Mary Robinette Kowal was on Writing Excuses this week talking about the principles of puppetry apply to writing. I’m not quite sure the direct correlation between all of them, but it feels like they apply to both how you execute tests and how an application should behave.

  1. Focus
    • Indicates thought
    • What the puppet is thinking about is what it is looking at
    • What you have [them] focus on is needs to be what you want them to think about
    • Humans are trained to look at what someone else is looking at
  2. Breath
    • Indicates emotion
    • The speed in which you do something tells people how you feel about it (example: speed of breathing)
    • Short choppy sentences (in action scenes for example) replication people talking in rapid breaths
    • We’re not writing, we’re storytelling. We just happen to be writing it down to share the story with people who aren’t in the room with us
  3. Muscle
    • The idea that a puppet is moving of its own volition even when it is obvious it is not
    • A puppet that is jumping looks down to see where it is landing
    • A puppet that is falling will look at where it came from
    • We don’t want to see the man behind the curtain
    • The character and the world needs to exist for a reason, not just because it is convenient for the author. (example: A tannery in the middle of the city)
  4. Meaningful movement
    • Every time a puppet moves it has to mean something
    • Every movement must convey meaning (emotional or plot content)
    • You can only do one thing at a time
    • One reason people (subconsciously) hate Jar-jar Binks is because his movement was so fluid and most of it didn’t convey meaning