How to Use This Game Guide

Unlike stories in just one Genre, the story of Samara is one of unity and emerging clarity, but it is also of diversity. This journey has seen many storylines. See the few below, which are just some of the few we have travelled. 

We believe in and have experienced joining a DHO being like Star Crossed Lovers. Why? Because if a Massive, Transformative Purpose pulls, the resonance is there, and we truly CARE... then we can find a meeting of the heart.

In Samara's case this was many hearts with a shared sense of something beautiful and unformed. For other founding pioneers, there may be a very different attraction, but that basic heart connection is what seems to have started the real commitment that subsequently emerged and is needed to do something as audacious as launching a DHO.

As any lover knows, being Present, being Patient and letting the unformed beauty emerge is an important pattern to nurture in any relationship. That is the kind of space and environment we saw being upheld in Samara as the activities and intentions are weaving together into something more distinct. 

Being able to facilitate the recognition of when a group is in each of these story patterns is a major aim of Samara's work to support the creation and evolution of new DHO's. We want to be able to assist a wide variety of founding groups to get a DHO up and running, but without resorting to cookie cutter methods: combinations of insights and tools that mean this evolution can be enhanced while still helping each group to quickly hone in on something unique, distinct and able to move forward around their massive transformative purpose.

This is why this space is really a place of magic and why in this story we are called a coterie.

co•te•rie kō′tə-rē, kō″tə-rē′

• n.
  A small, often select group of persons who associate with one another frequently.
• n.
  A set or circle of persons who are in the habit of meeting for social, scientific, or literary intercourse, or other purposes; especially, a clique.
• n.
  A set or circle of persons who meet familiarly, as for social, literary, or other purposes; a clique.

Coterie's are groups of magicians. In many stories they link minds in order to co-ordinate their magic. Part of the effort here in Samara has been to gain insight on the basic factors that allow flow, the experience of understanding and conversation where mind-linking occurs and the seeking out of these states and particularly the factors that both enhance or block the phenomena. This is an age-old human endeavour and we have all experienced this kind of magic. No one can deny the value in these patterns when they happen. How to foster an environment which facilitates them to occur more frequently without relying on the individuals turning up alone?

JS - notes on thinking about structure:

• Should we create a story line for the Game Guide (see below)
• Should we adopt a novel format (e.g. beginning, middle, end and tension points?)
  
• Personally love the last three archetypes below :)

• BW - Some pointers towards this inspired by this article are below. This can help us think about evolving the structure:
  
  Learn the pros of different story structure types

  
  Three act structure: the story can be divided into three parts. Classic novels of voyage and return, for example, often follow this structure. Randy Ingermanson breaks down this structure in fantasy series such as Harry Potter and Twilight
  Orson Scott Card’s 4 story structures: In a post for Writer’s Digest, Orson Scott Card details four story structure types according to the plot details authors structure stories around. They are:
  a) The Milieu Story: An observer who sees things the way we see them experiences a strange place (e.g. Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz) – the story is structured around the experience of a strange and outlandish setting.
  b) The Idea Story: A question is raised and answered (e.g. in mystery novels,  the central questions ‘who’ and ‘why’? Who was the killer and what was their motive?
  c) The Character Story: A character goes through immense inner change, and this is the story’s main focus. Coming-of-age novels, such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) typify this structure.
  d) The Event Story: Something is wrong with the world and either a new order must be established or the old must be destroyed. The Lord of the Rings, in which the tyrant Sauron must be stopped, is a classic example.
  Mirror structure: In David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), each section of the book is left incomplete until the book’s central section. From there, Mitchell resolves the unfinished character arcs in reverse order, ending with the first character’s arc and setting

  Know how to structure a novel to suit your central idea
  When you decide how to structure a novel, think about your central idea. What would best suit your story type?

  
  A story, for example, about an adventure and return home (like The Lord of the Rings or Homer’s Odyssey) might suit Three Act Structure because of the simple three-part narrative arc: ‘home – away – home again’.

  
  Think about the mirror structure of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas described above. The novel begins with diary excerpts by a sailor living in 1850. The middle section follows a different character. It could be set in pre-modern times, following tribal life, but we slowly realize it  might describe a post-apocalyptic future, a return to tribal life wrought by conflict or disaster.

  
  In Cloud Atlas, the idea of history being cyclical – of returning to the beginning and starting over – is everywhere. We see it in both the changing time-frame of the story and how its individual chapters circle back to previous, unfinished story arcs. The mirror structure of the book is thus perfect for showing cyclical, repetitive elements of history – how society builds itself up and tears itself back down to start all over.

   

• Think how you can structure your story so that the structure itself – the ordering of scenes, time-frames and events – creates meaning. It would make sense, for example, for a novel where the protagonist has amnesia, to include structural holes and gaps. You might have ‘missing’ chapters the story later fills in. Allow yourself to play with structure as you would with setting and characterization. Have fun with it.