@ Cool! And have fun, take your time, that books is soooo worth it! I'm and audiobook guy, so I was able to spend so time listening while doing other things, but man, that was a 62 hour audiobook. but I loved it! =D
I think there are roughly three types of writers and readers: instructive, representative, and hedonistic. Some people write message stories, some people write to reflect reality, some people write stuff that brings them broadly defined pleasure. Likewise, some readers' measure of a good story is whether it conveys a good message, for some it's whether or not it's realistic, and for others it's whether or not it's fun. It's not a hard and fast rule, most writers and readers are a mixture, but I feel like a lot of bad quality criticism is people applying a reading type that's different from the writing type. "Why can't it be a blog post?" is a heavily instructive reader getting upset that the writer is being too representative or hedonistic and therefore, from the reader's pov, diluting the message or adding fluff. Your average "think about the children/this pushes a bad message" is also an instructive reading of a (usually) hedonistic story. Most "uhmmm actually statistically..." is representative reading of something written instructively or hedonistically. "It's sucks, there's no dragons/smut/fight scenes" is a hedonistic reading of something written (usually) representatively. Good video, gave me a lot to think about.
Ever wonder why people dislike spoilers? It's because alot of the time, the experiencing of the story how it's presented is essential to it's message. An author has intent to show you things in a specific way, and by reducing a story to just what can be learned from it, you, paradoxically, lose any of that intent. How something is presented is equally, if not more important than what is being presented.
I agree, and I often bristle at people who say spoilers don't matter. The withholding of information until a certain time is a part of the art of story telling! Even for those stuffy works of literature.
@calebbridges4748 I agree. What I was trying to say is that the experience is more important. That the medium can matter more than the individual themes and ideas. And I think most mediums of storytelling are worsened with spoilers.
@michaelpietri9471 yeah I disagree that the media are affected by spoilers. That's definitely where we diverge. Summaries are no substitute, of course. But I'm not really wowed by any artist's use of mystery. It's just not part of the equation for me. My suspension of disbelief is sufficient.
Write your own stories. Make your own art. There's nothing more rewarding and intimate than turning your dreams into any form of enterainment. I've spent 25 of my almost 30 years just to get decent at translating my neurodivergence into something streamlined, and now I'm just developing my professionalism. I wanna be one of my favorite artists when I'm older, and there's no reason for more people to create and take a chance at vulnerability. I've failed so much more than I've succeeded, but the failures kinda just fall away. The successes each give me hope.
I had to read the essay by Tolkien “On fairy stories” in grad school and it has stuck with me ever since. Anyone who says we shouldn’t read fiction is a ninny. Also, the Great Gatsby is one of my favorite books. I know many people don’t like it, but not even wanting to read it but merely a summary feels criminal.
Did you reed Nghi Vo's interpretation of the Great Gatsby ?" The chosen and the faithful". I'd like to know what you think of this book as someone who liked the original story.
You know when people say "it's fate/destined to happen", what people really mean is "it's like a story". When people talk about fate, they do not mean "the chaos of circumstance", they mean "the narrative I tell myself". Saying something happened because of fate is almost always in a positive context, no one says a car crash was fate unless it is in some narrative sense justified, like someone's come-uppance.
I come from an area with a lot of Calvinists; here, some people _absolutely do_ say things like car accidents are 'fate'. It's an interesting world-view (I'm not sure if it's a strict interpretation of their church doctrine, but it's certainly part of the associated culture.)
I love how you just brushed by: "You don't have to fight human nature just because you can't explain it." That is in incredible thought! I feel like I'm reading some random text by plato where he drops random bomb shells of thought without even acknowledging them. Also your final conclusion reminded me of my favorite pom: "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." -William Carlos Williams. Hats off to you good sir, thank you for your contribution!
I feel that different people have different reasons for writing and reading stories, but I think for many the reason we write and the reason we read is because something within us yearns to experience the life of someone else, and to see things from their perspective. We want to live, and live a lot, and to see through someone else's eyes, or walk alongside someone as a narrator tells us their life, is important to us. We want to feel, and stories make us feel. We want to connect, and stories let us connect with more people than exist. Some may tell stories to spread a message, and some may tell stories to explore an idea, to understand, but for most it is because it expands the life we live, gives us things we want and can't always get, and gives us new friends, even if they aren't flesh and blood. I have mourned for people who didn't exist, and urged on those who couldn't hear me. Stories expand the world.
The experience is what changes us, we have to live through it. It has to be at least a little difficult. Duration absolutely changes things, not only in more of the experience to ingest, but more net time of our lives through which we ingested it. Not only do I want BURGER over pill, but I want BURGER with friends and another with different friends. The recap can add to the experience as conversations or reviews. We are taught to read not only because this book or that book is most important and once you understand this or that you are done, but if and only if we could inspire at least just a few to continue reading and thoughtfully experiencing things then they can contribute to the rolling snowball of this immortal being we collectively attempt to be.
@@Billionth_Kevin Wow you are more profound that I can ever be. In this day and age it really easy to thing that reading is gonna soon be a thing of the past. Which is scary cus I really don't want to be jobless and pennyless, or that Chatgpt gonna take my job
@@pippintooks6553 don’t sell your future short on its ability to be more profound. I am self proclaimed non-words-person, but for some reason after watching GE videos they just pour out. As for your existential dread… yes?, at least make sure you’ve gone through the denial, etc, acceptance steps with your own morality/mortality first before trying to put the whole weight of the world on your shoulders. Like.. ever realize the only ones you will ever love that you won’t have to mourn are the ones who will mourn you? As soon as that question doesn’t cause anxiety anymore, you’ll be fine
@ Tbh Im not that stress out by the future. But as a fresh writer myself, it can be scary thinking about the possiblites that our craft is on the verge of dying
Nice video! Some of the points you brought up remind me of the following Ursula K. Le Guin quote from the introduction of The Left Hand of Darkness: "The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words." Another aspect of stories which might make them more effective than something like a blog post for expressing certain ideas and emotions is the way in which a story often requires you to embody a perspective that is not your own, and places you in a world that is very different from your current one. This can make it easier to build empathy with certain experiences and causes in a way that reading nonfiction does not always do, and makes imagining alternate ways the world could be (relevant for something like social justice) more accessible.
I think an important thing to note is difference between mediums. For example, a film can’t show a character’s thoughts (without a voiceover), but books do it all the time. Much the same books can’t fill an entire chapter with people just giving looks to each other (without some weird prose like, “then he looked at his friend, and her eyes said that she was sorry, but her mouth betrayed that she did not regret what she did”. That didnt sound so bad on its own but imagine 20 pages of just that.), but movies can fill 20 minutes of people expanding glances, and it can become incredibly impactful. So when we talk about why we tell stories, it’s important to remember that storytelling actually comes with two parts: storytelling and formcrafting. A director is not just a story teller, but also a director, and probably an editor, and write, and an author is not just a storyteller but an author, a poet often. People are drawn to different crafts as much as they are drawn to telling stories, and I think that that plays a big role in why. Sorry, not a great comment, but I hope I got my ideas across effectively enough.
Andrew Klavan once said, “People will come up to me all the time when I’m working in a book and ask ‘what is your book about?’ Well it’s about a detective who finds a body in the woods and… ‘No no no. What’s your book ABOUT?’ And they’re asking what’s its deeper meanings themes and all that. But I can’t answer that question in one conversation. If I could, I would have written that instead of a whole story.”
This video reminded me of the scene in Deep Space Nine where Odo tells Garak the story of the boy who cried wolf "What's the moral?" says Odo. "Never tell the same lie twice," said Garak. Even with fables not everyone's interpretation will be the same
I rarely ever comment, but what a lovely video!! Personally, I love to write stories about people and worlds that don't exist, but maybe could. To whittle them down into just a summary would remove a lot of their messiness and the feeling that you're living life WITH them. Imo, that idea of experiencing/connecting to another life is what makes stories generally more memorable, because our strongest memories are from our own experiences. The closer to that feeling, maybe the more memorable a story can get. In any case, I also just find fictional worlds fun to explore and am always excited to see where they go. I'm often surprised even when I am the one making them. It's a great time!
Something funny I've found is how LessWrongers figured this out. LessWrongers are obsessed with minmaxing life, pretty much. Yet even still, their core texts often use stories. They give an example of the idea working, show it doesn't have any immediate flaws, and make the abstract ideas much easier to grasp.
I think fiction can be a testing ground for ideas found in philosophy. It's one thing to posit an idea. It's another thing entirely to put that idea into a test scenario and see if it holds up.
Dude, you're an inspiration to me. The world needs more people like you, people who read and are able to seek knowledge and question it. About the topic of the video: I think storytelling works nice as an emotional outlet. Reading takes me away to a different world, to another person's perspective and feelings, just like you said. The imagination wanders through vastly different landscapes, be it sci-fi or fantasy or any other genre. After being in these places, I become calm and ready to solve my own problems. I think it's really beneficial for the brain, just like music's warmth. To add to that, we have to remember that the brain activates the visual cortex when we imagine something, so stories improve our ability to visualize reality in our mind. I think it's fascinating.
This was very interesting. For a while a have found some modern professional level media to feel very fake - even when the media is so well done and loved by many people. When I think about books or movies that resonate with me and feel very human, I struggle to understand even 1/4th of the messages and would probably fail to explain everything in words (and the stuff I do understand is most likely a personal reflection). Such as the Studio Ghibli movies, simply because messages are so layered and so abstract they were probably not all written down in the first place. In contrast, something like Arcane is not bad, in fact it is very prefect, so much so that I can summarize every character arc in its own thesis statement and not feel like I missed anything.
