it to (but expect 3-4 hours).

Subscribe now

(I’ll be asking for a 5$/£/€ donation to offset some costs.)

Storytellers, rebels, and visionaries, PROMPT: Narrative Resistance is here! It is time to leave behind the stale conventions that have limited our imaginations for far too long. We’re not just challenging the domination of conflict-driven plots, the restrictive confines of three-act structures, and the worn-out hero’s journey—we’re transcending them. This is your call to creation in the revolution of narrative, where we’re forging a new path towards “visionary fiction” that bends the arc of storytelling towards justice and liberation. We welcome all pioneers doing the work and those ready to unshackle their creativity and reimagine worlds where healing trumps conflict, where new voices rise, and where the strength of our relationships fuel change. At PROMPT, we’re not just rewriting stories; we’re reauthoring reality itself. Remember, the stories we tell shape who we become—so let’s craft tales that birth cultural innovators, not cautionary cool. It’s time to challenge our imaginations, unleash limitless liberation, walk and share countless paths—please join us in reshaping the narrative landscape.

Here are the initial provocations for PROMPT:

Intro/Brief: Jenifer Toksvig
Discussing her process “The Copenhagen Interpretation”
And why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Provocations: ‘How is/does agency affect narrative?’
And, as always, ‘How can we get past conflict as the central narrative driver in the West?’
The floor is open for other provocations and not limited to the above.

Please RSVP here!

Jenifer Toksvig
For our 20 minute opener: the amazing contributor to this community (and the human I always get feedback like, “I’m so glad I met/talked to her! after every PROMPT) is the fantastic
Jen Toksvig who will discuss her process The Copenhagen Interpretation and why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Bio:

Jenifer Toksvig gathers ideas and people, and crafts story worlds and artefacts. She believes that access support needs are situational, and that barriers to access are more complex and far broader than the typically considered disability conditions. Her theatre making process, The Copenhagen Interpretation, is therefore designed to be responsive to the individual, and from moment to moment. Her work manifests as theatre, games, novels, and handcrafted objects.

Overview of Open Space Tech (OST):

OST is fueled by the participants. The participants are asked to answer: What is the conversation you need to have now around the topic/issue?
That can be phrased as a question, topic, challenge, invitation to explore... or you can wait for all the offerings to be offered and head to which conversation you can learn or contribute to. And, most importantly, OST does not stand on the idea of the politeness of staying put. Once you’re done learning or contributing, head to the next conversation where you can… at any time.

The last piece of structure: if you propose a topic you are responsible for recording information for a summary, some key insights, and some action items (if any arise). If you decide to leave the convo that you started you need to hand this role off to someone before you invoke the Law of Mobility.

Open Space Technology/Principles are:
...WHOEVER COMES ARE THE RIGHT PEOPLE
...WHATEVER HAPPENS IS THE ONLY THING THAT COULD HAVE
...WHENEVER IT STARTS IS THE RIGHT TIME
...WHENEVER IT’S OVER, IT’S OVER

It is governed by one law: THE LAW OF MOBILITY

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF SOMEPLACE YOU AREN’T LEARNING OR CONTRIBUTING, MOVE SOMEWHERE YOU CAN

For an overview please click here.

“Plant a seed… sacred things are on their way.”

I’d be honored to see you there and experience any version of your participation that you wish to give.

This is not a review. Ms. Gish doesn’t need one — the book collected blurbs from the likes of Maxine Hong Kingston, and it’s been sitting in the Massey Lectures series at Harvard for over a decade being quietly right about everything.

What this is: a set of thoughts on why Tiger Writing matters to the argument this Substack has been building post by post — that the Western narrative toolkit is not universal, not neutral, and not even particularly old, and that the alternatives are not exotic curiosities but fully load-bearing structures. Ms. Gish gets at all of this from an angle I hadn’t seen before: not through craft, not through history, but through memory. Through the actual machinery of how a self stores its own life.

Read the book. Then come back and argue with me.

Your Memory Has a Nationality

Ms. Gish opens with a gut-punch of an experiment, and I want you to sit with it. In his 1932 classic Remembering, psychologist Frederic C. Bartlett had British test subjects repeatedly retell a Native American ghost tale — the famous “War of the Ghosts” — at intervals ranging from minutes to months. With each retelling, the subjects misremembered more. Not randomly.

Nationalistically.

They unconsciously edited the tale toward themselves — seal hunting became “fishing,” the strange story logic got smoothed out, the elements that felt “weird[1]” to a British sensibility got quietly deleted — until, as Ms. Gish puts it, the tale was no longer Native American at all. It had become, in fact, “pretty bloody British”.

That’s page six. Page six, and Ms. Gish has already handed you the mechanism behind everything this publication keeps circling. This is what I’ve been calling epistemicide-by-workshop: the process by which a story built on non-Western logic gets “fixed” in revision, in the MFA classroom, in the studio notes meeting, until it conforms to the reader’s inherited expectations.

Bartlett’s subjects weren’t malicious. They weren’t even aware. They were just remembering — and memory, it turns out, is a colonizing instrument. It doesn’t preserve the foreign story. It digests it and metabolizes it into the stories it already knows. Matthew Salesses has been telling us this about the American workshop process for years — craft expectations are cultural expectations wearing a lab coat — and here’s the experimental psychology, sitting in the literature since 1932, saying the same thing about the individual skull.¹

The Frame: Independent vs. Interdependent

Ms. Gish’s central distinction — borrowed from cross-cultural psychology and then put to work on literature — is between the independent self and the interdependent self. The independent self, dominant in the West (or more precisely, as psychologist Richard Nisbett notes, in the “West” of a “West and the rest” divide), stresses uniqueness. It defines itself through inherent traits, abilities, values, preferences. It sees things in isolation.

Sound familiar? The isolated Western hero? The process of isolation in the 2nd act of an Aristotelian 3-act structure?

Yeah, it better by now, what, with all my yelling.

Now the interdependent self, dominant across much of East Asia and, frankly, most of human history, stresses commonality. It defines itself through place, roles, loyalties, duties.

It sees things in context.

And here’s the move that makes the book essential rather than merely interesting: Ms. Gish argues that the novel — the whole apparatus of Western literary fiction, with its originality, its authenticity, its “truth of individual experience” — is not a universal form that happens to have been perfected in the West. It is the native art form of the independent self.

It’s what that particular kind of self produces when it sits down to make something. Which means every time we treat the psychologically interior, conflict-driven, character-arc novel as the default shape of story, we’re not making a craft claim. We’re making an anthropological one. We’re declaring one culture’s self-concept to be the human baseline.

Ms. Gish illustrates this through her father’s memoir, written at eighty-five, which describes the power structure of his world — the architecture of the family compound, the hierarchy inscribed in its 400 rooms and its doors — before it describes a single person, and doesn’t even mention his own birth date until page eight. No “I was born.” No David Copperfield opening. Not because the man lacked a self, but because his self was made of different material. Hold that thought, because we’re coming back to it.

Episodic vs. Semantic: The Craft Implication Nobody Is Talking About

Now the part that made me put the book down and stare at the wall.

Ms. Gish distinguishes between semantic memory — the storage bank for general knowledge and facts — and episodic memory — the storage bank for personal events, the things that happened to you, in time. Episodic memory is the raw material of self-narration. It’s the memory that produces memoir, produces the psychological novel, produces the whole confessional mode. Then the research Ms. Gish surveys — Qi Wang’s cross-cultural cognition work at Cornell prominent among it — finds that episodic memory is, on average, less keenly developed in Eastern populations than Western ones.

Morrison Interjection (not from the book): And for this human this is what makes Westerners believe that the human brain ONLY work based on stories it tells itself about itself. That ain’t science… it’s cultural. Time and time again this ‘stack finds that CULTURE IN = STORY OUT gets mistaken for science or “universal human experience”. Back to Ms. Gish.

Before anyone gets weird about that last sentence above: Ms. Gish is fast and explicit on this point. The Eastern brain is not less developed. It has developed in response to its own priorities — the same way, in her lovely phrase, a poet’s biceps reflect more interest in meter-making than muscle-making.

An interdependent culture doesn’t drill its children on “and how did you feel about that?” over dinner, so the muscle that answers that question stays proportionate rather than atrophied. Wang’s studies bear this out beautifully: Japanese children, asked to recount how they hurt their foot, will bring in other times they hurt themselves, other people’s injuries, the whole field of related experience. A Western researcher codes that as going off-topic. An interdependent mind codes it as answering the question properly — because the event doesn’t mean anything stripped of its resonances and wider experienced or learned or even just “heard about” experiences.

Another Morrison Interjection: I find in my relationship to the small, younger humans even in the West they tend to what we would call “ramble on” and then get chastised for it. This is the interdependent mind getting killed in its cradle[2].

Here is the craft implication, and I genuinely believe it’s enormous: if memory is trained, perception is trainable. These aren’t hardware differences. They’re workout regimes. Which means a writer raised on episodic, self-narrating, focal-object memory can deliberately develop the other capacity — can practice registering pattern, recurrence, relation, field — and thereby gain access to structures (kishotenketsu, wave structure, the whole toolkit Lien lays out) that otherwise feel unwriteable. You might not be able to write context-driven narrative with a perception system that’s been trained since toddlerhood to delete context. But you can retrain the system. The exercises at the end of this post are a first attempt at exactly that.

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Pages 69–71: The West Sees Change, the East Registers Context

Buy the book for these three pages, they a’ blew ma’ mind.

Ms. Gish walks through the perception research on Eastern and Western minds, and the finding is almost embarrassingly clean: shown the same photographic scene, Western viewers lock onto the focal object and track its change — what it did, where it moved, what it wants. Eastern viewers register the context — the field, the ground, the relations in which the object sits. Show both groups an aquarium and the American describes the big fish; the Japanese viewer describes the tank. Neither is seeing wrong. They are running different attention budgets, allocated by different cultures for different purposes.

The study Ms. Gish cites here is worth pausing on, because it did the work inside an fMRI scanner. Goh and colleagues, in 2007, put seventy-five young and elderly participants — half Chinese Singaporeans, half Americans — through a paradigm where they viewed quartets of pictures: a focal object placed against a background scene, repeated across the set with either the object changing, the background changing, both, or neither.² The scanner tracked which brain regions “adapted” — quieted down — to repeated elements: the lateral occipital complex handling objects, the parahippocampal gyrus handling backgrounds. The headline result was clean.

Elderly East Asians showed significantly less adaptation in the object-processing region in the brain than elderly Westerners.

Perceptual processing turns out to be malleable, shaped by decades of cohort experience and cultural exposure. Culture, in other words, physically sculpts the perceptual brain over a lifetime — and does it visibly enough that you can watch it happen in an MRI.

But here’s the twist that sharpens Ms. Gish’s whole argument, and it comes from the same research group’s follow-up analysis. Park and Huang, reviewing the accumulated cultural neuroscience in 2010, flag something almost every popularization gets backwards: background processing was equivalent across all four groups. What varied was how much extra attention Westerners devoted to the focal object.

Which means the “West sees change, East registers context” story is only half true — and the half that’s true isn’t the interesting half.

East Asians aren’t seeing more context.

Everybody sees the context.

Westerners are lessening its importance, because their attention is being aggressively pulled toward the focal object at the expense of the field around it.

Read that again.

According to this study and its follow-up,
Culture doesn’t teach East Asians to see the tank.

It teaches Westerners to see only the fish.

The independent-self perceptual style is not a neutral baseline with a contextual overlay available in Eastern varieties — it’s a subtractive filter applied to shared human perception, deleting the field so the individual can appear as if it caused itself.

Now follow that from the eyeball to the courtroom, because Ms. Gish does, and it’s where I wrote Holy Hell in the margin. If your perceptual training says the focal object is where the action is, then when something goes wrong, the person is where the fault is. Behavior gets attributed to disposition — to character, to essence, to what kind of person they are — and the surrounding conditions go as unexamined as the water in the tank.

This is the deep grammar of Western punitive justice: society is never on trial, only the individual. No context. The fish did it.

And notice — please notice — that this is also the deep grammar of the Western protagonist.

Character-driven story is dispositional attribution with a three-act structure bolted on. When we tell writers “character is destiny” and “your protagonist’s choices must drive the plot,” we are teaching the fundamental attribution error as a virtue.* We are training audiences, story by story, to find the individual and ignore the water. If you read my Boal post, you already know where I land on the politics of that: a narrative form that locates all causation inside individuals is a form structurally incapable of indicting systems.

That’s not a bug in the machinery.

That’s what the machinery is for.

* SIDENOTE (this is too important to footnote): The legal-theory crowd will tell you the fundamental attribution error — overweighting disposition, underweighting situation — is one of the MOST replicated findings in social psychology, andthat it replicates far more strongly in Western subjects. The bias we built our justice system on is a regional bias. So is the one we built our screenwriting manuals on.

Against this, put Orhan Pamuk — Nobel laureate, so miss me with “this is fringe” — who confesses that people do not actually have as much character as European novels portray, and that he has never once identified in himself the kind of character he encounters in them. Pamuk says outright that human character matters far less in shaping our lives than Western novels and criticism make out, and that in his own My Name Is Red the puzzle-like architecture matters more than any character’s inner depths — that what’s decisive about a protagonist is how they fit into the surrounding landscape, events, and milieu. His characters are governed by their context. Deliberately. As an aesthetic position. The man builds tanks, not fish, and he’s got the Nobel to suggest the approach has legs.

“Didactic”: The Word That Polices the Border

Ms. Gish also puts her finger on the single most revealing word in the Western critical vocabulary. In the East, literature with a lesson has traditionally been extolled — that art should be useful is, for most Chinese, simply a given. In the West, the mother of all deadly adjectives is “didactic” (read: preachy).

Think about how strange that is.

No, seriously, THINK.

We have organized an entire critical apparatus around the premise that art must be, wait for the big ole word…. autotelic— an end in its very own self, just like the sovereign individual it mirrors — and that any detectable usefulness is a contamination. Ms. Gish notes drily that the disinterestedness of art has been attacked by Nietzsche, Marx, and a myriad of others, and yet still informs mainstream ideas about fiction. Everybody who’s looked hard at the doctrine has knocked it down; it keeps standing anyway, because it isn’t held up by argument.

