You are here: Home > 2025 > Archives for May 2025

Archives for May 2025

Seven Layers of Story

2 May 2025 by Leave a Comment

For convenience, I am pinning this post to the top of my home page, so that readers interested in my monograph on ‘Seven Layers of Story’ can read the individual chapters in the right order. Here are the links:

  1. A Critical Problem
  2. Translation, Adaptation, and the Layered Model
  3. The OSI Model and the Story Model
  4. The Formal Layer: Delivering the text
  5. The Perceptual Layer: In the mind’s ear
  6. The Syntactic Layer: Diction, prose, and poetry
  7. The Semantic Layer: Figures of speech and mind
  8. The Diegetic Layer: A stage for the imagination
  9. The Immersive Layer: Views from the inside
  10. The Apperceptive Layer: Spirits of tales past
  11. How Story Happens
Filed Under: Essays

Digression: More about the OSI Model

2 May 2025 by Leave a Comment

In the earliest days of electronic computers, each computer stood completely alone. Each new machine represented a unique design, with its own architecture, operating codes, and methods of storing data. The early computer engineers were staggeringly ingenious in coming up with different ways of representing binary information. On different machines, ones and zeroes were represented by switching vacuum tubes, or magnetized patches on rotating metal drums, or bright and dark spots on oscilloscope screens – even by patterns of sound waves travelling through tubes filled with mercury. But two storage methods quickly became standard, allowing data to be shared between machines: IBM punch cards and magnetic tapes. If you have ever seen a computer in an old movie from the 1960s, you probably saw the whirring tape machines and clattering card punches in among the huge banks of machinery with their innumerable blinking lights.

The trouble with punch cards and magnetic tapes is that they have to be physically carried from one computer to another, and that is a slow process. By the end of the fifties, the U.S. military was using dedicated telephone lines to link computers together electronically. The SAGE network, as it was called, allowed several large computers to quickly share incoming data from the radar stations that continuously scanned the skies in case of a Russian nuclear attack. This worked because all the computers in the SAGE network were identical, so there was no trouble about translation. Other early networks had the same limitation. They either connected similar mainframe computers together, or connected one computer to many identical terminals. There was no general way of connecting different computers on the same network.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: ,

The OSI Model and the Story Model

2 May 2025 by 1 Comment

Seven is a significant number, for reasons that have nothing to do with luck. It has been said that the human brain is not equipped to deal directly with numbers larger than five; but that appears to be more a fault of the human visual cortex, which needs to mentally divide larger collections of objects into smaller groups in order to count them. Other regions of the brain cope very well with larger groups, and groups of seven are a particular favourite. In particular, the people who study group dynamics have found that the ideal size of a working group is seven. Fewer people in a group give you, of course, fewer hands to do the work, but also can limit the group’s ability to incorporate all the various skills needed for a job. With more than seven members, the group begins to become unwieldy, as people have insufficient opportunities to deal with one another face to face and get to know each other’s needs and capacities.

Film and television writers know this as if by instinct. The most memorable shows tend to have regular casts, not necessarily of seven, but at any rate of six to eight, close to the sweet spot of group dynamics, so that viewers can feel familiar with each character, yet also find them to have an interesting variety. This is why, when Sherwood Schwartz created Gilligan’s Island, he put exactly seven people aboard the S. S. Minnow. It is also why there are Seven Samurai in one film, and a Magnificent Seven in another. And it explains why, of the two most famous works of fantasy to debut in 1937 (both still beloved today), the Seven Dwarfs in Snow White are much more memorable characters than the rather faceless and interchangeable thirteen Dwarves in The Hobbit. Thorin, Balin, and Bombur are about the only ones who stand out in the reader’s memory; the others have little to do beyond making up the unlucky number for Mr. Baggins to make lucky again.

Of course we have seven Deadly Sins, seven Cardinal Virtues, seven Wonders of the World, seven (named) continents, and other useful sets of the same size. Mnemonics like ‘Roy G. Biv’, for the seven supposed colours of the rainbow, and ‘Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me’ for the seven principal spectral types of stars, often work best with seven members in the list. (XKCD once made a joke: ‘I have this problem where all sets of seven things are indistinguishable to me.’ He therefore listed the Seven Dwarfs as Sneezy, Phylum, Europe, Sloth, Guacamole, Data Link, and Colossus of Rhodes.)

For this reason, if you want to break a large task down into components so that they are easy to remember in the correct order, it is advantageous to have no more than seven parts. That is what the authors of the OSI networking model did, and what I propose to do with the mental process by which writers create stories and readers or viewers receive them. The OSI model takes the task of sending data across a computer network and divides it into seven sub-tasks or ‘layers’, each with its own clearly defined function. I list them in reverse numerical order, with the most abstract layer at the top and the nuts and bolts at the bottom:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With:

Translation, Adaptation, and the Layered Model

1 May 2025 by Leave a Comment

The late Ursula K. Le Guin complained that when she taught creative writing classes, there were always students who had a fine command of prose mechanics, but no notion of what a story is or how to tell one. She never could find a way to explain to such students what it was that she was actually trying to teach, let alone why. Editors of fiction, whether for magazines or book publishers, report the same thing: they get reams of manuscripts that are technically well written, but do not actually tell stories – presumably because the author doesn’t know how, or else doesn’t know what is and is not a story, and submits whatever he writes whether it is a story or not. There seems to be a failure of perception at work here, a sort of conceptual colour-blindness. I cannot pretend to cure it – even Le Guin couldn‘t do that – but I can perhaps shed some light on the condition itself; but to do that I shall have to take a rather odd detour.

One of the less perused books in my library is a thing called Legends of the World, edited by Richard Cavendish: a collection of legends, strictly so called – neither myths nor ‘realistic’ stories – from cultures around the earth. Most of these stories recognizably are stories: they are about characters who want things, and the deeds they perform in striving to get them. The same structure is visibly present (especially visible when the legends are reduced to their shortest form, as in this volume) all over the world: Europe, India, China, Africa, North America, the Inca culture. But when we get to the Amazon basin, something goes off the rails, in a very interesting way.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: , ,