Hot take: 80% of philosophy is purely entertainment litirature, another 15% is entertainment litirature that is centered around arguments instead of plot and characters, the rest 5% is math and logic It is often considered more prestigeous than fiction only because of the established tradition
Storytelling and philosophy are both prestigious and worthy of respect, but you shouldn't try to portray philosophy as less respectable as a way of showing that in my opinion.
@@PigOfGreedabsolutely. I didn't mean to belittle philosophers. British enlightenment authors are among my favourite writers. It just feels like people tend to exaggerate their importance
@ That's fair, to me your original comment just seemed to make philosophy seem like an unnecessary luxury, which I think doesn't do the study justice, but if that's not what you meant then there's no issue.
This channel is so weird. One day it's a skit about a book series, another day it's an actual book review, and yet another day it's an essay on the philosophical meaning of art and what value people find from it. God, I love this channel🤣
I'm in the middle of a creative writing program in college, and I've been in writing groups for about six years now, and one of the things that I keep seeing is that the writer's character is reflected in their work- not in a sense of "oh, that character is them", but moreso in a "oh, of course this piece is theirs, there is no one else on this planet that could ever have written this" way. I usually think of writing almost-backwards from that, like describing what color you see in "red" or "blue" or "yellow" or so on, in that the stories you make are your mind in paper and ink. It's an abstracted way of saying "this is who I am, this is how I see the world" or "this is how the world is to me". I've been making my personal sketchbook to read like that recently, because I do not have the words to explain my entire being, but I think a full collection of what I make and what's happening as I make it might work. It will at least work better
Thank you for making this video. This is a topic I have struggled with extensively (and contiune to do so). It is comforting to know that other respectable people feel the the same internal conflict.
Hoid: "What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind. " Kaladin: "What does the story mean, then? " Hoid: "It means what you want it to mean. The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that. "
I mean... lots of classic novels were originally published as serials. The Count of Monte Cristo. The Time Machine. Around the World in Eighty Days. The Hound of the Baskervilles. They were initially presented in a series of installments published in a magazine, and only got published as standalone novels later. There is no good reason they couldn't have been blog posts. A lot of fables - like, for example, The Boy Who Cried Wolf - could EASILY be told in a blog post. Most of Aesop's fables fit on one or two pages; they're under a thousand words. I write a thousand word blog post every week. Lots of people do. Some more than once a week. If you wrote 2,000 words on your blog every week for a year that's a 100,000 word novel, if you want it to be. Many people collect their blog posts into books. Every Malcolm Gladwell book is basically a collection of large blog posts.
this also influenced how those stories were written. They were sometimes a little overly verbose because the readers weren't reading a single book. Each new installment had to bring them up to speed on the plot. And authors were often paid by the word, so it encouraged them to write longer works. Dickens had his work published in serial, and it's kind of why his books are so long with so much exposition. The other thing is, a 'blog post' likely started out influenced by written essays. Most of Orwell's essays read like things he would have blog posted, if he'd had the tech at the time. Some even talk about letters received at the BBC, which could as easily be 'on social media I saw this comment the other day.'
Thank you for the video! It made me ask myself the same question and the first thing that came to mind was a quote from Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. "Because I want to feel you holding me." No essay, no philosophical treatise, no blog post could ever have the same effect this line had on me when I was reading. I keep coming back to it, it springs to mind in the most unexpected moments and it always surprises me with the depth of feeling that it expresses. I think that people who view fiction solely as a vessel for ideas often forget about what fiction makes us feel. Are emotions less valuable than ideas? Is the beauty of a written word worth less than its meaning? What matters more - the journey or the destination? These are all intriguing questions - ones that I can't quite answer. But I know that there is something (there's always something, isn't there?) that makes me come back to stories, makes me yearn for more. This inscrutable desire, I suppose, is a little bit like faith.
I write my stories mainly because when I think about them enough and mull over what it might look like for a while, I have an intense and burning desire to have them exist in the world. Something simply compels me to have them be written and to be read, telling me that it needs to be written, no matter what
The question you opened the video with is actually a good one. I've picked up writing since last year and I've had moments where I disliked the act of writing itself not because it's hard or because of the lack of ideas, but because I saw myself coming back to put down worthless words on a page instead of doing something better with my time. I feel this especially when it comes to my story/plot itself. I tend to like the process of reading and researching relatively obscure information, but the story itself feels nothing special and just a way to say things I could have otherwise just formulated in a couple paragraphs. ----- I hope to come back and watch this later on.
It seems many people like to try to narrow down the 'Why do we like stories?' question to a singular answer, as if there can only be one reason. I appreciate this video because you yourself can clearly see that there are multiple, possibly many, reasons for why we like and engage so much with stories. One I would like to add is that stories can offer us such believable characters and situations and gives us a good enough facsimile of a particular person's life and experiences that we're more able to feel compassion for not only the characters themselves, but, should we internalize that newfound understanding, actual people. Stories offer us opportunities for perspective and connection and can be a great tool (or guide) for increasing our empathy and self-awareness. I'm not saying this is always the case, of course, anyone can be inattentive or unwilling to engage on that level. And the story itself could just not be providing us with strong enough material to derive such impacts and outcomes. Seeing certain kinds of characters go through great hardships and come out the other end a new and improved person, who looks a lot happier and/or fulfilled, can be tremendously inspiring and might get us powerfully motivated to go and do the things we want and need to do to be better ourselves. On the flip side, tragic figures may have us feeling very sympathetic and wanting to avoid such a fate; maybe even reflect on someone in our own lives who's in somewhat of a similar position and wanting to help steer them onto a different path as well. Why put a message (or Big Question(s)) in a story instead of an essay? Because seeing is believing? (There are holes in this as an answer, I'm sure. But on some level, I sense a grain of truth to it.)
I don’t know if you’ll see this, but I just want to say that this video - and you - are a big inspiration to me. I hold a deep appreciation for written arts that not many of my peers share, and this video really well encapsulates the feelings I have toward the compartmentalization and shortening of writing. There really is something ineffable about stories that facts and messages cannot fathom, and the way you describe this dichotomy is very cohesive and satisfying. As a high schooler currently trying to write a book, this is some great insight that I thank you for🙏.
I completely agree, a story is an experience, a gift from author to reader. It is art, and as art, there is a part of it that is inherently worthless to us. It is more than just it's messages, it is a story, and there is something intangible and utterly indispensable from humanity. The world needs more than just cold facts or philosophy, we need to experience more of the world, and we can do that through the works of fiction.
Stories are like series of dreams and emotions. You can only have similar experience by watching shows, dramas, or acting. Reading is just the cheapest option out there. If we want to discuss, we write essays. If I have enough dreams for me to dive into, then I won't read stories. But I don't. And sometimes, I can see the story my dream is going to tell me, so of course I want something other people dreamt up.
"A man will not get himself killed for a half-pence a day or for some petty distinction, you must speak to his soul in order to electrify him" - Napoleon Bonaparte. This quote was used to show my class the idea of emotional truth (I'd first seen it playing Civilization IV but anyway) there is a theory of why stories exist in that the story exists on the emotional level and while people (or most people or people with extroverted tendencies depending on what theorist you are listening to) will use a story to explore how they feel in regards to a broad theme; While Victor Hugo is believed to have been a Deist and a Conservative, Les Miserable has inspired some to become Catholics, was banned by the Nazis and is believed to have inspired Ho Chi Min to become a Communist. In a sense St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about the way how an author sees a book as different to the viewer in his idea of 'The Two Paintings' in which a painter paints a painting and in actuality creates two, the one in their mind and the one in the mind of the person who sees it on completion. And thus stories are argued to exist as a cultural experience and create a shared emotional experience that acts as a glue for the tribe and perhaps via allegory allowed early societies room to debate the merits of their lot and rulers without any open challenge but that theory is somewhat more debated. The main point, it is argued is that the reason it can't be explained is because its not a rational construct but an emotional experience that allows for a mutual bonding process both between those who know the stories and can ponder their meaning as a communal exercise (often in oral tradition this was done by interacting directly with the story teller as they told it leading to different stories forming around a shared core depending on how the listeners interacted with the story teller) and by spreading the stories to others who did not know them, which often would be those outside the tribe but acted as a form of assimilation of new people groups but allowed them to keep a degree of self-identity if not self-governance, hence why even ancient writers gave their own versions of the legends because factual or philosophical ideas were less important than the communal process of sharing an emotional bond through a good story. This theory is contended with in academia and I happened be familiarized with different theories of story telling since being autistic I tended to struggle with being drawn into a shared emotional experience or abstracted conceptual thinking and so I could be a data point for people who wanted to understand how stories and philosophies work. Hope this short comment was interesting and that everyone is having as happy day as they can.
why we tell stories is a great question i ponder on all the time. they are meaning modulators. the lost in translation part is a natural consequence of the volatility of words and frames of reference/perspectives. the Reason for the story is the story itself. stories are journeys and are made of what you perceive of them. The Point for telling a story is to show them how they react to that journey and the choices they made in perceiving it a certain way. Interpretation is the effect of the story and Reflection is what makes it formative. So- the reason we tell stories is to gain choice about what and how we believe IMO; TL:DR - Humans are just the stories they tell themselves.
This is a very important video and I love you for making it. I have an absolute passion for storytelling, it enriches my soul and it is one the things I seek the most in my day to day as a human being and the fact that stories don't need inherit value determined by how many personal breakthroughs it causes you to have while experiencing them is very important.
Your “because it’s fun” point reminds me of a couple discussion threads I’ve seen talking about why fantasy series often get so long and “bloated”. The most popular responses were that to an extent the bloat is the point. Is all the shire lore in LotR necessary for the plot? No not really. Is all of the history in Asoiaf necessary for that story? Most of it, strictly speaking, probably isn’t. However, as a reader of plenty of fantasy, that is often part of the appeal. Being able to better understand the world the author has created is one thing I enjoy about sci fi and fantasy. Stretching your mind to imagine what could be if the world were different is fun.
