Where To Start Your Story
Also: Approval Voting, AI Walking Companions, and Sea Power
Note: This post contains spoilers to some popular TV shows and films.
This week as if I’ve been writing on my new novel, I’ve been thinking a lot about the opening act and it felt like I understood it better by thinking more about the ending.
While stories come in all shapes and structures, perhaps the most common feature among all of them, is to answer the question: where do you start?
Even if you’re doing a post-modern anti-story, stories like the mundane life of a guy called Norman, you start them *somewhere*.
If you follow more traditional storytelling structures, you’re more inclined to treat the start as a setup to make the big incident as impactful as possible such that it propels the reader into wanting to finish the story: just as much as necessary without dragging it on. If you start too late, you might lessen the impact of powerful early on emotional beats. Start too soon and the build up might bore readers.
In sharing these thoughts with a friend, he sent me a great screenplay lesson from Michael Arndt who wrote the screenplay to Little Miss Sunshine. It’s all about how to write great endings (thanks Devon!)
If you’re into stories and storytelling at all, it’s a really fun masterclass. The real lesson that Michael shares is that great endings require great stakes. Stakes in a story is what a person can gain or lose in the pursuit of their goal. There can be many variations of stakes: personal, external, internal, philosophical, etc. An example is:
A protagonist wants to win a competition (the goal). If they do, they will prove to themselves they are capable of rising above their circumstances. If they don’t, they might lose dignity and self-respect.
In Michael’s view when the stakes get overturned by the underdog values of a story, it’s a really great ending. In Star Wars, it’s the moral value of the community over the individual. In Little Miss Sunshine, it’s the moral value of being yourself and having fun over seriousness and competition. In other words: in a flawed story universe, a character comes in and redeems the universe by overturning its moral order.
In thinking about this, I pondered other great stories with great endings and tried to answer this question myself, especially when it looks like the protagonist does not overturn the moral order. The most notable one that came to mind where I scratched my head was Breaking Bad. The external stakes of the story is there in the opening scene of the entire series: he’s *maybe* committed a crime and shoots a video to tell his wife and son that he loves them and it was all for them. Over the course of the seasons, he descends into becoming a monster, losing himself, and then eventually realising his mistakes tries to right it before he dies.
The real stake, however, is something that Walter admits: he did it for himself. The very first few scenes shows him being made to be weak and humiliated by his in-laws. He is afraid of the world and making space for himself. His dignity and ego is the biggest thing that is at stake. If he loses his quest, he dies the loser he thinks he is. It’s devastating.
So, at the end, even though the world defeats him, he gained something he never had: the belief that he could make his own destiny and that destiny ended with accepting the consequences of his actions.
In the same way that Rocky Balboa, in Rocky, loses his fight at the end, he gained respect.
Thus, great endings result in something gained, even when it’s acceptance. Another notable one here is No Country for Old Men. A post-modern film with no happy ending that subverts the genre trope of a Western with the conclusion that violence and chaos/randomness can win over justice and order. At the end, the cop (played by Tommy Lee Jones) accepts this reality, as harrowing as it is, alongside his aging self and impending death to come. I feel much of postmodern media follows this trend as a means to teach the lesson that things sometimes just are the way the way they are. The introspection is the point.
So, in this assessment lies the original the answer to the question I was seeking: where to start a story (especially when you know how much of the middle will play out)?
I think the answer is: start by revealing a stake of the story as soon as possible and then keep that thread running throughout the story. My previous challenge was trying to start the story as soon as possible to an inciting incident, and then wondering how forgiving the reader would be in how long I take to set it all up. If you start with any of the story’s stakes at the outset, the reader will likely be more forgiving in the time it takes to set up the story.
So much to learn still. :)
Bonus Content!
Not much to report this week. Was in writing mode. Sometimes I go for walks to think about my story without distraction. Then, I saw a squirrel carry its babies to a new nest, something I’d never seen before. A highlight of the week.
And then, today, I ran the Cherry Blossom 10 miler. Plagued by illness and injuries, I wasn’t sure how it would go. My prime goal was a 9:00/mile pace such that I finish in 1h:30min. I literally finished *right* on 1:30 and had to push hard at the end to finish it. One of the best feelings. Such a fun race too even though it’s a very big race. I had to skip some of the watering stations because it was too crowded.
Approval Voting
One of the important parts of a democratic process is to engender legitimacy. Pure first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral systems sometimes result in many people feeling like they end up with candidates that no one wanted. Within FPTP, ranked-choice voting helps, but one other interesting alternative is Approval Voting.
Steve Waldman recently shared his thoughts again on this system.