It’s held up by story structures (and the stories themselves) and produced as product.

And underneath the doctrine, of course, is “fear” — fear of propaganda, fear of “educational” art, fear that admitting stories do things to people would obligate us to ask what our stories are doing.

And who’s responsible for what stories are doing?

Meanwhile our supposedly disinterested, art-for-art’s-sake tradition has spent a century training readers to be immersed in heroic individuals and systems of status-quo backed oppression, which is about as didactic as it gets. We didn’t eliminate the lesson. We just stopped labeling it. Ms. Gish even catches the class machinery behind the whole arrangement: the highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow hierarchy — and the cherished institutions that enforce it — emerged in America substantially as a reaction against the immigrant hordes. The border between Art and mere usefulness was drawn, like most borders, to keep specific people out.

It’s inherent in the language of separation itself: “Outsider art” “Primitive art” “Folk art” “Ignorant art” (though this was an intentional self-own and a clap-back… it’s context still matters)

Her footnote twists the knife: if you imagine those categories have been done away with, you have only to think of how we talk about women’s writing.³

A Direct Writing Lesson: The Garden That Borrows the Landscape

But the passage I keep returning to — the one I marked structure for writing, FOR SURE — is quieter than any of that. Ms. Gish describes the Chinese garden practice of borrowing the landscape: incorporating the scenery beyond the garden’s borders into its design, framing a distant mountain so that infinite space enters a bounded plot, so that an element of the real world enters the artifice. She reaches for it as an account of her own novelistic instincts, then pauses over whether it was an aesthetic choice at all or something deeper.

Friends, that is not a gardening tip. That is a narrative structure, and it’s one the Western toolkit has no name for. The Western text is a walled garden — the fictional world is complete, sovereign, decontextualized, and everything that signifies is inside the wall. A borrowed-landscape text does the opposite: it deliberately frames what lies outside itself — history, the reader’s world, other texts, the actual mountain — as a functioning element of its own composition.

Fan Kuan’s great landscape painting, which Ms. Gish uses to frame this idea, works this way: shifting perspectives rather than a single vanishing point, the qi connecting all things made palpable, the opposite of decontextualization — a radical contextualization. The independent-self tradition, Ms. Gish notes, tends to look at such art and mutter about robots and sheep, about all that reinforcing of a self we secretly consider not-quite-a-self.

Which brings us to the correction the whole book exists to deliver: an interdependent self is not the absence of a self. It is a different self — the possession of which is a joy, the loss of which is disabling, the restoration of which can be a joy too. If your storytelling instincts flinch at context-driven, community-scaled, borrowed-landscape narrative because it feels like the erasure of character, that flinch is not perception. It’s training. See above; training can be redone.

The Menu Is Bigger Than You Were Told

Ms. Gish isn’t running a replacement program, and neither am I. (Mostly.[3]) Her lodestar is James Alan McPherson’s vision of a true, chosen community in which every person’s humanity would be perceived — a balance, as she says, of independence and interdependence. She’s honest that she can’t read articles unqualifiedly extolling interdependence without pushing back; the ambivalence is the point, and increasingly it’s everyone’s ambivalence. Her America is, in her wonderful image, a bit like a Buddhist temple with less incense — a place of endless rebirth where the self is neither independent, necessarily, nor bounded, nor stable. And she closes on the observation that when critic Michael Wood wrestled with philosopher Galen Strawson’s claim that living well is, for many people, a completely non-narrative project, he was hardly alone anymore. There has been, in her words, a welcome expansion of our cultural menu.

Writers. Welcome to the expanded menu.

Let’s FEAST!

That expansion is the entire mission statement of this publication — which is exactly why Tiger Writing belongs on the shelf next to Salesses, next to Alison, next to Le Guin’s carrier bag, next to Lien. The argument keeps converging from independent directions, which — say it with me — is what being right looks like.

The hero’s journey isn’t human nature.

Conflict isn’t the atom of story.

Character isn’t destiny.

These are the artifacts of one self-concept, aggressively exported, and Bartlett showed us in 1932 exactly how the export works: one culturally-centered retelling at a time, until the seal hunt becomes fishing and nobody remembers there was ever anything else.

The way back is the same road in reverse.

Retrain the attention.

Register the water.

Borrow the landscape.

Get this book. Then go stand in front of a window and ask yourself what your story is framing that isn’t in your story.

That’s a place to start.

Now start them exercises! BUT first a reminder…

ANNOUNCEMENT! PROMPT IS COMING BACK, I WANT YOU THERE!

I’d like to invite you to PROMPT: Narrative Resistance V, an open space technology gathering on Zoom August 21st: 10am PST; 12pm CST; 1pm EST; 6pm GMT; 7pm CET; 3am AEDT (22nd). The gathering will last as long as it needs and people want it to (but expect 3-4 hours). Please RSVP here! (https://forms.gle/8oZAShkXYq2NuGRa9)

Here are the initial provocations for PROMPT:

Intro/Brief: Jenifer Toksvig Discussing her process “The Copenhagen Interpretation”
And why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Provocations: ‘How is/does agency affect narrative?’

And, as always, ‘How can we get past conflict as the central narrative driver in the West?’
The floor is open for other provocations and not limited to the above.

(I’ll be asking for a 5$/£/€ donation to offset some costs.)

Storytellers, rebels, and visionaries, PROMPT: Narrative Resistance is here! It is time to leave behind the stale conventions that have limited our imaginations for far too long. We’re not just challenging the domination of conflict-driven plots, the restrictive confines of three-act structures, and the worn-out hero’s journey—we’re transcending them. This is your call to creation in the revolution of narrative, where we’re forging a new path towards “visionary fiction” that bends the arc of storytelling towards justice and liberation. We welcome all pioneers doing the work and those ready to unshackle their creativity and reimagine worlds where healing trumps conflict, where new voices rise, and where the strength of our relationships fuel change. At PROMPT, we’re not just rewriting stories; we’re reauthoring reality itself. Remember, the stories we tell shape who we become—so let’s craft tales that birth cultural innovators, not cautionary cool. It’s time to challenge our imaginations, unleash limitless liberation, walk and share countless paths—please join us in reshaping the narrative landscape.

Jenifer Toksvig:
For our 20 minute opener: the amazing contributor to this community (and the human I always get feedback like, “I’m so glad I met/talked to her! after every PROMPT) is the fantastic
Jen Toksvig who will discuss her process The Copenhagen Interpretation and why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Bio:

Jenifer Toksvig gathers ideas and people, and crafts story worlds and artefacts. She believes that access support needs are situational, and that barriers to access are more complex and far broader than the typically considered disability conditions. Her theatre making process, The Copenhagen Interpretation, is therefore designed to be responsive to the individual, and from moment to moment. Her work manifests as theatre, games, novels, and handcrafted objects.

Okay, my paid subs… the other exercises and footnotes are below!

The Bartlett Reversal.

Find a story from a narrative tradition you did not grow up inside — a folktale, in translation, from as far outside your inheritance as you can reach. Read it three times. Then retell it from memory in writing, and afterward, compare your version against the original line by line. Every deviation you made is data: that’s your schema showing, your inner test subject changing seal hunting to fishing. Don’t fix the retelling. Annotate it. You are building a map of exactly which story-logic your memory refuses to hold — because that’s the logic you’ll need to practice deliberately.

Read more

Pre-emptive Statement: Yes, YES, I know “it/he/the book has its uses”. Yup. Yup, sure does. Let’s dig a bit further, shall we??? (Aristotle, not Boal, obvsly.)

While this ‘stack is long overdue for one of my “reviews” of this wonderment of a human’s book Theatre of the Oppressed I’m gonna NOT do that.

Not because it isn’t deserving, it more than is (it’s on line 26 of the now-I-hope famous spreadsheet of ideas for this ‘stack) BUT I wanna highlight a few of his main ideas surrounding Aristotle/Poetics/3-Act Structure¹/Catharsis.

But, in the end, please, for the love of all that’s holy read ToO yourselves. While not a book on “writing” per se it will reformulate your mind on storytelling, agency, theater, and at least give a good solid shake to your North American shaped brain. (Highly recommend Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire as its antecedent [by just over a decade] and inspo for ToO... ALSO not a book on writing but will do the same thing to your brain if you pay attention.)

Since I’ve just ordered you to read Freire, let me tell you why he matters here.

In 1968, Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and in it he named something teachers had been doing forever without examining it: the “banking model” of education. The teacher deposits knowledge; the student receives it. The teacher speaks; the student listens. The teacher acts; the student is acted upon. Freire’s radical proposal was that education should be a dialogue — that the oppressed shouldn’t be handed their liberation like a syllabus, they should be co-authors of it.

When his friend and countryman Augusto Boal published Theatre of the Oppressed, the title was not a coincidence. It was a declaration of lineage. Boal took Freire’s question — who gets to speak, and who is condemned to listen? — and walked it into the theatre. When Freire died in 1997, Boal said he’d lost his last father. (If you are a week-to-week reader of this ‘stack I almost fell outta my chair when I read that… see last week’s post about Rush and Neil Peart’s fathering of yours truly.)^[1]

This post is about what the son built. And what he tore down to build it.

Because here’s the thing: to build a theatre of dialogue, Boal first had to demolish the most successful monologue in Western history. The one we’re all still living inside.

He had to take on Aristotle.

Where These Ideas Come From (And Why That Matters)

Before we get to the demolition, we need to talk about place. Because Theatre of the Oppressed is not an academic exercise and reading it like one misses the entire point.

Boal was the artistic director of the Arena Theatre of São Paulo from the mid-1950s onward, making politically engaged, formally experimental work in a country that was — for a while — dreaming big. Then came the 1964 military coup, backed enthusiastically by the United States. Then came the hardening of the dictatorship in 1968.

Theatre that asked the wrong questions became dangerous. And Boal’s theater was definitely asking them. In 1971, Boal was arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. An international campaign got him released, and he went into exile — Argentina, then Peru, then Portugal, then Paris. Theatre of the Oppressed was written in exile and first published in Spanish in 1974.

So when Boal writes about catharsis, he is not writing a seminar paper. He is a man who was tortured by a regime that had very strong opinions about which stories the public should consume, asking: what does the dominant model of storytelling actually do to an audience? His answer was forged in Brazil and sharpened in Peru, where he worked with the ALFIN literacy program among people the European canon had never once imagined as an audience, let alone as authors.

It is most important that one understands that these ideas arise from the Global South looking back at an imported canon and asking who it was built to serve. Strip out that context and you’ve got a cute blurb. Leave it in and you got history, the real lived-in history that was living through the consequences of that imported story.

An Accident of Rubble

Now. Aristotle. Why him? Why is a set of lecture notes from the fourth century BC still the load-bearing wall of every screenwriting book, MFA workshop, and studio notes call?

Let’s answer with two Roman buildings.

Everyone knows the Colosseum. It’s the icon of Roman entertainment — the postcard, the movie set, the thing tourists queue for. Almost nobody pictures the Circus Maximus, even though it was vastly bigger and vastly more important to the Roman society.^[2] The Colosseum held maybe 50,000 people; the Circus Maximus held around 150,000 and hosted the chariot races that were the actual center of Roman popular entertainment for centuries. Yeah, the Ben Hur ones. Them.

The Circus was the people’s venue. And today? It’s a grassy field. A nice place to walk a dog. The Colosseum survived — partly stone, partly luck, partly because the Church found uses for it — and so the Colosseum became our idea of Rome. What survives tends to get mistaken for what matters(ed).

Long-time readers will recognize this as the same survivorship-bias argument I’ve made about the Poetics before: we don’t worship Aristotle because he won a debate. There was no debate. There was were fires, a millennium, and a surviving set of notes — preserved by Islamic scholars, adopted by Christian theologians, codified into “rules” by neoclassicists, and now treated like gravity by your MFA workshop.

The Circus Maximus is a lawn with dogshit on it when it was the literal epi-center of an empire.
Draw your own conclusions about what else we’ve mistaken for consensus.

The Poetics is the Colosseum of narrative theory. It wasn’t the only thinking about story in the ancient world — it wasn’t even Aristotle’s complete thinking, since the volume on comedy is lost. But it survived, was preserved and transmitted by Islamic scholars, got baptized by medieval theologians, and then — this is the crucial part — got weaponized by Renaissance and neoclassical critics who took a descriptive text (here is what tragedies tend to do) and made it prescriptive (here is what drama MUST do). The infamous “three unities” that generations of playwrights treated as law? Boal points out they barely exist in Aristotle — the unities are, in his words, no more than a simple suggestion, one not even the Greek tragedians themselves obeyed. Castelvetro and the French Academy invented the rulebook and stamped Aristotle’s name on it. We don’t follow the Poetics because it was right. We follow it because its papyrus got lucky and its afterlife got institutionalized.

Now, of course, Boal is far from alone in noticing this. Matthew Salesses, in Craft in the Real World, argues that “craft” is never neutral — that what we call universal storytelling technique is a set of culturally specific expectations, trained into audiences and enforced by whoever holds power over publication and pedagogy. Jane Alison, in Meander, Spiral, Explode, looks at Aristotle and asks a simple series of obvious questions:
1. Aristotle was writing specifically about plays… even more specifically about tragedies… film, television, video games, radio, the fucking NOVEL hadn’t been invented yet why use these “rules”.

2. Since Aristotle himself uses what he calls “organic unity” borrowed from living creatures why not have structures borrowed from life instead of imposed “logical” cause/effect? She offers waves, spirals, meanders, and networks as shapes nature actually uses, shapes that narrative could use too.

Both humans here are asking Boal’s question from inside the American writing etablishment: who does this structure serve?

Boal asked it from inside a dictatorship forty years before.

His answer is more alarming.

What Catharsis Actually Does

Here is the standard-issue understanding of catharsis, the one you got in school: tragedy arouses pity and fear in the audience and then “purges” those emotions. You watch Oedipus fall, you feel terrible, you cry it out, you leave the theatre cleansed. Catharsis as emotional detox.

Boal read the same text and saw a machine.

Follow his logic, because it’s the heart of the whole book. The tragic hero is admirable — noble, relatable, empathetic. You bond with him. But he has a flaw, a hamartia, and through the mechanics of the plot — peripeteia, anagnorisis, catastrophe^[3] — that flaw is exposed, punished, and renounced. And because you’re empathetically fused with the hero, you (supposedly) experience his error and his punishment vicariously.

