Writing Tips from Storymind.com

4 Novel Writing Tips

2011-08-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

Novels Aren’t Stories

A novel can be extremely free form. Some are simply narratives about a fictional experience. Others are a collection of several stories that may or may not be intertwined.

Jerzy N. Kosinski (the author of “Being There”) wrote another novel called “Steps.” It contains a series of story fragments. Sometimes you get the middle of a short story, but no middle or end. Sometimes, just the end, and sometimes just the middle.

Each fragment is wholly involving, and leaves you wanting to know the rest of the tale, but they are not to be found. In fact, there is not (that I could find) any connection among the stories, nor any reason they are in that particular order. And yet, they are so passionately told that it was one of the best reads I ever enjoyed.

The point is, don’t feel confined to tell a single story, straight through, beginning to end.

Rather than think of writing a novel, think about writing a book. Consider that a book can be exclusively poetry. Or, as Anne Rice often does, you can use poetry to introduce chapters or sections, or enhance a moment in a story.

You can take time to pontificate on your favorite subject, if you like. Unlike screenplays which must continue to move, you can stop the story and diverge into any are you like, as long as you can hold your reader’s interest.

For example, in the Stephen King novel, “The Tommy Knockers,” he meanders around a party, and allows a character to go on and on… and on… about the perils of nuclear power. Nuclear power has nothing to do with the story, and the conversation does not affect nor advance anything. King just wanted to say that, and did so in an interesting diatribe.

So feel free to break any form you have ever heard must be followed. The most free of all written media is the novel, and you can literally – do whatever you want.

Get Into Your Characters’ Heads

One of the most powerful opportunities of the novel format is the ability to describe what a character is thinking. In movies or stage plays (with exceptions) you must show what the character is thinking through action and/or dialog. But in a novel, you can just come out and say it.

For example, in a movie, you might say:

John walks slowly to the window and looks out at the park bench where he last saw Sally. His eyes fill with tears. He bows his head and slowly closes the blinds.

But in a novel you might write:

John walked slowly to the window, letting his gaze drift toward the park bench where he last saw Sally. Why did I let her go, he thought. I wanted so much to ask her to stay. Saddened, he reflected on happier times with her – days of more contentment than he ever imagined he could feel.

The previous paragraph uses two forms of expressing a character’s thoughts. One, is the direct quote of the thought, as if it were dialog spoken internally to oneself. The other is a summary and paraphrase of what was going on in the character’s head.

Most novels are greatly enhanced by stepping away from a purely objective narrative perspective, and drawing the reader into the minds of the character’s themselves.

Keep A Daily Log Of Tidbits

One of the biggest differences between a pedestrian novel and a riveting one are the clever little quips, concepts, snippets of dialog, and fresh metaphors.

But coming up with this material on the fly is a difficult chore, and sometimes next to impossible. Fortunately, you can overcome this problem simply by keeping a daily log of interesting tidbits. Each and every day, many intriguing moments cross our paths. Some are notions we come up with on our own; others we simply observe. Since a novel takes a considerable amount of time to write, you are bound to encounter a whole grab bag of tidbits by the time you finish your first draft.

Then, for the second draft, you refer to all that material and drop it in wherever you can to liven up the narrative. You may find that it makes some characters more charismatic, or gives others, who have remained largely silent, something to say. You may discover an opportunity for a sub-plot, a thematic discourse, or the opportunity to get on your soapbox.

What I do is to keep the log at the very bottom of the document for my current novel, itself. That way, since the novel is almost always open on my computer, anything that comes along get appended to the end before it fades from memory.

Also, this allows me to work some of the material into the first draft of the novel while I’m writing it. For example, here are a few tidbits at the bottom of the novel I’m developing right now:

A line of dialog:

“Are you confused yet? No? Let me continue….”

A silly comment:

“None of the victims was seriously hurt.” Yeah – they were all hurt in a very funny way.

A character name:

Farrah Swiel

A new phrase:

Tongue pooch

A notion:

Theorem ~ Absolute Corruption Empowers Absolutely

Corollary ~ There are no good people in positions of power

I haven’t worked these into the story yet, but I will. And it will be richer for it.

Don’t Hold Back

Unlike screenplays, there are no budget constraints in a book. You can write, “The entire solar system exploded, planet at a time,” as easily as you can write, “a leaf fell from the tree.”

Let you imagination run wild. You can say anything, do anything, break any law, any taboo, any rule of physics. Your audience will follow you anywhere as long as you keep their interest.

So, follow your Muse wherever it leads. No idea is too big or too small. Write about the things you are most passionate about, and it will come through your words, between the lines, and right into the hearts and souls of your readers.

Don't Try To Be Shakespeare - He Didn't...

2011-04-05T07:27:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare just wrote as himself, and you should too. While trying to emulate another famous writer can be useful as an exercise (just as an artist might copy the Mona Lisa as a "study"), that approach is never userful in creating or advancing your own art.

Sure, read what other write, disect their work, and practice their techniques - even in your own creations, but ONLY if those techniques also fit your own personality and style. The best way to achieve Writer's Block is to try and write like someone else. When you do, you are hobbling your Muse; locking her in irons. You are trying to play a role for which you are unsuited.

Of course we all want to be beloved successful writers, but we are not all going to be. You are only as good as you own talent - GET OVER IT!

Why are you writing in the first place? To make a buck? To make a name for yourself? Or perhaps, just perhaps (Lord help us) because you actually like writing? Or maybe, just maybe, because you want to like writing, but don't, try as you may?

Fact is, while money and fame are good motivators for any career, be it singing, dancing, playing a sport or writing, if they are the Prime Motivators, you won't have a very good time doing it, whatever "it" is.

The Wise Man famously said, "Work at what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." The important aspect here is that he didn't expect to become a famouse wise man when he said it. It just occured to him as part of his personally satisfying manner of thinking. Just as it occurs to me to say, "Don't blame the weather - its' only humid."

Now that clever little phrase is never going to make me rich OR famous. But I did have a really enoyable time telling it to you. And that, dear readers, is the very essence of the writing life to which we should all aspire.

Unless you truly enjoy laboring over a single book for your entire life, word by word, with endless rewrites and improvements, then just write it out as you feel it. Plot doesn't make sense? Come back to it later when you know your story better. Characters dull and derivative? You're not going to fix them by micromanaging them.

Give it up and get on with it. Write endlessly. Write until your fingers fall off. Keep an archive somewhere to put all the stuff the world should never see and then post the bulk of the rest on your blog. (You DO have a blog, don't you? All real writers have a blog.....) And for those gems - the occassional piece that just zings and sings and hits the mark - well those you send off to a publisher, magazine or agent.

If you're looking for gold, you won't find as much by sifting the same sand through a finer and finer mesh as you will by marching from one dig to the next in search of nuggets. So be prolific, knock the blocks out from under your tires, throw open the stop-cocks and let loose the dogs of words.

Summary of the Story Mind

2011-03-10T21:33:00.000-08:00

1.7 The Story Mind (Revisited)

In summary, then, in our own minds we have a sense of who we are. In stories, that “sense of self”, essentially the identity or ego of the story, is represented by the Main Character. As readers or audience we tend to identify with that part of the Story Mind, either in empathy or sympathy, because it is the essence of the story’s humanity.

And just as within ourselves we sometimes must consider changing our point of view or our sense of what is right or wrong about a particular issue, so too does the Story Mind grapple with the possibility of change.

Our own survival instinct insists that we don’t recklessly abandon an old tried and true approach in favor of a new untested one without first engaging in some exploration of what such a change might mean in our lives.

After all, if we simply adopted a new mind set on a whim, we will have already changed and our allegiances would be to some other value standard, which may turn out to be contrary to our own interests.

So, essentially we have it out with ourselves. We think about how our world looks to us at present, then imagine what it might look like if we altered some aspect of our outlook or personal code.

We think about how that other belief system – what does it hold, how does it work, what can we learn from it – while still maintaining the belief system we have. Only then, if we are convinced it is a better way to look at the world, we’ll jump over and adopt it.

At that moment we have changed at least some small aspect of what we call our “selves”. We have changed who we are in our own heads.

In stories, it is the Obstacle or Influence character who represents this new person we might become. Functionally, this character might be very like the Main Character (and in practice often is) except in regard to the central message issue of the story regarding which these two characters are diametrically opposed.

The subjective story – the perspective in which the Main Character and Obstacle character duke it out over opposing belief systems – represents our inner struggle wherein we play devil’s advocate with ourselves, pitting who we are against who we might become.

In the end, we elect (or are emotionally compelled) to change or not. But whether change will prove to be a positive choice will remain to be seen, as sometime we change for the good and sometimes we change for the worse. And just as certain, remaining unchanged can also end well or poorly.
And here we arrive once more at the Objective view. It is the one perspective we can never have of ourselves, yet though we can apply that view to others, there it is hobbled in another way for we can never really see what is going on inside their minds.

Stories seem almost miraculous to us because they present us with more points of view in regard to a single central issue than we can perceive in real life. In a sense, the author provides us with a God’s Eye View of the Story Mind, enabling us to see the Big Picture even while we passionately share the Main Character’s inside experience.

The promise of a story is that we hope it may tell us whether or not we should accept the way things are in our own lives or rise up to change them and, in the process, whether we should remain steaadfast in our resolve or change our minds, abandon our proven methods and embrace the chance that new ones will serve us better.

In the end, it all amounts to the author professing to have some special knowledge that allows him or her to understand what is really best, regardless of how it might feel to us in the midst of it.

Your Main Character's Approach - Do-er or Be-er?

2010-11-18T13:52:00.000-08:00

Main Character Growth -Start or Stop? (12 Essential Questions Every Writ...

2010-11-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

12 Essential Questions Every Author Should Answer (1 of 12)

2010-11-09T14:53:00.000-08:00

Writing with Heroes and Villains

2010-11-01T16:02:00.000-07:00

Characters - First Impressions

2010-11-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

Choosing Your Protagonist & Antagonist

2010-11-01T12:29:00.000-07:00

Creating Characters from Plot

2010-10-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

A Novelist's Bag of Tricks

2010-10-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

Be a Story Weaver NOT a Story Mechanic!

2010-10-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

How to Create Great Characters!

2010-10-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

Character Arc 101

2010-10-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

Blowing the Story Bubble

2010-10-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

Difinitive Scientific Article on the Dramatica Theory

2010-10-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to the definitive explanation of the Dramatica theory (in PDF) from 1993, that explains all of the key concepts in text and graphics, including descriptions of non-story uses of the psychological model and the functioning of the model in terms of the dramatic circuit created by Potential, Resistance, Current, and Power (Outcome) and its relationship to the prediction of temporal story progression in terms of a quad-based 1 2 3 4 sequence.

http://storymind.com/free-downloads/sa_article.pdf

Introduction to Characters

2010-07-23T09:26:00.000-07:00

Dramatica Unplugged

by Melanie Anne Phillips

creator StoryWeaver, co-creator Dramatica

Section 2 - Characters

2.1 Introduction to Characters

Don’t get me started on characters: I could write about them forever. Not surprising, really, since characters are where story structure and humanity converge. It is the magical interface where mind and matter transmute from one to the other as things sometimes become people, and people sometimes become things.

But what really is a character? Well, like most dramatic elements in the world of story structure, it depends on who you ask. Some say characters are just ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Others say characters represent personality types. And, there are those who see characters as archetypes, personifying human ideals or exemplifying quintessential human qualities.

As usual, Dramatica see things a bit differently. First and foremost Dramatica always seeks to separate story structure from storytelling. We can actually separate characters into those two parts:

1. Those that have structural functions

2. Those that do not

To have a structural function, a character must have some impact on the flow of the plot or the growth of another character or even, perhaps, at least contribute to the thematic message.

If you were to take all of those functional characters out of a story, you’d still have a lot of people in it. In movies, they call them “extras”. In television series they are referred to as walk-ons. In books, they are “color”. But mostly they are just “window dressing” to make the story more interesting.

Each of these non-structural characters isn’t really a character at all – not as we define characters in Dramatica. Rather, we refer to them as players. In truth, every player in a story, be it person, place or thing, is capable of becoming a character. All it needs is a job to do that in some way changes the course of the story. Some may have a small impact, others a huge impact. Either way, if the player contributes in any way to the direction the story will take, it has graduated to become a Character.

So in a more refined sense, a character really isn’t a player at all, but rather occupies a player, much as a spirit might possess a body. The body (or tree or car) is simply a host in which the character resides.

That, of course, then raises the question, “If a character isn’t the physical host, what is it?” I’ll tell you.

In a conceptual sense, every story has a mind of its own, as if it were a single person, not an ensemble. This story mind’s psychology is represented as the story’s structure while its personality is presented in the storytelling.

Just as with characters, there is a structural side to stories and a storytelling side. Characters are found in the structure, players are found in the storytelling. And the combination of character with player creates that almost metaphysical marriage of substance and spirit.

Now, if characters are spirits, how can one every hope to define them? Fortunately, it’s not as ethereal as all that. In the story mind, character represent different facets of a single mind’s psychology.

Why this is so is covered way back in the first chapter of this book called, no surprisingly nor inappropriately, “The Story Mind.” In a nutshell (for those of you who skipped ahead to this chapter on characters as many are wont to do), in the course of hundreds of years of storytelling, the very process of communication between author and audience created a framework upon which to hang the ideas and feelings to be shared.

This framework, as a by product of this communion, established conventions upon forms and organizations that served to facilitate an accurate transmission of meaning between the two parties. And these conventions, as it turns out, are a picture of the very fabric of the common psychological elements of our shared humanity.

Hey, I know it sounds both flowery and scientific at the same time, but that’s because it is describing both story structure and storytelling.

Characters, then, appear in the structure and represent facets of our own psychology – facets we all have, though we all employ them in differing degrees and combinations. The Protagonist, for example, represents our initiative, and that is why the Protagonist is the prime mover of the effort to achieve the story’s goal.

The reason stories hold such universal appeal (beyond the simple thrill of the storytelling) is that we see ourselves in them. We see the aspects and processes of our own minds made tangible, incarnate, and can therefore look into ourselves from the outside and gain a much more objective sense of how we should feel and act in the situations explored by the story.

That characters are common facets of each of our own minds is the quality of story structure that gave rise to the concept of archetypes. But prior to Dramatica, story structure was generally not separated from storytelling and so each of the well-known archetypes (such as those proposed by Jung and later Campbell) are part facet and part expression of that facet; part character and part player.

When we split a character's function apart from its personality, we can far more clearly see what each part contains and how each works.

And so, armed with this basic understanding of the nature of the beast, we are ready to divide some common archetypes into their component parts to learn what makes them tick.

Based on the Dramatica Unplugged Video Program
(click for details)

What's the Big Idea?

2010-07-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

Write Your Novel Step By Step

by Melanie Anne Phillips

creator StoryWeaver

co-creator Dramatica

Step 1 - What's The Big Idea?

How many times have you heard someone (perhaps even yourself) say, “That’d make a great story!” Usually this is uttered right after some unexpected event (observed in life or on television) or after hearing or reading about some new bit of information (in a conversation with a friend, on the radio or in the newspaper).

Such an idea is called high concept because the very notion is so intriguing that anyone who hears it becomes enthralled with the potential for how interesting and involving a story built around that idea could be.

High concepts are rare. Otherwise, as they say, “Everyone would be writing them.” But even if you are lucky enough to recognize a great idea for a story – even that only gets you partway there because you still need two other ingredients:

1. You need to have the abilities to write that particular kind of story. After all, just because you can recognize what would make a great story doesn’t mean you actually have the natural skills or insider knowledge that may be essential to bringing that concept to life.

2. You need to have the interest in the subject matter of such a story. No matter if the idea’s great and you have the required skill set – if you just aren’t personally excited by the material it doesn’t matter how great the idea is, you’ll never have the drive to carry it through to completion.

Take Step 1:

One: Since high concept ideas are few and far between, be sure to note them down at the moment when they occur. All too often a wonderful idea crops up in the midst of some frenetic activity, and by the time you get back home you can’t remember what it was for the life of you.

So, record it on your cell phone or mobile device, call your own number and leave it in voice mail, jot it down on a scrap of paper, or even just share it with someone you are with which doubles your chance of remembering it.

Two: Also, great new ideas generally don’t spawn from the same old ****. The more you expose yourself to new experiences, venture into new locations, different social circles, or even just watch television programs you’ve previously avoided – the more you fill yourself up with unusual (for you) information, the more likely you are to come up with an unusual idea.

Three: Once you’ve been fortunate enough to come up with a high concept, don’t just stop there. Though it is getting ahead of our step by step approach, it pays to do any development you can when you first think of the idea.

At that time you are enraptured with it and, if you are like most writers, a lot of other tangential ideas grow from that fascinating core. Take the time to follow them as far as you can before the inspiration evaporates, charting out as many details and timelines as you comfortably can. Every minute spent in this early stage will be worth an hour of effort later on.

Looking ahead to Step 2

Not surprisingly then, most books are not completed because the core idea was astonishingly captivating to begin with. Rather, it is because the author had some core interests and the skills and drive to make it happen.

So, if you haven’t got a high concept idea as we’ve outlined in step one, it makes sense that the second step in writing any book is coming up with an idea that isn’t high concept but will inspire you and falls within your experience and abilities.

Based on StoryWeaver Step By Step

Story Development Software

(click for details)

Dramatica Sequences, Acts, and Variations

2010-07-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

Dramatica user just asked:

I have reached a small roadblock in reference to SEQUENCE, in terms of a division of ACT and organization of SCENE. The term is not covered in your theory book online. It seems like an important concept to me since I am writing a novel.

I am confused about your use of Sequence as you talk about 4-ACT structure, since you talk about the Concern being looked at from the VARS of each type as it sequences through the 4 acts. Does this mean that in BEING you are looking at (CONCERN=BECOMING) as judged by [knowledge ability desire and thought]? Or am I judging BEING through those four variations: as in (BEING [knowledge, ability, desire & thought]) and applying that to BECOMING?

When I look at this second interpretation it makes more sense, but I don’t want to force myself into overburdened complication (which I have a tendency to do).
My reply:

Actually, both of your statements are true:

The Concern is valid throughout the entire course of the story, so it is going to be shaded and better understood by experiencing it (learning about it) through all four variations of a given act.

Equally true, the attempt to get to the center of the story’s problem will be enhanced by looking at each Type in each Act through the four Variations of that act. In this way, by the end of the story the location of the story’s central problem can be triangulated on (or actually quadrangulated, since there are four Acts and four Types).

But, it is not as complex as that sounds. In truth, because all our minds work alike beneath the level of our personalities, in storytelling, all one must do is make sure that the Concern, each Act’s Type, and each Act’s Variations are all represented. The reader/audience will assemble that information in the proper place all by itself so that the Variations act as “lenses” to clarify the location of the problem.