With ranked choice voting, you rank the candidates in preference. But, in approval voting, you simply vote for as many candidates as you want. In other words, a person could vote for a block of left and centrist candidates while another only wants one far-right candidate and no-one else. Votes are still tallied as normal. So, in essence, a candidate can get a maximum amount of votes equal to the amount people that are voting. But, so can *any* candidate. It matches much better the broader preference of a populace and it makes the people feel that what they end up with is more legitimate because they were able to express their prefences between multiple parties. I wish I could do this in the upcoming South African elections as I’m not sure whom to vote for yet among 3-4 parties.
The positive outcome of this is that in a FPTP system, you can get back more parties in countries where they’ve lost it (like in the USA).
Under approval voting, voters can always vote their true preference without splitting their broader coalition and handing an advantage to the worst candidate. And because voters' actual preferences become publicly visible, the self-fulfilling dynamic that stabilizes our current two-party duopoly is undermined. Third-parties can emerge as contenders. Once major parties can submerge.
…and more:
Approval voting disfavors "mobilize the base" electoral strategies in favor of outreach and persuasion. One shouldn't evaluate electoral systems only by the electoral outcomes they tend to produce, but also by how they shape the behavior of candidates and the electorate. Our current system, in which primaries favor factional extremists, who are then mostly either shoe-ins for their position or subject to coin-flip general elections, does more even than Elon Musk to turn politics into a carnival of performative whack. Approval voting would dramatically change candidate incentives, and by doing so, would dramatically change our society for the better, regardless of who wins the various contests. Approval voting promotes social cohesion.
That being said, while it is a great idea in general, I always wonder how this is treated in practice by a populace who are used to one-person-one-vote. Steve, idealistically describes how voters *could* see this issue.
Contrary to some very mistaken presentations, people who select multiple candidates are not "casting multiple votes" and thereby usurping voting power, violating the principle of one-person-one-vote. On the contrary. Selecting multiple candidates under approval voting is an act of generosity. You have selected your first choice, but then you add a candidate that is someone else's first choice, that is lesser from your perspective, and put that candidate on an equal basis to your own.
I think that’s optimistic. I suspect it might be rife with misinformation where if a broader coalition does exist (eg, more left-wing candidates vs a handful of right-wing candidates), people might complain that some people get more of a say (incorrectly). Or, just being generally confused why it feels like some people can vote harder/more than others. One-person-one-vote is very easy to understand.
I think, perhaps, interestingly, one way to work around this and create more a sense of legitimacy to the process when it might be hard to understand is that you have approval voting as a primary race and then one-person-one-vote as a run-off. So, you first ask the electorate: “Who do you want to be in the race for President? In the following multiple-choice boxes, choose the ones you think would be a good fit.” And then, the top 2 goes to a run-off.
Something like that, perhaps.
Curious if you have any thoughts on approval voting?
Token Engineering Stakeholder Study
Tokens serve as tools for decentralizing ownership, asserting social rights, and enhancing coordination strategies. These represent the ambitious goals that token systems aspire to achieve, along with the increasing consumer demand for greater privacy and autonomy. While the overarching concept of token engineering may appear clear at a high level, the intricacies of its practice and the precise definition of its terminology were abstract and have inspired the undertaking of this study. Engaging with token engineering practitioners attempts to answer foundational questions to bring greater rigor and legitimacy to how token systems are contemplated, researched, designed, implemented, validated, and maintained. Therefore, the primary question of this research study is: What is token engineering?
It remains such an interesting domain and discipline. As it says: it brings engineering rigour to an economic field.
Zero-Knowledge Proof Explanation
Zero-knowledge proofs as a concept is always really interesting. Found this two-minute video that does a simple interactive walk-through on how it works.
The cave example is also always a smart way to explain the basics. Now, don’t ask me to explain how you get from this to building a virtual machine with zero-knowledge proofs. That goes over my head.
Terra - AI Walking Companion
I found this little open source device to be a really great example of smart mindfulness. It moves technology as augmented background tool vs the tool that tries to take you out of the present (your phone).
You give it an intention with potential pit-stops along the way. The example they gave is a 2hr stroll through a Paris neighbourhood that includes a visit to a patisserie. So, instead of pulling up your phone to look at Google Maps (which takes you out of the present and sucks you into the notifications), it has an arrow and haptic feedback to guide you along. Smart.
Sea Power - Instrument of Surrender
After playing Disco Elysium in December, I got back to the soundtrack this week by Sea Power. Such a beautiful soundtrack that puts me back in Revachol. Damn. What a game that was.
That’s it for this week folks. May you find a beautiful sunset!
Simon
Typo… Waldman, not Waldam, and I think you mean “for” not “again[st]”?