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Showing posts from November, 2014

The Law of Superposition and Context

It wasn't until yesterday as I was speaking with a college rep that I realized my passion for geology and storytelling have endless parallels.  No wonder I love them both.  Let's see if I can put it into words. In Geology sediments stack up and are compressed to form sedimentary rocks.  The Law of Superposition states that older sediments will be beneath younger sediments.  Simple.  Common sense.  Now, using knowledge of various natural processes we can determine how the rocks formed, what they were before, what the weather and the atmosphere was like.  The general ages of the layers give a timeline to those processes.  The processes shape the rocks and they can tell a story about the past.  So can we.  So can everything else in nature.  If we understand what we are looking at and what rules made it happen.  What are our rules? Storytelling for me is no different.  The environment of a story is made up of the other characters, the mood, the events... these are the processes