So, simply ensure that those elements are in the mix, and your reader/audience will actually do the hard work for you.

Melanie

The Audience and the Main Character

2010-07-12T15:28:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

Suppose your audience/reader and your Main Character do NOT agree in attitudes about the central issue of the story. Even so, the audience will still identify with the Main Character because he or she represents the audience’s position in the story. So, if the Main Character grows in resolve to remain steadfast and succeeds, then the message to your audience is, “Adopt the Main Character’s view if you wish to succeed in similar situations.” If the Main Character remains steadfast and fails, changes their view and succeeds, or changes and fails, completely different messages will be sent to your audience/reader.

Clearly, since either change or steadfast can lead to either success or failure in a story, when you factor in where the audience itself stands in regard to the issues of your story a great number of different kinds of audience impact can be created by your choice.

Do you want your story to bring your audience to a point of change or to reinforce its current view? Oddly enough, choosing a steadfast Main Character may bring an audience to change and choosing a change character may influence the audience to remain steadfast. Why? It depends upon whether or not your audience shares the Main Character’s point of view to begin with.

From the Dramatica Pro Software

The Narrative Archetype

2010-07-12T15:23:00.001-07:00

A writer recently asked:

Hi Melanie.

I had a question. Have you ever heard of the term Narrative Archetype? What does it mean to you in theory and to all of us who use your products “Dramatica” and last but not least, Could you tell me a little bit more about your new software “StoryWeaver” and how it can benefit me and make life a little easier for me as a storyteller?

My reply:

Although I’ve heard the term Narrative Archetype somewhere or other, I honestly have no idea what it means! I can tell you that in Dramatica theory, the narrator is seen as the author speaking, even if the author also appears as a character in the story.

For example, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout is ostensibly the author and relates the piece as an older woman. But, she also appears in the story as Young Scout. When she is in the story, she is one of the characters, but when she addresses us directly as older Scout, she is acting as narrator.

Crucial to this difference is the understanding that there is a difference between a Player and a Character. A Character is a particular collection of human traits, whereas a Player is simply the host that manifests them.

So, when one player dies and another player picks up his or her dramatic functions, that new player may actually be the same character. Now, getting back to the narrator, in Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams has written himself as a character in this loosely autobiographical piece. But, from time to time, he steps toward the audience and addresses them directly. Then, he returns into the stage to continue as if he was unaware of the audience. This is the player as character, then dropping that role to adopt the role of narrator and then returning the role of character. Basically, it’s the same “person,” but with different functions.

In comedy, you’ll often see a player do an “aside” to the audience – a look directly through the “fourth wall” of the stage or into the camera that breaks the fiction. It forms an author’s commentary on the action that is clearly meant to indicate that at that moment the player is speaking to the audience directly and therefore carrying the author’s message.

A great example of this is in the old series Northern Exposure. There is an episode where two major characters are about to fight a duel. The series lead, Joel, tells them to wait. He then launches into a discussion about the script and it’s implications. One of the other characters, Maggie, says that he can’t to that: he can’t just step out of the story and discuss the script in front of the audience. He goes on to argue that they are doing this whole thing for the audience and are obligated to make it come out right.

So, then enter an “impromptu” story conference until they all decide to skip the duel scene since they can’t figure out how to make it work out without a tragedy and go directly to the scene at the end where both parties survived and everyone are friends again.

Now what is particularly interesting about this is that they stay “in character” while stepping out of character! In other words, their personalities, attitudes, and approaches remain consistent while arguing about the script, even though they have all become narrators!

So, it is often a fun storytelling technique to blur the line between the two!

Keep in mind; audiences and readers come to a story to ignite their passions. They only need enough structure to support that passion, never to get in the way of it.

Which brings me to your second question about StoryWeaver, the new software program I’ve created specifically to deal with the passionate side of storytelling.

As co-creator of Dramatica, my purpose was to define structure absolutely, so we could all know what pieces we had to work with, and how they could fit together to create different combinations that were always sound drama. But there was something lacking – the heart and soul of storytelling! And that’s where StoryWeaver comes in.

Since Dramatica was first released in 1994, I’ve struggled to devise a passionate approach to story creation that was both consistent with Dramatica’s structural view, but focused on the heart line, not the head line. StoryWeaver is the first release of the result of that work.

By listening to the students in my UCLA course in Dramatica theory, by getting back in touch with my own roots and reasons for writing, and by answering email like this, I’ve come “full spiral” back to the joy of writing, but carrying a bag of structural tricks. And that’s what I’m sharing in StoryWeaver.

StoryWeaver is a step-by-step approach to working out the details of what your story is about and how it unfolds. But, it doesn’t mention structure at all. Rather, the structural side is hidden behind the questions, not right up front where you would have to turn away from your muse to figure something out.

There are four stages in StoryWeaver – Inspiration (where you come up with ideas for your Plot, Characters, Theme, and Genre to supplement what you already have in mind), Development (where you add detail, depth, and richness to you ideas), Exposition (where you work out how these ideas will actually show up in your story), and Storytelling (where you develop a timeline as to how these ideas will be revealed to your reader or audience as the story unfolds).

By the time you get through all the questions (about 150 of them!), you’ll have devised a complete, detailed, sequential treatment of your story, ready to write OR to take to Dramatica for further structural development.

You can’t import directly to Dramatica (at least not yet!) but if you work out your story passionately in StoryWeaver first and THEN approach Dramatica, you’ll have created so many interesting characters and so much involving action that Dramatica won’t dry up the muse.

Thanks for the email, and I hope this helps!

Subjective Characters and the Objective Story

2010-07-12T15:22:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

One of the most common mistakes made by authors of every level of experience is to create a problem for their Main Character that has nothing to do with the story at large. The reasoning behind this is not to separate the two, but usually occurs because an author works out a story and then realizes that he has not made it personal enough. Because the whole work is already completed, it is nearly impossible to tie the Main Character’s personal problem into the larger story without a truly major rewrite. So, the next best thing is to improve the work by tacking on a personal issue for the Main Character in addition to the story’s problem.

Of course, this leads to a finished piece in which either the story’s issues or the Main Character’s issues could be removed and still leave a cogent tale behind. In other words, to an audience it feels like one of the issues is out of place and shouldn’t be in the work.

Now, if one of the two different problems were removed, it wouldn’t leave a complete story, yet the remaining part would still feel like a complete tale. Dramatica differentiates between a “tale” and a “story”. If a story is an argument, a tale is a statement. Whereas a story explores an issue from all sides to determine what is better or worse overall, a tale explores an issue down a single path and shows how it turns out. Most fairy tales are just that, tales.

There is nothing wrong with a tale. You can write a tale about a group of people facing a problem without having a Main Character. Or, you could write a personal tale about a Main Character without needing to explore a larger story. If you simply put an Objective Story-tale and a Main Character tale into the same work, one will often seem incidental to the real thrust of the work. But, if the Main Character tale and the Objective Story-tale both hinge on the same issue, then suddenly they are tied together intimately, and what happens in one influences what happens in the other.

This, by definition, forms a Grand Argument Story, and opens the door to all kinds of dramatic power and variety not present in a tale. For example, although the story at large may end in success, the Main Character might be left miserable. Conversely, even though the big picture ended in failure, the Main Character might find personal satisfaction and solace. We’ll discuss these options at great length in The Art Of Storytelling section. For now, let us use this as a foundation to examine the relationship between the Subjective Characters and the Objective Story.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Story Justifications

2010-07-12T15:11:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

An author builds an argument that the Main Character was either justified or not in his actions, then “proves” the point by concluding the story with an outcome of success or failure and a judgment of good or bad. In this way, the author hopes to convince an audience that actions taken in a particular context are appropriate or inappropriate. The audience members hope to become convinced that when the proper course of action is unclear, they can rely on a more “objective” truth to guide them.

In real life, only time will tell if our actions will ultimately achieve what we want and if that will bring us more happiness than hurt. In stories, it is the author who determines what is justified and what is not. Within the confines of the story, the author’s view IS objective truth.

The author’s ability to decide the validity of actions “objectively” changes the meaning of justification from how we have been using it. In life, when actions are seen as justified, it means that everyone agrees with the reasons behind the actions. In stories, reasons don’t count. Even if all the characters agree with the reasons, the author might show that all the characters were wrong. Reasons just explain why characters act as they do. Consensus regarding the reasons does not determine correctness.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

The Purpose of Stories

2010-07-12T15:10:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

This is the purpose and function of story: to show that when something has previously served you well one hundred percent of the time, it may not continue to hold true, or conversely, that it will always hold true. Either message is equally valid and depends wholly upon the author’s personal bias on the issue, which arbitrarily determines the slant of the message. Obviously, the outcome is not arbitrary to the author, but it is completely arbitrary to the story.

Whether the Main Character is change or steadfast, the outcome success or failure, and the judgment good or bad, determines the audience’s position in relationship to the correct and incorrect approaches to the problem, and therefore the impact of the message upon them.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

The Four Stages of Communication (Class Transcript)

2010-07-12T14:50:00.001-07:00

Dramatica : I’m going to start tonight with the four stages of communication.

Pete P 432 : Okay

Dramatica : In Dramatica theory, we see all communication as having four distinct stages. Now, its important to realize we are talking about “communication” here. There are all kinds of artistic endeavors that are not attempts to communicate. For example, you might just want to follow your muse, document the path, and let the audience make of it what they will.

Many fine works are great not because the “communicate” but because they provide a fertile environment for conjecture. Dramatica deals only with the act of communication. Now to communicate, it means you must have an idea you want to get across. That idea may be a point of view on an issue, a logical conjecture, a feeling that you want to share, or an emotional result that will change your audience.

But only if you, the author, know what it is that you want to get across, (Hi Moon!)

MoonBailey : hi!

Dramatica : will you be able to figure out how to communicate it. Moon, we are working our way into plot, by way of the four stages of communication.

Stage one is to have an idea in the first place, that you want to communicate.

MoonBailey : OK, I’m interested to see how it works

Dramatica : This is true of ANY kind of communication. When we are talking about communicating through the medium of stories, Dramatica calls that first stage StoryFORMING. Storyforming is the process of working out just what it is you want to say. Once you have completely FORMED your idea, you move to the second stage of communication, StoryENCODING.

Encoding is where you symbolize what you are trying to communicate, so it can be transmitted over a medium, and understood by your intended audience. Now, what is this symbolizing process? Suppose you have a feeling that you want to impart, Well, then you know how you feel, that’s a Storyform. But what kinds of things do you have to show your audience, that will make them feel the same thing. You can’t just come out and say what you feel, as there is no single word for it.

Perhaps it is a feeling that you felt on a particular rainy day as a kid, and only then, never again. No single word or event in the world, will be able to handle that kind of description. So, you come up with some kind of setting or progression of events that makes it happen again for you. And then hope your audience will be similarly affected by what you have presented them. For the very first storytellers in ancient times, They might be hungry or looking for something in the distance, and have to find non-verbal symbols, like rubbing their stomachs while pointing at their open mouths, or holding their hands to shade their eyes and pointing, to symbolize what they meant.

And they would assume that any other human being would be able to tune in to that, and understand the meaning. But they were just describing things, or physical states. And because we all share the same basic physiology, and live in the same physical world, we can assume that the nature of our physical selves, being much the same, would lead to an understanding at an intuitive level of the symbols we use. But the minute you want to get across logic, or feelings, those are both internal. How can it even be possible?

In fact, the very fact that we CAN communicate such things, seems nothing short of miraculous. Unless…there is something just as similar about our minds, as there is about our bodies. And that is the case. We don’t all think the same things, but we think the same way. So, when we want to communicate, a society first begins to build symbols, that describe the basic feelings, and logical givens that are common in that society. We fashion words and scenarios, that each of us learns through cultural indoctrination, that generate within us, a predictable logical or emotional response.

MoonBailey : What about serendipity or having things emerge from the characters as you write?

Dramatica : Serendipity in message or symbol?

MoonBailey : message

Dramatica : As we write a work, in any format, we are telling about the pieces that make up our message, and also about the way they hang together to create the “big Picture” message of what it all means when the smoke clears. Since we do not write the story all in one moment, we are only describing a piece of it at a time, and because a partial message always has many options, that only close down as we add constraints through additional influences that we describe in our work, then we have the opportunity to change our message anywhere within the remaining options, without violating, the integrity of the finished product. But if we become “inspired” and do something that is not consistent, then we will either have a work with holes, or we will rewrite what came first or not do what we were inspired to do.

MoonBailey : Good. I agree with your premise, I just think there is also self-discovery in writing/art

Dramatica : Yes, self-discovery is very important to many, but not all, writers. For example, James A Michner, works out all of the details of what he wants to write about before he writes a word, then he just describes the outline he has created. But other writers like to explore their topic, until they understand how THEY feel about it, and then go back and either write from scratch, or rework what they have so far to conform to the way they now see what their message is. The final kind of writer, just wants to document the journey, and doesn’t care a hoot about internal logic. just wants to document the journey, and doesn’t care a hoot about internal logic. And that is just fine too, and can be very moving and entertaining. It just won’t come to a point.

MoonBailey : Yes, you must create consistency and internal logic.

Dramatica : Okay, so we have stage one as coming up with the message. Storyforming, whether it is done before you write or in rewrite, but ALWAYS before the work is given to the audience, if your purpose is to communicate. The second stage is Storyencoding. Where we symbolize what we want to communicate in culturally specific symbols that we have learned have a particular meaning in our society.

Narrative theory has it that stories are transportable from one medium to another. But as we all know, that doesn’t always work in practice. That is because each storyform, is the same in any culture or time, but the symbols used in the finished work, are culturally specific, and perhaps even medium or format specific. This is why books don’t always translate to the screen and vice versa.

Now, for stage three. Once we have these symbols, how do we unfold them for our audience. Suppose our goal is to Obtain the stolen diamonds… Do we have someone come out and tell us that in the first scene, or do we have a bunch of people involved in some unknown activity, and only make it clear what they are doing, as the story winds down to the end. Only in the last scene does our audience realize what everybody was after. And do we want to tell our audience the whole truth, or through them red herrings and put things out of context, so that they think things have one meaning, and then we spring a larger context on them that shows the friend was really the foe, etc.

Well, how and when we unfold the true dramatics of our story, is the stage three process, of StoryWEAVING. Now, it is important to note, that the internal logic of the storyform or message, REQUIRES a particular order and meaning for events. For example, a slap in the face followed by a scream, is not the same as a scream followed by a slap in the face! The order makes a difference. When we are constructing our story each series of events, scene by scene and act by act, scans across the mind of the audience, like the scanning lines on a TV set.

By the time they have all been played out, the audience can stand back in retrospect and see the big picture created by the lines they had followed one by one. Each line must make sense in and of itself. Colors and shading must come in the right order that does not violate the “givens” of the story, nor the givens of the audience. But they also must do a double duty. When all the parts have been laid out, they HAVE to describe the message you started out to tell.

This happens in all linear-progressive art forms. You don’t see the finished product all in one moment, but strung out over time, and then you reassemble it. So, you start with the message, stage one, encode it into symbols, stage two, and then transmit it through storyweaving, stage three. But the order of transmission can be scrambled, so that the audience needs to decode it in time as well as space, to put the internal logic of the story back together. So, the storyform actually calls for the order of dramatic events, but storyweaving allows the author the ability to play with their audience by choosing what order and how much for these events in the telling.

And finally, we have stage four. Reception. We all see pictures in clouds. We make figures out of constellations, we look at ink blots in which there is no intended meaning, yet find some. This is because we seek order out of chaos. The mind IMPOSES patterns on that which it observes. So it is with the audience. An audience will seek to find meaning in the story being presented to it. BUT Each member of the audience is coming to the story with its own preconceptions, its own experiences. So, the symbols it sees, may not be interpreted the same as the author intended.

This means, that when you want to communicate, the more broad your symbols, the wider the audience that will see them the same way, but the more specific your symbols, the more narrow your audience. As a result, to get complex concepts and feelings across to a mass audience, we must use broad symbols, each of which, does not do the job, but taken together, in the order in which they are presented, build up an understanding in the audience, much like winding string in a circle will build a baseball.

We use our inexact symbols, to get all around the issue, like a dot to dot picture. By the end of the story, we hope our audience will connect the dots and then make the intuitive leap and say, “If this is where all these things are, then THIS must be what’s at the center of it.” And that thing at the center is what you wanted to communicate in the first place. Questions at this point?

Pete P 432 : not yet.

Dramatica : Okay,

Dan Steele : the film writer must also worry about how the chosen encodings could be changed during that last stage is Stage four: Reception.

Dan Steele : the production process

Dramatica : Yes, Dan, for the film writer, their audience is not the good folks that sit in the chairs in the theater, but the cast and crew. You tell your story to the artists and technicians, you hope they get your intent, and then they go out as your messengers and hopefully interpret your work correctly.

Dan Steele : which is why film writing differs from books, in part

Dramatica : It is one of the BIGGEST differences in writing for film vs. books. Okay, so with these four stages of communication, we can see how the StoryWEAVING phase is what is commonly thought of as plot, but is really only half of what is going on. The essential internal logic of the story contained in the StoryFORM, is the first part, and the order in which it is presented is the second.

Now when it comes to the Storyweaving part, Dramatica can make some suggestions, but it is really up to the desires of the author, because it is an unlimited opportunity to play around with the order of things. Like flashbacks or flash forwards for example. Take a flashback that moves the essential dramatics along, one in which the characters are aware they are “flashing back” or remembering, and it is part of the storyform, because the characters ARE aware and therefore, it effects them after they have flashed back.

But take something like “Remains of the Day.” The characters know nothing about the flashbacks. They are only seen by the audience. So flashbacks IN the story are Storyform, Flashbacks OUTside the story are Storyweaving. It is the storyforming part that Dramatica can be very specific about Do either of you have the structure charts?

Dan Steele : no

Pete P 432 : no.

Pete P 432 : ?

Dramatica : Well, there is a four level structure in Dramatica. Keep in mind, Dramatica is not just a structure, You might consider including the chart when you separately issue the book, by the way half of it is dynamics that rearrange the structure. Actually, Dan, the chart is in the book already, and the book is already available. Anyway, the top level of the structure is most akin to Genre, the next level down is most akin to Plot.

Pete P 432 : which book? The ones with the program?

Dan Steele : At end tell title and availability

Pete P 432 : I do then have the chart, but I haven’t looked at it. I will tonight.

