It seems to me that Hollywood has now stopped at the "Reacting" stage. Just make the audience feel something, no matter how shallow or transient, and it's "job done".People often say a show was like a roller coaster ride. Well now the studios seem to have taken it literally. Just elicit base emotional reactions. "Arrrh! Monster!", "Ooh! Naked bodies!", "Aww! So cute!"" No sense of wonder, meaning, or ideas to tickle the mind. Go straight for the lizard brain and to heck with the grey matter.

"Hopefully it was interesting"?! It was great! It was a free course in quality storybiulding. Thank you. David.

Power simply reveals who you truly are. Anyone can be good when their life and livelihood depends on it.

Alien is a good horror film hitting the entire pyramid hard !!

I love how Frodo gets to the end of his journey and as soon as he truly has the power to destroy the ring he is also the most tempted by it. It reminds me of a politician who wants to change government or clean it up but when they get into power they are more concerned with keeping power than changing what they ran on like a mister smith goes to Washington but with a corrupt ending

Interesting, what you said makes sense. I struggle and usually give up on stories I try to write because I don't believe I'm explaining it well enough, that the person isn't going to think or react how I want, and I don't know how to convey what's going on in my mind's eye to them. A friend tried to cheer me up / get me over the hump once by throwing a popular Stephen King quote at me, I think it's from "On Writing.." but I never read it. Something along the lines of, "A story begins in the writer's mind but ends in the readers," and some extra bits following that were basically "Once you let go of the ball it's out of your control, the batter will either hit it or miss it." I can see the validity there but I actually hate that idea. Makes me depressed, like if I can't share what's actually going on in my head, if all I can do is flick paint out and people see what they want to see, if I can't send out my intent, then why bother? Most of all I just have no discipline though and this is just another excuse. Meh.

David, thank you for joining The Distributist. Loved the shared confab and looking forward weekly to your latest work. Also, enjoying Helga!

As always, most interesting stuff.. Learn a couple of things everytime I tune in.. Thanks David

Now I clearly understand why I never cared for horror movies and couldn't see what people saw that was so special about them. I knew it had something to do with endorphins releases that we get after recovering from a scaring situation but I had not seen the link between reaction and the other components of the pyramid. Also now I understand better why I think The Empire Strikes Back is so much better than the other 2 original trilogy movies. Thank you for this analysis, it was fascinating.

Absolutely loved this video. Thank you, David.

Interesting stuff David. Interesting to see how the story and effect really resonates with people in books and movies. Keep up the great work.

The story, and effect triangle makes sense to me when I think about it for some reason. Keep it up David. You're video are always so informative. 😊

Really interesting stuff. This is the quality content I subscribed for.

another great vid David, your insight to a writers mind, has helped me a lot trying to develop my own story, keep up with the excellent job dude, BTW im reading water of awakening and im loving it, awesome book!!

I just rewatch great movie again from 1995, "Crimson Tide" directed by Tony Scott. With the leading actors Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. This is a perfectly made movie.

A link to the previous video you're refering to would be nice. I could argue why; but I think we can both agree on that.

I think Ray Bradbury's novel "Something Wicked This Way Comes" was able to achieve all these levels of the pyramid. It made me react, care, and think. And it was horror.

Huzzah more story craft.

It is interesting, as one of my favorite authors is Isaac Asimov. He never had the most interesting prose, the most intriguing plots or the most interesting characters (though some were). But his books are so full of ideas and people discussing ideas, that I feel intellectually stimulated the whole books through.

I remember Vonnegut wrote down his rules for how to write a story that's worth your reader's time, but then at the end of it wrote, "But the truly great writers break pretty much all of these." P.S. Hey David, I was just curious: when writing your books, what is generally the seed for your stories? like using these pyramids, is it generally the plot that first occurs to you, and you build setting around it and weave characters into it? Or do you start with a goal, such as, "I want the reader to walk away thinking about x or caring about y?"

Thumb up! I recommend "Cold Prey 1 and 2" ("Fritt Vilt") as a good slasher/horror - that even makes you care somewhat about the characters! ... LOTR is the best book (series) there is! =) Good explained, David!