You are corrected by proxy.

Boal calls this Aristotle’s “coercive system of tragedy,” and he’s blunt about its function: it is a powerful system of intimidation, and its basic task is the purgation of all antisocial elements from the spectator.

Read that again.

Not the purgation of pity and fear. The purgation of antisocial elements — where “antisocial” means anything that threatens the existing social order. The flaw the tragedy trains you to renounce is, structurally, whatever the society staging the tragedy has decided is deviant. Which — in a theatre funded by the state, performed for the citizenry, curated by the powerful — means the impulse to challenge the state.

Boal’s conclusion is one of the most electric sentences in the book: what gets purged is “something capable of changing society.” A catharsis of the revolutionary impetus is purged from you. Dramatic action substitutes for real action. You stay lethargic.

Sit with that last part, because it’s the twist of the knife. The problem isn’t just that catharsis pacifies. It’s that it pacifies by satisfying. You watched someone struggle against injustice. You felt it. You wept, you cheered, the lights came up — and the feeling of having acted has been delivered to you, so the need to act has been dissolved. The theatre didn’t suppress your revolutionary impulse. It metabolized it. It fed the impulse a fictional meal so the real hunger would pass.

Now, this is only if it actually works… which it doesn’t most of the time… BUT it is a hugely powerful cultural indicator about what is acceptable in society and what is achievable – stories teach you how to be. So, if it IS purging you, it’s purging you of what Boal warns about: any impulse to change the system. This ties directly into what Eugene Nulman is discussing in How Popular Culture Destroys Political Imagination^[4] we can’t imagine the end of Capitalism b/c our stories won’t tell us how to, BUT they are more than happy to show us the end of literally EVERYTHING else instead… (please remember: FUCK your dystopia).

And Boal insists this machine didn’t stay in the amphitheatre. The system appears in disguised forms on television, in the movies, in the theatres — the shapes vary endlessly, but the essence doesn’t: it is designed to bridle the individual, to adjust him to what pre-exists. Every time a story raises a genuinely destabilizing question and then resolves it through the hero’s personal triumph — every time a villain articulates a real critique of the system, and the narrative answers the critique by making the villain also a mass murderer^[5] so we don’t have to think about it anymore — that’s the machine running. (Watch The Legend of Korra with this lens sometime. Season after season, a villain shows up carrying an actual political idea — populism, anarchism, communitarianism — and season after season the idea is discredited by strapping it to a maniac. We keep agreeing with the villains. The show keeps needing us to stop.)

Each era, Boal shows, re-tools the machine for its own ruling class. The Greek aristocracy split the celebration — theatre was once the people singing freely in the open air, a festivity in which everyone could participate — into stage and seats, actors and spectators, protagonists and chorus. Feudal art made characters into walking abstractions (a character literally named Goodness) to teach religious submission. Then the bourgeoisie arrived and pulled its cleverest trick: it took those abstract values and dressed them in trousers. Goodness became John Doe. The exceptional individual — Machiavelli’s man of virtù, the self-made protagonist — replaced the aristocrat, equally separated from the people, a new aristocrat for a new order. And if you’ve ever heard a Producer say a story is “really about the eternal struggle of good versus evil,” congratulations: you’ve heard feudal dramaturgy alive and well and taking meetings.

Hegel poured the philosophical concrete: dramatic action, he insisted, must proceed from personal volition and character, not external conditions — from the inner life of “free men,” men free of material want. Princes, basically. We are still there. Ask yourself: when did the protagonist of your favorite prestige drama last worry about rent? Go to a job that wasn’t the premise? The Hegelian hero doesn’t have material conditions; he has feelings about his destiny only (and never has to have a job or take a shit).

Brecht was the first to seriously flip it — characters, he argued, acquire their characteristics through social life; individual wills matter, but they are never the determining factor of the fundamental dramatic action. Sociology becomes psychology, as Boal compresses it — the social forces get laundered into personal motivation, and the system disappears behind the face. Brecht wanted the system visible again, because a work that shows the world as transformable makes a claim that mere empathy never can. Boal loved Brecht for this.

And then went further, because Brecht still left the audience in their seats.

What Boal Built Instead

This is where the book stops being a critique and becomes a toolbox, and it’s why I want to be clear: Theatre of the Oppressed is not a smart-ass takedown, and neither is this post. Boal is almost sporting about Aristotle — he concedes the coercive system works brilliantly, better than any other, if adjustment to the existing world is what you want. You want to maintain the status quo by all means you got the tool for it. You wanna challenge shit? Change Shit? Maybe look elsewhere.

His argument is simply that it’s not the only poetics, and for the oppressed it’s the wrong one. If you want spectators to transform their society rather than be reconciled to it, you have to build something else.

So he built it. The core invention is the spect-actor — the demolition of the wall the aristocracy put up. In Forum Theatre, a scene of oppression is played; then it’s played again, and any audience member can stop it, take the protagonist’s place, and try a different tactic against the oppression. Not discuss it. Try it.

And for some reason “immersive theater” people think they’ve made something new… UGH.

Surprise, agency in stories wasn’t invented by video games (or Boal either… some other time.)

Boal’s friend George Ikishawa gave him the frame I can’t stop thinking about:

bourgeois theatre is the finished theatre —

the bourgeoisie already knows what its world looks like and presents completed images of it in shapes and beats and forms they already know and comfort them. (Almost ALL of mid-late 20^th century American and British theater.)

I tend to argue that if/when catharsis works it’s just to give the bourgeoisie someplace to express their damn feelings (or experience them at a nice, safe distance; in a nice, safe, dark-ass room and then claim they experienced feelings “in community with others”… utter horseshit).^[6]

Theatre of the Oppressed is the rehearsal, because the oppressed don’t yet know what their world will become. The theatre is a rehearsal for the revolution. In an era this saturated with uncertainty, I’d put it to every storyteller reading this: are you making finished spectacles of a world you’re pretending is settled, or are you making rehearsals?

Status quo?
Challenge to the status quo?

The toolbox overflows.

Newspaper Theatre, developed at Boal’s Arena Theatre: a dozen simple techniques for turning the day’s news into performance — reading an item detached from the propaganda of its layout; crossing two items so each exposes the other; adding the data the ruling-class papers omitted; performing the minister’s austerity speech while the actor devours an enormous dinner.

The Joker system: a magical, omniscient master-of-ceremonies figure who floats above the play, creating and re-creating its reality, speaking directly to the audience — a structural cousin, delightfully, of the chobo in Kabuki, the side narrator who can speak for the actors. (Non-Western theatre had non-Aristotelian machinery all along. Survivorship bias, meet the histories and the cultures you blatantly ignored [or, worse, just didn’t bother to reference in your privileged ignorance].) And a healthy aesthetic chaos as principle: expressionism next to realism next to symbolism in a single evening, because in theatre — I’d say in any art —

any break^[7] stimulates.

And then there’s the nail.

In Lima, working with the ALFIN literacy project, Boal’s teams asked people to answer questions with photographs. Asked what is exploitation?, adults photographed the grocer, the landlord, the government office. A child photographed a nail on a wall. The adults were baffled; the children understood instantly. Boys of five and six shine shoes downtown, and they can’t haul their shine-boxes home each night, so each boy rents a nail on a shop wall to hang his livelihood on — paying the shopkeeper nightly for the privilege.

A crown, an Uncle Sam, a Nixon would have meant nothing to those kids.

The nail meant everything.

Symbols are only as good as the people who get them.

There is no universal grammar of story — there are communities, and what they know, and what has been done to them. That single photograph does more damage to the “timeless universal structure” argument than any chapter on theory ever could.

The Encouraging Part

Now, honesty.

In my notes I wrote, in the margin, that I’m not qualified to analyze all this from a Marxist perspective — and I’m not, and neither are most of us, and that’s fine. You don’t need to accept Boal’s entire political frame to be changed by his central move.

There are places I push back: when he claims Westerns purge the spectator’s aggressive tendencies, I’d add that they also stimulate and titillate them — the machine sells the sin along with the absolution. And when his “breaking repression” technique asks a participant to relive a moment of real oppression and replay it fighting back, I’ll admit my own margin note said I’d be scared to run that exercise — is this therapy theatre? Who’s qualified to hold that room? Boal spent the rest of his life working on exactly that question, which is to his credit, but the vertigo is real and worth naming as too many folkx these days just decide they are “qualified” to be therapists.

Here’s what I want you to take, though — the genuinely liberating part.

Boal is not telling you your three-act structure is evil and you’re a cop for using it. (I am, a little bit. I at least want you to consider that you’re aiding and abetting the cops at least.) He’s telling you it’s a technology with a function, and once you know the function, you finally have a choice.

Empathy, catharsis, the exceptional protagonist, the climactic release — these are levers, and they were engineered to produce reconciliation. Some stories should reconcile. Fine.

But if your story is about injustice and your structure is engineered to metabolize the audience’s response to injustice, you have built a beautiful machine that eats its own point.

And remember Boal’s warning about the artist’s actual job, which he aims at slavish realism but which I’d tattoo on the forehead of half the immersive industry: art is a form of knowledge — the artist is obligated to interpret reality, to make it understandable, and the more art merely reproduces reality, the more useless it becomes. (Every VR project chasing photoreal “presence” as an end in itself: he’s talking to you. He was talking to you in 1974.)

The Poetics was, in Boal’s words, a fetter on the explosive Thespian tradition — a brilliant, historically accidental, institutionally enforced fetter. Theatre began as the people singing freely in the open air. Everything in the West since has been a negotiation over who gets to sing and who has to sit the fuck down in the dark. Boal spent his life giving agency back to people it’d been blatantly stolen from.

I’m asking you take it back even though it was taken from you in the dark of a theater.

Change is imperative.

He said that too.

Okay weird week… the usual one exercise for the peeps, but before the paywall the full announcement that PROMPT: Narrative Resistance V is coming!

Writing Exercises

The Metabolizer Take a story you love that raises a real social problem — inequality, surveillance, exploitation — and trace exactly how the ending makes the problem feel resolved without the world of the story actually changing. Name the mechanism (the villain’s defeat, the hero’s promotion, the wedding). Now outline the version where the personal resolution happens but the systemic problem visibly persists. What does the audience leave carrying? If you don’t have one go back into your past and pick a favorite that does this.

ANNOUNCEMENT! PROMPT IS COMING BACK, I WANT YOU THERE!

I’d like to invite you to PROMPT: Narrative Resistance V, an open space technology gathering on Zoom August 21st: 10am PST; 12pm CST; 1pm EST; 6pm GMT; 7pm CET; 3am AEDT (22nd). The gathering will last as long as it needs and people want it to (but expect 3-4 hours). Please RSVP here! (https://forms.gle/8oZAShkXYq2NuGRa9)

Here are the initial provocations for PROMPT:

Intro/Brief: Jenifer Toksvig Discussing her process “The Copenhagen Interpretation”
And why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Provocations: ‘How is/does agency affect narrative?’

And, as always, ‘How can we get past conflict as the central narrative driver in the West?’
The floor is open for other provocations and not limited to the above.

(I’ll be asking for a 5$/£/€ donation to offset some costs.)

Storytellers, rebels, and visionaries, PROMPT: Narrative Resistance is here! It is time to leave behind the stale conventions that have limited our imaginations for far too long. We’re not just challenging the domination of conflict-driven plots, the restrictive confines of three-act structures, and the worn-out hero’s journey—we’re transcending them. This is your call to creation in the revolution of narrative, where we’re forging a new path towards “visionary fiction” that bends the arc of storytelling towards justice and liberation. We welcome all pioneers doing the work and those ready to unshackle their creativity and reimagine worlds where healing trumps conflict, where new voices rise, and where the strength of our relationships fuel change. At PROMPT, we’re not just rewriting stories; we’re reauthoring reality itself. Remember, the stories we tell shape who we become—so let’s craft tales that birth cultural innovators, not cautionary cool. It’s time to challenge our imaginations, unleash limitless liberation, walk and share countless paths—please join us in reshaping the narrative landscape.

Jenifer Toksvig:
For our 20 minute opener: the amazing contributor to this community (and the human I always get feedback like, “I’m so glad I met/talked to her! after every PROMPT) is the fantastic
Jen Toksvig who will discuss her process The Copenhagen Interpretation and why story is the least important thing in storytelling!

Bio:

Jenifer Toksvig gathers ideas and people, and crafts story worlds and artefacts. She believes that access support needs are situational, and that barriers to access are more complex and far broader than the typically considered disability conditions. Her theatre making process, The Copenhagen Interpretation, is therefore designed to be responsive to the individual, and from moment to moment. Her work manifests as theatre, games, novels, and handcrafted objects.

Okay, my paid subs… the other exercises and footnotes are below!

Read more

Something deeply seismic is/has/has been occurring in my life as of late.

My god-damn favorite band of all time is back on tour after we all assumed they were 1000% done. Now, this doesn’t seem like a surprise for most of you reading this as we live in an age of endless “farewell-cash-grab^[1]” tours from legacy acts.

But RUSH is different.

Why?

Because they’ve pulled off what has seemed impossible:

They are aging, cis-het, white dude artists that have done everything correctly^[2].

See, I have a bit of a problem with most of my artistic heroes/people I admired that fit the above description… almost all of them have NOT done everything correctly and, frequently, have done inexcusable and criminal things against women (or at best cringe things) or just won’t keep their fuckin’ mouths shut and continue to insert their foots^[3] deep in their pie-holes.

Here’s a very partial list:
John Cleese
Garrison Keillor
Neil Gaiman
Frank Miller
Warren Ellis
Dennis Leary
William Shatner
Quentin Tarantino
Junot Diaz (not white but still)
Terry Gilliam (sad two Pythons are on this list)
Richard Dawkins
George RR Martin
Joseph Campbell
Russel Brand
Louis C K
Stephen Fry
[Now dead older comedian that informed a lot of my core beliefs for years and never did or “said” anything utterly objectionable^[4], just aged into a desperate apathy that I can’t condone]^[5]

Christ it never stops…

OR

My artistic heroes of the same description age… and then… kill themselves.
Again, a partial list:
Robin Williams
Spaulding Gray
David Foster Wallace (I didn’t even read him but he counts as he was “around”)
Brad Delp
Chester Bennington
Tony Scott
Chris Cornell
Hunter S. Thompson
Bill Hicks (didn’t officially kill himself but basically smoked himself to death)

Now, a lot of those peeps in both those lists weren’t foundational to me and their fuck ups are mostly just more proof that men are scum^[6] and serve to compound the feeling that I’m aging alone in my art and my politics and my attempt at living an ethical life identifying as a male.

