The more I read the book, the more I wonder if Heisig ran out of new stories and that's why he suddenly tapered off and said you have to write your own. Even just coming up with the english primitive system was no small feat, but I wondered if he ran out of stories or whether it is essential to the methodology to write your own.

I typically grab a story from Koohi and plug it in. I don't know whether writing my own would be better. Some of the Koohi stories are downright near genius (The Water Turkey for example is borderline genius) and I really don't think I could write a better story for a lot of these. I'd be faking it - writing the primitives in a nonsense sentence.

No, I don't think it's critical. I do think Heisig's approach toward you personalizing your stories as much as possible in order to make them memorable is quite valuable, though.

That's one of the key benefits of this site. You can look through many stories, and choose the one that works best for you. It doesn't matter if someone else came up with the story you use as long as it's something that has struck a cord with you. There has been a lot of discussion on this site in the past about nsfw or vulgar stories. They work for some people, but offend some others. For the people those kinds of stories work for I'm sure they work really well. Because Heisig didn't foist stories on the reader, both of those styles are supported in the method.

I think it was a good decision on Heisig's part since there's no way to come up with good stories for every reader of the book in every culture. Ideas and concepts that are relevant to one reader in Austin, Texas, USA might not feel as relevant or impactful to a person living in Cape Town, South Africa. Users taking ownership of their own stories is the only way for the method to work for everyone.

My two cents:

I found this site after Heisig's stories ran out and I had tried writing my own for a few days. I had the experience a few times where I chose one of the stories here, but then later during reviews it was actually another one of the stories I read that came to mind. So I learned what type of story worked for me.

Nowadays, I look at the keyword and note the first thing that came to mind (eg. Foster: maybe "foster kids, Jodie Foster, your Swedish grandfather telling you to run "foster"*, whatever), then I scan the first 10 stories or so looking for a story that matches that. If there isn't one there that fits, or that I can tweak to match my primitives, then I write my own.

I do think, unless you have a very good reason, you should try not to rename the primitives. It might work for the few stories you see right then, but a few hundred characters later it might come back to bite you. As an example where I made an exception to that, I have very little knowledge of Spiderman and his world. And since there were about 50 stories involving the thread primitive in a row, I made my own primitive for thread and came up with all my own stories. However, most of the other ones I took from the site (Mr. T, Data**, Pinocchio, Robin Hood, etc.).

In short, I think it is a huge time-saver to find a story that works for you here. Over time, you will get really good at choosing a story quickly.

*I have no idea about Swedish accents
**I was extremely shocked to find that Data ended up with the "pity" kanji, as I imagined that everyone here was working together to get us to the perfect Mr. T kanji!

I wrote over 2000 of my own stories (more like sentences) just a few years ago and I probably can't recall a single one of them now, though that's not really a problem because I can read pretty much anything at this point. It's hard to say whether they helped initially or not, I honestly don't know. I remember feeling like I was progressing quickly, but that might have been the same if I used pre-set stories.

I would definitely say it's not critical. One of my regrets was trying to force myself to make my own stories, and most of them came out pretty bad because I'm not creative. Unfortunately I didn't really check out this site much until after I went through RtK. If you're finding difficulty making your own stories I'd say don't struggle further and make use of the contributions of the other users of the site.

Roketzu Wrote:I wrote over 2000 of my own stories (more like sentences) just a few years ago and I probably can't recall a single one of them now, though that's not really a problem because I can read pretty much anything at this point. It's hard to say whether they helped initially or not, I honestly don't know. I remember feeling like I was progressing quickly, but that might have been the same if I used pre-set stories.

The point is that you're supposed to forget your stories over time, and instead just remember the kanji. The story is mental scaffolding to help connect the 2 pieces of knowledge together. Once the connection between the 2 pieces of knowledge is strong enough, that scaffolding can be removed. So "forgetting your stories" after a period of time isn't really an issue.

At some point I was taught a clever acronym for order of operations in arithmetic. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was, but I still remember order of operations. The goal was for me to remember order of operations, and so it doesn't matter that I forgot the scaffolding I used to get there.