Weave a wide web of relationships.
- Principle
- Weave a wide web of relationships.
- Type
- Cyclic Principle
- Stage
- Resolution, Elderhood
With this principle, we make new connections, using the things already introduced in our story. We can heal divisions by weaving the various sides back together, using the things we’ve introduced in the story so far.
You can answer looming questions as part of this reintegration, connecting your answer to this larger web of relationship that you weave at the story’s resolution, when you can heal the divisions introduced at the tale’s beginning.
#Examples
- Writers talk about setup and payoff — introducing elements in the story so that they can fall into place by the end. For a writer, this takes careful planning; but when we hunt a wild story we have to take a somewhat different approach. We can pay off everything we’ve set up so far by drawing connections between them. * Improv actors call this “reincorporation” — taking the things introduced to our story earlier, and bringing them back in. It might not seem obvious, but as you keep reincorporating as many things from earlier in the story as you can, you create more and more relationships, making it almost impossible to avoid some meaningful narrative from emerging. You could explain this as an emergent property of any sufficiently dense graph of signs, or you could choose to adopt the animist point of view and extend the story the courtesy of recognizing its personhood, the way it so often presents itself to us.
- In the first stages of our stories, we draw lines, finding divisions and breaking relationships. We end the story by finding new relationships, relating all of the elements we’ve seen in the story in new ways, weaving a new web.
- Don’t simply negate the severity of the problems explored in the first two stages of the story. In the third stage (contrast) we introduced new elements that contrasted with the problems introduced in the first two. Use these new elements to overcome the problems introduced in the first two, integrating everything we’ve seen so far into a new web. For example, if the first two stages explored the rift between two elders in the village, then your third stage may have introduced a new character. With this principle, you could create a relationship between each of the two elders and the new character introduced in the third stage, and through their common relationship with this third character, finally overcome their differences.
- The web of relationships woven under this principle should differ from the original web we had before the story began.