I think most philosophy I ever consumed was through science fiction stories. I tried to read philosophy texts, but I simply couldn't get through. I tried to write stories, years ago and reached conclusion that if I have an idea I just share it as it is to my friends or anyone willing to listen and I can't transform it into subtext or characters or plot arcs. And when I tried to write, it was always full of pathos, but with no message, because there wasn't a message I needed to put into it. It had almost no structure as I tend to put my thoughts into a stream, that takes me wherever. It didn't look like any kind of writing I like to read, so I stopped trying, because I couldn't figure out why should I continue putting out a mediocre writing.
I like stories. I like creating them, I like consuming them. Sometimes I even like ruminating on them, or reading blog posts where other people ruminate. Sometimes I like stories that have something to say - even if that something is perhaps frivolous, like "how fuckken cool is this spaceship battle!?" Thankyou for your thought-provoking piece...
Another thing I just realised (consciously, though I've been using the skill unconsciously for some time): The skills that we learn in English/literary studies, of deconstructing stories and writing essays about their content and meaning, can actually be applied _in reverse_ to first note down a story idea in essay form and then construct that outline into a fully-fledged fictional narrative. It's not maybe the world's most useful insight but it is a piece of practical advice that someone who's just learning to write might be able to use; writing an essay about your idea might not be the same as writing the full text of a book (unless you are Borges, as established in the other video), but it's a lot better than sitting there staring at a blank page and thinking 'what do I write now? How do I get from where I've written to where I want the story to finish? How does all of this plot and characterisation fit together?'
I want to add an alternative point of view to when you said that it's easy for stories to get misinterpreted--I think missing context here is stories would have, earlier in our history, only been passed along to a narrow selection of cultures. That's not to say cultures never changed or stories never passed cultural boundaries, such as the Romans adopting a lot of Greek culture and religion. But that the modern era has so many different cultures that have access to everything they could want, and different cultures will necessarily perceive everything through their own cultural lens. The further you go back in the past, the less true this is. This would limit the range of interpretations (and misinterpretations) because compared to today, the people interpreting would have been from a much more limited pool of people that would exist within the same set of foundational values that would guide interpretation. For example in Classical Studies this year we've been analyzing Greek plays and texts, and the gist of it is that there's a lot of stuff the authors never explain in those works because they assume the audience already knows about it, and we're now missing that information so we in the present can only theorize what they meant. The more homogenous a culture, the more homogenous the interpretation would be. (It seems to me a culture can only have so many people before it starts dividing, but that gets into a tangent about group dynamics and I'm not going to do that lol.) Of course that doesn't mean that how stories have been used hasn't changed over history. Like anything, it's changed as civilization has evolved. You get a lot of books in the modern day, for example romance novels, which are purely a means of escapism and living out one's fantasy, and has nothing really to do with the traditional function of storytelling. Capitalism has also affected storytelling in the same way it has affected all art, by making it a means to an end and often more superficial. But the thing that affects storytelling the most is, in my mind, the beginning of stable civilizations--because if storytelling exists to impart wisdom, but you are not living in a state of survival where you NEED that wisdom, then you can become much more creative with it and apply it to different purposes. It also becomes something where we keep doing it, but it doesn't seem connected to anything, because we're completely detached from the life we evolved to live. Sorry this is so long but I feel like a fundamental aspect of answering these questions is asking how things existed before they were changed by civilization and technological advances. Like was fiction invented or have we always used it? And so on.
Writers and artists probably struggle to explain the creative process because, for most of them, they have ideas and a compulsion to get them out. We can usually explain 'how to do' things that are pretty basic. You explain how to fix something, but explaining how to design something is harder. On 'conveying a message' - a story meant to 'convey a message' can often just feel like, this author should have stuck with an essay. You get the point and the story is just making a point over and over again. Good stories go beyond any 'message'. They leave you wondering about what it all means, it opens up possibilities in life rather than reducing everything to neat messages or some philosophical system. Maybe the author just flat out knows they don't have the answers, and they give us a story where the message is mostly 'and what would you make of all this?' A philosopher who presents contradictory ideas is often a 'bad' philosopher, but sometimes that's the mark of a good storyteller. Like they're telling us 'and aren't philosophers suggesting we've got it all figured out?' The reason some works of fiction are still being read it that the 'message' isn't clear. Everybody takes something different from it. People still don't know quite what the Metamorphosis by Kafka is about, but the story grabs you just on strangeness.
The question of "why Tolkien wrote a book instead of a blogpost" reminds me of that quote from Quentin Tarantino "if podcasts existed back when I was 20 I would had never become a filmmaker" (or something like that) nowadays is very tempting for some people to just say their thoughs or opinions outright to an audience of potentially millions (if, for example, their twit goes viral) instead of trying to articulate them through art
I think it is george rr martin that said that writing is like visualiazing a dream and then translating it into literary format, so it is really really difficult
For the half of the video I had in mind one thing I heard somewhere - that stories are playgrounds for ideas. In story you can not only share your idea with others but try to excercise how implementation of such idea would have worked, and viewers/readers can then examine execution of this idea. They can see assumptions and biases that author is not aware of. On the other hand well-thought and well-executed story can show how world works under such idea and it is much more effective in convincing than any amount of logical reasoning. Because people are social beings and they much better reacts through empathy than through pure logic and reason. In theory you can love or hate any idea, but when you start seeing it influencing other people it is much harder to still support one which seems to hurt them. I hope I was clear enough. YT comments are too short for story explaining this idea, and it is very hard to give examples which are safe form starting off-topic and heated discussion.
I love this line of thinking … “Why? Art ! Book !” … One of my favorite things about Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, are the Footnotes. As they accumulate they create a unique build to this world of Susanna Clarke’s. The text & narrative build a very particular Voice. The likes of which, I’ve only heard from English Comedy. Meanwhile, the love story is so bitter and melancholy … that my last reread, ill timed; almost got me in trouble at work … the mood was visibly affecting me. - If the Book is as much a piece of art as a Painting or Sculpture, then The Whole Book must be in mind for the effect to occur, right?
Your description of Sartre's _Nausea_ reminded me of Borges' book-review-as-short-story, which you referenced in a recent video. I haven't read Nausea, so while I'm just experiencing the idea of a book about this dreadful horror, it's very very different from someone telling me at length about existentialist ideas of dread. I'm get the abstraction of the entire experience of reading that book, just from knowing those ideas take the form of a book. As you said in the Borges section of the other video, it feels a *little* bit like I've read it! Of course, it's a far different thing to actually read it, but I feel it's super neat that this extra power (perhaps memetic fitness) which ideas gain when built into a narrative holds, albeit perhaps in a similar but different way, even when they are just an abstraction placed into that conceptual frame. An idea of an idea can be more powerful than just an idea.
a while ago i stumbled upon a video in which the person making it claimed that their preferrred type of literature (business lit) is superior to fiction (and the examples shown were fantasy/sci-fi) cause at least there are practical in day to day life. that bummed me a lot. yes, fiction isn't practical but i don't believe it ever ought to be. today's society revolves around productivity and if something is considered not productive it means it is anti-productive, therefore the space for storytelling shrinks.
that is about as dystopian as it is. I guess next we should all read lines of code rather than stories of business lit, because it's even more 'practical.'
"I don't know what people learn from novels and poems that isn't more rigorously exposited and defended in philosophy texts." Yeah. The point of novels exactly : not being rigorous as philosophy tend to be, nor to defend points but to make them shine in particular ways. Philosophy try to answer "What is moral ?" when novels tell us : "let's do stupid for sake of stupid".
My intuition is that stories are more akin than climbing a mountain and feeling all that comes with climbing a mountain (for example the cold snow on one's skin or the pain in one's legs); it is more than one idea/emotion that creates a story whereas a summary just offers a disconnected idea which by itself does not mean much. In cognitive linguistics it is believe that words are simply triggers or access points to the parts of one encyclopedic knowledge which is then interpreted against the ICM (Idealised cognitive model- a stable representation of our real world knowledge in our minds) which is placed within for example going to a restaurant ro climbing a mountain. I think stories weave together ideas which one might normally not associate with each other and allow the expansion of one's encyclopaedic knowledge into not only a wider but also a denser network. (Yes I recently Finished studying for my linguistics exam😅😂)
i appreciated hearing this reflection, especially learning the term memetic fitness. though personally, i do think we tell stories mainly to teach lessons, evolutionarily speaking i think thats why our brains are wired to appreciate them, just like how we enjoy sugar. i think of stories like a mix of persuasive arguments heavily weighted towards pathos and thought experiments/anecdotes. in tolkien, i think of the conlangs and lineage tables as strengthening the ethos of the argument; an author intelligent and well-read enough to create those things and reference real world mythology lends credence to the wisdom imparted by the story. big respectful disagree with one conclusion, i think it is imperative we keep in mind that stories are built to impart messages onto our brains so that we are better equipped to defend against being propagandized. stories will mold our beliefs and we will take lessons from them that inform our real worldview regardless of if we believe that is their main purpose, so o think its actually safer to believe this and evaluate them critically.
I love this comment. I will remember it. And I will use it; I won’t steal it, don’t worry, I’ll say “I read this in, of all places, a RUclips comment thread.”
I think that first tweet you showed at the beginning of the video was saying the opposite of "the point of reading is to get messages". I think it was saying that if you only read to get a message, then you'd be far better served reading book entirely, 100% focused on messages (a philosophy book) rather than a fiction book which will always have stuff beyond messages in it.
