Please read John Truby’s book “The Anatomy of Genres”, and have your mind BLOWN by all the psychology in the different 14 Genres of story, dominating our cultures throughout the world, now…
It will make fiction in book AND movie form sooo much richer for you, and it will make other-people much-more-understandable, as well…
I’m autistic, am NOT likely to ever watch another movie in my life ( waaay too overwhelming ), but now I understand story so much better…
Truby’s got a special place in his heart for both Godfather I & II.
With reason, his explanations show.
There are an amazing number of awesome stories identified in that book, as examples demonstrating this, or that, aspect of story…
Please read it from beginning to end, so the explanations ( which build on each-other ) weave into the whole, properly ( instead of just hitting 2 chapters & not getting why it doesn’t make as much sense as I’m suggesting it does ).
The only significant error in the book worth noting, is the misunderstanding of Comedy:
Improbably-violated-expectations is the PROPER definition of it, and there is no requirement for any “drop”, which seems an American subset of humour.
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?
( :
The single most-important thing you CAN do, is understand yourself as profoundly as you can.
Read John Truby’s book “The Anatomy of Genres”, which is on the 14 story-genres that we form our own meanings of.
He’s got a few details wrong
( like mistaking the Wild West village for what Village-archetype is, when real Village-archetype is the Tribal Mother Village,
and he misunderstands humor, as well, believing that the US-culture “drop” ( related to put-down ) is the core of humor, but the entire category of creative-misinterpretation is humor that isn’t dependent on “the drop”.
Hofstadter, in his “Godel Escher Bach” book, identified that the real shape of humor is the moebius strip: a strange loop.
You walk around in a “circle”, and … discover you’re now somehow upside-down??
Surprised-by-improbability, would be near-the-heart of it.
Anyways )
Truby’s book is CRAMMED with psychology insights into our forming, our growing-up, etc.
I’d require it of all high-schoolers, planetwide, for their HS diploma:
simply by making people encounter considering how they’re forming the meaning that they, themselves, are, would lever humanity up into much greater global understanding/competence, though it’d take a generation or 2 for the effects to become visible…
Lanier’s “Foreign to Familiar” & Hofstede’s “Exploring Culture” are both important, too, because if you know that some of the dimensions of culture they identify work a particular way for you ( ie doesn’t-work or you-need-this ), then suddenly, that spotlights something in your nature that has harmony in a specific subset of cultures, and shows you why that is doing this, in you…
( libraries exist: you don’t need to buy those, but the Truby books, you’ll probably fill with notes… )
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