The Weird 19th Century Solution To Writer's Block

Are you an aspiring writer, but you can't get started? Take a few minutes to learn about the Myriorama and discover if an 1800s theatre innovation could work for you.

[fives]

I had never heard of Myriorama before and it's quite the interesting concept. That is also a nice top for getting over writer's block. I usually fish around in multiple random prompt generators to find a few touch points to plot a story around when I am suffering from writer's block.

[BazukinBelyugovich]

"Theater was for rich folks"
That's not really true, though. The best seats were for rich folks, sure, but that's still the case today. There were always seats for poorer/working-class fans especially in the upper parts of the theater sections. Even operas had their place among poorer audiences - the Swedish artist Carl Larsson described in his childhood, a period when he and his mother were in total poverty, times when they would attend performances of Mozart's operas, along with many other working-class theater-goers. Some operas, especially Italian ones, were written to strike directly at the hearts of its national peoples, many of whom were far from rich.
Sorry for this tangent.

[Jamman]

I genuinely thought shrek invented this idea as a low tech take on movies. Had no idea they were actually real.

[WolfWalrus]

I've got some dice called "Rory's Story Cubes", each face has a different image representing a plot point, character, scene or narrative beat, and they're great for helping come up with quests for my _Dungeons & Dragons_ games. It's the same principle as these cards, sometimes you just need a set of random gubbins and your brain will work out the rest

[theSoundCarddatabase]

If you don't already know them, Austin you should look into the "Oblique Strategies" set of cards made by Brian Eno (yes, the composer) that are specifically designed to help people fight creative block by employing unconventional techniques.

[duffman]

The answer better be "cocaine", cos I mean, it does work, brilliantly, at removing writer's block. Works almost _TOO_ well. You end up writing 100, 000 words in one go if you aren't careful

[Shatterverse]

When I was a kid we'd take shoebox lids, cut slits in them, and use cardboard and sheets of glued together paper to create analog side-scrolling shooters. This was the 80s so we ended up having to make shit up between irregular video gaming sessions. One hand pulls the threaded sheet, one hand controls your little fighter ship or w/e, and you made shit up while "shooting" drawn on enemies. We were in 3rd grade, what do you want.

[Yesica]

I had never even heard of the term, "Myriorama." That is so very cool! And I love that cards are still being made!

[SAM-tcwr]

There's a book that's formatted in a similar way to the story cards! It's called The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson and it's a bunch of small packets that can be placed in any order to make a story. Overall, its about 244 pages. I personally haven't read it in any order yet, but I plan to soon!

[Red-qqut]

It kinda reminds me of Story Cubes! Like you roll the dice and you try and make up a story based on what you rolled and you could mix up the order or the various dice together or just reroll it. Like 'I use a superhero based dice with a few mystery based dice to come up with a story about, uh, a guy with shrinking powers getting mixed up with ghosts or a murder. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I do like this concept!

[reaganmonkey]

I used to have dice that worked like this. Each dice had icons on each side. You rolled the dice, and arranged the icons, then wrote a story.

[chenoaholdstock]

I have a similar thing called "story cubes" and so I can confirm these are fantastic and I love them

[CulcoyoteCosmico]

"I don´t know, I think this was cool" Is the perfect way to describe your content, and I say that as a compliment

[trashboat]

Man! The fact you're putting out tv level content and still keeping up with videos like this in-between 👏 👌🏻

[fazzitron]

I have story dice that do a similar thing. I need to pull those out again...

[ellie]

Ooough that one set with the pipes in each scene leading to the next is way too cool

[KunyeeYT]

My writers block ceases under the right amount of caffeniation.

[Kabitu]

I can wholeheartedly recommend a card game named Arkham Noir that has a similar structure. It's more of an actual game, it's a Lovecraft-themed detective solitair game, you string together clue cards according to the rules, forming lines that make up the solution to a case. It's at once a good puzzle game, and tells you an improvised detective story where you're the hero. And the mechanics are really cleverly set up to make the story beats fit together and make internal sense.
I've had some fantastic experiences with this game. I've stumbled through city streets, mad with curses, looking frantically for a priest to cure me of insanity. I've chased a believed killer, only to discover in the end he was a hero who gave his life to protect people from the evil spirits. I've found the murder victim turned into a zombie for a witches amusement, and punished her by taking her magic powers away and locking her up in an asylum to rot.
And new stuff keeps happening at every shuffle of the deck.

[kaitlyn__L]

It's interesting how a scrolling background is such a common thing in theatre that even TV shows set in a generally-Renaissance level of technology feature them when doing episodes in theatres. 

It feels so lofi and basic that I can understand why they do that, but it makes me wonder in 500 years what anachronisms will be common about today. Behind-stage LCD screens in productions set in the 1970s?

[entropias_gonos]

Chat got DOES feel like 21st centurie's version of that actually, down to us using other people's work to come up with a story, but, in a less ethical way I suppose 😅