"I don't know what people learn from novels and poems that isn't more rigorously exposited and defended in philosophy texts." I dunno, the old-as-humanity process of storytelling? Linguistic beauty? Expansion of the human imagination? What a pretentious arse that person is. If you just want to read stuffy dry analyses of philosophy, go ahead - but stop pretending that you're better than people who read fiction. Fiction has been around far longer than philosophy, and it tends to last longer in execution (people still read ancient classics, but you don't see a lot of Stoics around).
I don't know how you can say that when multiple Stoic texts are still in print. Epictetus, Seneca, etc. What about Plato? Aristotle? All have have been culturally relevant for thousands of years in the west. Then you have Confucius, Lao Tzu, etc in the east. Different ideas require different methods to communicate them, none are superior to one another just like a hammer isn't superior to the drill.
Taste. The thing people learn form novels that they don't get from books on philosophy is taste. And they're fun. And you get the feeling of, "Woah -- my brain is a graphics card and every novel I read enhances the driver software to run more efficiently!"
I am noticing a rise in this mentality that challenging things are inherently not worth it and that there should or always is some kind of easier trick or exploit to get around such challenge. I wonder how such a mindset came about? In the states anyway we have begun to believe that challenge is antiquated.
This is interesting; I've been thinking (and writing!) about this for the past few weeks, but from the opposite angle: I asked for a book recommendation recently and was handed a murder-mystery,* which has a list of rules for solving the mystery printed right there on its first page. It's sort of half-diegetic; the main character is a mystery novellist. But it's also there to provide the audience with a starting-point for playing along at home and trying to solve the mystery before it's actually revealed in-text. And that's a very different type of fiction to a 'story', which we take as an assumed default but I suspect might be more specialised than it's given credit for. * I was looking for something light and fun, ** and kept getting lost in the most depressing parts of the classics section **I'm Australian, 'light and fun' murder-mysteries are a popular genre here
Stories are valuable because they can make a person cry. Crying is really important for the human experience. I have not really read any philosophy but I imagine it may not induce too many tears like a really good book will.
I've seen a lot of weird "stories need to be more blatant and literal to stop Nazis from misinterpreting the and appropriating them" takes in lefty spaces online for a while now, and I think it's contributed to this whole "just write a blog post" attitude. But I think you're right that's it's a stupid take because at the end of the day, everyone experiences art subjectively and so Nazi-brained weirdos are just going to imprint on what they like no matter what, so just make the fiction you want.
The problem is when too many books _are_ written to deliver a specific message - I even saw an author make a blogpost to clarify their message. Maybe it's the influence of English teachers insisting on a hidden symbolism everywhere like "the curtains are blue because it's a metaphor for X". It's even worse when the message can only be understood if you already read certain philosophy texts as a background. E.g. if you haven't heard of Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish', it's hard to tell why a fantasy world's justice system is also an asylum. And without that background, you'd come to totally different conclusions to what the author really wanted to portray. And it's even harder to get the message in stories with multiple themes, multiple unreliable narrators, in-universe deception, or when Narrative itself is a theme (these examples were all in one book). I still like stories, but if the author has a message I wish they'd also spell it out in an afterword, or at least give a reading list.
Funny..looking at the title I'd've thought that in an era of blog posts wherein so much is reduced to minimum we'd become nigh-solipsistically fixated w/words enough that a new venture into literacy in the interest of understanding poetry (with it's brevities and potentially irregular structures maybe more closely resembling 'raw thought') instead of narrative as with stories.
One thing I feel like you miss that is very important to me is connection. There's a quote I like about how you can think you're alone, and then find out Dostoyevsky felt the same way 150 years ago. I don't write to tell people messages, I write to connect with people. I suppose "I see you, and I am here too" is a message. And that's maybe part of the memetic fitness: I can say the words, but those are hollow words. I have to show you some kind of evidence that I mean it.
1:51 "simplify complicated books and make them easier to read" UGH! I did not know this existed. Don't get me started on that rant! People are becoming idiots! Stuff that we got through in high school is now supposedly "too hard" for adults!
The boy who cried wolf is a weird one to select for, considering the adults did nothing. By the second verse we have proof that the boy was correct and that the adults were to blame for his death. Imagine if you were investigating the murder.
To be frank I disagree a bit with the Starship Troopers example because, as much as I like that movie and the director, I think he missed the mark on the satire due to shoddy worldbuilding which leads a ton more room for interpretation than he intended (and I say this as a fascist-hating leftist). Or, in other words, it's bad as satire (which lots of reviewers at release seemed to note but currently gets lost amid all the ideological combat around that movie). Still, I love this channel and it's a treasure. Especialy the part when he didn't mention the author of the Twitter post because he doesn't want people to dogpile on anybody - I respect that so, so much.
@mister-BH yeah, it would have been better if the aliens were viewing the humans and adding context. Like by picking up on the signals in space trying to stay hidden.
??? Forgive me if I misremember the story, but what are you talking about? Kid cries outside his house everyday and says there's wolves when he knows there isn't, this makes his parents trust in him less and less each time that they find out it was just a lie, and then when it is true they no longer believe in him because they have reason to distrust him. How is this the adult's fault? If you lie consistently no one will believe you, that's the point of the story, through lying you cut off your own life support.
@@PigOfGreed he dies though? Like, he's a fool for calling foul, but that is no reason for him to be killed. He needed his community's guidance, instead they ignored him. It's better in versions where he loses the flock not his life, but still you're supposed to teach him. Kids are kinda dumb until they get smart.
@ He's told not to lie and yet he does, the story illustrates the gravity of the mistake which is lying by showing the worst possible outcome of doing so. It's a cautionary tale on the potential consequences of losing people's trust.
I think all art has a mysterious "something" that we can't quite explain. As a logical person, it drives me nuts, too. But it does seem to be the case. Might as well just accept it and enjoy it. Part of this is human nature. We love stories for more than just conveying information because we were created in God's image. Part of that image is that we are creative beings, as He is. It's no accident that Jesus often spoke in parables. I'm not sure exactly why, but it's part of how He made us.
@@CarrotConsumer I feel like the distinction is kind of artificial, it was more market driven. Plenty of authors now considered 'great' were pulp, because at the time, genre fiction was looked down on. HP Lovecraft is high art now, it wasn't when he was writing. Even a writer like Kurt Vonnegut (respected now) had his books out exclusively in paperback during his life, just because enough had sci fi elements that it fit into 'mass market paperback' genre.
I think we can 'convert' that ''pragmatic'', anti-story view with another pragmatic, but informed, view :D : Human memories are based on emotion. Bam! Dry, theoretical texts elicit little to no emotion, whereas a story abounds in it - nay, it is its primordial clay, if I may. So it's easier to remember information that we encountered in a story than in a 'blog post' or a schematic text or whatever.* Also, we are social creatures so something that includes people and their funky little business(es) calls to us and we connect with it better... - so, ultimately, I think some 'ultimate' answer can be given by a collab of anthropologist/historian, psychologist, neuroscientist and writer :D I'm just speculating around here, based on bits of understanding (I love brain stuff) *The interesting paradox here is that, sadly, some kids in school / college don't realise that MORE information can help you remember something better! At least I know that when I looked up for more context I could understand and thus memorise, say, historical events better. p.s.: lovin the shirt, that pumpkin-ish yellow with that (vaguely mauvey) grey is 👌
I love the message of this video but I'm worried that it might not stick in my brain for too long, and it's difficult for me to convince my friends to watch a video blog. Would you mind reworking it into a fictional narrative to improve it's memetic fitness?
The first 500 people to use my link skl.sh/genericentertainment01251 will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare!
Hey Tod, are there any more Stormlight themed videos coming any time soon?
@@ethanbrooks1615 Yeah, I need to finish Wind and Truth, but I'm really slow...
@ Cool! And have fun, take your time, that books is soooo worth it! I'm and audiobook guy, so I was able to spend so time listening while doing other things, but man, that was a 62 hour audiobook. but I loved it! =D
To quote Hoid, “The purpose of stories are not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon”
Ah, another fellow Hoidist! Hello
Hoid advice > the full sander brandonson lectures imo
@@solalabell9674
Alot of Hoid stuff is a distilled version if the lectures, I think. At least I recognized some of the lectures from Hoid quotes lol
Very Chekhovian. But I don't think it's universally true. Some of the best stories communicate universal life lessons.
Nobody like the comment. It's achieved the perfect number
I think there are roughly three types of writers and readers: instructive, representative, and hedonistic. Some people write message stories, some people write to reflect reality, some people write stuff that brings them broadly defined pleasure. Likewise, some readers' measure of a good story is whether it conveys a good message, for some it's whether or not it's realistic, and for others it's whether or not it's fun. It's not a hard and fast rule, most writers and readers are a mixture, but I feel like a lot of bad quality criticism is people applying a reading type that's different from the writing type.
"Why can't it be a blog post?" is a heavily instructive reader getting upset that the writer is being too representative or hedonistic and therefore, from the reader's pov, diluting the message or adding fluff.
Your average "think about the children/this pushes a bad message" is also an instructive reading of a (usually) hedonistic story.
Most "uhmmm actually statistically..." is representative reading of something written instructively or hedonistically.
"It's sucks, there's no dragons/smut/fight scenes" is a hedonistic reading of something written (usually) representatively.
Good video, gave me a lot to think about.
This might be the best comment I've seen on any video to date.
interesting take
Some of the best stories manage to pull off all three.
Ever wonder why people dislike spoilers? It's because alot of the time, the experiencing of the story how it's presented is essential to it's message. An author has intent to show you things in a specific way, and by reducing a story to just what can be learned from it, you, paradoxically, lose any of that intent. How something is presented is equally, if not more important than what is being presented.
This
I agree, and I often bristle at people who say spoilers don't matter. The withholding of information until a certain time is a part of the art of story telling! Even for those stuffy works of literature.
