Self Organized Criticality

The concept of Self-Organized Criticality was originally put forward by a physicist named Per Bak.

Bak did experiments using sand where he discovered once you start dropping more and more grains of sand, at some point, the sand castle topples over; it will break down.

This is what happens in our minds, too, when we add little grains of progressive complication. When we misread something, we don’t really recognize we’ve made a mistake until a critical moment. That’s what we call the turning point.

The turning point is when someone might say, “Oh wow, something just happened. I better get out of here!” or maybe, “Everything I thought was true is no longer true, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

A breakdown occurs when what we believe was true proves untrue.

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From Story Grid Writing Podcast - Episode 263