That’s the cliche part. However I have a secret theory on why imagination works the way it does, why it’s a powerful and sticky force, and therefore why I think analogue will always stick around.

I stumbled on this insight playing a game of chess years ago. I remember the game was close, it was tense, it felt interesting, engaging, expansive. We notated the moves so we could go back and analyze a position if we wanted, and the game only lasted 28 moves.

Wait, 28? That means I only played 14 moves. That can’t be right, this game felt like it’s own world while I played, it was epic. My experience of the game felt way bigger than it actually was. And that was curious to me.

The insight is this: the game felt bigger to me, because it was bigger to me. For every move I made, I considered 2 or 3 or 5 other options. Then for each of those considerations I wondered what my opponent would do. If he moved here then I could do this or this, no that won’t work. What if I did this instead, then he might move here and I could counter with that. No no, he would take my piece in that case, I can’t do that. Or COULD I?

Every single move was a spiral of options, possibilities, that I considered and tinkered with internally. I played way more chess in my head than was represented on the board. That’s why it FELT like a much bigger experience. Because it actually was.

However, this isn’t a guaranteed trait of analogue. The magic is choice. Imagination is in the possibility. The things that aren’t yet, but could be. This is the code line that activates the super computer in your head. Choice. Options.

If you do a basic study of game design, you’ll see this as a recurring truism. Interesting player choice is THE THING that makes a good game. To break that down even further, the player needs a real choice, in other words a game can’t be a series of obvious decisions. Tic-tac-toe becomes boring when you realize there’s a perfect set of X’s or O’s: the first mover can always win.

Additionally the choice can’t be so opaque the player doesn’t understand the consequences. If I can’t imagine the short to long term implication of my actions, there’s no consideration needed. I may as well play randomly, at which point it’s not a game, it’s an activity.

The sweet spot is a series of interesting choices that aren’t obvious, I can IMAGINE the potential outcomes and meaningfully choose different things. But not so non-obvious I CAN’T imagine any outcomes so I just shuffle some pieces around like I’m blindly fumbling in the dark.

But I don’t think this principle applies only to games. Stories follow a similar structure, with perhaps some more nuance. I argue that a good story is also about interesting choices.

A story is boring when it’s predictable. I think the nuance is, the reader (or viewer) isn’t given interesting choices. The characters are given interesting choices, and the reader is given the opportunity to engage. They can imagine what the character would do when presented with an interesting choice, and consider the decision they made after. I’ll try and show you why the nuance matters.

One of my favorite movie going experiences of all time was watching Toy Story 3 in theaters. Warning: mild spoilers.

Woody, Buzz and crew find themselves at the climax of the movie in a dump yard, slowly slipping down a quicksand of trash towards an incinerator.

Now, you may be asking, “What’s the choice here?” The toys are stuck, the odds are insurmountable. They can’t do anything, right?

The interesting choice here, at this specific moment, is: “What do you do in the face of death?”

Do they keep crawling up the quagmire, refusing to give up until the very end? Do they give in to depression? Do they become hysterical? I think you could imagine at least a small list of how someone, or perhaps specifically Woody and the other characters, would respond in this situation. Because the toys are well developed characters, you can imagine, I’m sure, multiple different possibilities for each different toy. However, the toys make the choice to hold each others hand and go through whatever comes together (which is a running theme in the Toy Story series.)

But once that moment passed, and they made their choice, as the viewer my response was, “Wait, that can’t be the choice. They can’t die here, right?” I tried to imagine what was going to happen sitting in the theaters on that first viewing. And I couldn’t. And that was interesting. In stories I love trying to imagine what could happen, and then being wrong, but it still feeling right. The story isn’t obvious, it’s textured with a rich imagination space.

I won’t spoil how this scene ends, other then they do claw their way out of the jaws of defeat, and it’s perfect. (Because of course they can’t die. We have a franchise to continue!). When the scene ended, I thought, “Ah, I could have imagined that, but I didn’t. What a great story.”

There’s lots of directions I could run with this, talking about deus ex machina, or Chekov’s gun and how those fit into my little theory, but I’ll end with this:

Imagination is the art of possibility. Good art, whether it be a board game or story (or otherwise!) invites participation through interesting choices. And this participation (can, when done well) create something that’s much bigger, more expansive, than the thing itself.

As long as our brains can imagine things, stories and board games giving us interesting choices will always be able to compete with the AAA video games and youtube shorts.

The most recent time I visited her she kept calling me “Alex,” my brothers name (her other uncle). Her mom (my sister) insisted she knew my name, and tried to correct her, but Livy kept calling me by the wrong name. When pressed, she finally said my brothers name was easier to say, so she decided to just call me by that. We’re both uncles, close enough, right? (Why “Alex” is easier than “Evan” I’m still perplexed by)

As the good uncle I am I started calling Livy by her brothers name, “Zeke” (short for Ezekiel). She got frustrated at first. “That’s not my name,” she said, then quickly realized what was happening, and a sly smile on spread her face. She got the joke, she’s a smart cookie. She started calling me uncle Evan after that (for now).

Livy just met my Aunt (her great Aunt?) for the first time. Livy demonstrated she could say “Tracy,” but then proceeded to say “Shishi” instead. Again, when pressed, she just said it was easier. To rectify the situation Livy approached her Aunt Tracy and simply asked her, “Can I call you Shishi?” which Aunt Tracy thought was incredibly cute, and said, “Yes please.”

The Brevity Law (originally called Zipf's law of abbreviation, some irony there) states that the more frequently a word is used, the shorter the word tends to be.