Wild. I don't resonate with this at all.
Dude just spent a whole ass time explaining how the MESSAGE isn't the core of the thing. Lmao at spoil-heads.
@calebbridges4748 I agree. What I was trying to say is that the experience is more important. That the medium can matter more than the individual themes and ideas. And I think most mediums of storytelling are worsened with spoilers.
@michaelpietri9471 yeah I disagree that the media are affected by spoilers. That's definitely where we diverge. Summaries are no substitute, of course. But I'm not really wowed by any artist's use of mystery. It's just not part of the equation for me. My suspension of disbelief is sufficient.
Write your own stories. Make your own art. There's nothing more rewarding and intimate than turning your dreams into any form of enterainment. I've spent 25 of my almost 30 years just to get decent at translating my neurodivergence into something streamlined, and now I'm just developing my professionalism. I wanna be one of my favorite artists when I'm older, and there's no reason for more people to create and take a chance at vulnerability. I've failed so much more than I've succeeded, but the failures kinda just fall away. The successes each give me hope.
I had to read the essay by Tolkien “On fairy stories” in grad school and it has stuck with me ever since. Anyone who says we shouldn’t read fiction is a ninny.
Also, the Great Gatsby is one of my favorite books. I know many people don’t like it, but not even wanting to read it but merely a summary feels criminal.
Did you reed Nghi Vo's interpretation of the Great Gatsby ?" The chosen and the faithful". I'd like to know what you think of this book as someone who liked the original story.
@@vivelesfleurs2907I’m sorry, I have not. In fact, I’ve never heard of it. I’ll add it to my to-read list though.
You know when people say "it's fate/destined to happen", what people really mean is "it's like a story".
When people talk about fate, they do not mean "the chaos of circumstance", they mean "the narrative I tell myself".
Saying something happened because of fate is almost always in a positive context, no one says a car crash was fate unless it is in some narrative sense justified, like someone's come-uppance.
I come from an area with a lot of Calvinists; here, some people _absolutely do_ say things like car accidents are 'fate'. It's an interesting world-view (I'm not sure if it's a strict interpretation of their church doctrine, but it's certainly part of the associated culture.)
I love how you just brushed by: "You don't have to fight human nature just because you can't explain it." That is in incredible thought! I feel like I'm reading some random text by plato where he drops random bomb shells of thought without even acknowledging them. Also your final conclusion reminded me of my favorite pom: "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." -William Carlos Williams. Hats off to you good sir, thank you for your contribution!
I feel that different people have different reasons for writing and reading stories, but I think for many the reason we write and the reason we read is because something within us yearns to experience the life of someone else, and to see things from their perspective. We want to live, and live a lot, and to see through someone else's eyes, or walk alongside someone as a narrator tells us their life, is important to us. We want to feel, and stories make us feel. We want to connect, and stories let us connect with more people than exist.
Some may tell stories to spread a message, and some may tell stories to explore an idea, to understand, but for most it is because it expands the life we live, gives us things we want and can't always get, and gives us new friends, even if they aren't flesh and blood. I have mourned for people who didn't exist, and urged on those who couldn't hear me. Stories expand the world.
I love this.
@Yesica1993 thanks! I appreciate that 🙏🫂
This should've been a novel
Heh heh well said
I mean recap is cool, but come one, that is no way to actually digest it. I dont want some nutrition pill, i want BURGER
The experience is what changes us, we have to live through it. It has to be at least a little difficult. Duration absolutely changes things, not only in more of the experience to ingest, but more net time of our lives through which we ingested it. Not only do I want BURGER over pill, but I want BURGER with friends and another with different friends. The recap can add to the experience as conversations or reviews. We are taught to read not only because this book or that book is most important and once you understand this or that you are done, but if and only if we could inspire at least just a few to continue reading and thoughtfully experiencing things then they can contribute to the rolling snowball of this immortal being we collectively attempt to be.
@@Billionth_Kevin Wow you are more profound that I can ever be. In this day and age it really easy to thing that reading is gonna soon be a thing of the past. Which is scary cus I really don't want to be jobless and pennyless, or that Chatgpt gonna take my job
Yes! Perfect analogy
@@pippintooks6553 don’t sell your future short on its ability to be more profound. I am self proclaimed non-words-person, but for some reason after watching GE videos they just pour out. As for your existential dread… yes?, at least make sure you’ve gone through the denial, etc, acceptance steps with your own morality/mortality first before trying to put the whole weight of the world on your shoulders. Like.. ever realize the only ones you will ever love that you won’t have to mourn are the ones who will mourn you? As soon as that question doesn’t cause anxiety anymore, you’ll be fine
@ Tbh Im not that stress out by the future. But as a fresh writer myself, it can be scary thinking about the possiblites that our craft is on the verge of dying
Why write books instead of blog posts? *proceeds to make a video blogpost*
Honestly love your stuff!! Keep it up
What an interesting perspective. Thanks for taking the time to share Todd!
Nice video! Some of the points you brought up remind me of the following Ursula K. Le Guin quote from the introduction of The Left Hand of Darkness:
"The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words."
Another aspect of stories which might make them more effective than something like a blog post for expressing certain ideas and emotions is the way in which a story often requires you to embody a perspective that is not your own, and places you in a world that is very different from your current one. This can make it easier to build empathy with certain experiences and causes in a way that reading nonfiction does not always do, and makes imagining alternate ways the world could be (relevant for something like social justice) more accessible.
That is such a Le Guin thing to say; I need to stop being so cheap and get the rest of her sci-fi books.
I think an important thing to note is difference between mediums. For example, a film can’t show a character’s thoughts (without a voiceover), but books do it all the time. Much the same books can’t fill an entire chapter with people just giving looks to each other (without some weird prose like, “then he looked at his friend, and her eyes said that she was sorry, but her mouth betrayed that she did not regret what she did”. That didnt sound so bad on its own but imagine 20 pages of just that.), but movies can fill 20 minutes of people expanding glances, and it can become incredibly impactful.
So when we talk about why we tell stories, it’s important to remember that storytelling actually comes with two parts: storytelling and formcrafting. A director is not just a story teller, but also a director, and probably an editor, and write, and an author is not just a storyteller but an author, a poet often. People are drawn to different crafts as much as they are drawn to telling stories, and I think that that plays a big role in why.
Sorry, not a great comment, but I hope I got my ideas across effectively enough.
0:28 but, if you're not Todd... and I'm not Todd... who's Todd???
You’re Todd now💥
Andrew Klavan once said, “People will come up to me all the time when I’m working in a book and ask ‘what is your book about?’ Well it’s about a detective who finds a body in the woods and… ‘No no no. What’s your book ABOUT?’ And they’re asking what’s its deeper meanings themes and all that. But I can’t answer that question in one conversation. If I could, I would have written that instead of a whole story.”
This video reminded me of the scene in Deep Space Nine where Odo tells Garak the story of the boy who cried wolf
"What's the moral?" says Odo.
"Never tell the same lie twice," said Garak.
Even with fables not everyone's interpretation will be the same
I rarely ever comment, but what a lovely video!! Personally, I love to write stories about people and worlds that don't exist, but maybe could. To whittle them down into just a summary would remove a lot of their messiness and the feeling that you're living life WITH them. Imo, that idea of experiencing/connecting to another life is what makes stories generally more memorable, because our strongest memories are from our own experiences. The closer to that feeling, maybe the more memorable a story can get. In any case, I also just find fictional worlds fun to explore and am always excited to see where they go. I'm often surprised even when I am the one making them. It's a great time!
Something funny I've found is how LessWrongers figured this out. LessWrongers are obsessed with minmaxing life, pretty much. Yet even still, their core texts often use stories. They give an example of the idea working, show it doesn't have any immediate flaws, and make the abstract ideas much easier to grasp.
I think fiction can be a testing ground for ideas found in philosophy. It's one thing to posit an idea. It's another thing entirely to put that idea into a test scenario and see if it holds up.
Dude, you're an inspiration to me. The world needs more people like you, people who read and are able to seek knowledge and question it.
About the topic of the video: I think storytelling works nice as an emotional outlet. Reading takes me away to a different world, to another person's perspective and feelings, just like you said. The imagination wanders through vastly different landscapes, be it sci-fi or fantasy or any other genre. After being in these places, I become calm and ready to solve my own problems. I think it's really beneficial for the brain, just like music's warmth. To add to that, we have to remember that the brain activates the visual cortex when we imagine something, so stories improve our ability to visualize reality in our mind. I think it's fascinating.
This was very interesting. For a while a have found some modern professional level media to feel very fake - even when the media is so well done and loved by many people. When I think about books or movies that resonate with me and feel very human, I struggle to understand even 1/4th of the messages and would probably fail to explain everything in words (and the stuff I do understand is most likely a personal reflection). Such as the Studio Ghibli movies, simply because messages are so layered and so abstract they were probably not all written down in the first place. In contrast, something like Arcane is not bad, in fact it is very prefect, so much so that I can summarize every character arc in its own thesis statement and not feel like I missed anything.
Hot take: 80% of philosophy is purely entertainment litirature, another 15% is entertainment litirature that is centered around arguments instead of plot and characters, the rest 5% is math and logic
It is often considered more prestigeous than fiction only because of the established tradition
Storytelling and philosophy are both prestigious and worthy of respect, but you shouldn't try to portray philosophy as less respectable as a way of showing that in my opinion.
@@PigOfGreedabsolutely. I didn't mean to belittle philosophers. British enlightenment authors are among my favourite writers. It just feels like people tend to exaggerate their importance
@ That's fair, to me your original comment just seemed to make philosophy seem like an unnecessary luxury, which I think doesn't do the study justice, but if that's not what you meant then there's no issue.