When I look at artistic work, I tend to look at how effectively the message was conveyed. In this case, "message" is essentially artistic intent, which includes mood, themes, character intent, etc. Because of this, I try not to pay attention to director's statements or press or even other's comments until I've seen a piece of media myself; otherwise, my attempt at judging what message is being communicated may be biased. Afterwards, this is all cool food for thought, but it's sometimes prohibitive when I try to see what the art is conveying and how effective it is at conveying it. I think the two pyramids shown in this video are a more granular breakdown of what constitutes this "communication." Also, the interesting thing about the second pyramid (the one with Reacting and Thinking) in my experience is that the Thinking part usually branches off from the Reacting. For example, I care about some characters, and then I keep thinking about how so-and-so could've done this or that differently, or what regrets I had about that character, etc. On the other hand, it's also possible to have the Thinking part without much of the Reacting part, and this usually garners some sort of cult following among the fan base. I've encountered some media that have strange info dumps that, while not particularly effective at tugging at the heartstrings, engages in a lot of trivia and theorizing and world building. True, the story could be *better* if it checked off the Reacting part, but I find that more stories that engage in solely the Thinking section seem last longer than if it only engaged in the Reacting part. Thanks for this video!

You're rationalizing something that can get very abstract. Why wouldn't I want any genre of a story to provide me with as much of the effect pyramid as possible. If I react to a story a lot, if I feel heavily emotionally invested, and if it makes me think, then what does it matter what the genre is? Horror that makes me think, SciFi that makes me care, and fantasy that gets a good reaction out of me all sound great.

Another Excellent video, how do you not have more subscribers...

I enjoy your videos immensly. Thank you! Do you have any tips on how to combine writing setting, characters and plot efficiently? I seem to concentrate on one at a time.

"Hopefully this has been interesting to you." *Takes screenshot of the two pyramids and puts a few quotes from the video in how everything relates to each other.

Then how can one make the audience care about the characters ? What makes a person "connect" or "bond" with these abstract semblances and start worrying about them in dire situations or feel happiness with them when success is achieved ?

Something that shouldn't be underestimated is the ability to make readers HATE a character. Horror films sometimes do this by having a cast of annoying teens who you take a bit of pleasure in watching get hunted down. But my favorite instance is in the story "The Crucible" where one girl getting her way over and over becomes this incredibly hateable figure.

Plot - Jump Scare - Reaction

I have always felt more for Sam then Frodo.

Please, make a video about The Horus Heresy Rise Of Horus!

If you ignore anything that is not intentional then what about creative instincts? When offering aspiring photographers criticism I often used to see someone "with a good eye". They don't have specific training but they instinctively create shots that are structurally well-balanced. They didn't set out with the intention but the result is pleasing.

Interesting, as always. I'm a disciple of Gautier, Wilde and Poe. Art is the creation of beauty for beauty's sake. I judge a work of art from a purely aesthetic point of view. Is it a thing of beauty? Storycraft, I think, is something different. A piece of music like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't really make one care or think. Your analysis can't be extended beyond storycraft. So is it really part of aesthetics? And yet, these ideas of reacting, caring and thinking obviously play such an important role in deciding whether your story is effective or not. Perhaps a story that fails to elicit these responses is inherently ugly, poorly constructed, aesthetically displeasing. Whatever about Star Wars, your videos certainly make me think!

