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Reading List, April 2023

  • 4 min read

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists share music, ideas, events and research that connect to our stories.

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Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green


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Archetype → Explorer

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The journey makes you forget yourself; you stop obsessing over the exoskeleton of little parts of yourself and giv e into the unknown. The familiar shells get broken, and you are reborn. You begin to notice the relationship between being and place, human and environment. 


But paradoxically, it is this loss of self that leads you to find yourself; not the version you knew, but a truer, more essential you. The eternal you that remains despite the world rushing by. This is the wisdom of the explorer archetype—one of the Jungian archetypes we use to create characters, whether they are fictional or for real brands and businesses. The rasas—categories of evocative emotions used in our storytelling—that we explored this month are wonder and beauty. 


This reading list will take you through ideas, incidents, people, films, music and research connected to this month’s story, character archetype and evocative rasa.




April 2023


  • 2023, Rick Rubin. Magic, everyday mystery, and getting creative. On Being with Krista Tippet: The flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering — and life practices which call that alchemy forth. The mystery of it all that can only be named and wondered at — and the ordinary mystery that creativity is a human birthright, a way of being rather than doing, that beckons to us all, in everything we do, from crafting something to conversing to the arranging of furniture in a room. This is where Krista goes with the rock star music producer Rick Rubin. It's not a conversation about the creative process of the many great musicians he's worked with — but a conversation that is for and about us all.


  • 2021, Kravchenko, N., Zhykharieva, O., & Kononets, Y. (2021). Rap artists’ identity in archetypal roles of hero and explorer: A linguistic perspective. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies: The explorer archetype, also known as the seeker, adventurer and pilgrim, is one of the most culturally popular archetypes that particularly appeal to younger people. The Seeker archetype resides on two principal discursive roles manifesting archetypal motives of wandering along the roads of life and searching for freedom, discovery and the unknown. In this research paper, popular rap artists’ identity in the archetypal role of the explorer is decoded from a linguistic perspective of song lyrics. It’s an interesting short study of how popular music may influence the popularity of archetypes in the collective psyche.


  • 2007, Into the Wild. Sean Penn. Art Linson, Bill Pohlad. Paramount Vantage, River Road Entertainment, Square One C.I.H., Linson Film: This iconic movie is a story about the desire for freedom. It is an adaptation of the 1996 non-fiction book of the same name written by Jon Krakauer and tells the story of Christopher McCandless ("Alexander Supertramp"), a man who hiked across North America into the Alaskan wilderness in the early 1990s.


  • 2020, An Explorative Study of Wanderlust; Examining the desire to travel for the sole purpose of traveling rather than reaching a destination. Emma Bak Nielsson. Copenhagen Business School: Looking back at our times, ‘wanderlust’ is probably one of the cultural phenomena that would define the 2015-2025 decade. What is Wanderlust and what does it drive and is driven by? This study investigates the construct of wanderlust based on the foundation of travel motivation literature and on the existing, however, limited literature on the term. Furthermore, the study considers the possible drivers and outcomes of wanderlust, while simultaneously comparing the construct with the already established concept of tourism xenophilia. It investigates a new and potential travel motivator and further intends to develop a reliable scale based on wanderlust to enable researchers and marketers to explore and conduct possible future research on the concept.


  • 2001, Water music 2. William Basinski. Digital album: The fluidity of water is captured perfectly in this mesmerizing work by Basinski. A one-hour track entirely composed on a Voyetra synthesizer, Water Music is a perfect antidote to stagnant city lives. It's a never-too-present low humming lullaby, caressing the brain and the ears and slowly developing from silence.


  • 2020, Musical Exploration in Everyday Practices. Tiri Bergesen Schei and Elin Eriksen Ødegaard – Identifying Transition Points in Musicking: While music exploration is the process of examining and being curious about sounds, rhythms and instruments, musical exploration refers to musicality and the embodiment of and sensitivity to music as a possibility for expression.



  • 2021, Within the Known: Wonder That Comes from Understanding. Amanda Vick: Is understanding contradictory to wonder? There are two sub-moods of the Adbhuta Rasa (the mood of wonder) in the eastern Rasa theory. The first includes wonder that occurs when there is a lack of understanding of an experience that could be understood. The second sub-mood comes from not understanding experiences that cannot be understood. What is the possibility of understanding leading to or supporting experiences of wonder? To explore the concept of wonder, thirty interviews were conducted in this study.


  • Movies and books touching on space exploration have held appeal over the last century, feeding our collective desire to discover meaning through the lapse of time and place in the greatest possible scale. These films and books chart us through our known world and beyond, following explorers undertaking the loftiest of missions, traveling beyond our planet, solar system and even galaxy to discover our place among the stars.

    1. 2015, Interstellar. Christopher Nolan. Warner Brothers.

    2. 1979, The black hole. Gary Nelson, Walt Disney Productions.

    3. 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clark. Hutchinson (UK), New American Library (US).


Monthly Story, April 2023

  • 3 min read


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Archetype → Explorer

Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow +

Śṛṅgāraḥ (शृङ्गारः): Romance, Love, attractiveness. Presiding deity: Vishnu. Colour: light green

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Kalu got into his jeep and started the engine. Scanning the night sky for signs of rain through the windshield, he lit the first smoke from a neatly arranged row of rolled joints lining the secret pocket of his wallet—one for every significant stop in the seven-hour drive ahead. After thumbing through the long list of travel playlists on his phone, Kalu settled for one out of instinct more than reason. Cranking up the volume, and tapping the steering wheel in sync to Led Zeppelin, he set off. It was late and he knew the road would be empty, save the wild elephants resembling moving boulders in low light, the occasional long-distance bus, and the packs of boar and deer dashing across to get to the other side. Only those out for desperate things like love and survival were on the road at this hour.


