[zoeysmithe]

When I started writing fiction I found myself naturally gravitating towards inserting puzzles and mysteries and twists and unknowns. I think some people just love that. There's this dopamine aspect of solving the problem or knowing the unknown and the anticipation towards it can be very intriguing! Games do this in a more obvious way, but the 'rule of fun' is everywhere.

Look how exciting mystery is and how boring well known things are, but ironically there's a lot more to, say, the theory of gravity that if contextualized differently would be exciting and deeply interesting that 'unknowns' like the mystery of some cult or whatever can't even come close to, but in the end, there's something inside of us that wants to read about that cult. I make sure to self-aware of this and do deep dives into the boring 'known' world and push back on the sensationalism and such I'm so drawn to.

[ehnto]

To your last paragraph I think contextualising the mystery is a good amount of the fun and I guess all of the storytelling.

There's a lot of things about our real world, that if told by an alien race, would make us sound like ethereal wizards.

"They convinced the sand itself to think for them, guided the power of Sol to move them, and spoke to eachother through the very fabric of energy that moves invisibly through us all"

Similar to that, there's a bunch of magic/fantasy storytelling that can kind of pull me out of disbelief, because I can't help but think "yeah we have that, it's electricity" or "witches are just pharamacists without good research"