But some really stabbed me in the heart^[7].

HOWEVER.

THERE IS LIGHT.

Because…

RUSH (Geedy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart) is foundational to me and my development.
And they’ve been beacons of artistic, ethical (mainly in the sense of conducting oneself and making moves in the artistic world), and personal joy.

Then Jan 7^th 2020 came around.

The day I found out that Neil Peart, their drummer and lyricist died (of brain cancer; not his own hand) I said, out loud;
“I just lost my Dad again.^[8]”

Not an exaggeration… why?

As I grew up Catholic but wrestling directly with it most of the way I hit on some artists that, literally, solidified my morality and buttressed my thinking.

To be clear here, SO DID MY PARENTS.
They were awesome, but ya gotta see more than that out in the world for reinforcement and encouragement that your worldview is worth fighting for. Well, I went looking for it at least.

And I found it.

Here’s a list of works/peeps responsible for, well, early ME.
They are what I call “my pillars”.

They helped shape my morality, personality, and interests^[9]
(in the order they entered my life):
Sesame Street/The Muppets: Jim Henson [the first artistic hero I lost that I had to grieve]
Star Wars: George Lucas
X-Men/Wolverine (comics): Chris Claremont (the writer): Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Terry Austin, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr., Marc Silvestri, Frank Miller (the artists)
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (books at first): Douglas Adams [the next one that really hurt]
Robotech (TV): Carl Macek (basically)
Akira (film): Katshuhiro Otomo

And from the music world:
RUSH
(and a band called King’s X… but they are a WHOLE other story)

Like a lot of magical things; I can not tell you when or how they entered my life.
I do seem to remember somewhere around age 8 or so someone waving around an LP of 2112 with the “red star” on it (as the fans call it)… I called it what it is…

A GLORIOUS PENTAGRAM!

But I don’t even know if I heard the album that specific day.

The main way they entered my life was their 1987 album “Hold Your Fire” and the tour for that album was the second concert I ever saw.^[10]

I haven’t missed a tour since (okay, OKAY, I missed fucking ONE for “Snakes & Arrows” and I’ll never forgive myself). I’ve seen them the most of any band at 11 times (with one more due in London in ’27 to make my nice even dozen)^[11].

Okay, why are RUSH so important outta the list of humans I’ve made up there?

And why did I consider Neil Peart… a freakin’ drummer, so important to me

(aka: Seriously, what’s up with the Dad thing)?

Gonna go list again, sorry:

1. They are virtuosos of their instruments and make the most complicated yet accessible music I’ve ever heard. They clearly work hard at being good and they never hide that work^[12].

2. When I saw them in ’87 I’d just started to explore performing and when they took the stage after MSG (The Macauly-Schenker Group which consisted of some seriously credited road musicians) they were so fucking comfortable up there that it made what the opener was doing with their bodies almost laughable.
Their presence was arresting and the performance was so damn engaged and they seemed at home on stage.

3. This is a band with something on their minds, and they write music directly about what it is they are interested in: be that Necromancers, Individualism, Libertarianism (shut up, I know, I’ll address it and it is a KEY point of why I love them… big hint it’s NOT THE LIBERTARIANISM), Growing old, Performing, Weather (not kidding they have at least three songs about/mention weather phenomenon), Black Holes, Tolkien, Death, Love, and even, *gasp* Relationships^[13].

Most importantly:

4. They have always, ALWAYS followed their interests and embraced CHANGE in their musical style and their artistic expression without reservation and then TALKED ABOUT THAT EXACT FACT.
They always managed to be additive without denigrating their previous work.

All their output was THEM without apology, without hesitation, without rose-colored glasses, without “Oh this was the best time”, without hurting themselves or others in their process, without ever talking down to their fanbase…

SIDEBAR: Okay the band have been guilty of parroting the always bullshit idea that there were never any women at Rush shows. Women have been fans from the beginning, it was just bullshit gatekeeping by critics and geeks and nerds who were proud to be a bit misogynistic. At least on Rush’s part this was always mentioned in a self-deprecating way to separate themselves from the “concerns” of most rock-and-roll bands of Sex, Drugs, and Rock-and-Roll machismo bullshit. However, it happened at the erasure of the women presenting fans of the band and that sucks and reeks of gatekeeping^[14].

5. Peart was not just their drummer he was their lyricist. Now being the readery type I am lyrics matter to me (most of the time) and there was no other band singing about #3 like they were.
The lyrics were political, literate, quotidian, fantastical, questioning, science-based, curious, statements, epic, complex, simple, restless, and, above all, meaningful.

There is meaning (or the search for meaning) in almost every, single Rush track that Peart was on^[15].

Make some sense?

Alrighty now I’m gonna list the things they’ve done “right” for this, the last portion of their career… the surviving two members are in their 70’s so, yeah this is the twilight for them.

1. Peart was/is literally considered one of the best (if not the GOAT) of rock/prog-rock drummers. And when he died Alex and Geddy took the appropriate amount of time to not only mourn him but take stock of their careers in beautiful ways. And when an appropriate amount of time passed and they decided they not only wanted to tour again to play this music that they created and built their lives around they announced they wanted that tour to honor Neil.

AND THEN

2. They hired Anika Niles.
A female German jazz-fusion drummer not many in the rock world had heard of.
Why? Because she’s the best damn fit for the job.
She was the drummer Neil was trying to become as he aged.^[16]

This in the age of the outrage-internet was quietly bold. (And a wonderful acknowledgement that the SIDEBAR was no longer in play.)

And it was SUCH the right, classy move.

3. The tributes to Neil inside the concert are phenomenal. Touching voice recordings of Neil talking about why and what music always meant to him AND how expressing himself as an artist with integrity was always the point. Lovely visuals over some of my favorite heart-felt tracks played live was incredible.

4. THEN oh, lord THEN not only did they feature Anika dead center upstage exactly where Neil would play, they brought out (for the first four shows) Amiee Mann, the only other woman associated with the group as a back up singer for one of their minor “hits” Time Stands Still, which was supported by another Niel montage. Why does this matter?

Because then this tour’s message became crystal clear:
This was not only a celebration of their music and their fallen friend, but of everyone who ever contributed to the band as a performer.

5. Which was then brought home during the encores where they paid tribute to their first drummer John Rutsy who played on their very first album which broke them in the US.

This tour is a celebration of the ARTISTS who made this amazing stuff (including Alex and Geddy, ofc).

Seriously, that’s just the stuff they got right for this tour to emotionally honor their friend and bandmate and all the artistry and hard work of their work.

I’m gonna end on one last thing they got so damn right by addressing the above libertarianism phase they went through.

As cringe as it is to say that, yes, 2112 has this liner note:
With acknowledgement to the genius of Ayn Rand

And that Peart has gone on record as calling himself:
A libertarian

A try-a-terian (meaning all it takes is effort and trying and you can do ‘anything’… all sorts of privilege shining through there)

A bleeding-heart libertarian

He softened that shit and frequently spoke up about privilege and the needs for social safety nets like public health care. And he did it in his ART.

2112 is no doubt a simplified objectivist screed against collectivism and can easily be seen as a musical rendering of Randian self-reliance and anti-collectivism^[17].

BUT

Their last album Clockwork Angels’s explicit themes — the virtue of balance, the idea that extremes of either order or chaos are equally undesirable, the nature of life and death, the purpose of imagination, and freedom (including the freedom to fail) — read almost like Peart directly answering his own younger self telling him to put the Rand down.

And THAT, that public, artistic, categorical, undeniable GROWTH is what I love about him and this amazing band and all the things they,

THANK THE FUCKING GODS

got (and continue to get) RIGHT.

I fucking love RUSH.

PS: They’re funny too.

Onto the exercises…

Answering Your Younger Self

The core here is the 2112 → Clockwork Angels arc — an artist who, near the end of his career, wrote a work that structurally rebuts the work that made him famous, without disowning it. Peart never issued a press release renouncing Rand; he wrote a novel-album where both the Watchmaker AND the Anarchist are traps. The recantation happened in the art.

Take a piece of your own early work — a script, a story, a scene, even an old blog post — that contains a belief you no longer fully hold. Now write a short new piece (1–2 pages) set in the same world, or using the same structure, that answers it.

The rule: no character may state the correction directly. The younger work’s thesis must be complicated purely through what happens, not through anyone announcing that the old idea was wrong.

Bonus difficulty: keep something from the original that you still believe. Growth isn’t demolition.

Reflective question: What was harder — finding the flaw in your old work, or resisting the urge to have someone in the new piece deliver the verdict out loud?

Read more

Pick a piece of your work you’re proud of. Now trace it back. Not the big influences — your heroes, the writers you worship. The actual mechanics: the sentence you built that way because you read someone who built sentences that way; the structural choice that came from a show you watched; the image that’s a faint echo of a line you read at…

Read more

And in the air of transparency/stats/for the curious: last time I looked at my total number of subs it was 2,401 before the previous post and now its (as of me posting this) 2,384; a loss of 17 subs (none paid thus far). Now, to be clear, I lose subs EVERY POST anywhere between 2-20 a post anyway. So, well, while certainly on the high side (and last week’s post oddly has a bit less than normal views so maybe it’s high?) not the apocalypse (yet) that was foretold (by me).

Let’s see how it keeps rolling though THIS week as I get into more details/thoughts on peeps coming for artists for using this tool.

(Just as last week, I’ll do a separate post for paid subs so everyone can comment on this if they wish to… so all the footnotes [usually reserved for paid subs only] will be available to everyone.)

S.T.G.O.O.T.W.F
(Shit to get out of the way first)
1. Obviously, anyone/any artist using AI to generate work whole-cloth and putting their name to it without crediting AI is NOT what I’m defending here:

I define that practice something like this:
“Hey, AI, write me a play/novel/short-story/script/whatever that is like [A] and/or [B] with [these elements] and [these themes] with [these characters] going on [this journey] and make sure [this happens] and [that happens].” (Or some version of that.)
And then they publish that, unedited/unadulterated/unchanged as their art… that to me isn’t art (or at least their art) it’s a “producer” (the supposed writer in this example) working with a “writer” and claiming the output as their own.

And there’s a loooong history of legal and copyright battles to draw from to say this isn’t the Producer’s work. To me there’s no difference between that and a human Producer “hiring” a writer with similar (if not exactly the same) parameters and then crediting themselves as the “writer”. Seriously, we’ve already got rules for this problem^[1].

“What about feeding it an outline!” you cry… yeah, I’ll cover that below^[2]… so wait a horny-toad minute, will ya?!?

(These next two are from last week’s post but too important not to include here [I’ve adjusted them somewhat.])

2. I am not dumb or ignorant, nor right-wing nutties that do not know the consequence of AI’s environmental impact. I believe that this tool is something that needs refinement and, preferably to be nationalized at every level. If that can not happen then it needs to be regulated to the fuckin’ teeth to help avoid calamity.

Please recall that every major leap in tech causes social and environmental harm: the plough, railroads, the cotton gin, the telegraph (yes, putting in wires was calamitous), rockets, recording music^[3], the internet, cell towers, and the big-ass grand-daddy of them all: Nuclear. And, of course, that’s an incomplete list.

Now I’m not a progress-for-progress sake human, however, I do believe in the use of science, social-mechanisms/pressures, shared fear of mutually-assured-destruction as mitigating factors. These factors do not happen unto themselves, they need desperate and intense human forces to make an impact for the mitigation to be functional, and I believe those forces are being applied to AI… and the real enemy here is

ALWAYS CAPITALISM

and its levers and functions to make these advances only MONETARILY benefit the 1% (in general^[4]). (Maybe more on this below.)

3. I DO NOT IGNORE THE FACT THAT AI IS BUILT ON STOLEN LAND^[5]

and that the colonizers are doing colonizer things and selling it back to us, its creators.

That sucks.

It does not mitigate its myriad of uses for the progression of my art and my thinking; just as living and working on stolen land doesn’t destroy the legitimacy of my work and/or my art.

Nor does it prevent me from speaking out against the act of stealing, advocating for the stolen-from, nor advocating for regulation/nationalization/reparations/enforcement where it’s appropriate.

Now.

You believe that’s possible or not.
I get that you might not.

Onward.

Okey-doke with those outta the way…

Let’s start with:

1. Ghostwriters and Co-Authors
YES, I KNOW THEY’RE PAID (most of the time).

You may or may not know that some of the most popular authors of all time (by output and monetary rankings) didn’t write all their shit.

Here’s a partial list: Alexander Dumas (yeah, the Three Musketeers human), RL Stine, James Patterson, Danielle Steel, Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, the Nancy fuckin’ Drew series, every celebrity book anything (for the most part).

Instead of falling into a snarky, “Why don’t you call these people out and insist that they ‘expose’ their co-authorship” argument let’s just stay with the idea that leads us into my next point…

A’int nobody do it alone.

2. No one and everyone has said: “All art is thievery it’s just bad thieves deserve to get caught.”1

If you don’t want to stand on the idea that all authors are recycling, working with/working through their inspirations and heroes, and, YES, outright “stealing” from them… then I don’t think you’ve been in any creative endeavor for very long.

Is this cynical? Nah, I don’t think it is.

As it’s the fuckin’ PROCESS.

And, yeah, AI is now a part of that process that allows artists a higher rate of churn to get to, as Miles calls it out in this one of my other favorite phrases/mis-quotes on art of all time:
“It took me a long time to sound like myself.”

And that’s MILES muther-fuckin’ DAVIS often heralded as one of the most pioneering, original musicians TO EVER HAVE LIVED.

If that human can admit that aping and imitating and, yes, that “stealing” is part of the process I don’t see why it’s even an issue.

If you only have respect for artists who somehow arrive fully formed before you believe they’re worth your time, money, and attention… welp, that’s your deal and you’re entitled to it.

And.