Kalu hadn’t told Jakie that he was driving over to her that night. Jakie lived a few hundred kilometres away, on the east coast of the island, running the seaside guesthouse that she inherited from her parents. Kalu’s family house was near the southern tip of the island, but you couldn’t quite say it was his home because he was barely there. Kalu lived between the two coasts—giving surf lessons in his family village through the southern season and at Jakie’s when the currents moved east—driving between the houses of his folk and his woman. The road became his home. He knew every bend, every tree, where the sambhur lurked, where the leopard liked to prowl and where it was worthwhile to make a stop and dissolve into the view with a smoke in hand.


By the time Kalu reached his last pitstop, it was almost three am. He inhaled the smoke and looked at the Govindahela peak standing singular and sombre over the tropical flatlands—the only thing resolutely unmoving amidst treetops dancing in the night breeze. This peak always reminded him of Jakie—the one person that he remained inexorably attached to, despite the distance, the temper, the other women and the numerous offers to flee abroad to greener pastures.


In the early days of their romance, Kalu had found it impossible to understand why he couldn’t stay away from Jakie. After all, the promise he made to himself—to never get caged to a wife, kids, and a pot of rice—was sincere. But, ever since he set eyes on Jakie sitting alone, sulking over her resort counter all those years ago, he had not been able to ignore her pull. He had left but always returned with the same irrational devotion that the sand held for ocean currents. He liked her unapologetic moodiness in the sunny tourist town where everyone went out of their way to keep things bright, cheery, and good for business. He also liked that his typically-southern and typically-Sinhala family couldn’t quite digest this brooding Burgher beauty. 


But, what he liked the most was that she never followed him. The handful of times that Jakie had travelled with Kalu to his coast, she had complained, cried, fought, and left early, swearing never to return. (But, she did visit for his brother’s wedding and mother's funeral). Outwardly, she seemed his opposite; he—always cruising easy with an open smile, and she—unmoving and impenetrable with eyes brewing seasonless storms. But inwardly, Kalu knew that she was his anchor—the only one who didn’t try to possess but insisted on guarding his freedom from a coast apart.


Kalu arrived at Jakie’s twenty minutes to sunrise. He showered in a guest room so as to not wake her, and came in quietly like a cat. He puffed the leftover roach from his last smoke while watching her long brown hair frame the solemn face and eyebrows furrowing slightly in their unwearying mistrust against the world. As the sun rose, he climbed into bed and felt for her breasts under the sheets. This was an unspoken ritual they had continued for almost twenty years, from the first time Kalu had climbed into Jakie’s bed at dawn, uninvited but welcome nevertheless. ‘Happy anniversary my storm cloud’, he said in her ear.




The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.



Can AI service our appetite for stories?

  • 3 min read

Updated: Aug 30, 2023

We were curious about the potential of AI as a storytelling tool. Interested to find out whether it could save ourselves and our clients money and time without compromising quality, we did a quick experiment. We gave ChatGPT the same brief as our April 2023 monthly story. 

 


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What we learned is that ChatGPT is great for saving time when testing out ideas, but not so much for producing final work. It allows you to produce quick renderings of productions and identify which ideas may work better. But, for quality final productions, we think human insight and a more in-depth understanding of the context are more necessary. Right now, this is not what AI can offer. 


Something that surprised us at first was that ChatGPT seemed partial to cheesy endings. It was surprising because even when specific instructions were given to avoid typical endings, ChatGPT always produced a predictable, completely unoriginal ending in every one of the stories that it produced at our prompt. Later, thinking about how ChatGPT works, we realized that this is because the AI’s resource for ideas being collective data, it’s bound to derive from something standard.


But, this is also the strength of AI. It eliminates the need to spend time on the mundane. We found that ChatGPT is great for administrative messaging. ChatGPT can explain, list instructions, and sound impersonal yet perfectly polite. We don’t see the need to write another invoice follow-up email again.



The story brief: write a 500-word short story for the Public Works Publishing monthly stories. It should explore feelings of desire. The protagonist character has an explorer personality. The antagonist is the journey the hero of the story must accomplish to be reunited with his lover. The story takes place between the Sri Lankan surfing seasons on the south and east coasts.





If you are thinking about getting an AI to produce creative work, learning how to give a good brief is essential. We were able to get ChatGPT to produce the kind of story we wanted only after refining the brief again and again. Until our instructions were optimized for ChatGPT , the outcomes were always too far from the expectations. To produce this story—which ChatGPT produced at a remarkable speed once we briefed it right—it took us 1.5 hours of fine tuning the brief. Good briefs have never been more important. 


We found that for more abstract creative briefs—those involving images, for example—ChatGPT seemed to produce quality outputs faster, while more specific ones—like writing—needed more detailed instructions and revisions to the brief. 


Analyzing written productions by ChatGPT we see a marked difference in the depth between lived human experiences and ‘echoes of experience’ learned and re-assembled by AI. There was a more coherent richness to experiences or stories recorded by humans. But, the more ChatGPT and other AI learn to mimic human minds, perhaps this difference will become subtler.

 

We think there’s a lot that AI can do in helping human messaging. Learning how to use ChatGPT to save time in mundane tasks can open up room to put more into what your business specializes in. We think chatGPT can be a great tool for small businesses to scale without necessarily having to hire people for certain administrative tasks. But the chances of it replacing a creative team that can read and interpret the human experience in its real depth are still very slim. But, that’s only for now, and AI is still in its infancy. The potentials of AI and its influence on our lives will only become evident in the next decade. We leave you with a line from one of our favourite Zen stories— “Good, bad, who knows?”


Yes, who knows? And, what an interesting time to be alive.


Want to know more about our storytelling process?






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