This channel is so weird. One day it's a skit about a book series, another day it's an actual book review, and yet another day it's an essay on the philosophical meaning of art and what value people find from it.
God, I love this channel🤣
I'm in the middle of a creative writing program in college, and I've been in writing groups for about six years now, and one of the things that I keep seeing is that the writer's character is reflected in their work- not in a sense of "oh, that character is them", but moreso in a "oh, of course this piece is theirs, there is no one else on this planet that could ever have written this" way. I usually think of writing almost-backwards from that, like describing what color you see in "red" or "blue" or "yellow" or so on, in that the stories you make are your mind in paper and ink. It's an abstracted way of saying "this is who I am, this is how I see the world" or "this is how the world is to me". I've been making my personal sketchbook to read like that recently, because I do not have the words to explain my entire being, but I think a full collection of what I make and what's happening as I make it might work. It will at least work better
Thank you for making this video. This is a topic I have struggled with extensively (and contiune to do so). It is comforting to know that other respectable people feel the the same internal conflict.
Hoid: "What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind. "
Kaladin: "What does the story mean, then? "
Hoid: "It means what you want it to mean. The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that. "
I mean... lots of classic novels were originally published as serials. The Count of Monte Cristo. The Time Machine. Around the World in Eighty Days. The Hound of the Baskervilles. They were initially presented in a series of installments published in a magazine, and only got published as standalone novels later. There is no good reason they couldn't have been blog posts. A lot of fables - like, for example, The Boy Who Cried Wolf - could EASILY be told in a blog post. Most of Aesop's fables fit on one or two pages; they're under a thousand words. I write a thousand word blog post every week. Lots of people do. Some more than once a week. If you wrote 2,000 words on your blog every week for a year that's a 100,000 word novel, if you want it to be. Many people collect their blog posts into books. Every Malcolm Gladwell book is basically a collection of large blog posts.
this also influenced how those stories were written. They were sometimes a little overly verbose because the readers weren't reading a single book. Each new installment had to bring them up to speed on the plot. And authors were often paid by the word, so it encouraged them to write longer works. Dickens had his work published in serial, and it's kind of why his books are so long with so much exposition.
The other thing is, a 'blog post' likely started out influenced by written essays. Most of Orwell's essays read like things he would have blog posted, if he'd had the tech at the time. Some even talk about letters received at the BBC, which could as easily be 'on social media I saw this comment the other day.'
Thank you for the video! It made me ask myself the same question and the first thing that came to mind was a quote from Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. "Because I want to feel you holding me." No essay, no philosophical treatise, no blog post could ever have the same effect this line had on me when I was reading. I keep coming back to it, it springs to mind in the most unexpected moments and it always surprises me with the depth of feeling that it expresses. I think that people who view fiction solely as a vessel for ideas often forget about what fiction makes us feel. Are emotions less valuable than ideas? Is the beauty of a written word worth less than its meaning? What matters more - the journey or the destination? These are all intriguing questions - ones that I can't quite answer. But I know that there is something (there's always something, isn't there?) that makes me come back to stories, makes me yearn for more. This inscrutable desire, I suppose, is a little bit like faith.
I write my stories mainly because when I think about them enough and mull over what it might look like for a while, I have an intense and burning desire to have them exist in the world. Something simply compels me to have them be written and to be read, telling me that it needs to be written, no matter what
The question you opened the video with is actually a good one. I've picked up writing since last year and I've had moments where I disliked the act of writing itself not because it's hard or because of the lack of ideas, but because I saw myself coming back to put down worthless words on a page instead of doing something better with my time. I feel this especially when it comes to my story/plot itself. I tend to like the process of reading and researching relatively obscure information, but the story itself feels nothing special and just a way to say things I could have otherwise just formulated in a couple paragraphs. ----- I hope to come back and watch this later on.
I am in that exact spot right now, feeling like I'm beating around the bush for 200 pages
It seems many people like to try to narrow down the 'Why do we like stories?' question to a singular answer, as if there can only be one reason. I appreciate this video because you yourself can clearly see that there are multiple, possibly many, reasons for why we like and engage so much with stories.
One I would like to add is that stories can offer us such believable characters and situations and gives us a good enough facsimile of a particular person's life and experiences that we're more able to feel compassion for not only the characters themselves, but, should we internalize that newfound understanding, actual people.
Stories offer us opportunities for perspective and connection and can be a great tool (or guide) for increasing our empathy and self-awareness. I'm not saying this is always the case, of course, anyone can be inattentive or unwilling to engage on that level. And the story itself could just not be providing us with strong enough material to derive such impacts and outcomes.
Seeing certain kinds of characters go through great hardships and come out the other end a new and improved person, who looks a lot happier and/or fulfilled, can be tremendously inspiring and might get us powerfully motivated to go and do the things we want and need to do to be better ourselves. On the flip side, tragic figures may have us feeling very sympathetic and wanting to avoid such a fate; maybe even reflect on someone in our own lives who's in somewhat of a similar position and wanting to help steer them onto a different path as well.
Why put a message (or Big Question(s)) in a story instead of an essay? Because seeing is believing? (There are holes in this as an answer, I'm sure. But on some level, I sense a grain of truth to it.)
I don’t know if you’ll see this, but I just want to say that this video - and you - are a big inspiration to me. I hold a deep appreciation for written arts that not many of my peers share, and this video really well encapsulates the feelings I have toward the compartmentalization and shortening of writing. There really is something ineffable about stories that facts and messages cannot fathom, and the way you describe this dichotomy is very cohesive and satisfying. As a high schooler currently trying to write a book, this is some great insight that I thank you for🙏.
I completely agree, a story is an experience, a gift from author to reader. It is art, and as art, there is a part of it that is inherently worthless to us. It is more than just it's messages, it is a story, and there is something intangible and utterly indispensable from humanity. The world needs more than just cold facts or philosophy, we need to experience more of the world, and we can do that through the works of fiction.
At the very beginning I was thinking it would be a sketch, but no. And oh boy, thank you to let your little goblin run around for a bit
Beautifully put. Personally, I enjoy writing as just a means of release, having a story idea and not writing it, is just frustrating.
Stories are like series of dreams and emotions. You can only have similar experience by watching shows, dramas, or acting. Reading is just the cheapest option out there.
If we want to discuss, we write essays.
If I have enough dreams for me to dive into, then I won't read stories. But I don't. And sometimes, I can see the story my dream is going to tell me, so of course I want something other people dreamt up.
"A man will not get himself killed for a half-pence a day or for some petty distinction, you must speak to his soul in order to electrify him" - Napoleon Bonaparte.
This quote was used to show my class the idea of emotional truth (I'd first seen it playing Civilization IV but anyway) there is a theory of why stories exist in that the story exists on the emotional level and while people (or most people or people with extroverted tendencies depending on what theorist you are listening to) will use a story to explore how they feel in regards to a broad theme;
While Victor Hugo is believed to have been a Deist and a Conservative, Les Miserable has inspired some to become Catholics, was banned by the Nazis and is believed to have inspired Ho Chi Min to become a Communist.
In a sense St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about the way how an author sees a book as different to the viewer in his idea of 'The Two Paintings' in which a painter paints a painting and in actuality creates two, the one in their mind and the one in the mind of the person who sees it on completion.
And thus stories are argued to exist as a cultural experience and create a shared emotional experience that acts as a glue for the tribe and perhaps via allegory allowed early societies room to debate the merits of their lot and rulers without any open challenge but that theory is somewhat more debated.
The main point, it is argued is that the reason it can't be explained is because its not a rational construct but an emotional experience that allows for a mutual bonding process both between those who know the stories and can ponder their meaning as a communal exercise (often in oral tradition this was done by interacting directly with the story teller as they told it leading to different stories forming around a shared core depending on how the listeners interacted with the story teller) and by spreading the stories to others who did not know them, which often would be those outside the tribe but acted as a form of assimilation of new people groups but allowed them to keep a degree of self-identity if not self-governance, hence why even ancient writers gave their own versions of the legends because factual or philosophical ideas were less important than the communal process of sharing an emotional bond through a good story.
This theory is contended with in academia and I happened be familiarized with different theories of story telling since being autistic I tended to struggle with being drawn into a shared emotional experience or abstracted conceptual thinking and so I could be a data point for people who wanted to understand how stories and philosophies work.
Hope this short comment was interesting and that everyone is having as happy day as they can.
why we tell stories is a great question i ponder on all the time. they are meaning modulators. the lost in translation part is a natural consequence of the volatility of words and frames of reference/perspectives. the Reason for the story is the story itself. stories are journeys and are made of what you perceive of them. The Point for telling a story is to show them how they react to that journey and the choices they made in perceiving it a certain way.
Interpretation is the effect of the story and Reflection is what makes it formative.
So- the reason we tell stories is to gain choice about what and how we believe
IMO; TL:DR - Humans are just the stories they tell themselves.
This is a very important video and I love you for making it. I have an absolute passion for storytelling, it enriches my soul and it is one the things I seek the most in my day to day as a human being and the fact that stories don't need inherit value determined by how many personal breakthroughs it causes you to have while experiencing them is very important.
Your “because it’s fun” point reminds me of a couple discussion threads I’ve seen talking about why fantasy series often get so long and “bloated”. The most popular responses were that to an extent the bloat is the point. Is all the shire lore in LotR necessary for the plot? No not really. Is all of the history in Asoiaf necessary for that story? Most of it, strictly speaking, probably isn’t.
However, as a reader of plenty of fantasy, that is often part of the appeal. Being able to better understand the world the author has created is one thing I enjoy about sci fi and fantasy. Stretching your mind to imagine what could be if the world were different is fun.
I thought Tolkien's point was that thicc dragons were hot or did I misinterpret something
Nah you're right.