BEFORE you say it… of course there’s a difference between practicing to sound like your heroes (or stealing from them) and asking AI to rip them completely off (which isn’t directly possible any more^[6])… might I suggest you see the S.T.G.O.O.T.W.F. section above about how I believe AI is to be used in an artist’s process.

Speaking of which… here’s my main argument…

3. Allow me to rope in another rather heralded artist of her time: Anne Bogart. If you hate this process go yell at Anne Bogart for “not being a director” as she, herself, directly stated in a room that I was actually in that she’s not a director; that she’s an editor… (REMINDER: I’m NOT speaking for Ms. Bogart when it comes to her stance on AI… I have zero idea what that is). Hold on, it’s gonna make sense in a ‘mo.

For those who aren’t familiar with the bulk of Ms. Bogart’s output, she was one of the lauded Artistic Directors of the now defunct SITI company and still acknowledged as one of the premiere theater and opera directors in America. She’s also influenced a generation of artists as a professor of directing at Columbia University (and ran SITI company’s month long workshops [which is where I was taught directly by her and was in the aforementioned room]) NOT to mention SITI influencing a good number of American theater training programs across the US.

She’s primarily known for making popular a form of devised theater through her interpretations of Viewpoints. She was awarded a life-time achievement OBIE award.

She’s a badass.

As she worked with her company for over 25 years on devised work (some of which she outsourced to us her students on the SITI company’s summer workshops btw, not just the company itself) she came to think of herself as an editor of information that flowed in front of her/was presented to her, not as a director per se.

Starting to see where this joins up with the argument?

Here, I’ll spell it out:

In my opinion, working with AI buffs is one’s ability to EDIT your work/your thoughts/your opinions/your output.2

Now if you hold the sacred idea that an artist creates everything on their own in some isolated tower/cave/room this will not jive with you. However, if one expands their understanding on how art is created one begins to see with much greater clarity on how it is one’s ability to edit the information flowing through/towards/into/outta one’s self that actually creates the art.

THEREFORE

AI is just another stream of that information that you must edit to get to soundin’ a bit like yourself; just like editing your heroes/influences/experiences/inputs/outputs in your own work.

Now.

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Every movement/cultural conversation needs all people’s of all intents/purposes/angles/tactics to get anywhere; to pierce culture.

You need the militants, the apologists, the capo-cooperators, the moderates, the “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-alongs”, and everything in between. Where you sit (and what you do about it) is what counts.

It is my opinion those who militantly spend their time attacking/shaming the artists who are making use of the tech are wasting their precious time and energy. Attack and shame the politicians for being in the pockets of big tech; attack and shame the billionaire profiteers making the profits; attack and shame institutions who are not doing their jobs vis a vis regulation and nationalization.

Purity-testing or shaming artists for using another tool to get their jobs done don’t seem like one is utilizing one’s time well due to^[7]… everything laid out above.

But you do you.
I’ll do me.

And I’ll see ya on the other side.

PS: just for giggles I’m gonna throw this in: I don’t use AI this way but I’ve been told countless times directly from peeps who do use it this way that I think it’s relevant to mention. (Though this point falls outside the scope of the “art-based” arguments I made up above.)

Here’s things modern life requires of us now to structurally to function: emails, texts, a lot of forms of written communication as we are remote quite a bit (seriously if you don’t believe this or you think you can just “go off grid” and still function in society… good fuckin’ luck).

Who that leaves out (or makes life insanely more complex for): most peeps with ADHD, dyslexics, any form of written communication disorder or attention disorder, and neurodivergent learners.

I’m not gonna bother with numbers… I think we all know by now that there’s HEAPS of folkx who deal with this.

You know what helps these people function better in society?

Yeah, you do… AI.

You know what that makes AI?
Not a ‘helpful tool’ or something that ‘makes life easier’: it’s an Accessibility Tool.

So, yeah, it is not a stretch to say attacking people for using AI is an ableist argument at its core, and I do not think you get to cherry pick and say, “Well for these people it’s okay and for these others it isn’t.” As we don’t do that for say, curb-cuts or elevators or subtitles/captions or screen readers… the list goes on.

It’s early days and the what, the who, the whys, the hows are all being worked out.

Come at me bro!

Or, ya know.

Don’t? or do? Why not?

Them’s my thoughts.

Hope ya stay around.

Hey, just realized…

Ironically?

Appropriately?
None of this was written with the help of AI.
HA! That’s funny!

See?

See?

Wait… what does that even mean?

Fuck if I know…

Next week, back to the “usual” stuff!

^[1] And YES, I have had direct experience with that particular issue in the film biz a LOT… beyond the simple write for hire contract stuff.

^[2] SPOILER ALERT: as you’ll find for most of this post if the human does NOTHING with the AI output… I have issues, but if they then edit it and rewrite the output… I generally have no issue… however, yeah, how detailed the outline is matters. What that line is? I got no real idea but’s I feel’s it to be relevant, so it is.

^[3] YUP check it out for yourself.

^[4] ‘In general’ as sometimes the tech does create a swath of middle-class jobs for the ‘minor-elite’ let’s call them allowing some money to be spread around but there seems to be enough evidence now that it really only increases wealth inequality on a bubble/cyclical cycle. So real generational wealth is still only concentrating in the 1%. To be clear… I’m now one of those ‘minor-elite’ classes due to the damn hard work and general bad-assedness of my partner using her formidable mind to go from last-generation Communist Romania to where we are now.

^[5] Mad props to Mihir Pathak of AntiTech whose line this is which I will be using until the endtimes (and crediting them with until then as well).

^[6] Well, directly any way… you can’t put in, “give me a script that sounds like X or Y person” or an image “in the style of X or Y person”. OFC there’s way around this but let’s not pretend steps haven’t already been made.

^[7] Eventually I’m gonna tackle the New Luddite Movement in all its various glories/botches/stupidities/possible wins… but I’ll not muddy the waters just yet.

Pick a post you’ve written recently (published, or just drafted). Go through it line-by-line and mark every section—every paragraph, every sentence, every phrase—that came from:

• Your brain, typed directly

• Your brain, but revised/reshaped mid-writing

• Someone else’s input (feedback, research, quotes, inspiration)

• A tool (spellcheck, Grammarl…

Read more

I’ve been wanting to post a stack entitled “Why attacking artists for using AI is a waste of your time” for a while now… seriously it’s number 8 on the Excel spreadsheet of ideas I keep for this stack out of what is now 156 rows long (with 48 being used with some posts not even coming off the spreadsheet - for those stat lovin’ kidz out there^[1]).

I was ready to take the unsubbing even posting that (which this post will cover), but I suspect it’ll even be worse when I tell you these things:

1. I live in an AI driven household, meaning: my partner is the AI lead for a large multi-national (and their head of Innovation);

2. I use Claude a lot in my everyday to assist me in thinking and research

3. I use Claude for this stack to assist me in thinking and research and occasional first assembly drafts based on outlines/thoughts/theories

Ah, the holy *pings* of the unsubs… au revoir, my dears, au revoir…

For those still kindly around, I’ll continue…

To be clear… this a’int no apology. My household and my career for the last decade has survived on storytelling in high-tech spaces. Metaverse, videogames, VR, XR, immersive theater, and yup, AI. I make zero apologies for that. My current bailiwick includes using my research and reading and my overall work to assist in finding better structures that fit in those technologies.

That includes using those technologies or I would be a hypocrite.

In fact to drive the finalé nail-y in ye olde coffiné:

My current day-job is critiquing pitch-deck output for an AI company.

I will now detail out #3 from the list above.

It is never a guarantee how I use Claude^[2] in the posts.

Sometimes I feed it my mere thoughts and outlines,

sometimes I drop in the ideas found on the spreadsheet augmented into basic trains of thought,

sometimes it fetches some research for me that I then check to make sure it a’int made up,

sometimes I’ve written a draft and I put it in for checking and sideways thoughts I didn’t come up with and

sometimes I ask it for first drafts based on any or all the above that I rewrite into the final piece

A guaranteed major use case I use it for is the book reviews, not for the review itself, but to organize what I call my “notes” on the book itself… here’s what one of those “notes” looks like:

I wrote some of these “notes” a few years ago and even after reading them I really, really fuckin’ appreciate the help of Claude/AI to go through and organize what are my immediate reactions to the text into a basic prose structure. I then edit this and really mold my thoughts into final, realized form.

Sometimes I also have it fetch other peep’s reviews (in light of my own notes and thinking) to help clarify and highlight the good (sometimes the bad) stuff I believe I’ve found in the book. I then go read those reviews myself. Always. (And credit them if I/Claude pull stuff, ofc.)

Here’s the place where it’s used on just about every post now:

I always ask it for first drafts on the exercises.
I always, always edit those exercises for clarity and relevance, but to be honest that’s where Claude does the heavy lifting for me. I’m a clever, well-read thinker and teacher, but three relevant exercises a week my ADHD brain cannot handle.

Writing in prose is tough for this mind who was mostly reared/trained on writing dialogue for plays and films. So after prosing my brains out, it’s Claude to the rescue for the exercises as I can’t see the post for the stress-induced-headache.

Now go forth and comb through the stack for Claude speak vs Morrison speak… love to see what you come up with.

You still here?
It is appreciated.

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If is not gonna stay… hey, your call.

And that’s it.

That’s all I’ll say directly related to this ‘stack and how I use AI in making this thing a weekly thing (which it wouldn’t be without AI’s assistance, FOR SURE).

Onto the next thing that will lose me subs… why I think this AI biz is a “purity test” for artists right now.

FIRST OF ALL
Please: I (and my partner) are not dumb, ignorant, nor right-wing nutties that do not know the consequence of AI’s environmental impact. I shall not speak for her, but I believe that this tool is something that needs refinement and, preferably to be nationalized at every level. If that can not happen then it needs to be regulated to the fuckin’ teeth to help avoid calamity.

HOWEVER

It is here and useful and I use it thoughtfully… I don’t use it to answer dumb searchable questions, I don’t use it to “have conversations”, I have no relationship to it (I certainly do not refer it with a human-associated pronoun). I use it as a tool for my thinking and my writing. To do otherwise, particularly in my line of work and relationship would be rather foolish.

NOR DO I IGNORE THE FACT THAT AI IS BUILT ON STOLEN LAND^[3]

and that the colonizers are doing colonizer things and selling it back to us, its creators.

That sucks.

It does not mitigate its myriad of uses for the progression of my art and my thinking just as living and working on stolen land doesn’t destroy the legitimacy of my work and/or my art.
Nor does it prevent me from speaking out against the act of stealing, advocating for the stolen-from, nor advocating for regulation/nationalization/reparations/enforcement where it’s appropriate.

Now. You believe that’s possible or not.
I get that you might not.

Down go the subs.

Fair.

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Now I don’t claim to say I’ve heard every argument, I’m certain I have not, what I am fuckin’ sick of is the SAME arguments that are not acknowledging some of the following or what I see as reality moving forward.

Okey-dokey, my arti-chokies… onto what the original post was gonna be:

You Are Wasting Your Time Yelling At Artists Who Use AI

Here’s why.

Next week.

Sorry for the bait and switch… still sick… still jetlagged and don’t wanna get too far behind in the schedule.

And since this is a hot-button topic that peeps wanna talk/yell about, I’ll do a separate post just for paid subs so all peeps can comment here. (Yeah, weird that when I do a paid post Substack turns off comments… pisses me off… but ahh, well.)

^[1] I add to the bottom as things come up, although there is a list of books to review that I just track with an asterisk when it is unread/unprocessed and the asterisk goes away when it’s ready for review… there’s 17 finished books waiting to be reviewed, 10 reviewed, and four left with asterisks. Sheesh, books, eh?

^[2] I used GPT a bunch first but when they became govt’ shills I jumped ship almost entirely, I certainly cancelled my subscription… I only occasionally ref it now as a counterpoint if needed, which is, I’d say, rarely.

^[3] Mad props to Mihir Pathak of AntiTech whose line this is which I will be using until the endtimes (and crediting them with until then as well).

PUPPIES

See ya’ll next week.

There is a version of the superhero story — and the whodunit — that has been so thoroughly industrialized, so completely optimized for quarterly IP delivery, that it no longer holds anything resembling a surprise^[1]. You know this version. The villain monologues before they are defeated. The detective/smartest person in the room (usually man^[2]) reveals everything in a drawing room or a warehouse or an airport hangar and then the credits roll and it’s all forgotten about 10 minutes later.

Endless procedurals shoveling murder at us for forgettable entertainment^[3].

Empty structures fulfilling their lionized promise: story on demand.

Four-quadrant, lowest-common-denominator spreadsheet wonderment.

Spitting out adherence to cultural norms and training us all to parrot Western ideals and norms. Okay, okay I’ll stop…

but ya’ll know that’s the entire point of this ‘stack, yeah?

Okay, okay, you know. Ya’ll’s is smart folx.

However.

Right now, two things are being genuinely interesting while using and subverting those norms. Daredevil: Born Again, and Rian Johnson’s Blanc trilogy — Knives Out (2019), Glass Onion (2022), and Wake Up Dead Man (2025) — are both slipped in as entertainment while doing something considerably more ambitious.

They look like heroic entertainment.

They wear the costumes of heroic entertainment.

And then, quietly, they refuse to behave like it.

Let me start with Daredevil, because what’s been accomplished there is something that Marvel — the MCU in particular — has almost completely failed to do with any other property: build a genuine superhero/supervillain rivalry that repeats yet continues to offer new depths of character and resonance.

Overall, the superhero filmed media genre has a villain problem, and it’s structural. The format demands a new threat every season/film, a new Big Bad, generally a new existential stake. The villain shows up, the villain is defeated (killed or whisked off somewhere/imprisoned in SUPER-prison) so definitively that they can’t return. This is how you get an entire cinematic universe that is nominally about consequence and yet features almost no consequences that accumulate. Thanos snaps his fingers, everyone comes back. Loki dies, then appears in a spin-off.

What you never get is two characters who are genuinely, philosophically opposed and who are forced to keep returning to each other across years of story because neither of them can win cleanly. What you never get is something that looks like a rivalry.

SIDEBAR: [Hey, weird new feature here. This would usually be a footnote, but this seems too important for comics-lite writers to miss so… sidebar.]