I love stories in which the characters can't do anything about the plot (speaking as a fan of true horror like Lovecraft and the classic Gothic tales, and not of jump scare fest garbage like slasher films and found footage). It's such a fascinating structure for story, and yet so underutilized in the modern craft since so many see writing so narrowly. Speaking as an aspiring writer myself... These "formulas" for writing are utter trash, and I hate them. Especially the Hero's Journey (as an example), it was only intended as an interpretive measure and consistently fails as a blueprint for storycraft. All it produces is cliched works that do nothing but copy stories that have come before, which as I'll cover later can very rarely lead to success but usually just leads to a "good enough" title that languishes in eternal obscurity. What is original art? Every new story, that holds intrinsic value anyway, is nothing but endlessly building upon ideas presented to the author, whether that be using old story concepts in new ways or doing something creative with a life experience or real world occurrence. That is the best definition of original work, adding to something pre-existing in a very personalized manner. However, there are several other ways to look at storycraft, several other ideologies if you will. Let's refer to this first one as the additive route - you take something that came before and fundamentally add to it in some untested manner, even if in a small and intangible way. This provides inherent intrigue derived from both the viewer and the author themself. Thus, it's very advisable. The first alternative method, and most aggravating to me in particular as someone who favors the first style of concepting, is to simply reflect what came before - IE, figure out what makes it tick and do that all over again. To be clear, I'm not saying that studying how writing works holds no value, it's something you 100% should be doing, merely that you should not try and form "new" ideas by merely figuring out what makes old ideas tick and copying that appeal to the letter. Bear in mind that most truly timeless stories like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings took the additive route when they could and only used this second route, what I call "the zero-sum route", as a last resort. It's a route that holds some small form of value yes, but we must remember that any and all ideas depreciate with time and overuse. When we reflect someone else's idea, we are not taking its original value from the time it saw success. Rather you're cashing in on its current, oft highly depreciated value. This makes the zero sum route actually lead to lower profits than the original, in most cases, excepting rare outlier scenarios where those involved accidentally create a truly unique combination of elements. To discuss it a little; it frankly feels to me like people like David Stewart, for all their intellect and talent, for how much I adore their content, do nothing but opt for and explain to death this zero-sum method of storycraft, misleading an entire generation of young authors (intentionally or not) into taking a route difficult to execute on effectively. It's actually had a hugely negative trickle down effect, which I am starting to see ever more often from small, consumer focused pushes like Comicsgate and Double A gaming. It's repeatedly producing works which are nothing but reflective of the past and thus fail. For example, most #comicsgate wannabes are producing nothing but an endless string of 80s and 90s era comics revivals that all fundamentally do the same thing, and none any better than another; this is because the way they were recommended to write was to reflect the past, not to take a fundamentally additive method. The second alternative method, the "destructive method", is to destroy old concepts. This is common among SJW writing, and is why it rings so hollow - it simply doesn't add anything and doesn't do anything unique, and thus holds no inherent interest without the use of cheap psychological tricks. At least the zero sum method can provide us some unique combinations and thus some success stories, albeit if you want a guarunteed success you need to use the additive method as your primary source of artistic flair. In contrast the destructive method just shits on everything. But to be thorough let's also take the time to define what this destructive method is NOT. A commentary on a genre such as post-westerns, deconstructions like Watchmen and Madoka Magica, and direct parody and other forms of commentative humor, all very constructive and are built with an additive flair in mind. They are the sheer opposite of destructive fiction. The SJW tactic, meanwhile, does nothing but destroy, and willfully so - they've mistaken destruction for deCONstruction, and it's become a shallow, bitter mess of a failure. The two are not equatable, and hold drastically different artistic value. The final route I want to mention (not to say that these are the only four writing philosophies out there) is what I dub the manipulation method - you don't actually make an attempt to write well and just implement our understanding of psychology to get an emotional reaction from the viewer. David has spoken out about this method of writing a lot, and it fails for anyone who sees though it. But it's also sadly quite profitable as most people aren't trained to see through it. I don't have much more to say on that.

Wait, so do you like the Song of Ice and Fire books, or do you not really? I thought you didn't, and I mean, it may be just a good example for uncertainty and surprise (Ned's head left my mouth wide open for like 5 minutes, no joke), but I just want to be sure. :P. I think they're great books Btw. Not a huge fan of the show, haven't watched it really, because what little I have watched seems like it takes away the sauce from the books.

I think a lot of entertainment today actually has all three, reacting, caring, and thinking. But all in the bad ways. The reactions are just so bass that it doesn’t mean anything. You only care about it because half the time it’s a really bad sequel to a wel loved franchise. After the fact you end up thinking about why it was was bad and what could have made it better

Also. Horror is NOT about making the audience feel fleeting fear. It's about EXPLORING that fear, or at least helping them come to terms with its existence. The notion that horror even needs jumpscares or otherwise uncomfortable moments speaks to a person's complete and total lack of understanding of the genre.

While the Story Pyramid makes sense, the Effect one does not. I can think about media, without care about them, and I certainly don't want people to think about my works as some thought provoking stuff. And since you brought him up, Tolkien didn't either. He never intended 'The Lord of the Rings' to be something thoughtprovoking, but rather he just wanted to write a nice, long story. No Thoughts involved whatsoever.