If you want to tell a good story, one that makes people feel pressure and understand the

stakes and that takes all of the broad open-endedness of the options that we have in the world,

including oftentimes the option to just sit and do nothing and see if things work out,

if you want to take all of that and condense it down into a good story that helps the viewer,

reader feel the pressure of the situation and feel collegiality or get inside the head of the hero

and have to wrestle through the tough choices the hero has to wrestle through. If you want to do

that, you usually have to depend on some sort of time crunch that gets built into the plot,

maybe multiple time crunches. And when you really think about movies or books or whatever,

you might think, well, yeah, but a lot of deep artsy, artsy character studies and things like that,

they don't really have a time crunch. But if you go and dissect almost any story, the pivotal

moment in the story will often have some sort of in-the-moment pressure and the more action-oriented

a story is, the more hero-centric a story is, the greater the time crunch pressure will be and

the more immediately recognizable it will be to an outsider. Now, I just went and pulled up the

list of highest grossing films ever, because maybe you're like, sounds like you're making stuff up,

Mr. or even if you're not, I haven't had enough time to think about it yet. And I'm not prepared

to ascent to what you're saying. So let's see, we're just going to go look at unbelievably

popular stories that people have paid to millions of dollars to watch. Number one, all-time highest

grossing film. Interesting. I didn't know this was still true. I thought this had been surpassed.

Apparently it's Avatar. Does Avatar have a time crunch? Well, absolutely it does. The horrible,

awful live-out-of-balance minors, they come with their tanks and their goons and their

booms and they're going to attack the forest people. And so something has to be done right now.

Number two, all-time Avengers Endgame. That one has time crunch within a time crunch within a

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