This is one of the great gulfs between comic books as a printed medium and comic books as filmed media. Comic books as a printed media were/are absolutely, structurally, inescapably built UPON rivalries. Each superhero desperately wanted/needed/had/have/has a dark mirror or ultimate adversary.

Batman has The Joker.

Spiderman has the Green Goblin.

Wolverine has Sabertooth.

Trust me these motherfukas are always gonna come back no matter what goes down.
There are various reasons for this, mostly the fact that these never-ending IPs (some now going on 70-80+ years) are never, EVER coming to anything resembling a conclusion (do to capitalistic forces [and/or as some say]) basic, rooted structural underpinnings of the genre.

So, I have been a bit surprised when the MCU (even in the TV shows) just jettisoned this aspect completely^[4].

Until Daredevil.

Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk have been doing this since 2015. Across the original Netflix run^[5] and now two seasons of Born Again, Daredevil and the Kingpin have fought, each winning partial victories, each losing things they can’t recover, and each have been fundamentally changed by the other.

The Netflix series did something brilliant, it established the terms of the rivalry in moral rather than merely physical language: Fisk sees New York as a place to be owned, Murdock sees it as a place to served. This is not just superhero ideology. This is a genuine disagreement about what cities are for, about whether power is a tool or an end, about what you owe the place that made you and your place within it. Not to mention what effect you leave on it. And then had the sense to make all that personal to the characters.

Two seasons of Born Again have widened that argument from something very present in the comics leading to the elevation of the show. Fisk is now Mayor of New York. The man who used to be the crime boss of Hell’s Kitchen is now running the city through electoral legitimacy rather than intimidation, which is a distinction that turns out not to matter as much as you’d think.^[6]

SIDEBAR THE SECOND: Look, I started this as a nacent widdle-baby-post-of-an-idea to parallel the obvious, heinous reality that this is all what’s exactly happened in the US with Orange Cheeto In Charge… but that’s, well, all one needs to say on the subject, yes? So onto more of the writing stuff…

Murdock is fighting an enemy who has achieved the ultimate villain upgrade: institutional authority which provides the ever-useful plausible deniability and manipulating the bureaucracy of “Whoops we broke it/stole it/crime’d it. Please, by all means open an investigation… in the meantime we’ll continue to reap the benefits and, just-so-youze-know we’ll be over here breaking/stealing/crimeing^[7] all these OTHER things while ya’ll ‘good governance your way through all our breaking/stealing/crimeing.^[8]”

What makes this work — what makes it different from every other superhero filmed media piece — is time and cost and what the shows chose to focus on with said time and cost.

Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio have been playing these characters for over a decade now. The performances are lived-in in a way that no amount of craft can manufacture quickly. D’Onofrio’s Fisk has always been one of the most textured villain performances in the genre: a man of broken tenderness and absolute ruthlessness who is not playing at either, and whose love for Vanessa is not a weakness that the hero will eventually exploit but a real thing that coexists within his capacity for violence. And that love is returned and earned from Vanessa. She’s never retconned into a simpering battered woman. She’s his god-damned equal in ruthlessness and affection. We stan Vannessa… which is of course why they reverse fridge her ass. But at least she got to be a full character first and her death didn’t make the show terrible even if her death is still in the context of giving us more clarity, motivation, and emotional depth to Fisk.

Still.

Woulda’ appreciated it if she’d lived.

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Cox’s Murdock is a man who goes to confession not as a character beat but as a genuine expression of Catholic guilt and Catholic stubbornness, a man who keeps choosing the mask not because he enjoys it but because he can’t stop. Due to addiction? Responsibility? Ego? Thrill-Seeking? Yes, to all those things and more.

These are adults in crisis, not action figures – but, for certain, cranked up to operatic 11 levels of, what my Maryland born aunties would call, “The Drhaaaaama.^[9]”

The current seasons — specifically the arc where Fisk’s power has expanded into legitimate governance — are doing something pointed about this moment. (Okay indulge me here.)

Here is a man whose entire apparatus of corruption has been laundered into electability.

Here is a man who uses the rhetoric of law and order to dismantle the conditions that make safety possible for the most vulnerable people in the city.

Born Again is not subtle about this.

But because the show is fundamentally about whether a blind Catholic lawyer in a red devil suit can stop him, the politics land differently than they would in a prestige drama with no costumed characters and some wounded lawyer with a gambling addiction and a snarky teen-aged daughter that secretly loves him to bits.

The costume is a permission structure.

It lets the show be about power and corruption and institutional betrayal without the audience feeling lectured at, because there’s also a guy getting punched through a wall.
IT’S ALSO ABOUT TRUMP^[10].

Okay. Sorry. That’s the last time I swear.

This is the oldest trick in genre fiction and it still works every single time. The genre wrapper allows the content to comment and comment and comment. Whether that’s on the current moment or a human ill that has plagued us since time immemorial.^[11]

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Rian Johnson has understood this completely, and the Blanc trilogy is the most consistent proof of it currently running.

What Knives Out (2019) understood was that the whodunit’s classic mechanics — the sealed room, the finite suspect pool, the brilliant detective who sees what others don’t — were designed by and for a very specific class of people, and that the person who actually knows what happened in a rich family’s manor should never be a clever rich person. It is the immigrant housekeeper.

Marta Cabrera is the most honest person in the room shown by having a body that physically rejects lying, by caring about Harlan Thrombey not as a source of inheritance but as a person she was paid to keep alive. The Thrombey family is a portrait of liberal American entitlement — politically vocal, spiritually hollow, sustained entirely by money they feel entitled to because they’ve convinced themselves they earned it.^[12] Knives Out is a film about the oppressed other navigating the spaces of the powerful, and the detective — Blanc — is less the protagonist than the instrument through which Marta’s virtue is made visible.

Glass Onion (2022) kept the stakes at the class level but raised the target: now it’s tech-bro wealth, Silicon Valley utopianism as a front for pure narcissism, the way that money accumulates around the performance of intelligence rather than actual intelligence. Miles Bron is famous for being “a disruptor” and he is also, at bottom, just a man who stole something from his friend and built an empire on it.

The film’s central argument — that genuine intellectual achievement is not the same thing as the social capital we assign to it, that the people who get rich off ideas are frequently not the people who had the ideas — is not a subtle argument, but it’s the right one for the moment it was made in, which is the moment when the tech industry had thoroughly captured the cultural imagination as a site of genuine genius and continues to do so.

The film’s formal trick, the way it withholds and then restores narrative information, is thematically integrated: you can only see what really happened when you stop being dazzled by the performance of the man at the center of the room.

And then there is Wake Up Dead Man (2025), which is the most ambitious of the three and, in some ways, the hardest to talk about, because it is doing several things simultaneously that most films don’t have the nerve to attempt at all.

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The film takes place in a small Catholic community where a manipulative monsignor has cultivated a congregation that is, in Johnson’s own framing, increasingly extremist. The murder mystery is almost secondary to the theological and psychological drama at the film’s center, which is about what happens to ordinary people inside closed belief systems^[13], about the difference between the institutional church and the faith it is supposed to embody, and — this is the part Johnson has spoken about directly — about radicalization.^[14]

The Monsignor is not simply a villain; he is the leader of a group of people who have been shaped by his contempt and his certainty into something smaller and angrier than they started. The congregation has been made. This is not metaphor. This is an accurate description of how extremism actually works, and a straight, knobbly point at the manosphere of today.

What’s remarkable about Wake Up Dead Man is what it asks of Blanc — and what Blanc cannot provide. In Knives Out, Blanc is the smartest person in the room who is outmaneuvered by Marta’s virtue. In Glass Onion, Blanc is the outsider who can see through Miles Bron’s performance because he is genuinely unimpressed by the performance. In Wake Up Dead Man, Blanc is confronted with a mystery that his methodology — observation, deduction, the accumulation of evidence toward a rational conclusion — cannot fully resolve, because the territory he is moving through is one where faith operates.

Father Jud, the young priest played by Josh O’Connor, represents a different epistemology: not evidence but witness, not proof but trust, not the smartest analysis but the willingness to believe that grace is possible. The film does not ask Blanc to convert. But it asks him — and us — to sit with the limits of cleverness and supplant that with the grace that is required for a person to reach an enlightened forgiveness. It’s point is something that I, personally, have grappled with a lot recently… “It’s better to be okay than right.” If Blanc reveals the “trick” of the locked room murder Glenn Close’s character of Martha will never find sympathy and grace for (unironically named) Grace.

This is extraordinary for a genre built on the premise that cleverness is the highest human virtue. The entire DNA of the whodunit says: the person who thinks most clearly wins. Blanc has to give that up, at least partially. He has to accept that Father Jud knows something he doesn’t, not through superior analysis but through a different way of being in the world and do things Jud’s way so that the “evilest” person in the room can receive Last Rites with a light heart.

Grace is granted instead of a clever person being correct.

This is a trilogy meeting the present moment with things to say about societal and structural issues all wrapped in one of the most safe, friendliest, intelligence-celebrating, punitive “justice” obsessed genres.

That, my friends and dear readers, is ART.

What both Born Again and the Blanc trilogy are doing, under their genre surfaces, is addressing the current political and spiritual and economic moment with more clarity than most work that is explicitly trying to address it.

Now, while I’m one to eschew the entire screaming about the hairy complaints of “too on the nose” or “preachy” as coming from people who just don’t wanna hear shit,^[15] the disguise matters. The genre wrapper is not (always) a concession or a commercial calculation; it can be a formal tool. When a show is ostensibly about a blind lawyer in a devil suit fighting a crime boss who became mayor, it can say something precise about how institutional power protects itself and what it costs ordinary people to resist it — and the audience will receive that argument because they came in for the devil suit.

When a film is ostensibly a cozy murder mystery with a charming Southern detective, it can trace the mechanics of radicalization, examine what forgiveness (and/or grace) requires in a world structured seething in ( a lot of justified and unjustified) resentment, and ask whether the analytical mind can ever fully access the territory of grace — and the audience will sit with those questions because they came in for “clever man solves mystery”.

What makes Daredevil genuinely unusual in the superhero landscape is that it has spent a decade building a rivalry that is also an argument — about power, about service, about what you owe your city — and has let both sides of that argument be credible, even when one of them is monstrous and the other is monstrously driven.

What makes the Blanc trilogy the most interesting use of the whodunit in years is that it has used the genre’s formal machinery to say something different in each film: here is what we owe the oppressed other, here is what money does to intelligence and art when it is limitless and can just purchase it all and claim it for itself, here is radicalization and what it takes to extend grace to those who need it all the while not relying on just “doing your job” and not surrendering your belief system when it would be convenient to do so. Not to mention being in conversation with the current moment at every level.^[16]

Glorious.

Just glorious.

That’s not the standard “cleverest man in the room” hero nor the standard superhero.

That is something a little more difficult and a lot more honest.

And right now, this is the storytelling we need.

ONTO THE Exercises!

The Costume Is a Permission Structure

Pick a theme you want your story to address — something political, systemic, or ideological — but that you’re worried will feel preachy or heavy-handed. Now build a genre wrapper for it. Not a metaphor. An actual genre: a heist, a romance, a ghost story, a sports drama. Write the scene where the genre is doing its job and the real argument is landing simultaneously.

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The Napoleonic Wars are raging.

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy plays, swelling on the audio track.

An officer stands framed in a doorway of blackness with an unlit chandelier hanging and he’s… pensive and unsure at best.

He turns and walks past a terrifyingly life size yet grungy crucifix walking with disdain? Certainly world-weary ambivalence into the bombed out central square of a town, Saragossa, Spain. It’s got an improvised low stone wall leading to an arch outta town.

Unsteady, unorganized soldiers run into the square and each other, not exactly in a Keystone Cops kinda way, but not unlike them either. The soldiers self-organize, not consulting the officer (who makes no effort to get involved), and sorta make for the arch and that’s when the bullets start flying at them.

A soldier immediately falls to the ground, dead and the officer hides behind the wall.

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The officer poignantly does NOT rally the troops who make a half-hearted run for the arch and that’s when the explosions start and the soldiers say ‘fuck this!^[1]’ and run away the way they came (which is decidedly away from the arch) and the officer continues to cower.

Only once the explosions stop does the officer break cover, check on the ‘dead’ soldier who gets up after a miraculous recovery (or, in my reading, a wise-Falstaffian faked death at the start of the erstwhile battle) as the rest of the soldiers haphazardly fire rifles at nothing and generally beat feet. Only after they’ve all left does the officer pull his sword and implore his absent soldiers half-heartedly forward until the explosions start again and he runs for it unheroically squealing the entire time.

FULL DISCLOSURE: This is now one of my favorite opening scenes of all time^[2].

Then we see our officer has bravely stumbled into an abandoned inn, locking the door behind him. He finds a book with some pretty gruesome pics and some pretty porn-y pics. He’s enthralled. The enemy immediately break down the door. They should be fighting each other. Instead, they crowd around the porn… ahem… the book.

And one of them realizes it was written by his own grandfather.

Both men. Enemies. Sit down together.

And read.

That’s the opening of The Saragossa Manuscript, the 1965 Polish film directed by Wojciech Has, and it’s not just a clever framing device. It’s the entire argument of the film made visual in the first five minutes. Story — specifically nested story — collapses categories. Enemies become readers together. The war outside becomes irrelevant. The book is more powerful than the conflict. (It’s also funny as hell and full of commentary on its own images and text.)

This is a three plus hour film based on a 700-page book. And the film flies by… for me.
How’d it do that?

Welp… here’s another structure for ya’ll to play with…

First: What IS Nested Structure, and Why Should You Care?

Henry Lien — in his genuinely essential book Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling — describes nested and circular structures as part of a broader tradition of non-linear storytelling that has been almost completely ignored by Western craft education.[^1]

Here’s his diagnosis of why it matters: “Circular and nested stories are a community of stories. The community of stories achieves things that no individual story can. It can transcend the experience of any one character to show more universal truths.”

Read that again.

No individual story can do what a community of stories can.

This is the thing Western craft culture refuses to teach you because it fundamentally contradicts the idol at the center of most writing education: the individual protagonist on their individual arc driving individual conflict toward individualistic resolution.

