Week 12 Lab: TEDEd Videos: Style

For this week's story lab, I watched a playlist of TEDEd videos on creative writing and style. There were 8 videos in total, each discussing an important aspect of learning how to write in an engaging manner. Here, I took notes on a few of the videos that I found most interesting.

(Creative writing; source: Pixabay)

1. The power of creative constraints - Brandon Rodriguez
• This video points out how having an infinite set of possibilities can be paralyzing. Having constraints on your ability to feasibly accomplish certain things is a necessary component of creative thinking.
• For example, when sending a rover to Mars, there are certain constraints engineers must take into account when designing the rover.
• Such creative constraints are applicable to any field, even writing.
2. What makes a hero? - Matthew Winkler
• This video discusses the hero's journey as constructed by Joseph Campbell. I first heard about this concept in an earlier story lab.
• The idea is that the hero starts out in an ordinary world, receives a call to action, departs on a journey, confronts and defeats "monsters" (physical or mental) along the way, encounters the "final boss," dies or is momentarily incapacitated, resurrects, defeats or escapes the evil, receives some new knowledge/power/ability, and returns to their ordinary world as a changed person.
• As humans, we experience this cycle regularly on the most mundane tasks.
3. How to build a fictional world - Kate Messner
• It is important to first ask yourself overarching questions about this society (ex: what does this society value most?). 
• Next, you ask yourself about how day-to-day life works within this world.
• A good fictional world will enable the reader to understand how it functions just as well as the characters in the story.
4. Beware of nominalizations (AKA zombie nouns) - Helen Sword
• One of my biggest fears when it comes to creative writing is sounding too academic. Though I grew up reading fantasy novels (and still enjoy doing so), much of the writing I've done has been academic in nature.
• Nominalizations are other forms of speech that are turned into nouns. An excessive amount of these are what makes deciphering academic papers so difficult sometimes.