Dramatica : We have written the Dramatica Theory Book, which comes with the software, but is also available for $24.95, I believe, as a separate item. Now this plot level, consists of sixteen “Types”. These are called “Types” because they are the Types of things that will be going on in the plot at any given point. And in fact, all sixteen will show up in every complete story. Its just that they will show up in different orders, depending on the overall impact (big picture message) you are trying to create at the end.

These sixteen types are divided into four groups, called quads. One of the groups is in the Universe Domain, which just means they describe a situation. They are Past, Present, Future, and Progress.

Pete P 432 : okay, now I remember what you mean.

Dramatica : Good. There are four others in the Mind (or attitude) domain, Conscious, Subconscious, Memory, Preconscious.

Dan Steele : what would a parallel world correspond to in that scheme? It is not past, present or future, or progress but alternative, as in maybe Mad Max

Dramatica : Well, a parallel world would depend on whether you wanted it to be A: A situation in which the characters find themselves B: an activity where one world is taking over from another, pushing the first one out (that would be Physics Domain for B) C: an alternative world where the problem is created by two opposing attitudes by the leaders.. Which would be Mind (a fixed attitude or prejudice) or D: an alternative world that has supplanted the old world, and the problems are caused because the way one responds to problems, (psychology domain) is no longer appropriate to the new world.

As you can see, the concept of an alternative or parallel world is a storytelling one, as all “high concept” ideas are. For example, do you want to do a story about a State of war, which would be Universe, or the activity of waging war, which would be Mind. Either one is just fine, but Dramatica forces you to consider, just what kind of problem you are talking about that drives the struggle in YOUR story. At the Type level, we see groupings of these sixteen Types in four quads that help us see the kinds of concerns that will come up in each different domain, each different kind of story. And, in fact, all four domains will be in every complete story as well. One will be the Domain of the Objective Story. This is the area in which ALL the characters are involved. For the audience, it is the THEY perspective.

Dan Steele : so there are what, maybe 4×4×4×4=256 different basic story types?

Dramatica : Actually, Dan, by the time you get down to the element level where characters are created, there are 32,768 different unique storyforms. The other three perspectives are the Main Character Domain (Me, to the audience) The Obstacle character Domain (YOU to the audience) And the Subjective Story Domain about the relationship between the Main and Obstacle Characters. (WE to the audience)

All four Domains and therefore all sixteen types will be in each story, but with point of view gets involved in which TYPES of activities, describes the most broad stroke, overview of your story’s plot.

There is MUCH more to say about plot in Dramatica, but we’ve run out of time for tonight!

Dan Steele : how does Dramatica SW handle bookkeeping for subplots? whoops, okay

Dramatica : Here’s an answer, Dan.. Right now, Dramatica only carries you through encoding. To weave, you take out the old 3×5 cards and begin figuring out which “appreciations” from the Dramatica reports, you want to illustrate in which scenes. Then you can change the scene order around for your storytelling.

Dan Steele : so I would have to set up subplots as separate stories with Dramatica oh, I see

Dramatica : Yes, Dan, each subplot should have its own separate storyform. We are working right now on a future upgrade, that will allow all that kind of manipulation to be done within the program, with the goal of making Dramatica capable of carrying the author from forming through encoding all the way through weaving.

Pete P 432 : Great, when will we see it?

Dramatica : Well, I hope to see that version out this year. Its a lot of complex work, but we recognize the value.

Pete P 432 : One quick question?

Dramatica : Sure, shoot!

Pete P 432 : After Storyforming, when D asks me to illustrate something I’ve answered in SF, Do I think in very specific terms or more symbolically

Dramatica : Yes. Each storyform point needs to be illustrated in your story, or the audience won’t know about it. There will be a hole. Think specifically at this point for example, Suppose your goal is “obtaining” Obtaining WHAT? You must pick the specific way in which Obtaining is the goal in YOUR story. Once you know that, you know a great deal about a lot of other things that must happen to support and grow from that.

Medium and Format

2010-07-12T13:36:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

Up to this point [in the Dramatica Theory Book], we have explored the encoding process as if storyform and storytelling were the only concerns. This is only true in a theoretical sense. In practice, a story cannot be transmitted from author to audience except across a medium. The medium in which a story is presented both limits the tools available to the author, and provides uniquely useful tools. For example, motion pictures are not known for the capacity to present stories told in taste or touch or smell. Stage productions, however, have made effective use of all three. Also, a novel allows a reader to jump ahead if he desires, and examine aspects of the story out of order, something one cannot do in a movie.

Stories in many media are recorded to play back directly to the audience. Others are recorded as cues to performers and translated through them to the audience. Still others are not recorded at all and simply told. There can be as many media as there are means of conveying information.

Even within a single medium there may exist several formats. For example, in television there are half-hour three-camera formats, half-hour single-camera formats, one-hour and two-hour and mini-series formats. Also, time is not the only quality that defines a format. Soap operas, episodic series, and multi-storyline episodic series are but a few variations. Each of these formats offers dramatic opportunities and each operates under constraints. By exploring their demands and benefits, the process of encoding can be related to best advantage in each.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Storyweaving and Structure

2010-07-12T13:30:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

Part of the purpose of Storyweaving is to communicate the underlying dramatic structure or message of a story. The other part is to make that process of communication as interesting and/or effective as possible. In addition, the manner in which the structure is expressed can have a great impact on how the audience receives the message which extends far beyond simply understanding the message.

Our first job then is the somewhat mundane task of describing how a structure can been communicated through exposition. Once we have laid this foundation, we can cut ourselves free to consider the enjoyable aspects of using weaving techniques to build suspense, create comedy, shock an audience, and generally have a good time putting the frosting on the cake.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

A Word of Warning About Propaganda

2010-07-12T13:09:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

Propaganda is powerful but using it involves risks. It is like a virus or engaging in germ warfare. Once an audience is exposed to a propagandistic message, the only way they can neutralize it is to balance it with an equal but opposite force. Audiences frequently don’t like to think they are being manipulated. If the audience becomes aware of the nature of your propaganda, the equal but opposite force can take the form of a backlash against the author(s) and the propaganda itself. Look at the strong reaction against advertisers who “target” their advertising to specific demographic groups (e.g. African Americans, women, Generation X, etc.), particularly if they are trying to sell liquor, tobacco products, or other items considered “vices” in America.

Once released, propaganda is difficult to control and frequently becomes subject to real world influences. Sometimes propaganda can benefit from real world coincidences: The China Syndrome’s mild propaganda about the dangers of nuclear power plants got a big boost in affecting its audience because of the Three Mile Island incident; the media coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder case may not have tainted potential jurors, but Natural Born Killers’ propaganda against the media’s sensationalization of violence got a little extra juice added to its punch. Often real life or the passage of time can undermine the effectiveness of propaganda: it is possible that Reefer Madness may have been effective when it first came out, but audiences today find its propaganda against drug use obvious, simplistic, risible and, more importantly, ineffective.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Misdirection as Propaganda

2010-07-12T13:07:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

The most subtle and possibly most effective form of propaganda from a single exposure is the use of misdirection as a way to impact an audience’s Subconscious. Like “smoke and mirrors” used by magicians, this form of propaganda requires focusing the audience’s Conscious attention in one place while the real impact is made in the Subconscious. Fortunately for propagandistic minded authors, this is one of the easiest forms of propaganda to create.

This technique comes from omitting parts of the storyform from your storytelling. What you leave out becomes the audience’s blind spot, and the dynamic partner to the omitted storyform piece becomes the audience’s focus. The focus is where your audience’s attention will be drawn (the smoke and mirrors). The blind spot is where your audience personalizes the story by “filling-in-the-blank.” The story’s argument is thus linked directly to the audience’s subconscious, based on the context in which the story is presented.

Let’s look at some dynamic pairs of partners that appear in a storyform. The following pairs concern the nature of the impact on your audience:

Motivation <p;> Purpose
Means of Evaluation <p;> Methodology

Should you wish to impact your audience’s motivations, omit a particular motivation in the story . The audience, then, focused on the purpose they can see will automatically supply a motivation that seems viable to them (e.g.: Thelma and Louise ).

Here are the storyform dynamic pairs that relate to story/audience perspectives:

Objective Perspective <p;> Subjective Perspective
Main Character Perspective <p;> Obstacle Character Perspective

Combining a nature with a perspective gives an author greater control over a story’s propaganda. For example, if you wish to impact your audience in how they view the means of evaluation employed by the world around them, omit the Objective Story means of evaluation elements and the audience’s attention will be distracted by focusing on the methodologies employed (e.g.: Natural Born Killers).

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Conditioning As Propaganda

2010-07-12T13:06:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

Presenting an audience with an alternative life experience is yet another way to impact your audience. By ignoring (or catering to) an audience’s cultural bias, you can present your story as an alternative reality. This impacts an audience by undermining or reinforcing their own personal Memories. By experiencing the story, the message/meaning of the story becomes part of the audience’s memory base.

The nature of the propaganda, however, is that the story lacks context, which must be supplied by the audience. Thus personalized, the story memory is automatically triggered when an experience in the audience’s real life summons similarly stored memories. Through repeated use, an audience’s “sensibilities” become conditioned.

In Conditioning propaganda, audience attention is directed to causal relationships like When A also B (spatial), and If C then D (temporal). The mechanism of this propaganda is to leave out a part of the causal relationships in the story, such as When A also B and If ?? then D. By leaving out one part, the objective contextual meaning is then supplied automatically by the audience. The audience will replace ?? with something from its own experience base, not consciously considering that a piece is missing because it will have emotionally arrived at the contradiction: When A also B and then D.

This type of propaganda is closest to the traditional usage of the term with respect to stories, entertainment, and advertising. For example, look at much of the tobacco and alcohol print advertising. Frequently the Main Character (the type of person to whom the advertisement is supposed to appeal) is attractive, has someone attractive with them, and appears to be well situated in life. The inference is that when you smoke or drink, you are also cool, and if you are cool then you will be rich and attractive. The connection between “cool” and “rich and attractive” is not really in the advertisement but an audience often makes that connection for itself. In Conditioning propaganda, more than in the other three forms of propaganda, the degree of impact on your audience is extremely dependent on your audience’s life experience outside the story experience .

Crimes and Misdemeanors is a film example that employs this conditioning technique of propaganda. The unusual aspect of the film is that it has two completely separate stories in it. The “Crimes” story involves a self-interested man who gets away with murder and personally becomes completely OK with it (a Success/Good story). The “Misdemeanors” story involves a well meaning man who loses his job, his girl, and is left miserable (a Failure/Bad story). By supplying two competing stories instead of one, the audience need not supply its own experiences to arrive at a false context while viewing this work. Audiences will come to stories, however, with a particular cultural bias. In our culture, Failure/Bad stories which happen to nice people are regrettable, but familiar; Success/Good stories about murderers are uncommon and even “morally reprehensible.”

The propaganda comes into effect when the audience experiences in its own life a Failure/Bad scenario that triggers a recollection of the Success/Good story about forgetting the grief of having murdered – an option that the audience would not normally have considered. Lacking an objective contextual meaning that sets one over the other, both stories are given equal consideration as viable solutions. Thus, what was once inconceivable due to a cultural or personal bias is now automatically seen as a possible avenue for problem-solving.

Awareness as Propaganda

2010-07-12T13:05:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

Another method is to be up-front about the nature of the propaganda, letting your audience know what you are doing as you do it to them. This impacts an audience at a Conscious level where they must actively consider the pros and cons of the issues. The propaganda comes from controlling the givens on the issues being discussed, while the audience focuses on which side of the issues they believe in.

A filmic example of this technique can be seen in JFK. By choosing a controversial topic (the assassination of President Kennedy) and making an overly specific argument as to what parties were involved in the conspiracy to execute and cover-up the assassination, Oliver Stone was able to focus his audience’s attention on how “they” got away with it. The issue of who “they” were was suspiciously contentious as the resulting media bru-ha-ha over the film indicated. Who “they” were, however, is not the propaganda. The propaganda came in the form the story’s given which is that Lee Harvey Oswald had help. By the end of the story, audiences found themselves arguing over which of the parties in the story were or were not participants in the conspiracy, accepting the possibility that people other than Oswald may have been involved.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Shock as Propaganda

2010-07-12T13:02:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

One tried-and-true method is to control what an audience knows about the story before experiencing the storytelling process so that you can shock them. Within the context of the story itself (as opposed to marketing or word-of-mouth), an author can prepare the audience by establishing certain givens, then purposefully break the storyform (destroy the givens) to shock or jar the audience. This hits the audience at a Preconscious level by soliciting an instantaneous, knee-jerk reaction. This type of propaganda is the most specific and immediately jarring on its audience. Two films that employed this technique to great effect are Psycho and The Crying Game.

Psycho broke the storyform to impact the audience’s preconscious by killing the main character twenty minutes or so into the film (the “real” story about the Bates family then takes over). The shock value was enhanced through marketing by having the main character played by big box office draw Janet Leigh (a good storytelling choice at the time) and the marketing gimmick that no one would be allowed into the movie after the first five or ten minutes. This “gimmick” was actually essential for the propaganda to be effective. It takes time for an audience to identify on a personal level with a main character. Coming in late to the film would not allow enough time for the audience member to identify with Janet Leigh’s character and her death would have little to no impact.

The Crying Game used a slightly different process to achieve a similar impact. The first twenty minutes or so of the film are used to establish a bias to the main character’s (and audience’s) view of reality. The “girlfriend” is clearly established except for one important fact. That “fact,” because it is not explicitly denoted, is supplied by the mind of the main character (and the minds of the audience members). By taking such a long time to prep the audience, it comes as a shock when we (both main character and audience) find out that she is a he.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Four Levels of Propaganda

2010-07-12T13:00:00.000-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

Here are the things an author should consider while creating a propaganda story:

1. Nature of Impact

How you want to impact your audience? Do you wish to play with your audience’s:

Motivations (what drives them)

Methodologies (how they go about doing things)

Purposes (what they are striving for)

Means of evaluation (how they measure their progress – their personal yardsticks)?

Pick only one as the area of primary impact. This will become the area of the storyform that you purposefully omit when storytelling. The remaining three areas will be used to support your intent by drawing attention away from the missing piece(s).

2. Area of Impact

What part of your audience’s world-view do you wish to impact?

View of the world around them – “objective reality” (Objective Story)

View of relationships (Subjective Story)

View of themselves (Main Character)

View of others (Obstacle Character)

Choose one of the perspectives. This will be the domain in which to place the “hole” in the storyform. The area of impact determines which part of your audience’s world-view the propaganda will “infect.”

3. Type of Impact: Specific vs. General

Do you want the impact on your audience to be of a specific nature, or of a broader, more general nature?

The more specific you make the propaganda, the more specific and predictable its impact will be on an audience. The upside (from an author’s point of view) is that specific behavior (mental or physical) can be promoted or modified. The downside is that specific propaganda is more easily identifiable and therefore contestable by the audience.

Specific propaganda is achieved by intentionally not encoding selected story appreciations, such as the Main Character’s motivation or the story Outcome (Success or Failure). The audience will supply the missing piece from its own personal experiences (e.g. the Main Character’s motivation in Thelma and Louise.; what happened to Louise in Texas that prevents her from ever going back is specifically not mentioned in the film – that blank is left for the audience to fill).

The more general you make the propaganda, the less specific but all-pervasive its impact will be on an audience. Instead of focusing impact on the audience’s motivations, methodologies, purposes, or means of evaluation, generalized propaganda will tend to bias the audience’s perspectives of their world. The upside (from an author’s point of view) is that generalized propaganda is difficult for an audience to identify and therefore more difficult to combat than the specific form of propaganda. The downside is that it does not promote any specific type of behavior or thought process and its direct impact is less discernible.

General propaganda is achieved by intentionally not encoding entire areas of the story’s structure or dynamics. For example, by leaving out almost all forms of the story’s internal means of evaluation, Natural Born Killers forces its audience to focus on the methodologies involved and question its own (the members of the audience) means of evaluation.

4. Degree of Impact

To what degree do you wish to impact your audience? The degree to which you can impact an audience is dependent on many variables not the least of which are your storytelling skills and the nature of the audience itself. There are some basic guidelines, however, that can mitigate and sometimes supersede those variables when skillfully employed.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Propaganda and Symbols

2010-07-12T12:57:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

Knowing (or preparing) your audience can have a tremendous effect on how your propaganda will impact them. Here are some rules of thumb:

The more specific the symbols you use to encode your story, the more limited an audience it will affect. The less specific the symbols, the greater potential audience.

The more specific the symbols used to encode the story, the greater the likelihood it will have an impact on the portion of the audience that understands the symbols. The less specific the symbols, the less impact the story will have.

The more familiar an audience is with the symbols used to encode a story, the more susceptible they are to propaganda. The less familiar, the less susceptible.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

The Basics of Propaganda

2010-07-12T12:55:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

The human mind seeks to understand itself and the world around it. It does this through various ways including organizing information into meaningful patterns. Depending on the quantity of the information and the accuracy of its interpretation, a mind will identify a pattern (or several potential patterns) and supply the apparently “missing” pieces to make the pattern, and therefore meaning, complete. This pattern matching and filling in of missing pieces is intrinsic to the processes that create the human “mind.” By choosing which piece(s) of the storyform to omit, authors can manipulate the impact a story will have on the minds of their audiences.

In its most basic form, propaganda is a way for authors to have an audience share their point of view. Closed (or complete) stories allow authors to present their points of view in the form of an argument which the audience can then take or leave. Open (or incomplete) stories require their audiences to supply the missing pieces in order to get meaning from the story. Just creating an open story, however, does not create propaganda. There must be a pattern to what is missing.

The amount and nature of the missing pieces have a tremendous effect on the story’s propagandistic impact. If you leave too much out of your story, an audience may not make the effort to “fill-in-the-blanks.” The story may then be interpreted by the audience as meaningless. If, however, you selectively leave out specific pieces of the storyform, the audience may unknowingly fill in those holes with aspects of its personal experience. In this way, the story changes from an argument made by the author to the audience, to an argument made by the author and the audience. Unwittingly, the audience begins to share the author’s point of view and perhaps even become coconspirators in its propagation: ergo, propaganda.

Since a propaganda story is based upon a tenuous relationship between an audience and an author, both perspectives should be considered to understand the techniques that can be used and the results that can be achieved.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Introduction to Propaganda

2010-07-12T12:53:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
Co-creators of the Dramatica Theory

Propaganda, n. 1. any organization or movement working for the propagation of particular ideas, doctrines, practices, etc. 2. the ideas, doctrines, practices, etc. spread in this way. (Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary)

Propaganda: 3. a storyforming/storytelling technique used to impact an audience in specific ways, often employed to instigate deliberation and/or action. (Dramatica)

Propaganda is a wondrous and dangerous story device. Its primary usage in stories is as a method for an author to impact an audience long after they have experienced the story itself. Through the use of propaganda, an author can inspire an audience to think certain ways, think about certain things, behave certain ways, and take specific actions. Like fire and firearms, propaganda can be used constructively and destructively and does not contain an inherent morality. Any morality involved comes from the minds of the author and his audience.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Both Sides of the Thematic Argument

2010-07-12T12:45:00.001-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips, co-creator of Dramatica

Every powerful theme pits a “Message Issue” against a “Counterpoint”, such as “Greed vs. Generosity”, or “Holding On To Hope” vs. “Abandoning Hope”.

