The Mind of Bryan Lee Peterson

In simplest terms, setting is where your story takes place, and it can be as broad as a world or as small as a room. The most important things about setting is to make it unique, real and logical, no matter if it is the most accurate and realistic settings or the most outlandish fantasy. These qualifiers are so important, I’m going to spend some time on each.

We’ll talk about developing a hook, and setting is a large part of hook. If we think about some of our greatest stories, anything from Lord of the Rings, Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Tale of Two Cities, anything, and try to extract them from their settings, you’ll find that their settings are unique, genre-defining and absolutely intrinsic to the story. The settings bring you into the story, and brings your mind back to the stories, and that’s hook. That gets you attention. Look at what is happening with James Cameron’s Avatar right now. Probably 50% of the marketing talks about the world of Avatar. That’s hook that is bringing people to websites, to the theatres. Any kind of story begins with laying out the setting, not necessarily in the inspiration, but in the telling. Even every news story begins with when and where.

But setting shouldn’t be overlooked as a significant storytelling device. If you doubt that setting is just a detail you throw in, think about one of our most prolific storytelling devices these days, reality TV. Really, haven’t we gotten past the characters of these shows, so that they are incidentally entertaining only so much as we stick them into a new place? Survivor Fiji, B-List Celebrities in a Jungle! Ghost hunters in an old landmark! Think about those shows that are about jobs. Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers, the lumberjacks, Pawn Stars, it’s all of the same characters in a different place, if we get right down to it. These shows rely on setting to be as entertaining as their characters. It is the only way to get through the noise of the next show that is coming out.

There’s a lot of noise to get through these days for any project. Let me give you an example. I have a new project, endoftheworldtimes.com. We have four talented young writers and several more preparing to come on-line creating a post-apocalyptic world as our characters explore it. I submitted this site to io9.com, and we didn’t make it onto the blog, even though I think the end of the world Times is quite good. I mean, we have a zombiepocalypse in Haiti, cannibal mushroom farmers in Ted Williams Tunnel, and a garbage mine collapse. All that, and we didn’t make the cut. The guy who made lego spaceships in the shape of the alphabet did, but a site that is creating an alternate future built from scratch didn’t. That’s the noise you have to get through, guys with legos. Please, if you want to help a project out, mention it to io9.com. We’d appreciate it. Otherwise you get more Legos.

But enough griping.

Setting is in its simplest definition, the place and time your story occurs in. This seems pretty mundane when you get down to it, but in truth, setting is often mundane. Realism- the dominant literary movement of the 20th century and one I happen to despise with a passion unknown for any particular school of art save hip-hop, used the mundane to tell stories. Of Mice and Men, and many of Steinbeck’s stories were told on farms, poor communities, very mundane places. Hemingway too, set many stories in mundane common places, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is set in a place as mundane as a street cafe. The story then must make these places interesting. I remember a story I read from school that was set in a fishery along the Atlantic shore. The story featured a man and woman struggling to have children while at work he opened up a fish to see thousands of eggs. This fishery is probably very boring to a fisherman, but very interesting for an eskimo. So, one man’s mundane is another’s adventure.

But let’s face it, these are mundane stories set in mundane places. I’ve read the same story I think with Steinbeck using cut flowers as the symbol for children, and I think Flannery O’Connor wrote a story about a goose’s eggs and the farmhand who can’t count. I may have the writers wrong, it was a long time ago, but I remember the stories. What makes these stories unique is their setting. As a writer finds a unique setting for the trope, it is fresh and once again publishable. A mundane setting also means you have to work that much harder as a writer, but we’re not afraid of work, now are we?

Of course, that story could be just as well told by Bradbury on Mars, or by Arthur C Clarke on a stopover for an interstellar colony ship. These novel settings can provide a unique twist on a story, the Clarke story I’m thinking of is in a book that isn’t near me, but the idea was if the traveler fathered a child with a woman he met on a stopover planet, that child would live and die and several generations would pass by the next time he was likely to wake up from hypersleep. From this example. We see how an old story finds new life by setting.

And of course, you can make the most ultimately mundane place as unfamiliar as possible very creatively and effectively. Think of Ray Bradbury’s house that goes on with its automatic processes even though all of the humans have died. Or Samuel Beckett’s tree that is the setting for Waiting for Godot. These settings are quite strange when we put them through the minds of great writers like these.