The three-act structure — and I’ve been going on about this for a while now[^2] — is structurally incapable of telling certain kinds of truths. It is architecturally committed to the psychological over the sociological (hi, Tufekci). It needs a single mind at its center to work. It has a literal formal requirement for a protagonist.

Nested structure doesn’t.

In a nested story, the “protagonist” keeps changing. The frame keeps shifting. You walk into a story, and inside it is another story, and inside that is another, and inside that is another, and each story recontextualizes the ones around it — the ones that contain it AND the ones it contains. The first protagonist (if there is one) disappears for entire swaths of the story… pages and pages, scenes and scenes, minutes and hours of story go by where they don’t show their face.

Causality doesn’t run in a straight line. Identity isn’t fixed. Culture, community, and the world become the subject because no single lens is ever sufficient.

This is what Lien means when he says nested storytelling allows “deep relational networks to emerge that transcend individual experiences.”

You can’t do that with a hero.

You need a labyrinth^[3].

So let’s get formal for a second — because this is one of those places where a clean definition actually helps before we dive into the beautiful mess of the best example I’m currently familiar with.

Nested structure is a formal answer for achieving depth of theme and highlighting culture over character. It favors great leaps in time, place, genre, and cause and effect. It can “stack” stories in a way that feels entirely different from pure episodic or anthological structures — which present stories side by side, sequentially — because in nested structure the stories are inside each other, commenting on and reframing each other simultaneously. It allows you to follow characters — or versions of characters, or descendants of characters, or thematic echoes of characters — across many times, locations, and even full epochs of human history.

This isn’t a new trick. This is one of the oldest structures in world literature, deployed consistently across centuries and cultures and media:

1001 Arabian Nights. Jan Potocki’s original Manuscript Found in Saragossa novel. Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. And some recent examples: Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.” David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Christopher Nolan’s Inception^[4].

These aren’t loosely related works that share a vibe. They are works using the same structural technology to achieve things that no other structure can. And notably: they span novels, novellas, short story collections, and film.

This structure belongs to no single medium.

It goes wherever storytellers take it.[^3]

The reason it keeps getting used across centuries and cultures — while Western craft education keeps pretending it doesn’t exist^[5] — is that it works for a certain kind of truth that the three-act structure simply cannot access.

The Saragossa Manuscript: Three Hours of Radical Proof

Wojciech Has’s film is three hours long, in black and white, and if you try to follow it as a conventional story you will, as one critic memorably put it, court madness.[^4]

Here’s the (inevitably simplified) structure: Alfonso van Worden, a captain of the Walloon Guard — honor-obsessed, Christian, deeply conventional in his values — is trying to cross the Sierra Morena mountains to reach Madrid. He’s warned away from the pass. He ignores the warning. And then stories start happening to him.

Not one story. Dozens. He meets travelers, hermits, a cabalist, a mathematician, a gypsy king. Each one tells him a story. Inside those stories are other stories. Those inner stories contain still more stories.

The film operates — with total commitment — at sometimes five levels of narrative depth simultaneously! (I think that’s right as I kinda lost count.) You are watching a man tell a story about a man who told him a story about a woman who had a story told to her about a man who…

And yet it doesn’t feel chaotic… well not in the bad ways.

It feels like being alive.

Because that’s actually how lived experience works. You don’t live inside a three-act structure. You live inside nested stories. Your grandmother’s stories live inside you and affect your decisions. The story of your culture lives inside your grandmother’s stories. The story of history lives inside your culture’s story. You are, at any given moment, a character in about forty different narratives simultaneously, most of which you can’t see from where you’re standing but boy howdy do they do a number on you^[6]…

Western storytelling pretends this isn’t true so it can give you a Hero.

The Saragossa Manuscript refuses the pretense.

What Nested Structure Actually DOES: Breaking Cause and Effect

The three-act structure runs on cause and effect. A causes B. B causes C. C causes D. The whole thing is a machine. And cause and effect, as I’ve written about before[^4], is fundamentally a psychological device — it locates agency in individuals making decisions that have consequences that are lived out by the “hero”… or, ya know, get completely ignored for maintain the heroic story^[7].

Nested structure breaks this on purpose.

In a nested story, you can’t always tell which story is causing which effect. Is Alfonso’s journey real? Is it a test? Is it a dream? Is it all three? The film keeps you genuinely uncertain — not as a cheap trick, but because the uncertainty is the point. The stories around him are shaping him as much as his own decisions are. He is not the driver. He is, more truthfully, a passenger moving through a world that is larger and stranger than his own psychology can account for.

This is thrilling for writers because it opens the door to a different kind of truth: systemic truth. The truth of how culture moves through people. The truth of how communities shape individuals rather than the reverse. The truth that sometimes things happen to you not because of who you are but because of the world you’re inside.

That’s the story Western structures have a hard time telling.

That’s the story nested structure was built for.

The Ending: The Most Radical Moment in the Film

Here’s the moment that gets me every time.

Alfonso van Worden — let me remind you, this is an 18th-century Christian Wallonian military officer— has spent the entire film being drawn toward two Moorish Muslim princesses, Emina and Zibelda. They’ve appeared and disappeared. He’s woken up under gallows. He’s been interrogated by the Inquisition. He’s been told they’re ghosts, that they’re cousins, that they’re part of an elaborate conspiracy, that the whole journey has been a test of his worthiness.

At the end of the film, someone tells him the two princesses are waiting for him.

And he throws the book aside — the very manuscript the whole film has been about — and runs to them.

A Christian man. Running off with two Muslim women. In Inquisition-era Spain.

No agonized inner monologue about faith versus desire. No tragic sacrifice. No conversion scene. No climactic debate about religious identity. He just goes to his two professed loves^[8]. And my poly-heart sings.

The nested structure made this possible. Because the film never committed to a single protagonist’s psychology as the organizing principle, it was free to let culture dissolve and reform around human connection instead. We’ve spent three hours living inside so many different lives, so many different stories, so many different worldviews, that by the time we get to that moment — the Christian man running toward the Muslim women — it doesn’t feel transgressive.

It feels obvious.

Of course he runs to them. The whole nested world of the film has been quietly demonstrating for three hours that the categories we use to separate people — faith, culture, honor, family — are themselves stories. Stories inside stories. And you can step out of one story into another.

That is what nested structure can do that no other structure can.

It doesn’t argue for tolerance. It doesn’t make a case for cross-cultural connection. It builds a world so full of interlocking, mutually-respecting stories that the human heart reaching across a supposed divide feels not like an argument but like a fact.

Try doing that with a three-act structure.

For Every Writer: The Practical Case

You don’t have to be writing a three-hour Polish semi-surrealist film to use this.

Every time you put a story inside a story — a character telling another character what happened to them, a letter that contains its own narrative, a flashback that holds its own flashbacks — you are using nested structure. The question is whether you’re doing it deliberately and whether you understand what it does.

What it does:

It distributes agency. No single character has to (or even can) carry the whole weight of meaning. The world itself can mean things.

It allows cultural argument. You can put two worldviews in conversation inside a story without having to declare a winner. The structure lets them coexist and comment on each other.

It breaks linear causality. Which, if you’re writing about trauma, systemic experience, memory, or anything that doesn’t behave like a machine, is not a bug. It is the whole point. Talk about a feature, eh?

It expands time. A nested story can hold centuries inside a single frame. The Saragossa Manuscript does this literally: Napoleonic-era officers reading an 18th-century manuscript, becoming ancestors to each other across a hundred years of nested time.

It is not the same thing as episodes or anthology. This is worth pausing on. An anthology puts stories next to each other. Episodes run stories sequentially with or without a reset.

Nested structure puts stories inside each other — so that the inner story changes what the outer story means, and the outer story changes what the inner story means, and you are always in both simultaneously. The resonance is exponential, as opposed to additive.

And most importantly: it makes community the subject. Not the individual. The web of stories that make up a world. Which, as Lien says, can achieve things no single story — and no single character — ever could.

The Carrier Bag Theory is, among other things, a nested structure.[^5]

The Thousand and One Nights is a nested structure.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a nested structure.

And The Saragossa Manuscript is possibly the purest, strangest, most radical version of one ever committed to film.

Go find it. Watch it. Get lost in it.

The getting lost is the lesson.

Onto the Exercises!

The Frame and What It Changes Write a scene where a character tells another character a story. Now go back to your outer scene — the one where the telling happens — and rewrite it, but this time let the inner story actually change something about how the outer scene reads. Not through dialogue. Through what the listener now knows. The goal: the inner story should make the outer story mean something different than it did before you added it.

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Now. Two books. Very different animals. Let’s get into it.

Meeples Together — Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline

Let me be straight with you: this is one of the most useful game design books I’ve ever read, and I go back to my notes constantly when building stuff... why?

Because I’m obsessed with making and playing co-ops.

A little window into my head/provlivities… I recently heard someone say,
“I hate playing games because I hate to lose, and I hate to win.”

I’m exactly the same.

Almost.

I don’t mind losing so much… but I tend to hate winning.
If there is someone without the “killer instinct” in a competitive environment?

It’s me^[1].

I’ve just always hated the duality of winning and losing.
I can’t HAVE unless you DON’T.

Ugh.
Fuck that.

I blame getting introduced to D&D at age 8.

I immediately twigged onto the idea that WE WERE PLAYING TOGETHER.
Not against the DM, not against the other players.

TOGETHER.

And we had a good time TOGETHER.

Okey-doke, exit through the gift-shop of my brain and back into the reviews.

Allen and Appelcline have written something genuinely rare — an analytical framework for cooperative game design that is both theoretically rigorous and immediately practical.

It doesn’t romanticize.
It doesn’t sell you on a vibe.
It just works.

The central thesis lands early and never lets go:

Cooperative game design is about allowing cooperation, then LIMITING it.

Full stop.

This is the engine of the whole book, and it’s one of those statements that seems obvious once you’ve read it and is completely invisible before you do.

You don’t build a good co-op game by maximizing players’ ability to help each other. You build it by creating meaningful friction against that cooperation. (I’m looking at you, Mountains of Madness, with your insanity-induced speech restrictions that prevent players from saying certain words mid-crisis — I love this so much I could cry.^[2]

What I find most clarifying is their taxonomy of cooperation itself. There’s a profound difference between tactical cooperation (players doing individual things that serve the group in the moment) and strategic cooperation (players coordinating a longer-term plan).

Most games blur this distinction and suffer for it. Getting clear on which one you’re designing for — or how you’re combining them — is the difference between a game that feels collaborative and one that just feels like parallel solitaire with politeness.

Their breakdown of the Challenge System is equally sharp.

The cycle of Activation → Trigger → Cascade → Decay is a proper design vocabulary that is super helpful to those of us with the “just tell me what to do!” type brains.

The cascade in particular — that moment where problems suddenly proliferate faster than players can address them — is the heartbeat of good cooperative tension. When a game has it, you feel it. When it doesn’t, the experience often flattens.

The section on Task design (pages 158-180) is worth the price of the book alone. Their questions for evaluating any task are surgical:

What action does the task support? What inputs does it take? What is its cooperative nature — can multiple players work on it simultaneously, can someone take another’s place? What are its results in relation to the Challenge System?

These aren’t abstract design philosophy questions. These are the questions you ask in playtesting to find out why a thing isn’t working.

A few things I particularly love and keep returning to:

The Cooperative Cue (pg. 84): the idea that you should jumpstart the cooperative instinct early, get players talking and working together before the real challenges hit. This is psychology and game design perfectly aligned. Don’t assume players know how to cooperate. Train them into it through the early experience of the game.

Shared Resources and Anti-Cooperative Incentives — The Approaching Dawn: The Witching Hour example is great: players must sometimes harm each other to take the strongest actions, which creates genuine moral tension in a cooperative space. This is cooperative design growing up. The best co-op games make you feel the cost of self-interest.

The Emotional Lexicon (pg. 285): Fiero (triumph over adversity), Amici (hanging out with pals), Amiero (reciprocity), Naches (pride in another’s accomplishment)… this is game design finally taking emotional experience seriously enough to name it. Love the idea of designing to emotional targets… now some take this a bit far for my tastes^[3], but it’s a very valid way of approaching work.

And then there’s this quiet gem: “Making opportunities for altruism more important to a game can create interesting gameplay dynamics. What if someone had to sacrifice themselves for the players to win?” Yes. YES. The entire concept of meaningful sacrifice in cooperative play is criminally underexplored.

My only real caution with the book is about the App-driven Black Box problem they flag (pg. 126): when data goes in and data comes out but players can’t track the relationship, you can break the cooperative contract. This warning is increasingly urgent as games trend toward digital integration. Worth heeding.

Writing for Games Theory & Practice — Hannah Nicklin

Here’s where things get more complicated. I quote this human at the start of most of my talks on the subject of storytelling^[4] from this exact book. I adore her mind and most of her thoughts.

Let me start with the good stuff, because it’s substantial.

Her concept of writing as a verb is the single most useful reframe I’ve found for game writing: What is your writing DOING at any given moment? Is it flavoring? Driving? Situating? Worldbuilding? Instructing? Reminding? Hinting? Developing^[5]?

This is a tool I now use constantly. Game writing that doesn’t know what job it’s doing is game writing that fails at all of them.

Her pull from Tufekci’s psychological vs. sociological storytelling analysis (the Game of Thrones seasons 7-8 diagnosis) is similarly brilliant^[6] — Western narrative tends to locate causality and change inside individual psychology rather than in systemic social forces. This is both a storytelling failure and a political one. Games, with their capacity for systemic modeling, are uniquely positioned to fix this, and Nicklin’s recognition of it is exactly right and it truly kick-started most of my thoughts on this here Substack.

Her Mutazione plot structure example (pg. 66) — mandatory A-plot conversations unlocking time progression, with B and C plots offering character/habit/ritual/comedy in any order — is elegant and teachable. I’ve stolen it shamelessly.

Her Choices About Choice checklist is gold. Who is speaking in this choice: the narrator, the character, the game, or the designer? Is there room for surprise or humor in the expanded result? Do choices track? Are they ever actions or images rather than words? Can the player miss the window? These are questions that prevent the lazy dialogue wheel.

Her championing of NPCs that can say NO and the broader concept of player presence over player supremacy (fromMeg Jayanth’s 80 Days work) is essential. Games that treat the player as God undermine the fiction of the world. Presence — the feeling of being in something — is far more valuable than the fantasy that everything bends to your will.

