HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence:

http://www.amazon.com/Wired-Story-Writers-Science-Sentence/d...

⬐ runevault

Fantastic book, both from a writing perspective and wanting to understand why people react to certain things they do. I need to reread my copy but it gave me a ton to chew on.

⬐ jessriedel

Ugh. I got into a spirited disagreement on HN a few months back sparked by how much I hate when magazines like Wired feel the need to entice me to read something mildly analytic by interweaving it with a human story. The author can't just talk about a law and its potential for unintended consequences, or even just the law and specific examples of people it hurt. He had to tell me a full narrative about Bob Jones and his green bicycle that means so much to him and the overcast clouds on the fateful day he had his front tire stolen when he was already late for work! I find myself skipping from paragraph to paragraph looking for actual analysis.

http://www.amazon.com/Wired-Story-Writers-Science-Sentence/d...

Wired for Story is a great book about the science of story. I think it applies to a lot more than writing.

⬐ DenisM

Bought the book on your recommendation. Thanks.

This is not "storifying" because the output is not a story. It's metadata and visualization attached to an album.

I make the distinction because story is important. I'd suggest reading http://www.amazon.com/Wired-Story-Writers-Science-Sentence/d... if you haven't already.

A storified album will only be a story if the user curates the album that way. There is a kernel of story in the demo but there will not be in every album. Questions to ask about a story: Who are the characters? What do they want? How are they changing? What is the dramatic tension? If you can't answer these questions, I submit that it's not a story.

So, you can't automate storytelling (at least not now.) Encompassing photos in metadata about their context IS valuable. Context is important. So you're on to something.

But storytelling is very very powerful. I'm sure you have a laundry list of features to implement but I think you should consider if there are ways to refocus on making it easier for album owners to author real stories around their photos. These are the types of narrative that compel us and resonate with us biologically.

Put another way: Where, when, what and how help us understand but why pulls us in. If you can focus less on automation and more on empowerment to enable authors to weave in the why, then I think you will really be on to something. Your site will also not be about travel and instead be about life. Because we are all living a story every moment, not just when we get on a plane.

⬐ lohnicky

Thanks for the insight. You are right that our primary target right now is traveling, because it is the best place to start. It is the easiest use case for which we can automate the process (based on photo metadata).

According to our study about sharing memories between FRIENDS and archiving memories, it comes up that the important parts of the story are who attended the events, what happened a what were the most important events and other related stuff (where, weather etc).

We tried to visualize what happened and the importance of the events (if you take a lot of pictures in a short time it is sure that it there was something interesting) in the chart to create the visual aid not textual to better understand the story. Yes I agree it is not enough clear what the chart is, we have to make definitely some improvements here.

WHY and other story related stuff are a bit tricky for us. We have to consider the usability point of view, how much time the user wants to spend in the creation process. Is it 5, 10, 40min? Other point of view is the target audience. Is it me, the author, to recall the memories? Is it my friends to share the story? Is it a public "blog" for all the people I don't know? You friends already know a lot information so you can trade for simplicity. We tried to solve the WHY issue with the description field to the event, but you are right that it should lead the user to input the information in a way that he creates the "real" story.

Thanks for the book tip, I'll definitely read it.