Steven Rodriguez: "I love how you are rehabilitating the genre for me" — Bluesky 07/05/2025, 14:54
Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 2h
I have been pondering the difference between what I'm calling "depth"
stories and "length" stories.
The primary force of a length story is that you are going somewhere.
The primary force of a depth story is that you are discovering new
things in a place you've already been.
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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 2h
Length stories derive their energy from discovery of the plot. What
happens next is the most important question.
Depth stories assume that the reader already knows the story.
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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 2h
Homer assumes his audience already knows the story of the Trojan
War. Shakespeare assumes his his audience
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Home Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 2h
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Homer's acts of play, then, are not in writing a new story. His motivation
Explore does not even seem to be telling an old story in a new way. He is Paper Skygest
particularly focused on deliberately erasing, submerging, paralleling,
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feigning, and delaying the story we already know.
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Chat tomslists.bsky.social @tomslists.bsky.social · 1h
Andor HICPAC Termination
And ‘Columbo’ tells us ‘who dunn it’ at the start of the show. I often find
Feeds I like murder mysteries more the second time, knowing a bit more than India-Pakistan Champions League
the characters do
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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 1h
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this is very interesting, given that murder mysteries are sometimes
trotted out as examples of the worst kind of plot-centric stories!
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tomslists.bsky.social @tomslists.bsky.social · 46m
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I often thing the murder is only there to give a good enough excuse to
pry into the private lives of others - who are likely to have interesting
secrets if they are suspects
detective work gives a very specific way of focusing on details of
behaviour which it would usually be rude to notice
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Steven Rodriguez
@smarcorodriguez.bsky.social
I love how you are rehabilitating the genre for me
7 May 2025 at 14:08
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tomslists.bsky.social @tomslists.bsky.social · 1m
I enjoy the TV adaptations of Agatha Christie. Poirot notices details of
how things are; Marple notices how people are – eg. "a girl like that
would never wear her best dress on a Tuesday" not so much logic as
an intuition of things being 'not quite right' - the depth of meaning in
the ordinary
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