The Message Issue and Counterpoint define the thematic argument of your story. They play both sides of the moral dilemma. The most important key to a successful thematic argument is never, ever play the message issue and counterpoint together at the same time.

Why? Because the thematic argument is an emotional one, not one of reason. You are trying to sway your reader/audience to adopt your moral view as an author. This will not happen if you keep showing one side of the argument as “good” and the other side as “bad” in direct comparison. Such a thematic argument would seem one-sided, and treat the issues as being black-and-white, rather than gray-scale.

In real life, moral decisions are seldom cut-and-dried. Although we may hold views that are clearly defined, in practice it all comes down to the context of the specific situation. For example, it may be wrong to steal in general. But, it might be proper to steal from the enemy during a war, or from a large market when you baby is starving. In the end, all moral views become a little blurry around the edges when push comes to shove.

Statements of absolutes do not a thematic argument make. Rather, your most powerful message will deal with the lesser of two evils, the greater of two goods, or the degree of goodness or badness of each side of the argument. In fact, there are often situations where both sides of the moral argument are equally good, equally bad, or that both sides are either good nor bad in the particular situation being explored in the story.

The way to create this more powerful, more believable, and more persuasive thematic argument is as follows:

1. Determine in advance whether each side is good, bad, or neutral.

Do this by assigning an arbitrary “value” to both the Message Issue and the Counterpoint. For example, we might choose a scale with +5 being absolutely good, -5 being absolutely bad, and zero being neutral.

If our thematic argument is Greed vs. Generosity, then Greed (our Message Issue) might be a -3, and Generosity (our Counterpoint) might be a -2. This would mean that both Greed and Generosity are both bad (being in the negative) but that Generosity is a little less bad than Greed since Generosity is only a -2 and Greed is a -3.

2. Show the good and bad aspects of both the Message Issue and the Counterpoint.

Make sure the examples of each side of the thematic argument that you have already developed don’t portray either side as being all good or all bad. In fact, even if one side of the argument turns out to be bad in the end, it might be shown as good initially. But over the course of the story, that first impression is changed by seeing that side in other contexts.

3. Have the good and bad aspects “average out” to the thematic conclusion you want.

By putting each side of the thematic argument on a roller coaster of good and bad aspects, it blurs the issues, just as in real life. But the reader/audience will “average out” all of their exposures to each side of the argument and draw their own conclusions at the end of the story.

In this way, the argument will move out of the realm of intellectual consideration and become a viewpoint arrived by feel. And, since you have not only shown both sides, but the good and the bad of each side, your message will be easier to swallow. And finally, since you never directly compared the two sides, the reader/audience will not feel that your message has been shoved down its throat.

Author's Intent

2010-07-12T12:42:00.001-07:00

Simply having a feeling or a point of view does not an author make. One becomes an author the moment one establishes an intent to communicate. Usually some intriguing setting, dialog, or bit of action will spring to mind and along with it the desire to share it. Almost immediately, most authors leap ahead in their thinking to consider how the concept might best be presented to the audience. In other words, even before a complete story has come to mind most authors are already trying to figure out how to tell the parts they already have.

As a result, many authors come to the writing process carrying a lot of baggage: favorite scenes, characters, or action, but no real idea how they are all going to fit together. A common problem is that all of these wonderful inspirations often don’t belong in the same story. Each may be a complete idea unto itself, but there is no greater meaning to the sum of the parts. To be a story, each and every part must also function as an aspect of the whole.

Some writers run into problems by trying to work out the entire dramatic structure of a story in advance only to find they end up with a formulaic and uninspired work. Conversely, other writers seek to rely on their muse and work their way through the process of expressing their ideas only to find they have created nothing more than a mess. If a way could be found to bring life to tired structures and also to knit individual ideas into a larger pattern, both kinds of authors might benefit. It is for this purpose that Dramatica was developed.

Communicating Through Symbols

2010-07-12T12:40:00.001-07:00

How can essential concepts be communicated? Certainly not in their pure, intuitive form directly from mind to mind. (Not yet, anyway!) To communicate a concept, an author must symbolize it, either in words, actions, juxtapositions, interactions — in some form or another. As soon as the concept is symbolized, however, it becomes culturally specific and therefore inaccessible to much of the rest of the world.

Even within a specific culture, the different experiences of each member of an audience will lead to a slightly different interpretation of the complex patterns represented by intricate symbols. On the other hand, it is the acceptance of common symbols of communication that defines a culture.

For example, when we see a child fall and cry, we do not need to know what language he speaks or what culture he comes from in order to understand what has happened. If we observe the same event in a story, however, it may be that in the author’s culture a child who succumbs to tears is held in low esteem. In that case, then the emotions of sadness we may feel in our culture are not at all what was intended by the author.

Sybmolizing Concepts in Dramatica

2010-07-12T11:37:00.001-07:00

It has been argued that perhaps the symbols we use are what create concepts, and therefore no common understanding between cultures, races, or times is possible.

Dramatica works because indeed there ARE common concepts: morality, for example. Morality, a common concept? Yes. Though not everyone shares the same definition of morality, every culture and individual understands some concept that means “morality” to them. In other words, the concept of “morality” may have many different meanings — depending on culture or experience — but they all qualify as different meanings of “morality.”

Thus there can be universally shared essential concepts even though they drift apart through various interpretations. It is through this framework of essential concepts that communication is possible.

The Free Form Author

2010-07-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

While some authors write specifically to make an argument to an audience, many others write because they want to follow their personal Muses. Sometimes writing is a catharsis, or an exploration of self. Sometimes authoring is a sharing of experiences, fragmented images, or just of a point of view.

Sometimes authoring is marking a path for an audience to follow, or perhaps just presenting emotional resources the audience can construct into its own vision. Interactive communications question the validity of a linear story itself, and justifiably so.

There are many ways to communicate, and each has just as much value as the next depending upon how one wishes to affect one’s audience.

Writing A Novel or Screenplay Step by Step

2010-07-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

Let's not kid ourselves. It's not really possible to write a novel (or screenplay) step by step because that's not how the creative mind works. Rather, we come to a story with a whole bag of bits and pieces of ideas, some complete, some half-baked.

What's more, the ideas we do have are from all across the board: a snippit of dialog, a setting, a bit of action, a type of personality for a character (even though we don't yet have any idea if it's a protagonist or antagonist or even if it is the Main Character).

You see, inspiration - the desire to write a story and an idea of what it will be about - comes from the subjects that interest us. But stories themselves come from the structure that holds them together. And that is the age-old author's dilemma: "How do I turn my interests and motivations into a finished novel that makes sense?"

When embarking on a new writing project, it often seems as if the whole process is summed up in that old saying, "You can't get there from here." And for many writers, once the novel is written, they can't really see how they did it, or more aptly, "You can't get here from there."

Yet, there is hope. There is an approach you can take that works with your Muse, rather than against her. And, it is a real step-by-step method that will actually take you from concept to completion of your novel or script. (Read More....)

Using Dramatica and StoryWeaver Together

2010-07-09T07:54:00.001-07:00

A writer who has both Dramatica and StoryWeaver Story Development Software recently asked me what was the best way to use them together. Specifically, how could he take the information he got for one of the programs and apply it to the other.

Here's my response:

Each one provides reports on different aspects of your story.

Dramatica provides dozens of reports about your characters, about your plot, about your theme, and so on. StoryWeaver provides two reports - a treatment of your story describing everything that's in it and what happens and also a time-line report which describes the order in which everything happens.

You don't use the reports from Dramatica to do anything with the reports from StoryWeaver or vice versa. Rather, each set of reports educates you about different parts of your story - Dramatica telling you about the structure and StoryWeaver telling you about your story's world and the people in it.

Then, you take all that information and use it to actually write your story in the word processor of your choice.

It's kind of like Math and Language. Each is an area of study. Each is a form of communication. Some things are better said in Language and other things are better said in Math. So, if you were to decribe a building, for example, you might be able to get all the dimensions and the colors right using math, but it wouldn't convey what it felt like to live in or look at the building. But, no matter how well you might try to describe the engineering of the building in language, you couldn't build it just from that description alone.

The end product is your story, but you don't write it in either program. Rather, you learn about the structural side in Dramatica and learn about the passionate side in StoryWeaver and then bring those two understandings together when you actually sit down to write your story.

The Grand Argument Story

2010-06-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

The question arises: Is telling a story better than telling a non-story? No. Stories are not “better” than any other form of communication — just different. To see this difference we need to define “story” so we can tell what a story is and what it is not. Herein lies a political problem. No matter how one defines “story,” there will be an author someplace who finds his favorite work has been defined out, and feels it is somehow diminished by not being classified as a story. Rather than risk the ire of countless creative authors, we have limited our definition to a very special kind of story: the Grand Argument Story.

As its name indicates, a Grand Argument Story presents an argument. To be Grand, the argument must be a complete one, covering all the ways the human mind might consider a problem and showing that only one approach is appropriate to solving it. Obviously, this limits out a lot of creative, artistic, important works — but not out of being stories, just out of being Grand Argument Stories. So, is a Grand Argument Story better than any other kind? No. It is just a specific kind.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Communication vs. Storytelling

2010-06-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

The process of communication requires at least two parties: the originator and the recipient. In addition, for communication to take place, the originator must be aware of the information or feelings he wishes to transmit, and the recipient must be able to determine that meaning.

Similarly, storytelling requires an author and an audience. And, to tell a story, one must have a story to tell. Only when an author is aware of the message he wishes to impart can he determine how to couch that message so it will be accurately received.

It should be noted that an audience is more than a passive participant in the storytelling process. When we write the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night,” we have communicated a message, albeit a nebulous one. In addition to the words, another force is at work creating meaning in the reader’s mind. The readers themselves may have conjured up memories of the fragrance of fresh rain on dry straw, the trembling fear of blinding explosions of lightning, or a feeling of contentment that recalls a soft fur rug in front of a raging fire. But all we wrote was, “It was a dark and stormy night.” We mentioned nothing in that phrase of straw or lightning or fireside memories. In fact, once the mood is set, the less said, the more the audience can imagine.

Did the audience imagine what we, the authors, had in mind? Not likely. Did we communicate? Some. We communicated the idea of a dark and stormy night. The audience, however, did a lot of creating on its own. Did we tell a story? Definitely not!
From the Dramatica Theory Book

Writing For Oneself

2010-05-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

In the Great Practical World of the Almighty Dollar Sign, it might seem trite or tangential to discuss writing for oneself (unless one expects to pay oneself handsomely for the effort). In truth, the rewards of writing for oneself DO pay handsomely, and not just in personal satisfaction. By getting in touch with one’s own feelings, by discovering and mapping out one’s biases, an author can grow to appreciate his own impact on the work as being in addition to the structure of the work itself. An author can also become more objective about ways to approach his audience. (And yes, one can gain a lot of personal insight and satisfaction as well.

The Author as Main Character

As an experiment, cast yourself in a story as the Main Character. Cast someone with whom you have a conflict as the Obstacle Character. Next, answer all the Dramatica questions and then go to the Story Points window. Fill in as many of the story points as seem appropriate to you. Print out the results and put them aside.

Now, go back and create the same story again — this time with your “opponent” as the Main Character and YOU as the Obstacle Character. Once again, fill in the story points and print them out. Compare them to the first results. You will likely find areas in which the story points are the same and other areas in which they are different.

These points of similarity and divergence will give you a whole new perspective on the conflicts between you and your adversary. Often, this is the purpose of an author when writing for himself. Thoughts and feelings can be looked at more objectively on paper than hidden inside your head. Just seeing them all jumbled up together rather than as a sequence goes a long way to uncovering meaning that was invisible by just trotting down the path. After all, how can we ever hope to understand the other person’s point of view while trying to see it from our perspective?

A wise woman once said, “Don’t tell me what you’d do if you were me. If you were me, you’d do the same thing because I AM ME and that’s what I’m doing! Tell me what you’d do if you were in my situation.”

Documenting Oneself

Another purpose in writing for oneself is simply to document what it was like to be in a particular state of mind. In a sense, we jot down the settings of our minds so that we can tune ourselves back into that state as needed at a later date. The images we use may have meaning for no one but ourselves, and therefore speak to us uniquely of all people. The ability to capture a mood is extremely useful when later trying to communicate that mood to others. To bring emotional realism to another requires being in the mood oneself. What better intuitive tool than emotional snapshots one can count on to regenerate just the feelings one wants to convey. To make an argument, accept the argument. To create a feeling, experience the feeling.

Who is “Me”?

A simple note is stuck to the refrigerator door: “Call me when you get home.” Who is “me?” It depends on who you are asking. Ask the author of the note and he would say it was “myself.” Ask the recipient of the note and they would say, “It’s him.” So the word “me” has different meanings depending upon who is looking at it. To the author, it means the same when they wrote it as when they read it as an audience. To the intended audience, however, it means something quite different.

In life, we assume one point of view at a time. In stories, however, we can juxtapose two points of view, much as we blend the images from two eyes. We can thus look AT a Main Character’s actions and responses even as we look through his eyes. This creates an interference pattern that provides much more depth and meaning than either view has separately.

My “Me” is Not Your “Me”

When writing for others, if we assume they share our point of view, it is likely that we will miss making half of our own point. Far better are our chances of successful communication if we not only see things from our side but theirs as well. Overlaying the two views can define areas of potential misunderstanding before damage is done. Still, “Call me when you get home” is usually a relatively low-risk communication and we suggest you just write the note without too much soul-searching.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Who Are You Writing For?

2010-05-25T18:14:00.000-07:00

What if you are writing not for yourself but to reach someone else? It might be that you hope to reach a single individual which can be done in a letter to a friend, parent, or child. You might be composing an anecdote or speech for a small or large group, or you could be creating an industrial film, designing a text book, or fashioning a timeless work for all humanity.

In each case, the scope of your audience becomes more varied as its size increases. The opportunity to tailor your efforts to target your audience becomes less practical, and the symbols used to communicate your thoughts and feelings become more universal and simultaneously less specific.

The audience can thus range from writing for yourself to writing for the world. In addition, an author’s labors are often geared toward a multiplicity of audiences, including both himself and others as well. Knowing one’s intended audience is essential to determining form and format. It allows one to select a medium and embrace the kind of communication that is most appropriate — perhaps even a story.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Author & Audience: A Collaboration

2010-05-25T14:15:00.001-07:00

Few authors write stories without at least considering what it will be like to read the story or see it on stage or screen. As soon as this becomes a concern, we have crossed the line into Reception theory. Suddenly, we have more to consider than what our story’s message is; we now must try to anticipate how that message will be received.

One of the first questions then becomes, how do we want it to be received. And from this, we ask, what am I hoping to achieve with my audience. We may wish to educate our audience, or we may simply want to bias them. Perhaps we are out to persuade our audience to adopt a point of view, or simply to pander to an existing point of view. We might provoke our audience, forcing them to consider some topic or incite them to take action in regard to a topic. We could openly manipulate them with their informed consent, or surreptitiously propagandize them, changing their outlook without their knowledge.

No matter what our author’s intent, it is shaped not only by who we are, but also by who the audience is that we are trying to reach.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Visit Our New Website for Writers!

2010-02-08T20:14:00.000-08:00

Dramatica Story Structure Encyclopedia - "Ability"

2010-01-25T13:17:00.000-08:00

From the Dramaticapedia:

What's "Ability" have to do with story structure?

If you look in Dramatica's "Periodic Table of Story Elements" chart (you can download a free PDF of the chart at http://storymind.com/free-downloads/ddomain.pdf ) you'll find the "ability" in one of the little squares. Look in the "Physics" class in the upper left-hand corner. You'll find it in a "quad" of four items, "Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire".

In this article I'm going to talk about how Dramatica uses the term "ability" and how it applies not only to story structure and characters but to real people, real life and psychology as well.

To begin with, a brief word about the Dramatica chart itself. The chart is sort of like a Rubik's Cube. It holds all the elements which must appear in every complete story to avoide holes. Conceptually, you can twist it and turn it, just like a Rubik's Cube, and when you do, it is like winding up a clock - you create dramatic potential.

How is this dramatic potential created? The chart represents all the categories of things we think about. Notice that the chart is nested, like wheels within wheels. That's the way our mind's work. And if we are to make a solid story structure with no holes, we have to make sure all ways of thinking about the story's central problem or issues are covered.

So, the chart is really a model of the mind. When you twist it and turn it represents the kinds of stress (and experience) we encounter in everyday life. Sometimes things get wound up as tight as they can. And this is where a story always starts. Anything before that point is backstory, anything after it is story.

The story part is the process of unwinding that tension. So why does a story feel like tension is building, rather than lessoning? This is because stories are about the forces that bring a person to chane or, often, to a point of change.

As the story mind unwinds, it puts more and more pressure on the main character (who may be gradually changed by the process or may remain intransigent until he changes all at once). It's kind of like the forces that create earthquakes. Tectonic plates push against each other driven by a background force (the mantle). That force is described by the wound up Dramatica chart of the story mind.

Sometimes, in geology, this force gradually raises or lowers land in the two adjacent plate. Other times it builds up pressure until things snap all at once in an earthquake. So too in psychology, people (characters) are sometimes slowly changed by the gradual application of pressure as the story mind clock is unwinding; other times that pressure applied by the clock mechanism just builds up until the character snaps in Leap Of Faith - that single "moment of truth" in which a character must decide either to change his ways or stick by his guns believing his current way is stronger than the pressure bought to bear - he believes he just has to outlast the forces against him.

Sometimes he's right to change, sometimes he's right to remain steadfast, and sometimes he's wrong. But either way, in the end, the clock has unwound and the potential has been balanced.

Hey, what happened to "ability"? Okay, okay, I'm getting to that....

The chart (here we go again!) is filled with semantic terms - things like Hope and Physics and Learning and Ability. If you go down to the bottom of the chart in the PDF you'll see a three-dimensional representation of how all these terms are stacked together. In the flat chart, they look like wheels within wheels. In the 3-D version, they look like levels.

These "levels" represent degrees of detail in the way the mind works. At the most broadstroke level (the top) there are just four items - Universe, Physics, Mind and Psychology. They are kind of like the Primary Colors of the mind - the Red, Blue, Green and Saturation (effectively the addition of something along the black/white gray scale).

