It's kinda interesting how stories that turn into cult classic landmarks (as opposed to critical darlings), they tend to hew to the most classical of story structures like Campbell. Star Wars, Fight Club, Groundhog Day, Rick and Morty... all classic Campbellian structure.

All Keanu Reeves movies are pure Campbellian. Point Break, Matrix, John Wick... he might be the most Campbellian hero ever.

And nobody has ever come up with a meaningful story structure model that's significantly different from Campbell. They simply increase/decrease the number of points in the cycle, kinda like resolution. The most I've seen is 52 (Save the Cat) and the least is 2 (stress/relief).

When weird avant garde shit doesn't work for you, it's rarely the content. It's usually too much self-important departure from the Campbellian structure.

McKee has a more "literary" breakdown and his unit is more fluidly defined beats and acts, but it's still basically Campbell.

The only 2 things I've encountered that feel slightly different are Keith Johnstone's Impro model, and Scott McCloud's triangular model in Understanding Comics, which explores a 2d space of form innovation vs content innovation.

That said, I don't think any great storytellers apply Campbellian formulae as their starting point. They tend to develop their instincts through trial and error and get good at telling rough stories, and at some point, they recognize what they're doing in a Campbellian mirror.

Story structure theory is NOT actually helpful for coming up with or writing stories. It's only helpful for troubleshooting and rewriting. The 0-to-1 draft is your problem. Campbell will help you get from 1st draft to nth final version.

Most of the storywriting advice I've seen that's actually helpful tends to be tactical bag-of-tricks stuff orthogonal to structure. Tropes basically. Like: 2 characters hate each other and need to like each other by the end of the act. What to do? Give them a shared challenge.

You need to be familiar with 100s or 1000s of such tropes through consumption of enough examples. It's like a kind of machine learning. Training your pattern generator. Until that's charged up, you can't go 0 to 1.

The stuff that I *haven't* seen properly described anywhere outside of briefly in Johnstone is that there's something like a procedural-generator within you that you need to spin up. It feeds on tropes pattern generation upstream, and is edited by story-structure downstream.

Tropes/patterns is like cotton bolls. Story structure is like tailoring garments. But the hardest, least documented part is the spinning of yarn and the weaving of fabric that comes in between those 2 extremes.

Campbellian structure is not always easy to recognize and you have to make tweaks for different genres, but it's not apophenia. It's really there. Harder to spot in comedy sometimes. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1355623211312902145

Fiction is way more intellectual-capital intensive than non-fiction. Like calculus vs geometry. You can figure out a lot of geometry via trial-and-error with a compass and straight edge and a few prompts. With calculus, that's very unlikely without a text.

Assuming basic arithmetic and algebra as foundation of math literacy, there are branches like probability and geometry which possess an intuitive beginner game (dice/coins/cards, compass/straight-edge construction problems) and ones that don't (calculus, statistics)

Challenge with fiction is that following the "make 100 pots to make 1 good pot" trial-and-error agile learning model is very hard, because there's no small, simple iteration unit. The smaller units (jokes, very short stories) are actually harder to execute than long.

So double jeopardy -- you have to do a lot of "intellectual capital prep" (consume a lot of fiction, read some structure theory, learn to recognize 1000s of tropes) AND learn with large iteration unit (I'd estimate 2000 words is the minimum viable beginner size)

The difficulty at short scales is comparable to the difficulty of learning electronics. Intuitions work best at breadboard scale with discrete classical components (resistors, transistors). Building compact circuits means understanding ICs, pinouts, and standard logic circuits.

If you're playing with beginner electronics, making something with a say a 10" x 10" footprint will be much easier than making something with a 1" x 1" footprint. You have to understand a lot less. Fiction writing is like that I think.

Vonnegut is kinda different. I binged everything he wrote in college. I'll have to think about how his models relate to Campbell's. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1355629956345151489

I do have idle plans of eventually working more on my fiction, but tbf, this stuff is interesting enough, I'll be fine if I end up just doing a gigantic yakshave exploring all this stuff and abandoning my fiction ideas. It's interesting in its own right.

There's a sort of lean-startup model for nonfiction and I understand it well enough to even teach now. I think I could get any reasonably competent English speaker writing decent blog post level essays within a couple of months. There's a reliably executable learning curve.

Fiction though, lacks both the agile startup learning curve AND any pedagogical model anyone can guarantee. There's a vast industry of people offering education, but none strikes me as reliably capable of getting you to a first good story even assuming you have decent ideas.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the main value of all those expensive, intensive creative writing workshops and programs is that you block out enough immersive time and pay enough that you're kinda forced to figure it out or risk having wasted your money.

Just like you learn foreign languages best by actually paying the big bucks to travel and live there for a few weeks. The situation forces you to pick up the language at least a little, and the cost provides an incentive. The immersion prevents all escape.

When the famous programs bring on famous fiction writers etc. that's mostly just evening entertainment. The main value is being shut up in Oberlin or wherever and wondering if you've wasted your money.

I've been sort of idly tweeting about this reading bunnytrail/yak shave for a while now. I oughta do an overview blog post of all the stuff I've looked at and what I've learned/failed to learn from them.

The thing about fiction is that there’s no point writing a *bad* story. By contrast, there is often a point to writing bad non-fiction. If you have interesting enough things to say, it doesn’t matter if you say them badly. This is not true of fiction.

If I knew I was writing a Catch-22 it’d be worth a decade of effort. Writing 10 dreck novels would likely be less fulfilling for me than flipping burgers for 10 years. Some authors manage to be both good and prolific, but unlike nonfiction there’s no strong correlation.

I suspect fiction writing is naturally a guild economy, while non-fiction writing is naturally a free market. So when the internet killed distribution scarcity and tastemaker gatekeeping, nonfiction exploded but fiction remained basically the same.

Fan fiction communities in relation to “published” fiction markets (text, screen) are a joke, compared to nonfiction social media vs old media. Non-fiction new media (blogs, newsletters) have pretty much brought all but the costliest investigative non-fiction to its knees.

The only reason to publish non-fiction in old media now is street-cred in circles that don’t actually read much. But there’s reasons besides market access and cred to participate in the fiction guilds. They actually possess IP that’s still mostly shared via apprenticeship.

In fields with a good “beginner game” how seriously you can take someone is a function of raw number of pots they’ve made. If they’ve made more pots the chances are good that they’ve made more *good* pots. A 200-pot person should be taken twice as seriously as a 100 pot person.

Nonfiction, math, programming are like that.

More words written = likely better writer
More problems/proofs done = better mathematician
More lines of code = better programmer
More pots = better potter

Fields that are NOT like that

More startups != better entrepreneur
More novels != better fiction writer
More acting credits != better actor
More movies != better director
More bills passed != better politician
More arrests != better detective

Good question. I don’t think so. The learning curve seems intrinsically longer. It’s not a tech or tools problem. Kinda like better shoes won’t turn more people into Olympic-grade athletes. Slight chance AI could help, a la http://TextSpark.ai  https://twitter.com/vktorious/status/1355648582968365061