I don’t know what to put here

I don’t have much going on this week. Worked at two schools, they were very different, built some Lego, ate chicken wings, you know, the usual.

I guess if I’m going to talk about anything, it’s bookending your stories, since that came up with the movie we watched today for the podcast.

We record the podcast on a pretty significant delay, a few weeks, so if something catastrophic happens like an injury or people going on vacation, and I remember to upload, we have a buffer. I’m not great at remembering. Anyways, we watched The Last Emperor, which is a good movie and you should watch it, and the ending of the movie is a callback to the beginning of the movie. This is a personal storytelling favorite of mine; often, the final chapter/paragraph/section of my writing will have very similar sentence structure on purpose. The reason why bookending is important is because, especially with long pieces of entertainment, you focus on what’s happening in the present, and by the time you get to the end, yes, you generally remember the beginning, but not that well. By mirroring the beginning at the end, the audience more easily recalls the entire work, and sees it as a completed story.

Harry Potter going home after Hogwarts is another good example of this. In general, the Hero’s Journey style of storytelling does this well, as the last step is when the hero goes back to his old life, but something has changed. Not every story can do this, of course. Shoehorning in writing tropes just because you like them is a good way to make a story feel disjointed. But when it’s done well, you almost forget how long you spent enjoying it. You’re back at the beginning again.

Song of the Week: Roundabout by Yes. That’s right, I’m finally getting around to watching Jojo. Only the first two seasons are on Netflix in English, but the third is coming soon. Of course, it’s still a good song in its own right, but nowadays, it’s been completely co-opted by To Be Continued memes.