Those for items in additive color theory are four categories describing what can create a continuous spectrum. In a spectrum is really kind of arbitrary where you draw the line between red and blue. Similarly, Universe, Mind, Physics and Psychology are specific primary considerations of the mind.

Universe is the external state of things - our situation or envirnoment. Mind is the internal state - an attitude, fixation or bias. Physics looks at external activities - processes and mechanisms. Psychology looks at internal activities - manners of thinking in logic and feeling.

Beneath that top level of the chart are three other levels. Each one provides a greater degree of detail on how the mind looks at the world and at itself. It is kind of like adding "Scarlet" and "Cardinal" as subcategories to the overall concept of "Red".

Now the top level of the Dramatica chart describe the structural aspects of "Genre" Genre is the most broadstroke way of looking at a story's structure. The next level down has a bit more dramatic detail and describes the Plot of a story. The third level down maps out Theme, and the bottom level (the one with the most detail) explores the nature of a story's Characters.

So there you have the chart from the top down, Genre, Plot, Theme and Characters. And as far as the mind goes, it represents the wheels within wheels and the sprectrum of how we go about considering things. In fact, we move all around that chart when we try to solve a problem. But the order is not arbitrary. The mind has to go through certain "in-betweens" to get from one kind of consideration to another or from one emotion to another. You see this kind of thing in the stages of grief and even in Freud's psycho-sexual stages of development.

All that being said now, we finally return to Ability - the actual topic of this article. You'll find Ability, then, at the very bottom of the chart - in the Characters level - in the upper left hand corner of the Physics class. In this article I won't go into why it is in Physics or why it is in the upper left, but rest assured I'll get to that eventually in some article or other.

Let's now consider "Ability" in its "quad" of four Character Elements. The others are Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire. I really don't have space in this article to go into detail about them at this time, but suffice it to say that Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire are the internal equivalents of Universe, Mind, Physics and Pyschology. They are the conceptual equivalents of Mass, Energy, Space and Time. (Chew on that for awhile!)

So the smallest elements are directly connect (conceptually) to the largest in the chart. This represents what we call the "size of mind constant" which is what determines the scope of an argument necessary to fill the minds of readers or an audience. In short, there is a maximum depth of detail one can perceive while still holding the "big picture" in one's mind at the very same time.

Ability - right....

Ability is not what you can do. It is what you are "able" to do. What's the difference? What you "can" do is essentially your ability limited by your desire. Ability describes the maximum potential that might be accomplished. But people are limited by what they should do, what they feel obligated to do, and what they want to do. If you take all that into consideration, what's left is what a person actually "can" do.

In fact, if we start adding on limitations you move from Ability to Can and up to even higher levels of "justification" in which the essential qualities of our minds, "Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire" are held in check by extended considerations about the impact or ramifications of acting to our full potential.

One quad greater in justification you find "Can, Need, Want, and Should" in Dramatica's story mind chart. Then it gets even more limited by Responsibility, Obligation, Commitment and Rationalization. Finally we end up "justifying" so much that we are no longer thinking about Ability (or Knowledge or Thought or Desire) but about our "Situation, Circumstance, Sense of Self and State of Being". That's about as far away as you can get from the basic elements of the human mind and is the starting point of where stories begin when they are fully wound up. (You'll find all of these at the Variation Level in the "Psychology" class in the Dramatica chart, for they are the kinds of issues that most directly affect each of our own unique brands of our common human psychology.

A story begins when the Main Character is stuck up in that highest level of justification. Nobody gets there because they are stupid or mean. They get there because their unique life experience has brought them repeated exposures to what appear to be real connections between things like, "One bad apple spoils the bunch" or "Where there's smoke , there's fire."

These connections, such things as - that one needs to adopt a certain attitude to succeed or that a certain kind of person is always lazy or dishonest - these things are not always universally true, but may have been universally true in the Main Character's experience. Really, its how we all build up our personalities. We all share the same basic psychology but how it gets "wound up" by experience determines how we see the world. When we get wound up all the way, we've had enough experience to reach a conclusion that things are always "that way" and to stop considering the issue. And that is how everything from "winning drive" to "prejudice" is formed - not by ill intents or a dull mind buy by the fact that no two life experiences are the same.

The conclusions we come to, based on our justifications, free out minds to not have to reconsider every connection we see. If we had to, we'd become bogged down in endlessly reconsidering everything, and that just isn't a good survival trait if you have to make a quick decision for fight or flight.

So, we come to certain justification and build upon those with others until we have established a series of mental dependencies and assumptions that runs so deep we can't see the bottom of it - the one bad brick that screwed up the foundation to begin with. And that's why psychotherapy takes twenty years to reach the point a Main Character can reach in a two hour movie or a two hundred page book.

Now we see how Ability (and all the other Dramatica terms) fit into story and into psychology. Each is just another brick in the wall. And each can be at any level of the mind and at any level of justification. So, Ability might be the problem in one story (the character has too much or too little of it) or it might be the solution in another (by discovering an ability or coming to accept one lacks a certain ability the story's problem - or at least the Main Character's personal problem - can be solved). Ability might be the thematic topic of one story and the thematic counterpoint of another (more on this in other articles).

Ability might crop up in all kinds of ways, but the important thing to remember is that wherever you find it, however you use it, it represents the maximum potential, not necessarily the practical limit that can be actually applied.

Well, enough of this. To close things off, here's the Dramatica Dictionary description of the world Ability that Chris and I worked out some twenty years ago, straight out of the Dramatica diction (available online at http://storymind.com/dramatica/dictionary/index.htm :

Ability • Most terms in Dramatica are used to mean only one thing. Thought, Knowledge, Ability, and Desire, however, have two uses each, serving both as Variations and Elements. This is a result of their role as central considerations in both Theme and Character

[Variation] • dyn.pr. Desire<-->Ability • being suited to handle a task; the innate capacity to do or be • Ability describes the actual capacity to accomplish something. However, even the greatest Ability may need experience to become practical. Also, Ability may be hindered by limitations placed on a character and/or limitations imposed by the character upon himself. • syn. talent, knack, capability, innate capacity, faculty, inherant proficiency

[Element] • dyn.pr. Desire<-->Ability • being suited to handle a task; the innate capacity to do or be • An aspect of the Ability element is an innate capacity to do or to be. This means that some Abilities pertain to what what can affect physically and also what one can rearrange mentally. The positive side of Ability is that things can be done or experienced that would otherwise be impossible. The negative side is that just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. And, just because one can be a certain way does not mean it is beneficial to self or others. In other words, sometimes Ability is more a curse than a blessing because it can lead to the exercise of capacities that may be negative • syn. talent, knack, capability, innate capacity, faculty, inherant proficiency

A Tale is a Statement

2010-01-25T08:42:00.001-08:00

You "spin" a tale and "weave" a story. A tale is like a thread, a story is like a tapestry.

Introducing the Story Mind

2010-01-21T18:34:00.000-08:00

2010-01-14T14:22:00.000-08:00

Dramatica Basics Audio Program

Volume One - Part 3

Story Perspectives

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The "Hinge" between Objective and Subjective Story Lines

2009-12-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

A Dramatica user asked:

Hi Melanie,

First I'd like to say how fascinated I've been over the last 3 or 4 years I've been exposed to the Dramatica theory and software.

I would like your thoughts on a question concerning the "Problem" element in the Overall Throughline and the Main Character's Throughline. In my Storyform they are the same element, Avoidance. My thinking is that all of the overall characters (main character included) are facing a problem of either doing avoidance or being avoided with a particular issue and concern in their domain (going back up through the chess set). But isn't it true that the problem of avoidance for the Main Character in his/her throughline can be a different appreciation of avoidance?

For instance, if the overall characters are pirates and they're trying to avoid being captured. The main character, one of the overall pirates, can be trying to avoid a change in leadership in his personal story as well as avoiding capture along with the other pirates.

I'd love your opinion. As an interesting aside, I find myself comparing and contrasting other things unrelated to storytelling in the same quad type thinking that dramatica is based on.

Thank you much,

Todd

My reply:

Hi, Todd!

Thanks for all your kind words about Dramatica.

In fact, you have it absolutely right - depending on the dynamics, either the Main or Ostacle (impact) character will share an element with the objective story in every storyform. This is what creates a dramatic "hinge" between the objective and subjective stories. So, the ultimate decision of change or steadfast is both influenced by and influences the dynamics of the story as a whole.In this manner, success or failure will depend on change or steadfast and/or the reverse. In short, an interdepency.

Also, you are not the first to start using Dramatica in everyday life. The Story Mind wasn't invented by us, it coalesced as story structure as a by product of the effort to communicate across a medium from an author to an audience. Once discovered, it forms the most accurate "truth" of the manner in which our minds operate. By tuning our own inner mechanism to be in sync with this "ideal" we can most easily solve problems and maximize happiness.

Melanie

The Story Mind

2009-08-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

Dramatica Audio Program

Volume One - Part 2

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Dramatica Basics - Part 1 - Introduction

2009-08-09T23:07:00.000-07:00

Dramatica - A Four Hour Audio Program

Volume One - Dramatica Basics

Part One - Introduction

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Storymind.com Redesign Continues!

2009-08-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

Based on your suggestions, we are continuing to refine the redesign of our web site ( Storymind.com ).

We're still looking for your input, so if you have any suggestions about the layout, organization, look and feel, content, or any other aspect you love, hate or would like to see, let us know!

The Dramatica Chart

2009-07-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

Dramatica Unplugged

By Melanie Anne Phillips
Creator StoryWeaver, Co-creator Dramatica

The Story Mind

1.4 The Dramatica Chart Download Chart in PDF

At the heart of the story engine is a matrix of story points: The Dramatica Chart of Story Elements (which is not unlike the Periodic Table of Elements in chemistry). You can use it to create the chemistry of your characters, plot, theme, and genre.

The Dramatica chart contains all the psychological processes that must exist in a Story Mind. In fact, every human mind shares all of these processes. What makes one mind different from another is not the kinds of mental activities in each, but rather how the activities are interconnected.

Just as in chemistry, various elements might be combined to create an infinite number of compounds, so too the dramatic elements of the Dramatica Chart can be combined to create virtually all valid psychological structures for stories.

At its most simple level, the chart can be seen as having four principal areas (called classes): Universe, Physics, Mind, and Psychology. These represent the only four fundamental kinds of problems that might exist in stories (or in life!)

Universe is an external state

Physics, an external process

Mind is an internal state

Psychology, an internal process.

Essentially, any problem you might confront can be classed as either an external or internal state or process.

Universe then is our external environment. Anything that is a problematic fixed situation falls into this category. For example, being stuck in a well, held captive, or missing a leg are all situational “Universe Class” problems.

Physics is about activities that cause us difficulty. Honey bees dying off across the country, the growth of a militant organization, and cancer are all “Physics Class” problems.

(Note that if having cancer is a problem – such as people being prejudiced against you because you are cancerous – that is a situation or Universe problem because it is a steady or fixed state: a condition. But if it is the spread of the disease that we see as a problem, then it is a Physics-style activity problem. It is important not to assume content in a story falls into a particular class until you determine how that content is actually problematic.)

Mind is the internal equivalent of Universe – a fixed internal state. So, a prejudice, bias, fixation, or fixed attitude would be the source of problems in a “Mind Class” story.

Psychology is the Physics of the mind – an internal process. A “Psychology Class” problem would be someone who makes a series of assumptions leading to difficulties, or someone whose self-image and confidence are eroding.

(Again, note that having a negative self-image is a state of “Mind” whereas the erosion of one’s self-image is a process that must be stopped or even reversed, and would therefore be a Psychology problem.)

In stories, as in real life, we cannot solve a problem until we can accurately define it. So, the first value of the Dramatica Chart is to present us with a tool for determining into which of the four fundamental categories of problems our particular issue falls.

Now you may think that the terms, Universe, Physics, Mind, and Psychology, are a little antiseptic, perhaps a bit scientific to be applying to something as intuitive as the writing of stories.

Back when we were naming the concepts in the Dramatica Theory, we were faced with a choice – to either use extremely accurate words that might be a bit off-putting or to use easily accessible words that weren’t quite on the mark.

Ultimately we decided that the whole point of the theory was to provide an accurate way of predicting the necessary components of a sound story structure. Therefore, we elected to use the terms that were more accurate, even if they required a little study, rather than to employ a less accurate terminology that could be grasped right away.

Returning to the chart itself, it appears as four towers, each representing one of the four classes and each class having four levels. As we go down the levels from top to bottom we subdivide each kind of problem into smaller and smaller components, thereby refining our understanding of the very particular kind of problem at the core of any given story.

The top level, being the most broad, describes the structural aspects of genre. Genre (in the traditional sense) is largely a storytelling or content-driven realm. But genre is not immune to structure. In fact, as we shall see down the line genre must be built upon a solid structural foundation or it will flounder.

The second level, slightly more refined, deals with the dramatic components that are most associated with plot, especially at act resolution. That’s an odd term, so let’s define it. An act is the largest building block of plot. Each act has a particular kinds of concern that defines all the action that goes on in that act. For example, one act may deal with looking for a lost object, the next act with trying to obtain it, and the last act with bringing it back against steep odds.

“Resolution” is a term we use in Dramatica to describe how big a dramatic component is. The Genre “classes” cover the whole story since each story falls within a particular genre. But the acts change over the course of the story, shifting from one concern in a given act to another in the next. Therefore, we say that the components of the Dramatica Chart in the second or act level, are of a smaller resolution. Just as the genre level components are called “classes,” the act level components are referred to as “types.” So, we have classes of genres and types of acts.

The third level has the greatest structural impact on a story’s theme. Each of these components is called a Variation, as in “variations of a theme.” The Variations are of an even smaller resolution, and therefore provide more detailed information about the story’s problem.

A story’s thematic conflicts can be mapped in the Variation level. Story-wise, variations are sequence sized. “Sequences” are smaller than acts and are usually comprised of a number of scenes that deal with a particular moral issue or ethical topic.

The fourth and lowest level of the chart provides the greatest resolution on a story’s problem. It is comprised of components called Elements (in reference to their indivisible nature) and has the greatest structural impact on characters.

It is here in the Element Level that we find the plethora of human traits that make up our motivations or drives. It is the interaction among characters representing these various drives that constitute the scenes of our story. So, we say that the Element Level is at scene resolution.

So, like nested dolls, scenes fall within sequences within acts within a genre. In this manner, the structure of a story can be understood not as a simple sequence as one would find in a tale, but rather as a complex mechanism built of wheels within wheels.

I’ll provide a full description of the chart and its workings later on, but for now, picture it as a cross between a three dimensional chess set, a Rubik’s Cube, and the Periodic Table of Elements, which can be used to build perfect story structures.

The Dramatica Theory of Story - Class 6

2009-07-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

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A Story is an Argument

2009-07-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Dramatica Unplugged

By Melanie Anne Phillips
Creator StoryWeaver, Co-creator Dramatica

The Story Mind

1.3 A Story is an Argument

A tale is a simple linear path that the author promotes as being either a good or bad one to take, depending on the outcome. There’s a certain amount of power in that. It wouldn’t take our early storyteller long to realize that he didn’t have to limit himself to relating events that actually happened. Rather, he might carry things a step farther and create a fictional tale to illustrate the benefits or dangers of following a particular course.

That is the concept behind Fairy Tales and Cautionary Tales – to encourage certain behaviors and inhibit other behaviors based on the author’s belief as to the most efficacious courses of action in life.

But what kind of power could you get as an author if you were able to not merely say, “This conclusion is true for this particular case,” but rather “This conclusion is true for all such similar cases”?

In other words, if you begin “here,” then no matter what path you might take from that given starting point, it wouldn’t be as good (or as bad) as the one I’m promoting. Now, rather than saying that the approach you have described is simply good or bad in and of itself, you are suggesting that of all the approaches that might have been taken, yours is the best (or worst) way to go.

Now that has a lot more power to it because you are telling everyone, “If you find yourself in this situation, exclude any other paths; take only this one,” or, “If you find yourself in this situation, no matter what you do, don’t do this!”

That kind of statement has a lot more power to manipulate an audience. But, because you’ve only shown the one path (even though you are saying it is better than any others) you are making a blanket statement.

An audience simply won’t sit still for a blanket statement. They’ll cry, “Foul!” They will at least question you. So, if our caveman sitting around the fire say, “Hey, this is the best of all possible paths,” the audience is going to say , “What about this other case? What if we tried this, this or this?”

If the author was able to successfully argue his case he would compare all the solutions the audience might suggest to the one he is touting and conclusively show that the promoted path is clearly the best (or worst). Or, a solution might be suggested that proves better than the author’s, in which case his blanket statement loses all credibility.

In a nutshell, for every rebuttal the audience voices, the author can attempt to counter the rebuttal until he has proven his case. Now, he wont’ have to argue every conceivable alternative solution – just the ones the audience brings up. And if he is successful, he’ll eventually exhaust their suggestions or simply tire them out to the point they are willing to accept his conclusions.

But the moment you record a story as a song ballad, a stage play, or a motion picture (for example), then the original author is no longer there to counter any rebuttals the audience might have to his blanket statement.

So if someone in the audience thinks of a potential way to resolve the problem and you haven’t addressed it in your blanket statement, they will feel there is a hole in your argument and that you haven’t made your case.

Therefore, in a recorded art form, you need to include all the other reasonable approaches that might be tried in order to “sell” your approach as the best or the worst. You need to show how each alternative is not as good (or as bad) as the one you are promoting thereby proving that your blanket statement is correct.

In order to do this, you must anticipate all the other ways the audience might consider solving the problem in question. In effect, you have include all the ways anyone might think of solving that problem. Essentially, you have to include all the ways any human mind might go about solving that problem. In so doing, you create a model of the mind’s problem-solving process: the Story Mind.

Now, no caveman ever sat down by a fire and said to himself, “I’m going to create an analogy to the mind’s problem-solving processes.” Yet in the process of successfully telling a story in a recorded art form (thereby showing that a particular solution is better than all other potential ones) the structure of the story becomes a model of psychology as an accidental byproduct.
Once this is understood, you can psychoanalyze your story. And you find that everything that is in the human mind is represented in some tangible form in a story’s structure.

That’s what Dramatica is all about. Once we had that Rosetta Stone, we set ourselves to documenting the psychology of story structure. We developed a model of this structure and described it in our book, Dramatica: A New Theory of Story.

Beyond that, we implemented this construct as an interactive software engine – the Story Engine, which sits at the heart of the Dramatica software. It allows authors to answer questions about their dramatic intent in any story they are developing, then cross references the impact of their various dramatic choices and predicts the remaining structure necessary to achieve that particular impact.