But let’s move beyond thinking of setting as just a place. Setting is culture as well. The people in the place. Rick’s Cafe American wouldnot be what it is without a cast of dubious background characters hanging around, and even if those people never pop their heads out of the background, they are described, your characters must maneuver around them, through them. They may be window dressing, but if Rick’s Cafe American was empty, you wouldn’t have a convincing story.

If we want to think of writing as producing a convincing reality, setting has to be convincing as well. What makes the setting convincing is details, and so the people, colors, smells, sounds, things. A room is a room, but the room with a huge fireplace, paintings on the wall, an ornate baroque desk, and all the trappings tells you who or what might pass through that room. Most likely not a peasant unless there’s a revolution on.

Which brings me to another point. Your setting needs internal logic. We’ll talk about this quite a bit when we get to world building. For now some of the basics. For internal logic to work with the setting, the people, objects, cultures, traditions, colors textures, smells, cuisine, technology, climate, wildlife, everything all have to mesh into a logical whole. No cold-blooded animals on the ice planet of Hoth, no French Haute cuisine in the outback. There is a lot of asking why when establishing a setting like this. Why does African cuisine have a lot of spices? To fight intestinal parasites. Okay, now that’s logical. Certainly a better answer than, it just is. The more unusual your setting, the more work you have to do in thinking through its logic.

But I want to get past setting as a place. You can make a setting without a place, per se, and move more towards setting as the things around your story. Think about Tim O’Brien’s The Things we Carried. Much of the setting of that is objects moving through a ubiquitous and almost generic wartime jungle. In this case, I’d argue to a certain extent, the things they carry, aside from being character details, are the personal settings the characters make for themselves. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but the point is, the characters carry their setting with them.

If we translate this into another world, the setting becomes the giant robot suit somebody experiences the world through, the regiment they serve in, the things they imagine to replace the world that is too much for them to take at the moment. The things they carry are the environments they create for themselves. Within the bounds of the story it could be an imaginary environment, but it is still a setting. It is the environment a character creates for himself, and so therefore is a part of the reality of the story. Hence, the unreliable narrator, and deceptive environment he creates to tell his story, ala The Usual Suspects.

In this case, the setting is an artificial construct of the character. This allows us to carry a setting with us through unfamiliar territories, and reflects on the character and on the real setting. We can carry this a bit further by thinking about a construct of the paranormal. Two examples of this might be the what a mentally unstable character might perceive. Because the environment we perceive is the environment that is real for us, the artificial setting is no less real. I play with this a bit in The Hidden, and more in Tev. In Tev, which you can read on mindofbryan.com or hear on the Horror Addicts Podcast, a man falls in his basement, and possibly due to the gas leak and bump to his head hallucinates a spot that starts talking to him, or maybe that spot is actually there. The reality of the story depend on whose eyes you are looking through. The unreliable narrator must have an unreliable interpretation of his setting, but it is no less real for him. Another example of this is the haunted house. In Richard Matheson’s Hell House, there’s a group of people who go into an abandoned mansion with a history of occult rites, and the reader spends a good deal of time wondering what paranormal occurrences are supernatural but real, and what are simply perceived by suggestion within the character’s minds.

There’s problems with settings as we see them, though. One is the generic setting. This is a trap lazy writers will fall into. If you wanted to write Of Mice and Men, you can’t just set it on a farm. I’m a big fan of doing the work. If you’re a writer, lesson one is: do the work. Make a map of your area, lay the farm on it. Know exactly where all the buildings lie, what they look like, what the view out of every window looks like. Refer to that map as you write.

Second, the single ecosystem problem, aka The Star Wars ________ planet. We know about Hoth, the ice planet, and Dagoba, the swamp planet, and Endor the forest moon, and Coruscant, the planet of high rents. Your readers will see this as laziness, too. We see through you, George Lucas.

Third, planets don’t have a uniform political system, Star Trek. Imagine a world with no political diversity, we’re all Republicans or all Democrats. We don’t need a congress, really, because we all follow the same rules as a personal way of life. We don’t have any wars. What a boring planet.

Don’t think this applies only to sci-fi or fantasy. Imagine our example of the day, Rick’s Cafe American without so many groups looking out for their own interests. No fun at all, a bunch of guys hanging around singing drinking songs.

