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Contents Updated: Saturday, 9 August 2008

Abstract

The Marienbad Muser Story Teller

As we have already said in connexion with PoltiPlot, if a computer could write you a story, then you as a storyteller are redundant. These pages are to stimulate your thinking, and help you overcome writer’s block. The plot outliner simply juxtaposes, not in any logical way, some Polti categories to give you ideas for plots. By merging with the Marienbad simulation, the musings of the Polti plot muser bring a degree more unity into the schema which emerges, but not much. It simply helps to remind us or convince ourselves that the attempt is to suggest one story, not several. The logic of your own story is your’s, but an exercise in creativity is to take one of these pages, and to force yourself to make a story, using the elements suggested, it being your choice, of course, what you consider the primary plot and what the subplots.

I should know… But it is hard to recall things…Ah, now I am beginning to remember. The hero is unfoundedly jealous of a lover through some mistake by a third party who is innocent. The cause of the unfounded jealousy might not be specified because he does not exist, the jealousy being a malicious rumour, or the intrigues, multiplied ad lib, of a traitor to the jealous one motivated pride. Many even improbable variations are generally acceptable in this situation. The outcome might be a divorce, but may be more forceful via instrumental characters. Strange… I should know… But it is hard to recall things… the labyrinthine palace, a luxury hotel for those apparently rich beyond care, a country paradise for its elegant clientele. Its baroque French design was geometric, made up of repeating flat surfaces and intersections, though punctuated with classical looking pictures and statues, and decorated with elaborate ornamentation. The curtain fell to polite applause. Now, I seem to remember—a play, a production put on for the guests, it was so cold. A physical injury had set up a conflict instigated by a human dispatcher, or was it a nonhuman impulse, like the bank foreclosing in Grapes of Wrath? Whatever! It started the hero on a quest for objects, he or someone desired like wealth. What is a dream but a fairy story, a quest, the hero sets off to find something or do something? But the story is the dream rationalized. That is what the writer must do, if they are not to make reality into a dream. It is one or the other. Today, the quest is metaphorical, a quest for happiness. You can decide. Incidents are instigated by the villain or a donor of magical gifts. The king gives the hero his reward, the hand of his daughter, the princess. In modern stories it is a goal achieved, a psychological state attained, or… there might not be one!

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