Story Robot

Not sure what’s going on, but if it doesn’t show up in the previous post, here is the TED lecture I was talking about.

Ah synchronicity.As soon as I start thinking about something, examples start to turn up all over the place.
First of all Joshua Wolf Shenk has written a great series of articles on the ways that John Lennon and Paul McCartney collaborated.
The introduction is here.
It’s a little wordy but the essential idea is that in the past people and creators have been viewed as individual units, but now science is more and more viewing people through they way they connect and relate with other people.
Improvisers have known this for a long time, for example in the classic Keith exercise ‘Sexy/Smelly/Stupid’ where each character is created by how they respond to other people (rather than an individual deciding ‘I’ll be the sexy one’).
The Lennon/McCartney article starts here.
One of the things that remains thrilling about a simple game like Word at a Time Story is where is the story actually coming from? One person says one thing expecting to take the story in one direction, the other person says something else expecting to take the story in another direction, in the end the story goes somewhere that neither person intended.
That is I think the essence of collaboration.
Then, today this turned up on TED
In which Steven Johnson pretty much repeats the exact same point. Great ideas tend to come not from individual eureka moments, but from people with little bits of an idea talking to each other.
As a bonus, here is the same point being made again. This time in the form of a discussion of who came up with the Star Wars character Chewbacca.