Week 10 Story Lab

For this week's writing lab, I checked out the "Story Lab: Style" playlist on YouTube. It's a compilation of great Ted Talks and my two favorites were "How to Build a Fictional World" (I'm a huge fantasy guy, so no surprise) and "The Pleasure of Poetic Pattern" (I grew up reading Shel Silverstein, and I've been a sucker for rhyming verse ever since). Here are quick summaries of both:

1. The voiceover in Kate Messner's talk sounds a bit like the text-to-speech feature on an old Mac, but the art style is fun and her topic is engaging. Her thesis boils down to the fact that fictional worlds operate within a defined set of parameters, no matter how outlandish. Laws of the universe dictate that goats can talk but trees can't? That's perfectly okay as long as you play by those rules for the rest of the story. If we don't have a defined ruleset to fall back on, fictional worlds cease to be believable and easy to understand. You establish a place and time for your world, flesh out a little bit of the laws that make for an interesting, non-mundane tale, and you've got yourself a fictional world.
2. David Silverstein's talk focuses on why repetitive, poetic writing is so satisfying to the ear. We are creatures of habit and pattern -- seeking out order from the disordered and kept alive by repetitive functions (e.g. heartbeats, breathing, etc.). Therefore, verbal/written repetition naturally jives with our brain; we enjoy identifying the patterns within speech and literature. These can take the form of rhymes, meters, alliteration, etc. and establish a sense of expectation for the reader. We identify a pattern, our brain comes to expect a certain "payoff" at the end of a line/stanza, and we receive a little burst of satisfaction when these expected conditions are met.

In a short span of time, our brains learn to expect words that sound a certain way at the ends of the lines. When the poet meets these conditions, it is pleasurable to the reader. Source: Wikipedia Commons.