Looking up, you find yourself standing beneath the brilliance of a night sky, a dazzling deep blue background of mosaics that holds an ordered constellation of stars that literally twinkle silver and gold as incoming light dances across the surface of the glass tesserae.

Small white-petaled flowers hang delicately between the stars. Red, yellow, and silver-crossed mandalas create the vision of other orbs floating freely in the universe.

The mosaic ceiling shimmers even under the cover of clouds. With the doors open, it is as though the face of each glass cube is emanating light.

Those who entered this place of reverence on a rainy day centuries ago, would find only flickering light through the fire of a torch. The ceiling of stars would become celestial, creating the night sky.

Terry Tempest Williams,
Finding Beauty In A Broken World

I’ll be offering some models for thinking about stories. No one of these is “correct” or sufficient. Think of them as rhetorical trial balloons.

If a model appeals to you, use it. If not, discard it.

In Buddhism, it’s said that a teaching is like “a finger pointing at the moon.” The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it’s important not to confuse finger with moon.

For those of us who are writers, who dream of someday writing a story like the ones we’ve loved, into which we’ve disappeared pleasurably, and that briefly seemed more real to us than so-called reality, the goal (“the moon”) is to attain the state of mind from which we might write such a story.

All of the workshop talk and story theory and aphoristic, clever, craft-encouraging slogans are just fingers pointing at that moon, trying to lead us to that state of mind.

The criterion by which we accept or reject a given finger: “Is it helping?”

George Saunders, Swim In Pond In Rain

No need to ask: “Is model true?”
If Truth means Whole Truth, Answer: “No.”

Only question of interest:
“Is model illuminating and useful?”

George (outside the) Box

Knowledge that is both familiar and uncontroversial is background knowledge.

A predictive theory whose explanatory content consists only of background knowledge is a rule of thumb.

Because we usually take background knowledge for granted, rules of thumb may seem to be explanationless predictions, but that is always an illusion.

There is always an explanation, whether we know it or not, for why a rule of thumb works.

Denying that some regularity in nature has an explanation is effectively the same as believing in the supernatural—saying, “That’s not conjuring, it’s actual magic.”

Also, there is always an explanation when a rule of thumb fails, for rules of thumb are always parochial: they hold only in a narrow range of familiar circumstances.  

David Deutsch, Beginning Of Infinity

The freedom to make drastic changes in mythical explanations is their fundamental flaw.

Whenever it is easy to vary an explanation without changing its predictions, one could just as easily vary it to make different predictions if they were needed.

Likewise for the superstitious gambler or the end-of-the-world prophet: when their theory is refuted by experience, they do indeed switch to a new one; but, because their underlying explanations are bad, they can easily accommodate the new experience without changing the substance of the explanation.

Without a good explanatory theory, they can simply reinterpret the omens, pick a new date, and make essentially the same prediction.

If an explanation could easily explain anything, then it actually explains nothing.

Richard Feynman said, “Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.”

By adopting easily variable explanations, the gambler and prophet are ensuring that they will be able to continue fooling themselves no matter what happens.

David Deutsch, Beginning Of Infinity

Getting smarter is not a matter of sheer brain exercise.

The mind is like a muscle in some ways but not in others.

Lifting pretty much anything will make you stronger.

But thinking about just any old thing in any old way is not likely to make you smarter.

The nature of the concepts and rules you’re trying to learn is everything when it comes to building the muscles of the mind.

Some are useless for buiding brain muscles.

Others are priceless.

Richard Nisbett, Mindware