The Dramatica Theory of Story - Class 5

2009-07-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

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Introduction to StoryWeaving

2009-07-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

The Dramatica Theory of Story - Class 4

2009-07-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

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The Dramatica Theory of Story - Class 3

2009-07-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

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The Dramatica Theory of Story - Class 2

2009-07-24T07:59:00.000-07:00

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The Dramatica Theory of Story - Class 1

2009-07-24T07:43:00.000-07:00

Too long to post here.

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The 12 Questions Every Writer Should Answer

2009-07-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

Each of these questions determines the nature and impact of a key force that will shape your story. If you can answer all twelve, you will have laid all the necessary structural foundation on which to build your novel, screenplay or stage play.

1. Main Character "Resolve" - Change or Steadfast?

2. Main Character "Growth" - Start or Stop?

3. Main Character "Approach" - Do-er or Be-er?

4. Main Character "Style" - Logic or Intuition?

5. Story "Limit" - Time Lock or Option Lock?

6. Story "Driver" - Action or Decision?

7. Story "Outcome" - Success or Failure?

8. Story "Judgment" - Good or Bad?

9. Overall Story Throughline?

10. Overall Story Concern?

11. Overall Story Issue?

12. Overall Story Problem?

Overall Story Problem

2009-07-23T14:52:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential Questions Every Writer Should Answer

12. Overall Story Problem

As an author you will want to know what drives your Main Character. Selecting the Main Character problem determines the nature of this drive. Choose the item(s) that best describes this issue. Main Character Problem: the source of The Main Character's motivation; the source of the Main Character's problems

Without motivation - without a Problem - there is no inequity that spurs the Main Character to better his lot. Sometimes it may seem that Problems exist in our environment. Other times, we may perceive a Problem with ourselves: the way we act or feel. In truth, Problems really exist between ourselves and our environment as an inequity between the two.

As example, we may hang on to our desires, even though it causes trouble around us. Conversely, a whole situation might be faltering because of one stubborn individual. These are really two ways of looking at the same inequity. One casts the Problem in the environment, the other places it in the person. So when we look at the Main Character's Problem, we are really looking at the inequity of the story at large as it is reflected in the Main Character.

The relative importance of knowing the underlying Overall Story Problem varies depending on the choices you have made about Main Character and Plot. Once again, it is a matter of emphasis rather than elimination. In some stories, the Problem will be the key to determining how you will approach the Storytelling illustrations, while in others it will seem less relevant to the story's thematic progression.

In the case of Jurassic Park, the Problem is more essential than the Thematic Range to the storyline. Within the Issue of Fate, the story explores the imbalance between Chaos and Order. But its message is felt as an underlying sensation rather than a constant point of focus as the primary characters try to save themselves by containing the huge dinosaurs within the park's electric fences.

Examples of Overall Story Problems:

Overall Story Issue

2009-07-23T14:49:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

11. Overall Story Issue

An author must not only choose the nature of the problem in his story, but also in what light he wishes to present it. The choice of Issue focuses the audience's attention on a particular issue affecting all the characters in the story.

Overall Story Issue: The thematic interpretation of the scenario against which a story takes place.

In stories, it is not only important what you wish the audience to look at but also in what light you want them to see it. The point of view from which the audience evaluates the meaning of the story is crucial to supporting the conclusion to a given argument. Issue helps select a filter through which the author can control the shading of the events that unfold. In a sense, Issue provides the audience with a yardstick and tells them, "measure what you see by this scale."

Examples of Overall Story Issues:

Overall Story Concern

2009-07-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

10. Overall Story Concern

Within the scenario against which your story takes place, there is an area of shared importance to all the characters in your story. Select the item(s) that best describes this Concern. Overall Story Concern: the purposes or interests sought after by the Overall Characters.

Problems can manifest themselves in several ways. Therefore, simply defining the nature of a Problem does not necessarily predict its effect. For example, if the Problem is that there is not enough money to pay the rent, it might motivate one person to take to drink but another to take a second job. The effects of a Problem are not necessarily bad things, but simply things that would not have happened quite that way without the existence of the Problem. So it is with Concerns.

The choice of Concern determines the principal area affected by the story's Problem and serves as a broad indicator of what the story is about.

The Concern of a story tends to revolve around a definable area of activity or exploration. This central hub may be internal such as Memories or Conceiving an Idea (coming up with an idea). Or, it may be external such as Obtaining or How Things are Changing. When choosing a Concern it is often useful to ask, "Which of these items do I want the characters in my story to examine?"
Keep in mind that the Concern only describes WHAT is being looked at. HOW to look at it is determined by choosing the Issue. The choice of Concern sets limits on how much dramatic ground the Theme can potentially encompass and therefore includes some kinds of considerations and excludes others.

Three of the 16 Concerns are Obtaining, Understanding and How Things Are Changing. For example, an Obtaining Concern can be seen in Body Heat as both the wife (Matty Walker, played by Kathleen Turner) and the lawyer (Ned Racine, played by William Hurt) are concerned with obtaining money. This propels them to plot the murder of her rich husband, which leads to further complications for the naive lawyer.

An Understanding Concern is seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as both Roy Neary and Jillian Guiler (played by Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon) are trying to understand why they're drawn to Devil's Tower. At the same time, the scientists are trying to understand what's happening in the heavens through the increased number of extra-terrestrial sightings, the consistent musical tones they are receiving from Space, and other unusual signs from above.

A How Things Are Changing Concern is explored in Dances With Wolves as both the Sioux and Lt. John Dunbar (played by Kevin Costner) are concerned with how things are going between the Native Americans and the white men who are encroaching on their land and eliminating their traditional means of survival -- primarily the buffalo. The white soldiers are also concerned about how things are going between the Native Americans and themselves in addition to the progressive influence the railroad is having on the Western frontier.

Examples of Objective Story Concerns:

Overall Story Throughline

2009-07-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

9. Overall Story Throughline

Every story is set against the issues which arise from a single problem. The problem itself will fall into one of four broad categories. If you want the problem to grow out of a situation, then choose Situation; if you want the problem to emanate from an activity, then choose Activity. If you want the problem to evolve from fixed attitudes and states of mind, then choose Fixed Attitude; and if you want the problem to result from the characters' manipulations and ways of thinking, then choose Manipulation.

Overall Story Throughline: The scenario against which a story takes place.

An author cannot successfully make an argument promoting a solution until he or she has identified the Problem. In stories, Problems can be identified as falling into four broad categories: Situations, Activities, States of Mind, and Manners of Thinking.

These categories are named by the four Classes, Situation (a situation), Activity (an activity), Fixed Attitude (a state of mind), and Manipulation (a manner of thinking).

Situation represents an External State

Activity an External Process.

Fixed Attitude is an Internal State

Manipulation an Internal Process.

Since they are related, all four of these Classes will figure in every story as the Problem works its influence into all areas of consideration. However, only one Class will ultimately prove to be both the source of the Problem's roots and therefore the place it must ultimately be solved.

The Overall Story Throughline is the throughline which describes how all of the story's characters have been brought together. By choosing this Throughline, the author sets the background against which the story will be told. Therefore, its influence is gently felt throughout the story.

A SITUATION story deals with an unacceptable situation - one in which the external environment is seen as problematic. This could be a job situation with poor working conditions, being trapped in a sunken ship, waking up as someone else, living next to an orphanage that keeps you awake at night with its screaming waifs or any other intolerable state of affairs. Often, the best way to see a Situation Overall Story is in terms of the Types below the Class of Situation: The Past, How Things are Changing, The Future, and The Present. These Types will be of primary importance to all the Overall Characters in a Situation Overall Story.

An ACTIVITY story employs an activity that needs to arrive at a solution. This might be the effort to steal the crown Jewels, win the love of your heart's desire, make the Olympic team, or raise the money to buy the orphanage and evict all the screaming waifs. Note that if the existence of the orphanage is the focus of the story, it is a Situation (Situation) Throughline. However, if the effort to buy it is the focus, it is a Activity (Activity) Throughline. Often, the best way to see a Activity Overall Story is in terms of the Types below the Class of Activity: Doing, Gathering Information, Understanding, and Obtaining. These Types will be of primary importance to all the Overall Characters in a Activity Overall Story.

In a like manner, the Fixed Attitude Throughline reflects a state of mind and the Manipulation Throughline describes a mental activity (or manner of thinking). Fixed Attitude Throughline stories might be about prejudice, a lack of self-worth (if it is a fixed view), or a refusal to see the value of someone's desires. Remember that, as an Overall Story Throughline, these fixed states of Mind will be the source of the problems that everyone in the Overall Story deals with. This would be an Overall view of problems of fixed states of mind, and not looking at how it feels to have these fixations. Often, the best way to see a Fixed Attitude Overall Story is in terms of the Types below the Class of Fixed Attitude: Memories, Impulsive Responses, Innermost Desires, and Contemplation. These Types will be of primary importance to all the Overall Characters in a Fixed Attitude Overall Story.

A MANIPULATION Throughline supports stories where people take too many risks, are egocentric, or make light of serious situations. Overall Stories of this Throughline will look at the effect of a person's or persons' thinking in these ways to manipulate others. Placing the Overall Story in this Throughline means in essence that the story will objectify Manipulation, taking an Overall view of these ways of thinking and their effects. The problems that everyone in the Overall Story deals with will come from ways of thinking and their manipulations. Often, the best way to see a Manipulation Overall Story is in terms of the Types below the Class of Manipulation: Developing a Plan, Playing a Role, Changing One's Nature, and Conceiving an Idea. These Types will be of primary importance to all the Overall Characters in a Manipulation Overall Story.

As a final note, it is important to keep in mind that stories are often not about a problem that exists but a desire to be fulfilled. Stories of this nature can create a much more positive feel as exemplified in a Situation story in which an heiress must spend a million dollars in 24 hours to inherit 30 million more, a Activity story where a mountaineer hopes to be the first to scale a mountain on Mars, a Fixed Attitude story of unconditional love, or a Manipulation story about overcoming a dependence on sedatives. The choice of Throughline narrows the playing field of a story. Without actually putting up walls, choosing a Throughline shifts the focus of audience attention by establishing the center around which broad scale dynamics will revolve. The Dramatica engine is calibrated to this center.

To illustrate the differences between throughline classes, let's consider how different story concepts might be illustrated in each of the four perspectives:

Overall Story Throughlines that deal with a Situation

All of the characters are concerned with maintaining or demolishing a situation (e.g. The Verdict or The Fugitive). For example, a country under the thumb of an authoritarian dictator; the condition of a dysfunctional family; a utopian society; a submarine trapped under the ice; progress in one-sided relationships; a murder that occurred 30 years ago; the future of gay rights; the forces that bring on an ice age.

Overall Story Throughlines that deal with an Activity

All of the characters are concerned with an activity or endeavor (e.g. Star Wars or Blade Runner). For example, searching for lost treasure; engaging in a sport; exercising as a way of life; self-flagellation; taking part in a cattle drive; learning about DNA; obtaining secret plans; understanding messages from space, etc.

Overall Story Throughlines that deal with a Fixed Attitude

All of the characters are concerned with a fixed aspect of the mind (e.g. Hamlet or The Client). For example, a community's firm belief in the occult; a family's commitment to the memory of its ancestors (ancestor worship); TV addiction; a culture's fixation on celebrities; a Martian's prejudice against humans; unthinking responses to the conditions of war; essential desires and drives, etc.

Overall Story Throughlines that deal with Manipulations

All of the characters are concerned with a mental process or manner of thinking (e.g. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Four Weddings and a Funeral). For example, curing a mental illness; determining why someone's relationships always fail; becoming a new person; being more responsible to the environment; working through childhood trauma; mass manipulation through propaganda; a group of young people coming of age; a team's creative effort to work out an idea; people pretending to be things they are not, etc.

Story "Judgment"

2009-07-23T12:51:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

8. Main Character Judgment: Good or Bad?

As an author, you can temper the story's Outcome by providing a Judgment as to whether the Main Character resolves his personal angst or not. Regardless of Success or Failure in the effort to achieve the goal, is your Main Character able to resolve his personal angst? If so, choose Good, and if not, choose Bad.

The notion that the good guys win and the bad guys lose is not always true. In stories, as in life, we often see very bad people doing very well for themselves (if not for others). And even more often, we see very good people striking out.

If we only judged results by success and failure, it wouldn't matter if the outcome was Good or Bad as long as it was accomplished. The choice of Good or Bad tempers the story's success or failure by showing whether the Main Character resolves his personal problems or not.

The Story Judgment provides you with an opportunity to address good guys that win and bad guys that fail, as well as good guys that fail and the bad guys that win. It also allows you to comment on the success or failure of your characters' growth as human beings.

An example of a story where a Main Character's personal problem -- finding inner peace -- remains unresolved at the end is The Silence of the Lambs. The abduction of the Senator's daughter initiates the Overall Story so her rescue provides its resolution. But Clarice's personal problem -- her recurring nightmares of lambs crying as they're being slaughtered -- is emphasized as she plays "cat and mouse" with Dr. Lecter. When he asks her in the end whether "the lambs are still crying," it is clear by her silence that they are. She will not be at peace until she releases her need to save innocents, so the story ends with a Bad feeling even though the Overall Story is successful and her future as an FBI agent seems bright. This juxtaposition creates a bittersweet ending which is further emphasized by the somber music playing over the final shots.

In contrast, Charlie Babbott (played by Tom Cruise) in Rain Man is seeking to collect an inheritance left by his wealthy father to the autistic brother he's never met. When Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) turns out to be a "idiot savant" in mathematics, able to memorize an entire phone book and "count cards," Charlie schleps him to Las Vegas. There he hopes Raymond will make him some fast cash to save his failing business although Charlie's girlfriend's protests and ultimately rejects him as he uses Raymond for selfish means. Along the way, however, depth of feeling Charlie discovers for his long-lost brother surprises and changes him. At the end, Charlie is forced to return Raymond to the hospital where he can be cared for properly, but it is clear to the audience that the bond Charlie feels for Raymond is real when he promises to visit Raymond. He has gained both family and self-respect through their journey so although Charlie fails to get the inheritance at the end, what he has gained personally outweighs what he has lost financially. As the story fades out, it is clear the author judges this Failure/Good to be positive and the audience feels hopeful for Charlie even though his money problems remain unresolved.

Examples of Good and Bad:

Story "Outcome"

2009-07-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

7. Story Outcome: Success or Failure?

Success or failure is solely determined by whether or not the story goal is achieved, regardless of how your characters feel about it. If you want the Goal to be reached in your story, choose Success. If you want a story in which your characters do not reach the Goal, then choose Failure.
Although it can be tempered by degree, Success or Failure is easily determined by seeing if the characters (in general) have achieved what they set out to achieve at the beginning of the story.
Certainly, the characters may learn they really don't want what they thought they did and choose not to pursue it any longer. Even though they have grown, this is considered a failure because they did not accomplish their original intention. Similarly, they may actually achieve what they wanted, and even though they find it unfulfilling or unsatisfying, it must be said they succeeded. The point here is not to pass a value judgment on the worth of their success or failure. It is simply to determine whether or not they achieved their original objective.

Examples of Success and Failure:

Story "Limit"

2009-07-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential Questions Every Writer Should Answer

6. Story Limit: Timelock or Optionlock?

In order to create tension in your audience, you will want to establish a limit to the story. This limit will indicate to the audience what will bring the story to a moment of truth, either running out of time or running out of options. If you want tension to increase as your characters run out of time, choose Timelock. If you want tension to increase as your characters run out of options, then choose Optionlock.

Every argument must come to an end or no point can be made. The same is true for stories. For an author to explore an issue, a limit to the scope of the argument must be established.
To establish how much ground the argument will cover, authors limit the story by length or by size. Timelocks create an argument in which "anything goes" within the allotted time constraints. Optionlocks create an argument that will extend as long as necessary to provide that every specified issue is addressed.

By selecting the kind of limit at work in your story, you lock down either the duration of the argument (Timelock), or the ground covered (Optionlock).

For example, in the film 48 Hours more time would indeed change the nature of burned-out cop Cates' efforts to track down a serial killer. If he had enough time for a leisurely search on his own, Cates (played by Nick Nolte) might not need to "borrow" fast-talking convict Reggie (Eddie Murphy) from jail. Thus the story contains a Timelock, stated clearly in its title, to propel the non-stop action along.

In Midnight Run, however, bounty hunter Jack Walsh's "easy job" of flying bail-jumping accountant Jonathan Mardukas (played by Charles Grodin) from NYC to LA becomes a logistical nightmare as his options become increasingly limited. Walsh (Robert De Niro) tries every available means of transporting Mardukas to LA, but Mardukas nixes each one for good reason. More delays are caused, allowing the mobsters, FBI agents and rival bounty hunters on their tail to catch up as the chase intensifies. If a Timelock were at work here, Walsh would ignore Mardukas' professed fear of flying at the start and force him to stay on the first plane to LA, arriving before the deadline runs out... but that would be another story.

Examples of Timelock and Optionlock

Story "Driver"

2009-07-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

5. Story Driver: Action or Decision?

Some stories are driven by actions. Others are forced along by decisions. All stories have some degree of both. This question determines which one "triggers" the other, but does not determine the ratio between the two.

If actions that occur in your story determine the types of decisions that need to be made, choose Action.

If decisions or deliberations that happen in your story precipitate the actions that follow, choose Decision.

Story Driver: The mechanism by which the plot is moved forward.

Action or Decision describes how the story is driven forward. The question is: Do Actions precipitate Decisions or vice versa?

Every story revolves around a central issue, but that central issue only becomes a problem when an action or a decision sets events into motion. If an action gets things going, then many decisions may follow in response. If a decision kicks things off, then many actions may follow until that decision has been accommodated.

The Action/Decision relationship will repeat throughout the story. In an Action story, decisions will seem to resolve the problem until another action gets things going again. Decision stories work the same way. Actions will get everything in line until another decision breaks it all up again. Similarly, at the end of a story there will be an essential need for an action to be taken or a decision to be made. Both will occur, but one of them will be the roadblock that must be removed in order to enable the other.

Whether Actions or Decisions move your story forward, the Story Driver will be seen in the instigating and concluding events, forming bookends around the dramatics.

Examples of Action and Decision:

Main Character Style

2009-07-23T11:37:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

4. Main Character Problem-Solving Style: Logical or Intuitive?

Every Main Character should have a Problem-Solving Style. Whether your Main Character is a horse, a house, a person, or an alien, the audience will not be able to empathize with it unless that character possesses a Logical or Intuitive mind. If you want your Main Character to tend to look for linear solutions to his problems, choose Logical Problem-Solving Style. If you want your Main Character to tend to look for holistic solutions to his problems, choose Intuitive problem-solving style.