Now there is one other way to look at setting, and that is as a character. If you want to look at a character as anything that acts on your main character. One of the oldest conflicts is “man vs. wild”. In this case, your setting (hopefully extremely detailed) is your antagonist. You can see these stories play out in Man vs. Wild and Survivorman, if you want an example from your everyday entertainment offerings, though there have been many books over the years dealing with this as a conflict as well.

Setting in narrative has evolved over the centuries. According to Aristotle’s unities, the entire story must take place in one setting, and anything that happens elsewhere is brought to the stage by messengers. This carried over into Shakespeare’s day to a certain extent, but by this time, setting had become fluid. Think about Shakespeare’s stage for setting. There was little that could be done to change the setting, and certainly no narrative prose to lay out the setting for the audience, and so setting had to be established by dialogue. When you think of some famous lines, they are actually lines that establish the setting of the scene.

“What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” In so few words, we establish the time (morning) and the setting (inside).

Or Hamlet:

Ber. Who’s there?

Fran. Nay, answer me; stand, and unfold yourself.

Ber. Long live the king!

Fran. Bernardo?

Ber. He.

Fran. You come most carefully upon your hour.

Ber. ’Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

Fran. For this relief much thanks; ’tis bitter cold,

And I am sick at heart.

Ber. Have you had quiet guard?

Fran. Not a mouse stirring.

Ber. Well, good-night.

Let’s see what this establishes setting wise. It is night, it is quiet, we’re in a king’s residence. It is cold. This scene does so much to establish not just setting, but tone and direction.

One of the habits we get into as we write long for prose, novellas and novels, is to start a scene with a description of the setting then move onto dialog and action. Your reader and editor will pick up on this. Think of every time you heard of a scene start off with “John sat in his office, a small oscillating fan occasionally promising to make a dent in the heat and humidity. A knock came at the door. ‘Get the hell out of my office,’ John screamed.” We can start this scene off just as easily with, “Get the hell out of my office,” John screamed to the knock at his door. You can lay the groundwork in previous scenes, or you can use details to set this up for you.

I’m a big detail writer. Every aspect of good storytelling is about the details. In the case of setting, we need to describe the everything to every sense as much as is needed or possible. We can certainly go overboard, but the more detailed your setting, the more convincing the reality of the setting and the story.

So that’s a brief look at setting. If you’re considering writing, and you have your unique, interesting and detailed setting, you can now move onto the next basic, plot theme, or character. Don’t know which one I’ll pick up on next. If you want any say in the matter, send me a comment.

Like most people in my situation, being a creator of content and trying to promote it, I am signed up and signed away on social media. It really is the way of the future. But there are so many options, what really is working, and what isn’t? I’ll certainly ask for your input for more ideas, but I’ll look at the main culprits here and give you an idea of what I see.

First, my own sites. As I’ve discussed, I’ve decided to post all my work on my site to give more exposure more quickly to the work than I can get by the magazine submissions process. Every time I post a new article or story, I can see the effects immediately. My days double or triple in traffic. To break it down, I get more unique visitors, and usually there are two to three page views per visitor, which means that people are looking at more than one page apiece. I also get more feed reads.

I can also tell where people are coming from. Each time I post a story, I see the tags that bring people in, and so I know that those search terms are helping my traffic in general. That makes it tempting to do reviews of podiobooks and books in general just to get the traffic from the tags, but I’ve already got enough on my plate. I do wonder however, how many people who are out looking for new UFO data are disappointed to find my “First Responder” short story on that search term, or is the UFO community enough of a sci-fi buff to read a short story, and in turn, how many of these people decide to follow my site, or sign up for the rss feed. What is disappointing is how few people leave comments. Comments are bread and butter, and can significantly influence what I focus on writing next.

I can also see on occasion an email read as an incoming referrer, so I know that a few people are sending my links out.

Twitter has been a revelation to many of us. The quick response and feedback of twitter, plus the amount of personality that is shown in a short message really succeeds as the quickest way to develop a network of dedicated fans, followers, and friends. I’m a fairly shy person, and so I question whether I should make random comments to people, but most times I do, I get a quick and kind response. It’s really helped to break shy little me out of my shell. Whenever I post a link, I get hits. Sometimes straight from twitter, but almost in an equal amount from twiturls.com and other similar sites. These simply list links that are posted on twitter.