And I have to admit: the “Stay Quiet” dialogue option — having silence as a genuine player choice — is something I came around to completely… even tho’ I’m a chatty motherfucker.

Now. The disagreements.

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On immersion: Nicklin is skeptical of immersion that I don’t find terribly helpful^[7]. Her Brechtian instinct — that calling attention to the artifice is more politically honest — is worth respecting. I take her point, especially around race and representation (when the “immersive” world is built on invisible assumptions of whiteness, the fiction is already broken for much of your audience). Not to mention I don’t think Brecht fully pulled it off even in his own work. I just don’t think immersion impedes or removes the audience’s ability to critically think.

On allegory: Nicklin argues allegory is the best vehicle for political meaning in games. Her reasoning is that allegory is honest about its artifice — it’s always calling attention to itself rather than pretending to full realism. While I love a good allegory as much as the next pretentious artist (not saying Nicklin is pretentious) but I feel that the political arguments that land hardest are the ones embedded in the texture of the world and the systems of play. Show me a mechanic that makes the player feel scarcity and systemic disadvantage and I’ll show you something… well, damn well made. Also, depending on how subtle the allegory, it can be radically misinterpreted (often in 180° the opposite direction). I remain a fan of fiction author Garth Merenghi: “Subtext is for cowards.^[8]”

On formats: Nicklin suggests using familiar social formats (the audition, the courtroom, the wedding) as structural devices in game writing. I think this works, but it achieves so much more if you subvert them or use them very sparingly. A format used straight is a cliché on arrival. The audition scene only does anything interesting when it stops being an audition scene.

The Through-Line

I read these two books a bit of time ago when starting on my game narrative journey and they’ve both radically shaped my thoughts and lit up dark alleyways of creation for me.

Allen and Appelcline are building a mechanics vocabulary; Nicklin is building a narrative one. For my money the best games exist at the intersection of both — where the Cooperative Cue is also a story beat, where the cascade in the Challenge System generates emotional consequence, where task design and dialogue design are asking the same questions with different tools.

The notes above will probably recur in future posts — in fact, some of these ideas have already been percolating here for a while in different forms^[9]. That’s not repetition for its own sake. These two books are that generative. Sometimes you read something and it just unlocks a room you didn’t know was there.

So read ‘em both!

Onto the Exercises… and they’re not just for Game Writers! Promise. ;)

Write as a Verb

Take a scene from your current project — ideally one that feels vaguely off but you can’t name why. Go through it beat by beat and, next to every line or paragraph, write a single verb describing what that piece of writing is doing. Not its subject. Its job.

Is it flavoring? Situating? Worldbuilding? Reminding the reader of something established earlier? Hinting? Developing a character or their arc?

Now look at your list of verbs. Two things will probably jump out:

First — strings of the same verb. Three situating beats in a row and nothing is moving. Four reminding moments and you’re writing for an audience you don’t trust. This is where your pacing is dragging.

Second — “I don’t know”. If you can’t name what a passage is doing, it probably isn’t doing anything. Cut it or give it a job.

The goal isn’t to make every beat pull double or triple duty (though that’s great when it happens). The goal is to make sure nothing is just sitting there looking decorative.

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It did not go well

And that hurts

and

was exhilarating

Because this is what I’ve dedicated my life to

The process (and occasional) product of making art

And it’s hard

And it’s exhausting

And it’s thrilling

And it breaks my heart over and over again

And it gives me moments nothing else on this earth gives me

So.

Please Know

I love you for your work

I love you for taking whatever time you have to do your art

I love you for getting to wherever you are in your art

I love you for conceiving your work

I love you for finishing your work

I love you for starting your work

I love you for stoping your art

I love you for giving up your work

I love you for taking a break from your art

Mostly, I love you for the effort.

I’m’a rest now for a bit

I’ll be back at it, I promise

Much love

[for you and myself]

And as this is late… apology puppies for everyone:

Okay. Okay. Okay.

First of all, credit.

All. Credit. To:

Stacey Patton and her post linked above for introducing me to the word (not the concept) that we are working with today and the central inspiration for the post. It hit me so hard it bumped at least three other posts from being completed. 

Second of all. Definition:

Epistemicide: the intentional, deliberate destruction of knowledge systems.

Third of all. Minefield:

While Stacey Patton’s post deals with the destruction of African (and native European) cosmologies I’m gonna wade into the effects on American soft power’s epistemicide of storytelling forms that do not conform to the “standard”.

By doing this I am in no way comparing the two.

One is one of the greatest genocidal projects humanity has ever experienced (chattel slavery/the birth of the race project and the spread of the Abrahamic religions^[1])…

The other is the upholding/whitewashing tool of the first.

But, in my non-expert opinion, it is one of the primary ways colonization keeps its marching boots stomping all over us.

Fun.

Stuff.

One frequently hears this phrase, “Those who win write the history^[2].”

Ever think about, “Those who win intentionally murder the culture they just beat?”

We should.

It’s the heart of Colonialism… particularly as practiced by White Europeans and made into literal law and interwoven into Capitalism by the race project^[3][4].

Here’s what Stacey Patton is pointing at that had to muscle its way into my ‘stack: colonization doesn’t just seize land and bodies and labor. It seizes the imagination. It convinces the colonized that whatever knowledge system, whatever cosmology, whatever way of organizing reality existed before the boots arrived — was primitive.

Was superstition.

Was darkness waiting for the light of European “civilization” to arrive and correct it.

Of course, the truly diabolical eventuality of colonization is, eventually, you don’t need the boots anymore.

Why?

Because colonization is a generational process.
Nothing is ever the same after they put boots on your land.

The colonized will guard the boundary themselves.

Aggressively.

Proudly.

As Patton puts it: “You don’t need chains forever. Eventually, the descendants will FIERCELY guard the boundary themselves.”

I’m not going to talk about religion today.

That’s Patton’s post and she’s working it with more precision and authority than I have any right to claim.

What I am going to talk about is what happens when you apply that exact same logic to storytelling.

To narrative structure.

To the question of what counts as a “good story” and who decided, and some of the ways that decision got made into the solidified muck we have today on what story actually is.

Because the same epistemicide happened/is still happening to narrative.

And most of us are still guarding the boundary^[5].

Argument the First: Hollywood Was Never Just Entertainment. It Was Policy.

After World War II, the Marshall Plan — you know, the thing that helped to rebuild Europe — included provisions that directly linked levels of American aid to recipient countries’ willingness to accept imports of American motion pictures.

This is documented.

Not conspiracy.

Not metaphor.

Actual policy.

You want the money to rebuild your bombed-out country? Open your cinemas to Hollywood. The reconstruction of Europe was partly financed in exchange for guaranteed screen time for American stories, American values, American ways of understanding the world.

The Motion Picture Association of America — the MPAA, the people who give your films a rating — was established in 1946 as a legal cartel under the Webb-Pomerene Export Trade Act, which exempts certain export associations from antitrust law. Its international arm, the MPA, has offices in Brussels, Rome, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, Mexico City, Toronto, and Jakarta. Its first president was a former US Postmaster General and former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The line between Hollywood and Washington has always been a revolving door, not a wall.

WikiLeaks cables — actual diplomatic communications — documented US embassies around the world actively lobbying foreign governments to eliminate film quotas, enforce intellectual property agreements, and punish countries that tried to protect their domestic film industries from being swamped by American product. South Korea was pressured to dismantle its screen quota system as a condition of free trade agreement negotiations. The Korea-US Film Agreement in 1985 and 1988 abolished Korean import quotas and allowed American studios to establish their own distribution subsidiaries in Korea directly. New Zealand, to this day, has not ratified a free trade agreement with the United States — partly because of concerns about what cultural concessions would be required.

Way to go Kiwis^[6].

This is not soft power as metaphor. This is soft power as trade enforcement mechanism^[7]. The American government used its economic leverage to ensure that American storytelling — with its three-act structure, its lone heroic protagonist, its conflict-driven causality, its individualist epistemology — became the default grammar of global cinema.

Not because it was better.

Because it was backed by the most powerful economic and diplomatic machine in human history.

So, when someone tells you “Three acts is just how stories work” — ask them who negotiated that into the trade agreement in their head.

Argument the Second: The Structure Is the Values, and the Values Are Not Neutral.

Here’s where this connects to everything this Substack has been banging on about since day one. Hollywood’s dominance didn’t just flood global markets with American films. It exported a specific set of narrative values and then a bunch of teachers and people with the need to eat off their writing tried to spin it so it looked like nature^[8].

And then the fucking Hero with a Thousand Faces and Star Wars drops and now we have a perfect shit-storm of hetero-white-male-colonization-hegemony trotted out as “universal^[9]”.

Hollywood’s economic infrastructure actively shaped what storytelling looked like globally, not through artistic persuasion but through distribution control, trade enforcement, and market saturation.

The three-act structure and the individual hero narrative didn’t conquer the world because storytellers everywhere independently arrived at the same conclusions. They conquered the world because the economic conditions were engineered — through the mechanisms we just covered — to reward conformity and punish deviation^[10].

And thus we march towards perfect institutionalization of Narrative and HOW THE NARRATIVE IS TOLD.

Think about what those conventions actually encode:

A lone protagonist whose individual choices drive events.

Conflict as the engine of all meaning.

A climax that resolves, definitively, in the defeat of an opponent.

A world organized around individual will, individual agency, individual transformation.

That’s not the natural shape of human experience.

That’s a WEIRD shape — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, to use Joseph Henrich’s framework — and it represents a tiny, historically specific slice of how humanity has understood itself. Not to mention a culture backed and enforced by a military-industrial complex that no longer has any idea how to function (or make money) without it.

Kishotenketsu — the East Asian four-act structure that Henry Lien writes about so brilliantly — doesn’t require conflict. It requires a third element that recontextualizes everything before it, and a fourth act that reveals invisible connections. It encodes a collectivist epistemology: the world affects you, and your response to that is where your character lives.

Circular and nested narrative structures encode the idea that repetition reveals rather than retreads — each return to the same moment yields new information.

West African griot storytelling is communal, participatory, correctable in real time by the community listening. None of these are primitive precursors to the “correct” form. They are sophisticated, internally consistent systems built on different but equally valid understandings of how people, time, causality, and meaning work.

But try getting any of that through the Hollywood distribution system. Try getting any of that greenlit by a studio whose international sales projections depend on conformity to decision makers whose minds are just as colonized into the one form of storytelling. Try teaching any of that in an MFA program whose workshop model was built to produce writers for that same system.

The epistemicide of narrative didn’t require anyone to explicitly ban kishotenketsu. It just required making the economic conditions inhospitable enough that storytellers who wanted to eat gradually learned to tell stories the approved, Capitalistic, Western way. And then taught their students to do the same. And then those students became the gatekeepers. And now we have a global film industry where, as Andrew Ali Ibbi documented in CINEJ Cinema Journal, Hollywoodization has led local filmmakers in markets like Nigeria and India to adopt Western styles and themes, actively diluting traditional cultural narratives in the process. Not as a choice made freely, as a condition of survival inside a system that was never designed to accommodate them.

The colonized guarding the boundary.

Fiercely.

“Professionally”.

Argument the Third: The Algorithm Is the New Marshall Plan.

If the post-WWII period was when American soft power engineered the conditions for narrative epistemicide, the streaming era is where that epistemicide went autonomous. You don’t need diplomatic cables anymore.

You got the algorithm.

Netflix operates in over 190 countries. Disney+ is not far behind. Amazon Prime Video is embedded in an e-commerce infrastructure that makes it functionally inescapable in markets where Amazon operates. These platforms are not neutral distributors of global content. They are American corporations, beholden to American shareholders, optimizing for engagement metrics built on the preferences of audiences already conditioned by seventy years of Hollywood dominance. The algorithm doesn’t know it’s committing epistemicide. It’s just doing what algorithms do: reinforcing what already works, surfacing what looks like what already works, and burying what doesn’t pattern-match to what already works.

Garbage in. Garbage out.
Tale as old as the mechanical computing machine.

The result is a global content economy in which the most financially viable path for a filmmaker in Lagos or Seoul or Mumbai or Mexico City is to make something that looks enough like Hollywood that it can be sold as “universal” — which is the industry’s colonizer word for “legible to American audiences” — while maintaining enough local flavoring to be marketed as “diverse.” The content becomes a vessel for the structure.

The structure carries the values.

The values replicate.

‘round and ‘round we go.

This is exactly what Patton is describing in her post.

You don’t need chains forever.

Build the economic conditions right and people will “choose,” freely, to tell the stories that the system rewards.

And then, here’s the fuckin’ kicker…

They’ll call it craft.

They’ll call it “what works.”

They’ll call it “universal human storytelling.”

And they’ll guard the boundary themselves.

The reason this Substack exists — the reason the PROMPT gatherings exist, the reason I keep shoving Lien and Salesses and Keene and Alison into your hands — is not because I think Western narrative structure is evil and must be destroyed… though you could be forgiven for thinking that’s my purpose here…

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It’s because it’s only one option among many, it was chosen on a cultural level (and who choses? those in power, naturally) as the only option through a process that involved diplomatic cables and trade agreements and cherry-picked “academics” and Marshall Plan conditionality and algorithmic reinforcement, and that process has costs.

Real costs.

Real colonialist costs.

Real classist costs.

Real cultural costs.

Real epistemological costs^[11].

REAL. LIFE. COSTS.

The cost is every story that didn’t get told because the teller couldn’t afford to tell it the way it needed or wanted to be told. The cost is every narrative knowledge system that got labeled “primitive” or “unmarketable” or “not universal enough” and quietly strangled in the guise of “good storytelling”.

Stacey Patton asks: “Who benefits from you never asking the question at all?”

Same question. Different realm in which to ask it.

However?

Same answer.

Start asking.

Exercises!!!

The Colonized Form Take a scene you’ve written in whatever form you work in. Now identify every structural “rule” it follows — does it have a lone protagonist driving action? Does conflict generate all meaning? Does it resolve? Write down where you learned each of those rules and who taught them to you. Now rewrite the scene breaking exactly one of them — not randomly, but because the story needs you to. Notice what resists. That resistance is the boundary you’ve been guarding.

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