NOTE: A character's Problem-Solving Style need not match its Gender.

Problem-Solving Style: A differentiation between logical and intuitive problem-solving techniques.

Much of what we are as individuals is learned behavior. Yet, the basic operating system of the mind is cast biologically before birth as being more sensitive to space or time. We all have a sense of how things are arranged (space) and how things are going (time), but which one filters our thinking determines our Problem-Solving Style as being Logical or Intuitive respectively.
Logical Problem-Solving Style describes spatial thinkers who tend to use linear Problem solving as their method of choice. They set a specific Goal, determine the steps necessary to achieve that Goal, then embark on the effort to accomplish those steps.

Intuitive Problem-Solving Style describes temporal thinkers who tend to use holistic Problem solving as their method of choice. They get a sense of the way they want things to be, determine how things need to be balanced to bring about those changes, then make adjustments to create that balance.

To be sure, we can go a long way toward counter-balancing those sensitivities, yet underneath all our experience and training, the tendency to see things more in terms of space or time still remains. In dealing with the psychology of Main Characters, it is essential to understand the foundation upon which their experience rests.

Main Character Approach

2009-07-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

3. Main Character Approach: Do-er or Be-er?

Some of the characters you create as an author will be Do-ers who try to accomplish their purposes through activities (by doing things). Other characters are Be-ers who try to accomplish their purposes by working it out internally (by being a certain way). When it comes to the Main Character, this choice of Do-er or Be-er will have a large impact on how he approaches the Story's problem. If you want your Main Character to prefer to solve problems externally, choose Do-er. If you want your Main Character to prefer to solve problems through internal work, choose Be-er.

Approach: the kind of techniques a character uses to solve problems, which favor either mental or physical effort.

By temperament, Main Characters (like each of us) have a preferential method of approaching Problems. Some would rather adapt their environment to themselves through action, others would rather adapt their environment to themselves through strength of character, charisma, and influence. There is nothing intrinsically right or wrong with either Approach, yet it does affect how one will respond to Problems. Choosing "Do-er" or "Be-er" does not prevent a Main Character from using either Approach, but merely defines the way he is likely to first Approach a Problem, using the other method only if the first one fails.

Examples of Do-er characters are John McClane (played by Bruce Willis) in Die Hard or Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in Dirty Harry. Rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) in The Silence of the Lambs also responds instinctively to events by taking action, which is why her supervisor believes she will make a good FBI agent when she graduates from training.
An example of a Be-er character with an intrinsic approach to problem-solving by deliberating is Frank Horrigan (played by Clint Eastwood) in the film In the Line of Fire.

Attorney Ned Racine (played by William Hurt) in Body Heat is also a Be-er. He seems impulsive in matters of love but deliberates about his options before agreeing to help sexy Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) inherit her husband's fortune.

A Be-er can seem like a victim in a story where actions precede decisions. In a story influenced by decisions, however, Be-ers are often the mastermind or supervisor behind the scenes, putting restraints on characters who are Do-ers. In a TV cop show like Law & Order, a Be-er might be the Chief of Police or District Attorney rather than an undercover Detective or a Assistant District Attorney whose job is to prosecute criminals in court.

Many famous movie pairs contain both a Be-er and a Do-er, such as Butch and Sundance (played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford) in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the title characters of Thelma & Louise (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon) or Billy Ray Valentine and Louis Winthorpe III (Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd) in Trading Places.

Examples of Do-ers and Be-ers

Main Character Growth

2009-07-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

2. Main Character Growth: Stop or Start?

Over the course of your story, the Main Character will either grow out of something or grow into something. Authors show their audiences how to view this development of a Main Character by indicating the direction of Growth by the Main Character.

If the story concerns a Main Character who Changes, he will come to believe he is the cause of his own problems (that's why he eventually changes). If he grows out of an old attitude or approach (e.g. loses the chip on his shoulder), then he is a Stop character. If he grows into a new way of being (e.g. fills a hole in his heart), then he is a Start character.

If the story concerns a Main Character who Remains Steadfast, something in the world around him will appear to be the cause of his troubles. If he tries to hold out long enough for something to stop bothering him, then he is a Stop character. If he tries to hold out long enough for something to begin, then he is a Start character. If you want the emphasis in your story to be on the source of the troubles which has to stop, choose "Stop."

If you want to emphasize that the remedy to the problems has to begin, choose "Start."
Whether a Main Character eventually changes his nature or remains steadfast, he will still grow over the course of the story. This growth has a direction. Either he will grow into something (Start) or grow out of something (Stop).

As an example we can look to Scrooge from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Does Scrooge need to change because he is excessively miserly (Stop), or because he lacks generosity (Start)? In the Dickens' story it is clear that Scrooge's problems stem from his passive lack of compassion, not from his active greed. It is not that he is on the attack, but that he does not actively seek to help others. So, according to the way Charles Dickens told the story, Scrooge needs to Start being generous, rather than Stop being miserly.

A Change Main Character grows by adding a characteristic he lacks (Start) or by dropping a characteristic he already has (Stop). Either way, his make up is changed in nature.

A Steadfast Main Character's make up, in contrast, does not change in nature. He grows in his resolve to remain unchanged. He can grow by holding out against something that is increasingly bad while waiting for it to Stop. He can also grow by holding out for something in his environment to Start. Either way, the change appears somewhere in his environment instead of in him.

Examples of Stop and Start

Main Character Resolve

2009-07-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

The 12 Essential QuestionsEvery Writer Should Answer

1. Main Character Resolve: Change or Steadfast?

The Main Character represents the audience's position in the story. Therefore, whether he changes or not has a huge impact on the audience's story experience and the message you are sending to it. Some Main Characters grow to the point of changing their nature or attitude regarding a central personal issue like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Others grow in their resolve, holding onto their nature or attitude against all obstacles like Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive.

Change can be good if the character is on the wrong track to begin with. It can also be bad if the character was on the right track. Similarly, remaining Steadfast is good if the character is on the right track, but bad if he is misguided or mistaken.

Think about the message you want to send to your audience, and whether the Main Character's path should represent the proper or improper way of dealing with the story's central issue. Then select a changing or steadfast Main Character accordingly.

Do you want your story to bring your audience to a point of change or to reinforce its current view? Oddly enough, choosing a steadfast Main Character may bring an audience to change and choosing a change character may influence the audience to remain steadfast. Why? It depends upon whether or not your audience shares the Main Character's point of view to begin with.
Suppose your audience and your Main Character do NOT agree in attitudes about the central issue of the story. Even so, the audience will still identify with the Main Character because he represents the audience's position in the story. So, if the Main Character grows in resolve to remain steadfast and succeeds, then the message to your audience is, "Change and adopt the Main Character's view if you wish to succeed in similar situations."

Clearly, since either change or steadfast can lead to either success or failure in a story, when you factor in where the audience stands a great number of different kinds of audience impact can be created by your choice. In answering this question, therefore, consider not only what you want your Main Character to do as an individual, but also how that influences your story's message and where your audience stands in regard to that issue to begin with.

Examples of Change & Steadfast Main Characters:

A Tale is a Statement

2009-07-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

Dramatica Unplugged

by Melanie Anne Phillips

Part One ~ The Story Mind

1.2 A Tale Is a Statement

Imagine the very first storyteller, perhaps a caveman sitting around a campfire. The first communication was not a full-blown story as we know them today. Rather, this caveman may have rubbed his stomach, pointed at his mouth and made a “hungry” sound.

More than likely he was able to communicate. Why? Because his “audience” would see his motions, hear his sounds, and think (conceptually), “If I did that, what would I mean?”

We all have roughly the same physical make-up, we make the assumption that we also think similarly. Therefore when that early man encoded his feelings into sound and motion, the others in his group could decode his symbolism and arrive back at his meaning.

Buoyed by his success in communication, our caveman expands his technique, moving beyond simple expressions of his immediate state to describe a linear series of experiences. For example, he might relate how to get to a place where there are berries or how to avoid a place where there are bears. He would use sign language to outline his journey and to depict the things and events he encountered along the way.

When our storyteller is able to string together a series of events and experiences he has created a tale. And that, simply put, is the definition of a tale: an unbroken linear progression.

We call this kind of tale a “head-line” because it focuses on a chain of logical connections. But you can also have a “heart-line” – an unbroken progression of feelings. For example, our caveman storyteller might have related a series of emotions he had experienced independently of any logistic path.

Tales can be just a head-line or a heart-line, or can be more complex by combining both. In such a case, the tale begins with a particular situation in which the storyteller relates his feelings at the time. Then, he proceeded to the next step which made him feel differently, and so on until he arrives at a final destination and a concluding emotional state.

In a more complex form, emotions and logic drive each other, fully entertwining both the head-line and hear-line. So, starting from a particular place in a particular mood, driven by that mood, the storyteller acted to arrive at a second point, which then made him feel differently.

The tale might be driven by logic with feelings passively responded to each step, or it might be driven completely by feelings in which each logic progression is a result of one’s mood.

And, in the most complex form of all, logic and feelings take turns in driving the other, so that feelings may cause the journey to start, then a logical event causes a feeling to change and also the next step to occur. Then, feelings change again and alter the course of the journey to a completely illogical step.

In this way, our storyteller can “break” logic with a bridge of feeling, or violate a natural progression of feelings with a logical event that alters the mood. Very powerful techniques wrapped up in a very simple form of communication!We know that the human heart cannot just jump from one emotion to another without going through essential emotional states in between. However, if you start with any given emotion, you might be able to jump to any one of a number of emotions next, and from any of those jump to others. But you can’t jump to all of them. If you could, then we all just be bobbing about from one feeling to another. There would be no growth and no emotional development.

As an analogy, look at Freud’s psycho-sexual stages of development or consider the seven stages of grief. You have to go through them in a particular order. You can’t skip over any. If you do, there’s an emotional mis-step. It has an untrue feeling to the heart.

A story that has a character that skips an emotional step or jumps to a step he couldn’t really get to from his previous mood it will feel wanky to the audience. It will feel as if the character started developing in a manner the audience or readers can follow with their own hearts. It will pop your audience or readers right out of the story and cause them to see the character as someone with home they simply can’t identify.

So the idea is to create a linearity. But doesn’t that linearity create a formula? Well it would if you could only go from a given emotion to just one particular emotion next. But, from any given emotion there are several you might jump to – not all, but several. And from whichever one you select as storyteller, there are several more you might go to next.

Similarly with logic, from any given situation there might be any one of a number of things that would make sense if they happened next. But you couldn’t have anything happen next because some things would simply be impossible to occur if the initial situation had happened first.

Now you can start from any place and eventually get to anywhere else, but you have to go through the in-betweens. So as long as you have a head-line and/or a heart-line and it is an unbroken chain that doesn’t skip any steps, that constitutes a complete tale.

"Hero" is a Four Letter Word

2009-07-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

Introducing the Story Mind

2009-07-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

Dramatica Unplugged

By Melanie Anne Phillips
Creator StoryWeaver, Co-creator Dramatica

Part One – The Story Mind

1.1 Introducing the Story Mind

The central concept in Dramatica is called "The Story Mind." It is what makes Dramatica unique. Dramatica says that every complete story is an analogy to a single human mind trying to deal with an inequity.

That's quite a mouthful, but all it really means is that a story structure is a model of the mind's problem solving process. It means that all the dramatic elements of a story are actually psychological aspects of the human mind.

This is not the mind of the author, reader or audience, but of the story itself - a mind created symbolically in the process of communicating across a medium. It is a mind for the audience to look at, understand, and then occupy.

Moreover, characters, plot, theme, and genre are not just a bunch of people doing things with value standards in an overall setting. Rather, characters, plot, theme, and genre are different families of thought that occur in the Story Mind, in fact, in our own minds.

In story structure, these thoughts are made tangible, incarnate, so that the audience members might look into the mechanisms of their own minds, see them from the outside in, and thereby gain an understanding of how to solve similar problems in their own lives.

Dramatica Storyforming Newsletter - Volume 1 Number 1

2009-07-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

Dramatica Storyforming Newsletter
Volume One * Number One

Download in PDF (179K)

The Dramatica Storyforming Newsletter contains Writing Tips, Analyses of popular books and movies, and materials to help your create a perfect structure in your novel, screenplay, or stage play.

In this Issue: "Building a Better Dinosaur" - a creative criticism of Jurassic Park, Objective vs. Subjective Story Perspectives, Story vs. Tale, The Story Mind, Storyforming vs. Storytelling, Leap of Faith, the Main Character, the Obstacle Character, Problem Element and Solution Element, Author's Proof, Change Characters vs. Steadfast Characters, "One Woman's Problem Solving is Another Man's Justification", Identifying the Throughlines in Your Story, Gender Speak - What's In a Name?, and more!

Introduction to Storyweaving

2009-07-17T12:52:00.000-07:00

How to Draw Readers Into Your Story

2009-07-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

StoryWeavingWriting Tips Newsletter

Issue 76

How to Draw Your Readers into Your Story

By Teresa Darnold

Have you ever read a story that pulls you right into it without you even noticing? This doesn’t happen by accident. Rather, some very specific methods are employed.

Read the following story segment, see if it pulls you in, and then I’ll describe all the techniques I used to craft it.

“When somebody's "fixin'" to do something,
it won't be long.”

“Go outside and tell your brother that I won’t be long…” Kate knew that tone of voice; her dad was impatient at having been interrupted while doing something he felt to be important – whatever that might be at that moment. This time, he had worked an all-nighter at the plant, got home late, and was trying to unwind a bit before he had to take his son to the game. Trouble was, he was making everyone late in the process of waitin’ for him to unwind.

Kate went outside. She knew her brother wouldn’t like the answer; he was more impatient sometimes than a cow that needed milkin’, but such was the way of her family. She went around to the back of the pickup where her brother was waitin’.

Her Brother spoke first: ‘Well?’

Kate: “Said he’s fixin’ to be out and take you, by and by.”

Her brother looked up at the sky. It was an unruly palate of greys, cold and dark like the weathered steel of an old rifle, or the dark look of the pond out back behind the house.

“It’s fixin’ to rain.” He said simply.

Kate looked up and saw that he was right; if they were going to go, it should be soon. She climbed up into the bed of the old pickup and sat down next to her brother. The wooden boards were cool while the steel bands between were hot. It was hard to find a place to sit where the metal didn’t feel like it was burning her legs. Giving up, she stood up and just leaned against the trucks cab: “He’ll be here soon enough.” She paused, not for effect, more because she knew her brother was upset, and in a mood like that – he’d be more quick to anger than most times. Calmly, she just repeated herself: “He’s fixin’ to take you soon, I’m sure of it.”

About that same moment, just as soon as she finished talkin’, a single large raindrop hit a wooden board between them with a loud slapping sound.

Her brother looked at the water stain on the wood, looked up at her, looked up at the sky; pausing - each time for just a moment before changing the focus of his gaze. He spoke with a slight sad tone to his voice, and just repeated himself: "It's STILL fixin' to rain."

How did I write that?

Right from the get-go, before I press a key and apply an electron to my screen, I start to consider in my mind the kinds of people, places, and things that I know most readers will be able to relate to right away. I know that if my readers can personally relate to my story elements (possibly having experienced them – or even only some of them) that they will connect with my story through their own lives. That’s the key I feel – involving your audience with your story in such a way that they can see the images you create through their own memories.

In the preceding story scene, I decided to use a family situation. The reason is obvious – most people have one - simple. But what of people who may have lost a family member? (t’s possible to lose some readers if they can’t personally relate to your story.) Well, an easy solution is to then write the story from a youthful perspective – a youthful POV. More folks are going to have their parents still around when they’re young than old, and justly so, will be able to relate more to your story then if you write from the point of view of a youth.

In the above story, I chose to start on a conversation between family members. For a short story, it’s the fastest way to establish some of a person’s personality and some personal information for a couple or more of story characters. You also get to use an already defined character interrelationship structure – an already established family group. Dad is the top dog usually – but it could be any adult family member that is used in this role. Siblings that are close in age have a tendency to be considered equals by adults. This is useful in that conversations between similarly aged siblings are usually one of equality. If a sibling is old enough to have acted in the role of babysitter to a younger sibling, those siblings will not have an equal relationship because the older sibling has had to take a parental role over the younger sibling, so conversations between siblings of large age differences usually defer to the older sibling just as they do for a family adult.

Another convenient quality about using family members or close friends in your story is that people who are close to one another have a tendency to speak in partial sentences with one another. Families and friends develop ,over time, subtle ways of communicating that includes an intrinsic awareness of the other persons personality and habits. I used this quality several times in the story. For example:

“Go outside and tell your brother that I won’t be long…”

“Her Brother spoke first: ‘Well?’”

“Kate: “Said he’s fixin’ to be out and take you, by and by.””

“It’s fixin’ to rain.” He said simply.”

“Calmly, she just repeated herself: “He’s fixin’ to take you soon, I’m sure of it.””

“He spoke with a slight sad tone to his voice, and just repeated himself: "It's STILL fixin' to rain."”

This is all the conversation there is in the story. You’ll note that the conversation alone can carry the story, even without all of the added descriptions I included. That’s because - in this case - the contents of the conversation are the story. That’s very important to note, because that means that the conversation also casts the direction the story will go. The conversation is like a divining rod, leading you onward toward where the water is to dig your well. Just so, the character’s verbal conversation directs the pace and focus of the story. If the story is first person and you’re just reading the characters thoughts, then in that case it’s the thoughts that disclose the direction the story takes.

The manner of speech used in the conversations is also character defined. The first sentence is from the father character. It’s authoritative, it’s an order, and it’s also the only formal manner of speech used. The remaining sentences spoken by the children are filled with local colloquialisms. This was done intentionally as this tends to mirror real life.

The second sentence is a demand, verging on being an order. The daughter’s reply is one of ignoring the manner her brother spoke to her. It’s a feminine, passive method of reestablishing a conversation of equality. She’s also the one who is empowered as she has information he desires. That’s why I made his second sentence to be passive also – because she had established that he wasn’t in charge.

The last two sentences were designed to express a subtle hint of mood. The fifth sentence from the girl is meant to express a subtle change in temperament. It’s designed to be more supportive and hopeful. The girl is trying to put a positive spin on what her father said. The sixth sentence was one of resignation. He repeats himself just as his sister did – his way of showing equality. But by pointing out that the weather wasn’t going to wait for his father, he was pointing out his father’s error in his decision – just as any adolescent boy does about parental decisions.