The community of sites developed around twitter is great and unique. The money woes of twitter have led to a significant number of other startups and tools, tinyurl.com, twiturls.com, etc. Some of which are useful, and some of which are frankly stupid. I stumbled across one person who Gives you a ranking on twitter based on how many characters of your 140 you use on average. I can’t think of a possible use of this statistic. Sometimes, a single word is more effective and indicative of a person than 140 characters.

There are some issues with twitter. How many people can I follow at any one time and still build some sort of relationship? I started a new project, gearsecure.net, and started following musicians as I found them, and really searched them out, and found I couldn’t follow as quickly as I’d like, and I lost track of conversations friends were having, and just didn’t like following more than like 250 people. I made a new twitter account for gearsecure.net, and I can follow both much better. What I’d really like is to have different timelines for groups of people. I could assign a person to a group, and follow the conversations of the writers, the musicians, the celebs, the social media types, the kinksters, and the right-wing freaks that I keep an eye on to stay a step ahead of the news (I really enjoy it when they decide to follow me, too). I know tweetdeck does this, but for some reason, it doesn’t pick up all of the people I follow, and it is a computer resources hog. For some reason, my recording software uses less system resources than this program.

Twitter also hasn’t gotten over some of its growing pains. There’s a lot of people who are just beginning to figure out how to spam on twitter. I got five spams tonight. There was the worm that went around last week. The sorting of people would seem like an obvious thing, but sometimes the obvious is not so much when you’re busy in a start-up. Another couple points of irk with twitter is that my bio can only be 140 characters, I can only input one website for public display. Maybe a field of 140 characters for a description and one of 500 for more info would be good. All in all though, it is mostly the best promotion tool, and I’ll tell you why: I have to be there. There is no silent salesman on this one. The more you put in, the more you get out. You get nothing out of it if you’re just collecting friends, and that’s what the spammers haven’t figured out yet.

Speaking of collecting friends, let’s talk about myspace. Myspace was the darling of the social media scene. Friendster (does that even exist anymore?) may have been the first, but Myspace improved the model. I used myspace to connect with friends I already had mostly, and avoided the popularity contest. I was one of the first music manufacturing companies on myspace with Jones MFG. Then I dropped off the face of the earth for a while, and now that I’m back, I can see that nothing has changed but the b.s. factor. When I came back, I found that I had a lot of hits on my blog, and I figured I might be able to capitalize on that. As I started to add content, my page views, subscribers, and friends didn’t change. Now, I could increase the amount of messaging, comments, and other “contacts” I make, but I just get this feeling of the high school popularity contest for me. If I decide to keep up with myspace, it might be a very passive thing. I’ll let you find me. The real reason for this is that I enjoy interaction, and I get that from twitter much better than anything else. Myspace has stopped working for me.

That brings me to facebook. Compared to myspace, facebook is slick. It gives me a lot of updates in a quick amount of time, and is really somewhere between myspace and twitter in terms of what it does. It is passive, in that the information comes to you and sits, but active in that it comes to you in a timeline like twitter. It just isn’t as dense. I really like this interface, but the downside is that I feel like I need a manual to learn it. I wanted to join a network for my school, and it required a school email. Not my regular email, my school one. I haven’t been to that school in ten years, and so I can’t join the network.

I don’t have an email from there. I can’t look at someone’s profile by casual browsing. I’m kind of a shy person, and don’t add people that aren’t pro or at least trying to be, but it is hard to identify who that might be from browsing, even if I’m browsing a group. I wanted to set up a page for gearsecure, but I can’t set up a page for a company. I set up a fan page, or should I have set up a group? Or both? Or is that too much work? I set up a fan page for myself, only to find that I already had seven fans for a photographer named Bryan Peterson. I use the Lee to distinguish myself from other Bryan Petersons, but now I can’t change the name on the fan page. It’s little things like this that just piss me off about facebook.

I think that the way social networking is redefining the word “friend” needs to be addressed. There was the guy who made news because he invited all of his facebook friends to a party, and only one showed up. We need to remember that unless we really have regular meaningful interaction, the person is a contact at best.

