The Nonfiction Story Circle

What can nonfiction writers learn from writers of fiction? In my view, the answer is how to quickly and efficiently write something using structure.

Without structure, writers often struggle with filling a blank page. What is often called “writer’s block” is not usually a lack of creative inspiration, but rather a lack of coherent way to analyze the problem at hand. A good writing structure provides a logical coherence for a beginning, a conclusion, and the transitions in between.

Dan Harmon’s “story circle” is a popular framework for structuring fiction writing, from short stories to screenplays. It is a simplification of the better known Hero’s Journey, and Harmon has famously used this framework to aid his writing process for Community and Rick & Morty. 

In Harmon’s view, all stories are “circular” in that they are about starting from somewhere familiar, going somewhere unfamiliar, and then returning with some lessons learned. This can be broken down to 8 simple words: You, Need, Go, Search, Find, Return, Changed. This framework is very popular, and has been applied to analyze many other works of fiction (see, for example, here and here).

However, this original framework lacks natural transitions between each stage. This is where Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s idea of connecting plot points with either a “but” or a “therefore” proves to be powerful. (The opposite of but/therefore is “and then”—which indicates a list of chores, not anything logical or structured.) 

In a previous post, I combined these ideas in what I called the “But-Fore Story Circle”. 

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Jordan Peterson Was Not “Addicted to Benzos”

In late 2019, Jordan Peterson went on an extended absence from public life. In a series of videos on his and his daughter Mikhaila Peterson’s YouTube channels (1, 2, 3, 4), it eventually became clear that he was suffering side effects from taking benzodiazepine medications (commonly known as “benzos”).

Despite the extreme detail the videos went into, the press reported these events in an incorrect and misleading manner. The most common headline and talking point became that Jordan Peterson was “addicted to benzos.” The reports later embellish this claim by declaring that Peterson was taking benzodiazepines to treat his anxiety.

Peterson was never “addicted” to benzos. He developed a physical dependency to them. There is a difference between these terms.

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The “Liberty Fund Rules” For Seminars and Discussions

Introduction

I am currently in a reading group on the Leo Strauss book On Tyranny, which also features essays by Alexandre Kojève. We just wrapped our first online discussion of the book, and it inspired me to write this post.

One of my fondest memories as a student was attending more than a dozen invite-only seminars on economic and political theory, which ranged from an afternoon to a full week. These were times when I got to spend time with some of the smartest students and scholars from around the world, to spend hours and delving deep into specific books, articles, and other intricacies of thinking, writing, and debate.

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Expectations and Applications

How do expectations affect economic decisions? The recent “inclusionary zoning” imbroglio at Toronto City Hall offers an interesting case study.

On October 22, 2021, the City’s Planning and Housing Committee approved the Inclusionary Zoning amendments, which would go up to vote in City Council on November 9th. 

This news was seen as a surprise to many developers, as evidenced by the flurry of activity in the three weeks leading up to the November 9 City Council meeting. Dozens of new Condominium Approvals were being submitted per week; a huge increase, as the trend had been for only a handful of these applications per week. 

The new rules go into effect in September 2022. This date must also have been a surprise to developers, because the day after the vote there was an immediate drop in the number of new Condo Approval applications being submitted per week. 

As part of my work with UrbanToronto.ca, I have access to all the city planning and permitting data as they come in. This lets me chart and quantify this surprise. (If you’re interested in getting a summary of this data sent to your inbox daily, check out the New Development Insider. This report was first published there!)

Before delving into the charts, a bit of background info:

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Study Guide to the Jordan Peterson – Robert Murphy Podcast

This week, Jordan Peterson released an interview titled, “Is Property Theft?”, with Austrian economist Robert Murphy. The conversation was fast and exciting, with a lot of references to books, articles, and other ideas from Austrian economics thrown in.

Since this is likely to be the first introduction to Austrian economics for many people, I am taking it upon myself to release a “study guide” of sorts for this interview. Here I will give citations, references, and other explanations for that may have gone by too quickly for the audience.

As a table of contents, I will use the time stamps from the original video as they appear on YouTube. Almost all of the links will take you to a free book, article, or lecture. That’s one of the great things about Austrian economics: there are a lot free learning resources.

A word of warning: the first few sections are much longer than others, as they provide a lot of necessary background information. Feel free to skim the information as needed on a first pass, and come back to it later for more details.

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Narrative Structure Equivalence Chart

There are many ways to structure a story. But one theory says that they are all really saying the same thing.

Here I create a table comparing the four major narrative structures: Aristotle’s chronological structure, John Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Dan Harmon’s Story Circle (the source for my “But-Fore Story Circle“), and the classic three-act play.

I’ve also included two other structures, which aren’t normally considered part of dramatic storytelling. First is something I call “MMO”, which stands for means, motive, and opportunity. This is how typically how detectives determine who is the perpetrator of a crime. Second is “Human Action”, Ludwig von Mises’s title for his treatise on economics (I wrote a one-syllable summary here); it is a theory of how basic principles of choosing can be used to explain all economic phenomena.

Chronological Hero’s Journey Story Circle Three ActsMMO (detective principles)Human Action (economic theory principles)
Beginning Call to adventure You. Need. Go. Setup Motive Prerequisites of action: felt unease about the current state of affairs, ideas about a possible better world, and a logical connection between ends sought and means required to instigate the change to get them
Middle Challenges and transformation Look. Find. Take. Confrontation Means Entrepreneurial judgment: whether the benefits of change outweigh the costs 
End Atonement and return Return. Changed. Resolution OpportunityAction: making the choices necessary to bring about the desired state of affairs: exchanging with oneself and others to alter the structure of production. 

The But-Fore Story Circle

What can Rick and Morty and South Park teach about writing a good story? Combining elements from the writing advice from the creators of both shows, I’ve devised a new way of structuring stories quickly and efficiently. In short, it is Dan Harmon’s story circle, with a logical transition between each stage: either a “but” or a “therefore”—a trick I learned from Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park.

The “But-Fore” Story Circle.

I explain the reasoning behind the But-Fore Story Circle in more detail below.

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Axiomatic Psychology

Can we have an axiomatic theory of psychology?

A bit of background: since at least the time of Spinoza, up until the present day, a limited number of people have made attempts at creating an axiomatic approach to understanding and studying the human psyche.

They have all failed to gain any traction or respect. The most likely reason, in my assessment, is quite simply having way too many axioms.

An axiom is supposed to be a clear, “self-evident” truth, from which one can then logically derive other truths. The most famous use of axioms is by Euclid, where he used 5 very simply stated axioms (like “The whole is greater than the part”) to derive a few hundred pages of geometry. Modern mathematical economics also uses a handful of axioms, while the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises only required one axiom (“Human action is purposeful behavior”) to understand the world.

However, modern attempts at axiomatizing psychology include dozens of axioms. For example, the “pyscho-logic” approach has over 50 axioms. What’s worse, is that many of these axioms have been expressed mathematically.

To me, this is unnecessarily complicated analysis. So below, I have attempted to give a start to a new kind of axiomatic psychology, using only one axiom:

Axiom: Thinking is the ability of a brain to observe, analyze, and decide.

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