I really like these video essays you do. You’re so well spoken, Todd or Mr. Entertainment or whatever your name is
I don’t have a TBR
I have a TBW 😅 I’ll finish writing these books some day!
Thank you for the enlightenment, Todd.
Very insightful video, Todd. Thanks for sharing
I think most philosophy I ever consumed was through science fiction stories.
I tried to read philosophy texts, but I simply couldn't get through.
I tried to write stories, years ago and reached conclusion that if I have an idea I just share it as it is to my friends or anyone willing to listen and I can't transform it into subtext or characters or plot arcs. And when I tried to write, it was always full of pathos, but with no message, because there wasn't a message I needed to put into it. It had almost no structure as I tend to put my thoughts into a stream, that takes me wherever. It didn't look like any kind of writing I like to read, so I stopped trying, because I couldn't figure out why should I continue putting out a mediocre writing.
I like stories.
I like creating them, I like consuming them. Sometimes I even like ruminating on them, or reading blog posts where other people ruminate.
Sometimes I like stories that have something to say - even if that something is perhaps frivolous, like "how fuckken cool is this spaceship battle!?"
Thankyou for your thought-provoking piece...
Just wanna say, reading fiction from a young age taught me empathy and compassion in a way nothing else in my life ever has.
Another thing I just realised (consciously, though I've been using the skill unconsciously for some time): The skills that we learn in English/literary studies, of deconstructing stories and writing essays about their content and meaning, can actually be applied _in reverse_ to first note down a story idea in essay form and then construct that outline into a fully-fledged fictional narrative.
It's not maybe the world's most useful insight but it is a piece of practical advice that someone who's just learning to write might be able to use; writing an essay about your idea might not be the same as writing the full text of a book (unless you are Borges, as established in the other video), but it's a lot better than sitting there staring at a blank page and thinking 'what do I write now? How do I get from where I've written to where I want the story to finish? How does all of this plot and characterisation fit together?'
I want to add an alternative point of view to when you said that it's easy for stories to get misinterpreted--I think missing context here is stories would have, earlier in our history, only been passed along to a narrow selection of cultures. That's not to say cultures never changed or stories never passed cultural boundaries, such as the Romans adopting a lot of Greek culture and religion. But that the modern era has so many different cultures that have access to everything they could want, and different cultures will necessarily perceive everything through their own cultural lens. The further you go back in the past, the less true this is.
This would limit the range of interpretations (and misinterpretations) because compared to today, the people interpreting would have been from a much more limited pool of people that would exist within the same set of foundational values that would guide interpretation. For example in Classical Studies this year we've been analyzing Greek plays and texts, and the gist of it is that there's a lot of stuff the authors never explain in those works because they assume the audience already knows about it, and we're now missing that information so we in the present can only theorize what they meant. The more homogenous a culture, the more homogenous the interpretation would be. (It seems to me a culture can only have so many people before it starts dividing, but that gets into a tangent about group dynamics and I'm not going to do that lol.)
Of course that doesn't mean that how stories have been used hasn't changed over history. Like anything, it's changed as civilization has evolved. You get a lot of books in the modern day, for example romance novels, which are purely a means of escapism and living out one's fantasy, and has nothing really to do with the traditional function of storytelling. Capitalism has also affected storytelling in the same way it has affected all art, by making it a means to an end and often more superficial. But the thing that affects storytelling the most is, in my mind, the beginning of stable civilizations--because if storytelling exists to impart wisdom, but you are not living in a state of survival where you NEED that wisdom, then you can become much more creative with it and apply it to different purposes. It also becomes something where we keep doing it, but it doesn't seem connected to anything, because we're completely detached from the life we evolved to live.
Sorry this is so long but I feel like a fundamental aspect of answering these questions is asking how things existed before they were changed by civilization and technological advances. Like was fiction invented or have we always used it? And so on.
Danke!
You are from the rare kind that asks seriously why questions . I tried this in forums and gave up 😂
Writers and artists probably struggle to explain the creative process because, for most of them, they have ideas and a compulsion to get them out. We can usually explain 'how to do' things that are pretty basic. You explain how to fix something, but explaining how to design something is harder.
On 'conveying a message' - a story meant to 'convey a message' can often just feel like, this author should have stuck with an essay. You get the point and the story is just making a point over and over again.
Good stories go beyond any 'message'. They leave you wondering about what it all means, it opens up possibilities in life rather than reducing everything to neat messages or some philosophical system. Maybe the author just flat out knows they don't have the answers, and they give us a story where the message is mostly 'and what would you make of all this?' A philosopher who presents contradictory ideas is often a 'bad' philosopher, but sometimes that's the mark of a good storyteller. Like they're telling us 'and aren't philosophers suggesting we've got it all figured out?'
The reason some works of fiction are still being read it that the 'message' isn't clear. Everybody takes something different from it. People still don't know quite what the Metamorphosis by Kafka is about, but the story grabs you just on strangeness.
The question of "why Tolkien wrote a book instead of a blogpost" reminds me of that quote from Quentin Tarantino "if podcasts existed back when I was 20 I would had never become a filmmaker" (or something like that) nowadays is very tempting for some people to just say their thoughs or opinions outright to an audience of potentially millions (if, for example, their twit goes viral) instead of trying to articulate them through art
I think it is george rr martin that said that writing is like visualiazing a dream and then translating it into literary format, so it is really really difficult
NEW GENERIC ENTERTAINMENT VIDEO !!!
STORIES ARE FUN!! STORIES ABOUT DRAGONS AND KNIGHTS AND VAMPIRE KNIGHTS ARE FUN!!!!!
For the half of the video I had in mind one thing I heard somewhere - that stories are playgrounds for ideas. In story you can not only share your idea with others but try to excercise how implementation of such idea would have worked, and viewers/readers can then examine execution of this idea. They can see assumptions and biases that author is not aware of. On the other hand well-thought and well-executed story can show how world works under such idea and it is much more effective in convincing than any amount of logical reasoning. Because people are social beings and they much better reacts through empathy than through pure logic and reason. In theory you can love or hate any idea, but when you start seeing it influencing other people it is much harder to still support one which seems to hurt them.
I hope I was clear enough. YT comments are too short for story explaining this idea, and it is very hard to give examples which are safe form starting off-topic and heated discussion.
2:04 "excuse me for just a second a second"
Buhummm *toc toc toc* GUAHHH
I love this line of thinking … “Why? Art ! Book !”
… One of my favorite things about Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, are the Footnotes. As they accumulate they create a unique build to this world of Susanna Clarke’s. The text & narrative build a very particular Voice. The likes of which, I’ve only heard from English Comedy.
Meanwhile, the love story is so bitter and melancholy … that my last reread, ill timed; almost got me in trouble at work … the mood was visibly affecting me.
- If the Book is as much a piece of art as a Painting or Sculpture, then The Whole Book must be in mind for the effect to occur, right?
Your description of Sartre's _Nausea_ reminded me of Borges' book-review-as-short-story, which you referenced in a recent video. I haven't read Nausea, so while I'm just experiencing the idea of a book about this dreadful horror, it's very very different from someone telling me at length about existentialist ideas of dread. I'm get the abstraction of the entire experience of reading that book, just from knowing those ideas take the form of a book. As you said in the Borges section of the other video, it feels a *little* bit like I've read it!
Of course, it's a far different thing to actually read it, but I feel it's super neat that this extra power (perhaps memetic fitness) which ideas gain when built into a narrative holds, albeit perhaps in a similar but different way, even when they are just an abstraction placed into that conceptual frame. An idea of an idea can be more powerful than just an idea.
wow, youtube has no ability to edit a comment. I'm get the hammer
a while ago i stumbled upon a video in which the person making it claimed that their preferrred type of literature (business lit) is superior to fiction (and the examples shown were fantasy/sci-fi) cause at least there are practical in day to day life. that bummed me a lot. yes, fiction isn't practical but i don't believe it ever ought to be. today's society revolves around productivity and if something is considered not productive it means it is anti-productive, therefore the space for storytelling shrinks.
that is about as dystopian as it is. I guess next we should all read lines of code rather than stories of business lit, because it's even more 'practical.'
"I don't know what people learn from novels and poems that isn't more rigorously exposited and defended in philosophy texts."
Yeah. The point of novels exactly : not being rigorous as philosophy tend to be, nor to defend points but to make them shine in particular ways. Philosophy try to answer "What is moral ?" when novels tell us : "let's do stupid for sake of stupid".
Me: "Your name is Todd????"
*Five seconds later*
Me: "Good. You don't look like a Todd."
My intuition is that stories are more akin than climbing a mountain and feeling all that comes with climbing a mountain (for example the cold snow on one's skin or the pain in one's legs); it is more than one idea/emotion that creates a story whereas a summary just offers a disconnected idea which by itself does not mean much.
In cognitive linguistics it is believe that words are simply triggers or access points to the parts of one encyclopedic knowledge which is then interpreted against the ICM (Idealised cognitive model- a stable representation of our real world knowledge in our minds) which is placed within for example going to a restaurant ro climbing a mountain. I think stories weave together ideas which one might normally not associate with each other and allow the expansion of one's encyclopaedic knowledge into not only a wider but also a denser network.
(Yes I recently Finished studying for my linguistics exam😅😂)
i appreciated hearing this reflection, especially learning the term memetic fitness. though personally, i do think we tell stories mainly to teach lessons, evolutionarily speaking i think thats why our brains are wired to appreciate them, just like how we enjoy sugar. i think of stories like a mix of persuasive arguments heavily weighted towards pathos and thought experiments/anecdotes. in tolkien, i think of the conlangs and lineage tables as strengthening the ethos of the argument; an author intelligent and well-read enough to create those things and reference real world mythology lends credence to the wisdom imparted by the story.
big respectful disagree with one conclusion, i think it is imperative we keep in mind that stories are built to impart messages onto our brains so that we are better equipped to defend against being propagandized. stories will mold our beliefs and we will take lessons from them that inform our real worldview regardless of if we believe that is their main purpose, so o think its actually safer to believe this and evaluate them critically.
