RECAP:

Lisa Cron wrote a book (STORY GENIUS) and I’m trying my hand at applying it. No, Lisa isn’t paying me to endorse her book. I just don’t want her publisher to sue me so I’m putting links all over the place LIKE THIS ONE.

What? Check. Why? Check. Misbelief? Check.

Or..if you’re like ‘what!??’ then you have some ketchup in your future (go back and read the previous posts).

Today I’m moving on to defining Roti’s worldview, or, the subjective lens through which he distills meaning from the world around him. For those following along, we’re in chapter 6 of Lisa’s book.

Why this is totally awesome

Remember: my story is out to get the folks on social channels who think it’s perfectly acceptable to blast the living daylights out of someone just for holding a differing opinion.

It’s forcing me to not make the same mistake I’m out to annihilate. To do this well (and for the story not to suck), I have to have an honest-to-goodness understanding of what…exactly happened to Roti that makes him think this way (ugh…why do I get the feeling I actually might start to…*groan*…sympathize with these trolls?).

To get there, I get to ask cool questions like:

What happened in someone’s life that encourages this sort of behavior?
Do they believe they are being abrasive?
What are they afraid of? Where did that fear come from? What do they believe is the best-case scenario for their bombastic comment?

Because chances are if I believed the same things as them I’d be a troll too.

The TODO

Fortunately for me, the task isn’t so enormous (or meta) that I’m required to psychoanalyze the entirety of social trolling to figure out my story. All I’ve got to do is

…envision the moment where the misbelief took root…

for Roti because his particular misbelief is tied to a reason enough to demonstrate the destructive power of poorly handling accuracy.

Since this is going to require some meandering, click here to get to the Google Doc where I’m working on all of this live (ish).