Goodreads is a new social networking site, and it connects people via books. This is somewhat interesting being an author, and I can upload material there, but I’m not very interested, or more to the point, encouraged to find “friends” there, and I can’t tell if people are reading my uploads. There’s no hit counter. Most of the authors I have friended started with their own books, and that’s all well and good, but then when it came to adding things that they have read, well, they haven’t been all that quick at adding those, and what has been loaded is either disappointing or they just aren’t reading widely. This was kind of a disappointment. I looked a little too closely at people I was looking up to. Ah, maybe they’ll get around to listing all of the great works of literature they’ve been reading in their free time eventually. We won’t think bad of you if you read outside your genre.

I am in dire need of a good comic artist for a project, so I have signed up for Deviantart. The problem with Deviant art is that it is too much like myspace for artists. It’s complete amateur hour. It is very hard to find a good artist, and most people up there aren’t very smart at marketing themselves. Anybody with a pen can put “art” up there, and the communication is very much on the myspace level. Thanks for the add. Thanks for the favorite. Okay. Buh-Bye. Nobody really reads the fiction, and nobody reads my site. Maybe if I favorite your art, I might be interested in a collaboration as I’ve put into my descriptions. I’ll eventually put more time into finding people up there, and communicating, but right now, the dividends are slight. One of the nice things about Deviant art is that talent can’t be faked. You can tell in an instant if somebody is holding a pencil for the first time, or if they have some skills. Talent, unlike myspace popularity, can’t be faked.

I found Scribd and made it part of my plan to market myself. I have a Scale manual for electric bass that is on Lulu.com. I haven’t pushed it much, and so I haven’t sold a single copy, and I can’t tell how many people are even looking at it, which is an issue. I put it on scribd, and in less than a month, with no effort have over 1,200 looks. It made it to the editor’s picks list twice. It’s now on the hotlist. So I added a short story, The Oral history of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. In a week it had 400 hits. It also made the editor’s picks and the hot list. Out of over a million documents, they put eight on their front page, and for one Saturday, two of them were mine. So I’ve been putting just about everything up there. It isn’t as social of a community, and I don’t see too much going there in terms of networking, but in terms of passive exposure Scribd is good. Literary stuff doesn’t get as much attention as other things, especially original literary things, but they are getting read. I’ve had a handful of comments on some short stories. I’ve gotten comments on my scale book. I admit that many of the hits on my first story up there are probably people looking for a copy of Hamlet, but who’s to say that somebody looking for Hamlet doesn’t stick around and read a short story involving Hamlet?

A new one I’ve found is Authonomy.com. This is a site Harper Collins uses to scout new talent, and uses writers and editors to give feedback and rank you. I don’t know if there’s a way to punk the system, and push yourself up popularity contest style, and there’s no guarantee that will lead to a deal. This could become a great site for workshopping, if it doesn’t attract too many amateurs in high school (the deviantart problem). It’s still in public beta, and I’m glad to be there. One of the nice things is that you can’t make a document public unless there is over 10,000 words of it. That should keep the kiddies at bay.

Blogcatalog is something of a myspace for bloggers. I get hits here and there, but of the 60 some odd friends I have, only one has really proven to be a real “friend”. That would be Shaun Duke, and you should check out his blog and twitter. This one has some potential, but I’m kind of over it in the same way as myspace. I think the benefits are somewhat limited, but it is the best community I have found so far for bloggers, and I don’t know what I’d change to improve it.

The last one I want to cover is We op-ed. This is strictly for political bloggers, and as such, is a vocal community. It is small, a very niche market, but I value it as much as any of the others. The feedback is real and challenging, the community is supportive even when the viewpoints are different, and so far I haven’t caused a flame war (even though I’m trying with one guy). I hope this one keeps going, and other pick up on this niche community thing.

There’s a couple forums I post on occasionally, boingboing, jref, tor.com, and a few others, but those don’t usually lead to hits or network, and I have very little time after everything else to spend there.

So that’s it, a what’s working, and what’s not. Bottom line is involvement will build your community, and I think twitter and facebook are going to be the most beneficial in the least amount of effort, but participation is the most important aspect of any of them. The strategy is to put that effort where it will get the most response. My focus is on twitter and facebook right now.

Hear it on

If you want to hear part four of the essays on structure and narrative, This is the place to do it. I did some extra improvising in this one that is interesting and not in the original essay, so you may want to give it a listen.