I write stories because I want to inhabit the creature that might write that story
I love this comment. I will remember it. And I will use it; I won’t steal it, don’t worry, I’ll say “I read this in, of all places, a RUclips comment thread.”
I think that first tweet you showed at the beginning of the video was saying the opposite of "the point of reading is to get messages".
I think it was saying that if you only read to get a message, then you'd be far better served reading book entirely, 100% focused on messages (a philosophy book) rather than a fiction book which will always have stuff beyond messages in it.
"I don't know what people learn from novels and poems that isn't more rigorously exposited and defended in philosophy texts."
I dunno, the old-as-humanity process of storytelling? Linguistic beauty? Expansion of the human imagination?
What a pretentious arse that person is. If you just want to read stuffy dry analyses of philosophy, go ahead - but stop pretending that you're better than people who read fiction. Fiction has been around far longer than philosophy, and it tends to last longer in execution (people still read ancient classics, but you don't see a lot of Stoics around).
I agree with you completely, but people do still read ancient philosophic texts
The individual who wrote that tweet initially is well-known for their extremely in-depth "bait", and this was merely an example of that.
I don't know how you can say that when multiple Stoic texts are still in print. Epictetus, Seneca, etc. What about Plato? Aristotle? All have have been culturally relevant for thousands of years in the west. Then you have Confucius, Lao Tzu, etc in the east.
Different ideas require different methods to communicate them, none are superior to one another just like a hammer isn't superior to the drill.
Taste.
The thing people learn form novels that they don't get from books on philosophy is taste.
And they're fun.
And you get the feeling of, "Woah -- my brain is a graphics card and every novel I read enhances the driver software to run more efficiently!"
I am noticing a rise in this mentality that challenging things are inherently not worth it and that there should or always is some kind of easier trick or exploit to get around such challenge. I wonder how such a mindset came about? In the states anyway we have begun to believe that challenge is antiquated.
I'm so glad that I got to see this video and I'm also grateful to you for making it 👌🔥🔥🔥❤️
This is interesting; I've been thinking (and writing!) about this for the past few weeks, but from the opposite angle: I asked for a book recommendation recently and was handed a murder-mystery,* which has a list of rules for solving the mystery printed right there on its first page. It's sort of half-diegetic; the main character is a mystery novellist. But it's also there to provide the audience with a starting-point for playing along at home and trying to solve the mystery before it's actually revealed in-text. And that's a very different type of fiction to a 'story', which we take as an assumed default but I suspect might be more specialised than it's given credit for.
* I was looking for something light and fun, ** and kept getting lost in the most depressing parts of the classics section
**I'm Australian, 'light and fun' murder-mysteries are a popular genre here
I know your name isn't Todd, it's Gene.
Gene Eric
That chair looks really comfortable
Stories are valuable because they can make a person cry. Crying is really important for the human experience. I have not really read any philosophy but I imagine it may not induce too many tears like a really good book will.
Maybe not from empathy but you might cry from an existential crisis.
I've seen a lot of weird "stories need to be more blatant and literal to stop Nazis from misinterpreting the and appropriating them" takes in lefty spaces online for a while now, and I think it's contributed to this whole "just write a blog post" attitude. But I think you're right that's it's a stupid take because at the end of the day, everyone experiences art subjectively and so Nazi-brained weirdos are just going to imprint on what they like no matter what, so just make the fiction you want.
The problem is when too many books _are_ written to deliver a specific message - I even saw an author make a blogpost to clarify their message.
Maybe it's the influence of English teachers insisting on a hidden symbolism everywhere like "the curtains are blue because it's a metaphor for X".
It's even worse when the message can only be understood if you already read certain philosophy texts as a background. E.g. if you haven't heard of Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish', it's hard to tell why a fantasy world's justice system is also an asylum. And without that background, you'd come to totally different conclusions to what the author really wanted to portray.
And it's even harder to get the message in stories with multiple themes, multiple unreliable narrators, in-universe deception, or when Narrative itself is a theme (these examples were all in one book).
I still like stories, but if the author has a message I wish they'd also spell it out in an afterword, or at least give a reading list.
amazing video,
Funny..looking at the title I'd've thought that in an era of blog posts wherein so much is reduced to minimum we'd become nigh-solipsistically fixated w/words enough that a new venture into literacy in the interest of understanding poetry (with it's brevities and potentially irregular structures maybe more closely resembling 'raw thought') instead of narrative as with stories.
This is giving hank green vibes for some reason
Indeed it is!
One thing I feel like you miss that is very important to me is connection. There's a quote I like about how you can think you're alone, and then find out Dostoyevsky felt the same way 150 years ago.
I don't write to tell people messages, I write to connect with people.
I suppose "I see you, and I am here too" is a message. And that's maybe part of the memetic fitness: I can say the words, but those are hollow words. I have to show you some kind of evidence that I mean it.
Another REMARKABLE video from Not Todd
Fun for me is using Starship Troopers as an example whenever I can
4:40 "Memetic fitness" comes from (near the end of) The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I think it's where the term "meme" was coined as well.
1:51
"simplify complicated books and make them easier to read"
UGH! I did not know this existed. Don't get me started on that rant! People are becoming idiots! Stuff that we got through in high school is now supposedly "too hard" for adults!
This is why I hated how literature was taught in school. It was all about 'decoding' the book into the right answers to multiple choice questions.
philosophical ideas can could be easier and shorter described in a philosophy text - laughs in Hegel
TO BE FAIR a lot of popular pulp fiction novels started off as magazine serials!
0:05 It would be true kino if he was sitting ther for like 5 minutes, reading.
The boy who cried wolf is a weird one to select for, considering the adults did nothing.
By the second verse we have proof that the boy was correct and that the adults were to blame for his death.
Imagine if you were investigating the murder.
To be frank I disagree a bit with the Starship Troopers example because, as much as I like that movie and the director, I think he missed the mark on the satire due to shoddy worldbuilding which leads a ton more room for interpretation than he intended (and I say this as a fascist-hating leftist). Or, in other words, it's bad as satire (which lots of reviewers at release seemed to note but currently gets lost amid all the ideological combat around that movie).
Still, I love this channel and it's a treasure. Especialy the part when he didn't mention the author of the Twitter post because he doesn't want people to dogpile on anybody - I respect that so, so much.
@mister-BH yeah, it would have been better if the aliens were viewing the humans and adding context. Like by picking up on the signals in space trying to stay hidden.
???
Forgive me if I misremember the story, but what are you talking about?
Kid cries outside his house everyday and says there's wolves when he knows there isn't, this makes his parents trust in him less and less each time that they find out it was just a lie, and then when it is true they no longer believe in him because they have reason to distrust him.
How is this the adult's fault? If you lie consistently no one will believe you, that's the point of the story, through lying you cut off your own life support.
@@PigOfGreed he dies though?
Like, he's a fool for calling foul, but that is no reason for him to be killed. He needed his community's guidance, instead they ignored him. It's better in versions where he loses the flock not his life, but still you're supposed to teach him. Kids are kinda dumb until they get smart.
@ He's told not to lie and yet he does, the story illustrates the gravity of the mistake which is lying by showing the worst possible outcome of doing so. It's a cautionary tale on the potential consequences of losing people's trust.
My g casualy dropped the link to his hard drive, I can't 🤣
Are you the guy who did the toothpaste post apocalypose skit?
this shit is so good bro keep making stuff
I think all art has a mysterious "something" that we can't quite explain. As a logical person, it drives me nuts, too. But it does seem to be the case. Might as well just accept it and enjoy it.
Part of this is human nature. We love stories for more than just conveying information because we were created in God's image. Part of that image is that we are creative beings, as He is. It's no accident that Jesus often spoke in parables. I'm not sure exactly why, but it's part of how He made us.
I wish we can go back to the pulp era. Simple stories meant for entertainment.
I don't know what most modern fiction is if not pulp. It certainly isn't fine literature.
@@CarrotConsumer I feel like the distinction is kind of artificial, it was more market driven.
Plenty of authors now considered 'great' were pulp, because at the time, genre fiction was looked down on. HP Lovecraft is high art now, it wasn't when he was writing. Even a writer like Kurt Vonnegut (respected now) had his books out exclusively in paperback during his life, just because enough had sci fi elements that it fit into 'mass market paperback' genre.
I think we can 'convert' that ''pragmatic'', anti-story view with another pragmatic, but informed, view :D :
Human memories are based on emotion. Bam! Dry, theoretical texts elicit little to no emotion, whereas a story abounds in it - nay, it is its primordial clay, if I may. So it's easier to remember information that we encountered in a story than in a 'blog post' or a schematic text or whatever.*
Also, we are social creatures so something that includes people and their funky little business(es) calls to us and we connect with it better...
- so, ultimately, I think some 'ultimate' answer can be given by a collab of anthropologist/historian, psychologist, neuroscientist and writer :D
I'm just speculating around here, based on bits of understanding (I love brain stuff)
*The interesting paradox here is that, sadly, some kids in school / college don't realise that MORE information can help you remember something better! At least I know that when I looked up for more context I could understand and thus memorise, say, historical events better.
p.s.: lovin the shirt, that pumpkin-ish yellow with that (vaguely mauvey) grey is 👌
I love the message of this video but I'm worried that it might not stick in my brain for too long, and it's difficult for me to convince my friends to watch a video blog. Would you mind reworking it into a fictional narrative to improve it's memetic fitness?
What Blogging era? That died over a decade ago.