The most common words in the english language are: the, be, of, and, to, a. About as short as a word can get. The law applies to both written communication and also the spoken word. (Some studies show this rule even applies to animal communication. Fascinating.)

This isn’t too ground breaking, right? Or at least it intuitively makes sense. We tend towards efficiency, the path of least resistance. From infants, like my niece, we are wired towards the efficient path, including with language. Why say “Tracy,” when “Shishi” will do?

The more we use words as a person and as a society, the more likely that word will get shortened, be made more efficient. This law doesn’t just apply to how often a word is used by percentage. It also applies to how much a word has been used over time. Or perhaps to simplify: the more total surface area of use a word has, the more efficient it will be made. Like a stone monument worn down through wind and rain, the softer stone wearing away and the stronger stuff lingering.

This happens with phrases too. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “Speak of the devil.” Did you know this isn’t the whole phrase? Which is: “Speak of the devil and he shall appear.”

Over time, people understood the meaning, and it become less necessary to say the whole phrase. So it was shortened, unconsciously by millions of people over time, to the most efficient amount of words to communicate the meaning without losing the meaning.

How about “Scot-free?” This originated from a line in the Shakespeare story, Macbeth: “we have Scotched the snake, not killed it.” Scotch, meaning “scratch,” in Shakespearean. Over time “Scotch,” shortened to “Scot.” and “Free” was added to shorten the rest of the meaning: “There should have been bad consequences, but were escaped without a scratch.”

OK, great. What does this have to do with story telling?

A story should show situations, dialogue, and characters in a way that seems real and truthful, despite those things are, literally, a fiction.

Using the “lie” of a made-up story to show underlying truths is the great tool of story. In order stay in a story and not be “pulled out,” a reader needs to accept that the story matches their own experience of how the world works on some fundamental level.

This truism of story telling is often called Verisimilitude.

How we use the made up names and terms and language in our story have to also abide by verisimilitude.

Epic fantasy stories have a certain reputation for long, complicated, made up names for cities and characters and places. Would people really use these long names in common practice? After considering the Brevity Law, probably not.

I think some interesting questions to ask as you write and build a story are things like:

Is this old?

Is it culturally significant?

Is it common?

Do people talk about this all the time?

If the answers are “yes,” than perhaps a good follow-up question could be: “How would people shorten this word/phrase/name over time? What nicknames and short-hand would people produce?” How would the Brevity Law wear down the words so only the most basic and true meaning remains?

That’s not to say don’t also create the original long complicated name. But if you have the original and show how people interact with it, shorten it, make it more efficient to communicate with each other, that shows movement and history. It shows a living, dynamic, cultural ecosystem. It shows you have real people and real society doing what they really do in real life. It adds a little spice of verisimilitude into the concoction that is your story.

The reverse is also true. If something is secret, if it is rarely talked about, if it is largely unknown, perhaps keep the long complicated name that’s hard to pronounce.

It’s an interesting tool in the writer’s tool belt to communicate history and texture and meaning. What do you think?

Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite authors, though not because any of his books are one of my favorites. Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s a good writer (I’d recommend checking out Mistborn if you aren’t familiar with Sanderson’s work), but that isn’t why he’s my favorite author.

There’s a myriad of reasons such as his unprecedented community engagement and free writing resources, but the main reason I continue to follow him is his work ethic. If you don’t know, he launched the most successful Kickstarter of all time last year, raising a staggering $41 Million in 30 days.

There are certainly many factors that led to this success, such as the trust and community he’s built up over the years. But his previous Kickstarter “only” raised $6 Million (obviously still a great success). What caused his sequel fundraising campaign to nearly 10x?

The “X” factor I believe was the (quite literally) unbelievable amount of work he put in. The premise of the Kickstarter campaign: he wrote 5 EXTRA full-length novels during the pandemic. I emphasize extra because the man was previously infamous as a prolific writer and wrote these novels on top of his already break-neck release schedule.

It was so audacious it felt like magic.

How did he do this? To use his own words, Brandon Sanderson writes like an accountant. He shows up, clocks in, and puts in the work. Something that is perhaps uncommon in the creative space that’s filled with “muses” and “writers’ block.” And during the pandemic when everyone was shut inside, he just did more of that accountant work than anyone reasonably would.

This is the simple truth: great things take hard work. And hard work isn’t such a mystery, it simply means putting in the time and doing the thing for an unreasonable amount of time.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master (which is about 3 hours a day for 9 years) in his book Outliers. He found that talent was not a shortcut or a predictor and that lack of talent was not a hindrance. You just have to put in the time.

Mr. Beast, the uber-viral youtube creator, has pushed this idea further and asks himself the question, “What if I put in 100,000 hours?”

This is something I keep coming back to for myself. How can I orient my life and remove distractions so I can put in the time?

Two of my favorite proverbs sum this up for me:

“Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox” -Hebrew Proverb

This is (in my mind) an ancient tongue-in-cheek way to say: if you don’t put in the work your life is clean easy, but if you want to make something in this world, you gotta shovel the shit out of that manger every day.

and

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” -Chinese Proverb

If you have something you want to do in this world, someone you want to be, you have to put in the work. And to be significant it needs to be 10x more time (or more) than everyone around you. It’s a long road and the best time to start is now.

The good news/bad news is we live in a world where distraction is easy. The bad news is to orient your life in a way to avoid distraction and put in the time can be hard. The battle to stay focused is real.

The good (but unsexy) news is most people lose this battle, and if you can be the outlier who puts in the unreasonable amount of time, 10x or 100x others, you can wield magic too.

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