What's the best way to use lanes?

I agree, these are very much A and B plots that mostly grow independently and might only have a couple of major connections. Flashbacks as well.

One recommendation we put into the docs, which I agree with more and more as a litmus test of whether something should be in its own lane, is whether you intend to stay there when you cut to it. If you jump to Winterfell and stay there for 5 minutes, and then jump to King's Landing and stay there for 5 minutes, these are great uses where I think a Lane helps keep separate things separate.

The problem is really only ongoing cross-cutting, because it's difficult to understand, and it even would be with post-it notes on a wall. Ultimately, you need to understand cross-cutting as a sequential thing, and that's very difficult if you have to jump 5,000 pixels up and down for each event, and where especially when everything isn't even visible on the screen at the same time.

I mean, yeah. Sort of. It's clear that we aren't speaking in the same terms here, which makes sense since I am the one with the weird understatement of story principles here. Just to clarify, yes, they are both similar. So similar, in fact, that most people agree that they are the same. But, like I said, I have a different viewing of them. Get this, the difference between a story thread and a storyline, is that story threads are the recollection of elements that make up a story. They are the literal strings that tie all the story elements together, creating a coherent, compelling story. If a story has a problem in its story threads, it’s not going to end well. Likewise, if an issue is found in a story, its most likely cause will be a mismanagement of story threads. Have good story threads, have an excellent story, have bad ones, have a garbage one. A storyline is the story that arises from the story threads. It’s a coherent sequence of dilemmas, in which each step is driven by characters’ questions that arise from their interactions with a phenomenon or another dilemma. A character’s goal should always be to explain the phenomenon or deal with the dilemma. At each step, the characters make progress on the story’s questions. Each step also generates questions that lead to the next step in the storyline. And as the story progresses, so do the characters and themes. A storyline provides a coherent path toward building a disciplinary core idea and crosscutting concepts, piece by piece, anchored in your characters’ own questions. There can be more than one storyline, but depending on your medium, that may or may not be recommended. So, uh, yeah.

Still, it's up to you where the lines are drawn. The problems with using lanes for storylines are more practical, and not really about Causality, since you'd have difficulty understanding a sequence of post-it notes on a wall if they were zig-zagged between 20 lanes. You'd be better off using fewer rows on the wall, and instead using colors of post-it notes (i.e. tags), because then you aren't forced into categorization questions you can't answer.

It turns out that lanes are better for things that are clearly separate, like an A and B story in a TV show that only rarely interact or cross-cut, and tags are better for everything else. Where you draw the line between what is a major storyline and a contributing storyline is up to you, and these boundaries also aren't clear. A contributing storyline in Episode 1 could evolve into the main story in Episode 2. With Tags, that's an easy transition, because there never was a hard boundary to begin with. With Lanes, you have to obey the structure throughout, and that's often not appropriate.

Remember that Lanes are for other things than storylines. They're also scratchpads, or temp workspaces for other users, or things that don't matter in the whole series etc. And they're also great for clearly separate A and B stories. But criss-crossing up and down the whiteboard (or a physical wall) breaks down when the number of lanes is high. Aristotle would have had the same problem drawing storylines on papyrus. It's a more fundamental problem than Causality.

I agree. The A/B storyline that rarely interact and a scratchpad/temp-workspaces, is another way of saying what I wanted to say, a much better way of saying it, may I add. Like, I said, thank you.