In order to have this available for another planned podcast, I’m putting everything that is narrowly to do with this podcast up at mindofbryan.com/compulsive

Music: Lift me Up Again by Derrick McKee

http://www.myspace.com/derrickmckeemusic

Go directly to the other parts of the essay:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: Film

Part 3: Theater

Part 4: 4 Act Teleplay

Part 5: Aristotle

Part 6: Wrap up

So what can I give you about all of this? Everything I write has a different structure and a different process, a way of thinking that is unique unto itself. No one structure can be used for everything, but everything has some kind of structure.

I like to think of novels in terms of an indefinite number of acts. As I am in my freest writing mode, I tend to look at major events, and write myself towards the next act goal. Some day I’d like to tackle a five-act Elizabethan style play, but that’s a way’s off into the future, I think. For right now, I’ll stick to books.

For a beginning writer, I hope that this small amount of thought can give you a little more fortitude to get through your project. I’ll cover outlining styles at some point, but I have never really seen anybody’s outlines but my own. Writers aren’t very prone to revealing their very early work on a story since it pales in comparison to the final product. Maybe they seem to think this will undermine them in the mind of the reader.

My point in all this description of acts is to think about the major movements of the work, and make sure there are several, there is a logical flow through them, with reversals and rises and falls. If you have to divide a book up, you’ll want to plan these points to coincide with act movements, but there is a strategy to it.

As I plan out a narrative, acts are my major units, and I’ll look at the overall shape to plan out how the story will progress. I look at whether the action generally rises or falls, or if it is a bumpy progression. Any of those is sufficient as a structure to tell a story, I don’t limit myself to following any classical model unless it is by design, but straying from the models should be done consciously.

I have a lot of time at work to listen to podcast books, and one I am currently listening to is J.C. Huthins 7th Son trilogy. I listened to the first book and put it down because it is a long story, and too much of anything can be a bad thing. I think the story is good, well conceived, and most factors I consider when judging a book were very good, though there was something that lingered in my mind as unsatisfying about the first book. It took me a while to put my finger on it. Story was good, characters were rich and colorful, the villain was a solid villain, the story has hooks, but there was something lacking. Then I realized that the first book isn’t the first book at all. It’s the first act. There is a single distinct rise, a single distinct climax, no reversal, and no resolution.

7th Son in its three parts is a long book in its totality, and it makes up for it when you get into book two, but if I were J.C.’s editor (and he probably didn’t have an editor when he recorded it), I would have put the end of the first book at chapter nine or so in book two, leave the audience with a cliffhanger, and probably developed a bit more of a turning point early in book one to give it a full three acts. As it stands, book one feels like an overdeveloped short story.

This is not to denigrate the work as it stands. The stopping point of the first book is a choice, and being a podcaster myself, I know that it is a lot of work to get these things out, and so when J.C. got to his first climax, it was a probably good point to take a break and coordinate the marketing strategy for book two. It is more logical than the place I chose to take a break in that context, and it really is a killer book.

But I’ll pull in an example of why structure is important from another branch of entertainment. The new Rachael Yamagata album is a double-disk album that chose a different structure than the usual album. Now I knew Rachael when she was in Chicago, and spent many hours at her old band’s shows, so as a solo artist, I got on her bandwagon pretty early. I even have a demo that is so early it was burned on her home computer and has a black permanent marker cover.  Her first Ep and album have a great structure to them, they go from her slower darker moodier stuff to rockers, and it gives every song a very individual feel, and makes listening a series of emotional movements. When you put together an album, you arrange songs in an order to accomplish this. On her double disk, she put all of the slow moody stuff on one disk, and the rockers on the second disk. This means that one is consistently upbeat and the other a consistent downer. The net result is that the first disk feels like one really long song, and I couldn’t hum a melody from any one of them, even though individually, they are as strong as any work she has put out.

Same thing happened with Stabbing Westward’s Darkest Days album. This is another band I knew back in the day. The songs were arranged in four movements, and the slow dark part of the album is a long and dull blur.

What these lack is the highs and lows. As an experience, they are consistent, and it doesn’t matter how high and intense they are on average, we’ll still become familiar with the level, and familiarity really does breed contempt. This is also the reason that Bergman films are fairly unpalatable to American audiences. They are just long and dull no matter how artistic they may be.

So as I look at my act structure, change is my friend, consistency in narrative is the enemy. Remember this is a shape, it is a story arc, not a flat. Think about sailing around the world with Magellan, a story in and of itself. The wind is never consistent, but sailors in the doldrums do nothing and get bored, but with the inconsistency of wind and weather always keeps them busy.