Now, let’s look at the first paragraph:

In this paragraph, I establish a lot about the history and mood of the father. As in real life – the spoken word is not just the words – it’s the manner with which something is spoken that conveys as much meaning as the words themselves. That’s why I use the opportunity that a spoken conversation in my story brings, to explain the manner of conversation that you would have understood had you ‘heard’ the words, and not read them. But knowing how a person speaks often isn’t enough for your audience; they often want to know more. So if a character has an extreme mood of some kind, giving a reason for that mood often helps to carry story information and to give life to the character. In this instance, you learned that the father is a man of at least two children, that he works long hours at some kind of a large company/plant that tires him out, but he still tries to do things for his children, even when he is tired and had to work overtime.

I also used a technique that is very subtle, and this is to morph a conversation into a thought in the mind of another character. I can do this by using the daughter’s thoughts to define the manner and mood that the father used to speak. It’s her mind that tells you the father’s mood. She then tells you the reason for her father’s mood – and is the source for giving information about the father to the audience. I then close the paragraph by completing the daughter’s mind thought by using a colloquialism that her father didn’t use – thus further defining a wall between the two characters, I show adolescent impatience for her father by the comments the daughter thought, and I show a bit about the character relationship between father and daughter because she didn’t voice her displeasure at waiting for her father, she only thought it.

The next paragraph:

This paragraph was used to define the manner of the family’s life. The country colloquialisms used in conjunction with a reference to a cow, milking, and a pickup truck is used to give the impression that the family lives on a farm and specifically that the daughter knows about tending to farm animals, like milking a cow. She also defines a little amount of information about her brother who the audience has yet to meet at this time. By thinking/telling the audience about her brother mood, she then defines the manner and mood of what the brother will say.

The next paragraph:

Her Brother spoke first: ‘Well?’ Kate: “Said he’s fixin’ to be out and take you, by and by.”

See what I mean? When you read the first line by the boy, you already know that his ‘Well?’ is said impatiently. I don’t have to follow what he say’s with an explanation because I already did explain it through the daughter’s previous thoughts. The daughter’s words that follow the son’s impatient ‘Well?’ don’t have to be mood defined because they were already mood defined when she showed her impatience with her father through her thoughts in the first paragraph.

If I were to have written: “Her Brother spoke first: ‘Well?’ he said impatiently." That sentence description would have appeared to be more simple, less professional, less creative and frankly – more ham-handed. Your audience doesn’t want to be outright told how a person is feeling, that makes a story seem less like a story and more like stereo instructions - seriously. They want to know how a person is feeling because they’re in your story – not reading it.

Her brother looked up at the sky. It was an unruly palate of greys, cold and dark like the weathered steel of an old rifle, or the dark look of the pond out back behind the house. “It’s fixin’ to rain.” He said simply.

This is conversation break is an opportunity to set up a reason for the son’s impatience; it’s about to start raining. I begin by defining the look of the sky which I have the boy do. I often use what I call ‘Flowery Words’ when I write my descriptions, because it often adds a bit of a ‘high-brow’ quality to my work (Sorry, but it’s true), and it is seen as more descriptive. I might write that: “The sky had a translucent azure quality to it”, rather than “The sky was dark blue and hazy”. See – the first one just reads better. But, if I’m writing a story that is to take place on a farm, I can’t use descriptive words that are out of place on a farm because it would take away from my stories realistic quality I’m trying to create in the mind of my audience. So I used descriptions that were based on things one might find on a farm – a cold pond - -the grey colour of the steel of a rifle-. If I were to go further with it, I might describe the sky as like the colour and appearance of weather worn grey wood, such as could be found on the old barn doors out back of the house. See?

I then made the whole concept of idea that it’s about to rain by having the son verbally make the declaration about pending rain. How this will affect the game they are about to go to is unclear. Perhaps the son is using the weather as an excuse for his impatience, or maybe he’s genuinely worried about the weather and the drive there. Like in real life, you can’t know every motivation a character has for being the way they are. You’re character looses the ability to surprise your audience if you overly define them. Besides, your audience will fill in any small holes you leave in your character’s personality.

I had mentioned the pick-up truck, so it’s a story element – however inconsequential. But I often use an inconsequential story element to further other story elements, like character personalities or elaborating further on environmental conditions for example. I remember from my childhood that the old pick-up trucks often had both wooden boards and metal strips in the truck-bed. And likewise – I remember when sitting in such a truck in the bed, that it was difficult to try to position yourself so that your legs were only on the wood. The metal bands really would feel like red hot metal on my young little legs. Because I want more people to relate to my story, made the truck old. I want people my age to think back to their childhood and relate to the old days on a farm in a nostalgic manner, while at the same time I want younger people to relate to the story and just think that the family has an old truck. Until I define the actual year later in the story – assuming I do that – I use this method to grab as big an audience as I can. Remember, you want to not loose too many people along the way of reading your story because they got bored with it part way through.

Why did I have her stand up? Because the truck bed was hot – obvious right? But why have her stand? Why not write a bale of hay in the truck bed for her to climb in and sit on? Because the boy would have already been sitting on it and the daughter would have had to stand anyway. Plus they may not have seen the rain drop as it would have hit the hay or the truck bed where the boy wouldn’t have likely seen it. I try to keep the characters in my stories consistent in behaviour and temperament with every change or alteration. Anyone who is familiar with siblings is going to know that without a parent around, the boy is absolutely not going to give up the hay bale for his sister to sit on so he can stand, and neither one of them is going to want to sit next close to the other one.

Adding too many story elements can overly complicate the story – lengthening it unnecessarily. There’s no need to bog down your story with too much incidental info when it’s still in the character and story development phase.

Next, once again we’re given a view into the mind of the daughter:

She paused, not for effect, more because she knew her brother was upset, and in a mood like that – he’d be more quick to anger than most times.

This has happened twice now, and the story is now being defined by this second thought narrative sequence. Because of this second thought narrative, Kate is becoming defined as the central character in the story. Now, I know this doesn’t come across immediately as a thought narrative. It shouldn’t, it’s designed not to look like one. By writing a description of what a character is doing physically, you can then segue into their thoughts behind those physical actions, and now you can write in the central characters mind narrative. It’s a subtle trick, like a slight of hand that a magician does – only you’re misdirecting your audiences attention so they don’t see how your redirecting them into the mind of the character. You can see that this is done because you can also see how I altered the language just a touch – going from the normal language an author uses - to the kind of colloquial language that the two children use with each other. The division line is where the line is to pause the audience, between the words “that’ and “he’d”.

See – an obvious manner of disclosing something that a character thinks would be to write something like this:

Her brother was upset, and in a mood like that – he’d be more quick to anger than most times: She Thought

This is another example of where we the author once again tell the audience something. Again – ham-handed…bad.

When the daughter comments after her thoughts:

Calmly, she just repeated herself: “He’s fixin’ to take you soon, I’m sure of it.”
She’s reinforcing her previous thought by putting into action a manner of talking that many people would use to calm someone down that’s agitated. Once again you’re already given the information about why she’s talking the way she is through your already having read the main character’s thoughts.

Bringing my audience back to the matter at hand, the need to go to this game;

About that same moment, just as soon as she finished talkin’, a single large raindrop hit a wooden board between them with a loud slapping sound.

I emphasize the point the boy made by making his pronouncement of rain correct. Now – from his personal point of view - He’s right – they waited too long. And since we’re focusing on the children and their point of view, we then presume that even though good ‘Ol dad is really tired, he should have just gotten into the truck and driven his son to the game. Had I made the raindrop small, it wouldn’t have emphasized the point that he was correct as much, and I couldn’t have written as definitive a comment by the boy later on when he repeats his comment about the rain coming.

In this story example, I start off emphasizing that the daughter is the main character by referring to her brother as only ‘Her Brother’. He doesn’t even have a name yet. For a story like what I’ve written for this creative writing lesson, it’s unnecessary ancillary information that only serves to get in the way and muddy the waters so to speak. If the story were written to be longer, or if her brothers name were necessary – it would have been included. The point is – if a character doesn’t need a name – don’t give it one.

I have her brother, the secondary character, go through the motions of looking around as a means of extending out the scene enough to give a length of time pause. In other words, I want the audience to wait a moment before they read the next line that is uttered by the secondary character. In real life – we often give a pause conversationally to make a point. Just so, this is often done in creative story writing. The difference is in talking, when we give pause to emphasize something – we really do pause. In a story, we have to have the scene progress visually in the eyes of the minds of the audience by writing visual descriptions, before we present them with the words that are spoken by the secondary character.

Now we’ve reached the end of the story segment. You’ve seen how what at first appears to be a simple scene that flows along naturally is actually a heavily crafted construction very specifically designed to create the impact it has.

Writing is often thought of as nothing more than letting the words flow passionately onto the page. Some writers are so naturally gifted that this happens all by itself. But for the rest of us, learning the techniques of story-crafting enables us to achieve the very same result.

MP3 Download "Be A StoryWeaver - NOT a Story Mechanic!"

2009-06-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

Download the entire 16 minute program for free in MP3 format:

"Be a Story Weaver - NOT a Story Mechanic!"

Origins of the Dramatica Theory

2009-05-07T07:51:00.000-07:00

Many people have asked how we came up with the Dramatica Theory. Well, it didn't happen all at once. In fact, it was a three year full-time effort, 8 hours a day. And the theory we now have is quite different than the concepts with which we started.

In going through my archives, I just discovered four hours of recordings we made in 1991 to document our very first attempt at a "complete" theory - kind of a unified field theory of story. Here are all four hours of audio in mp3 formt, divided into 8 parts. Enjoy!

Origins of the Dramatica Theory - Part 1 of 8
Origins of the Dramatica Theory - Part 2 of 8
Origins of the Dramatica Theory - Part 3 of 8
Origins of the Dramatica Theory - Part 4 of 8

Origins of the Dramatica Theory - Part 5 of 8

Origins of the Dramatica Theory - Part 6 of 8
Origins of the Dramatica Theory - Part 7 of 8
Origins of the Dramatica Theory - Part 8 of 8

Writing With The Story Mind (free ebook)

2009-05-02T13:53:00.001-07:00

Here's the first 27 pages of a book in process that I'm writing about the Story Mind concept and how to apply it in your writing.

Just thought I'd share it since it may be years before I get around to finishing it:

Here's the download link:

The Story Mind - Download in PDF

Characters, Dramatica Style

2009-05-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Here's an 18 minute mp3 recording of some basic Dramatica character concepts for a program I never got around to completing. Thought I might as well share it with y'all. Hope you find it useful.

Characters, Dramatica Style

(Click to listen, right click to download)

Introduction to the Story Mind

2009-05-01T15:55:00.001-07:00

Syllabus from one of my seminars:

Introduction To The Story Mind
Excerpted from “Writing with The Story Mind”
by Melanie Anne Phillips

What if your story had a mind of it's own, as if it were a character unto itself with its own personality, its own psychology?

Suppose your characters were seen as the conflicting drives of this "Story Mind," theme as its troubled value standards, plot as its efforts to resolve its problems, and genre as the Story Mind's overall personality?

More importantly, what if you could psychoanalyze your story's mind to learn who your characters should be, what thematic issues you should explore, how your plot should unfold, and what unique twists define your story's genre?

In this book you'll learn about all facets of the Story Mind. You'll find out how to create a personality profile for your story and to use it as a map to exactly what your story is about and what happens in it.

Structure Vs Passion

The Story Mind approach to story is a structural one. But no one reads a book or goes to a movie to enjoy a good structure. No author writes because he is driven to create a sound structure. Rather, audiences and authors come to opposite sides of a story because of their passions - the author driven to express his, and the audience hoping to ignite its own.

What draws us to a story in the first place is our attraction to the subject matter and the style. As an audience, we might be intrigued by the potential applications of a new discovery of science, the exploration of newly rediscovered ancient city, or the life of a celebrity. We might love a taut mystery, a fulfilling romance, or a chilling horror story.

As an author what inspires us to write a story may be a bit of dialog we heard in a restaurant, a notion for a character, a setting, time period, or a clever twist of plot we’d like to explore. Or, we might have a deep-seated need to express a childhood experience, work out an irrational fear, or make a public statement about a social injustice.

No matter what our attraction as audience or author, it is our passions that trigger our imaginations. So why should an author worry about structure? Because passion rides on structure, and if the structure is flawed or even broken, then the passionate expression from author to audience will fail.

When structure is done properly, it is invisible, serving only as the carrier wave that delivers the passion to the audience. But when structure is flawed, it adds static to the flow of emotion, breaking up and possibly scrambling the passion so badly that the audience gets nothing of what the author was sending.

Yet, the attempt to ensure a sound structure is an intellectual pursuit. Questions such as "Who is my Protagonist?" "Where should my story begin?" "What happens in Act Two?" or "What is my message?" force an author to turn away from his passion and embrace logistics instead.

As a result, an author often becomes mired in the nuts and bolts of storytelling, staring at a blank page not because of a lack of inspiration, but because he can't figure out how to make his passion make sense.

Worse, the re-writing process is often grueling and frustrating, forcing the author to accept unwanted changes in the flow of emotion for the sake of logic. So what is an author to do? Is there any way out of this dilemma?

In the pages that follow, you'll discover a new way of writing stories - a method that allows an author to retain his passion even while serving the demands of structure. This system can be used either before you write to know exactly where things will be going or after you write to find and refine the structure already hidden in your passion.

You won't be asked to discard any techniques or approaches you are currently using. Rather, you'll simply be adding to what you already know, to what you are already doing; extending your understanding of how stories really work and how to write them.

So join me on an expedition into the new world of the Story Mind. The risks are low, the potential rewards are great, and all you need to carry with you is your own passion.

Introducing the "Story Mind"

This book is entitled, "The Story Mind." and as described above, the Story Mind is a way of looking at a story as if all the characters were facets of a larger personality, the mind of the Story itself.

To illustrate, imagine that you stepped back from your story far enough that you could no longer identify your characters as individuals. Instead, like a general on a hill watching a battle, you could only see each character by his function:

There's the guy leading the charge - that's the Protagonist. His opponent is the Antagonist. There's the strategist, working out the battle plan - he's the Reason archetype. One soldier is shouting at the pathos and carnage - he's the Emotion archetype.

The structure of stories deals with what makes sense in the big picture. But characters aren't aware of that overview. Just like us, they can only see what is around them and try to make the best decisions based on that limited view. And so characters must also be real people as well, with real drives and real concerns.

Characters, therefore, have two completely different jobs: They must act according to their own drives and desires and also play a part in the larger mosaic of the story as a whole. The trick is to create a story in which these two purposes work together, not against each other.

As individuals, each character must be fully developed as a complete human being. As cogs in the Great Machine, they must each fulfill a function. So, when we develop our characters we need to stand in their shoes, make them real people, and express ourselves passionately through each of their points of view. But when we develop our story's structure, we must ensure that each character fulfills his, her, or its dramatic purpose in the story at large.

It is that larger purpose that we call the Story Mind. As previously described, the Story Mind is like a Super Character that generates the personality of the overall story itself, as if it were a single, thinking, feeling, person. So, in addition to being complete people, each of our characters also represents a different aspect or facet of a greater character, the Story Mind.

For example, the Reason archetype represents the use of our intellect. The Emotion archetype illustrates the impact of our feelings. Individually as supposedly real people, they each employ both Reason and Emotion in regard to their own personal issues. But when it comes to the central issue of the story - the message issue that is the essence of what the overall story is about - then one of these two Characters will attempt to deal with that issue solely from a position of Reason and the other solely from the position of Emotion.

This is why we, the audience, see characters simultaneously as real people and also by their dramatic functions, such as Protagonist and Antagonist. Regarding their own concerns, characters are well rounded. Regarding the overall concern of the story as a whole, they are single-minded. Collectively, they describe the conflicting motivations or drives of the Story Mind.

But characters are only part of the story. As we shall see, Plot, Theme, and Genre are represented in the Story Mind as well. For now, suffice it to say that the Story Mind is the character of the story itself.

Why a Story Mind?

Before asking any writer to invest his or her time in a concept as different as the Story Mind, it is only fair to provide an explanation of why such a thing should exist. To do this, let us look briefly into the nature of communication between an author and an audience.

Tales vs. Stories

When an author tells a tale, he simply describes a series of events that both makes sense and feels right. As long as there are no breaks in the logic and no mis-steps in the emotional progression, the structure of the tale is sound.

Now, from a structural standpoint, it really doesn't matter what the tale is about, who the characters are, or how it turns out. The tale is just a truthful or fictional journey that starts in one situation, travels a straight or twisting path, and ends in another situation.

The meaning of a tale amounts to a statement that if you start from "here," and take "this" path, you'll end up "there." The message of a tale is that a particular path is a good or bad one, depending on whether the ending point is better or worse than the point of departure and perhaps whether or not the result was worth the journey.

This structure is easily seen in a vast majority of familiar fairy "tales." Tales have been used since the first storytellers practiced their craft. In fact, many of the best selling novels and most popular motion pictures of our own time are simply tales, expertly told.

In a structural sense, tales have power in that they can encourage or discourage audience members from taking particular actions in real life. The drawback of a tale is that it speaks only in regard to that specific path.

But in fact, there are many paths that might be taken from a given point of departure. Suppose an author wants to address those as well, to cover all the alternatives. What if the author wants to say that rather than being just a good or bad path, a particular course of action is the best or worst path of all that might have been taken?

Now the author is no longer making a simple statement, but a "blanket" statement. Such a blanket statement provides no "proof" that the path in question is the best or worst, it simply says so. If the blanket statement reflects popular assumptions, it might be accepted at face value. But, if the blanket statement diverges from conventional wisdom or expectation, an audience is not likely to accept such a bold claim, regardless of how well the tale is told. It will demand to be convinced; it will demand proof.

In the early days of storytelling, an author related his tale to his audience in person. Should he aspire to manipulate his audience by making a blanket statement that conflicted with the norm, the audience would likely cry, "Foul!" and demand that he prove it on the spot.

Someone in the audience might bring up an alternative path that hadn't been included in the tale. The author could then counter that rebuttal to his blanket statement by describing how the path proposed by the audience was not as strong as the path he did include. One by one, he would disperse any challenges to his tale until he either exhausted the opposition or was overcome by an alternative he couldn't dismiss.

But as soon as stories began to be recorded in media such as song ballads, epic poems, novels, stage plays, screenplays, teleplays, and so on, the author was no longer present to defend his blanket statements. If he were to convince his audience of his point of view he must anticipate all reasonable challenges that might arise to his blanket statement and incorporate them in his presentation in advance. In fulfilling this new requirement, authors pushed the tale format forward beyond the blanket statement until it became a new art form we call the story.

A story is a much more sophisticated form of communication than a tale, and is in fact a revolutionary leap forward in the ability of an author to make a point. Simply put, a tale is a statement, a story is an argument.

Now this puts a huge burden of proof on an author. Not only does he have to make his own point, but he has to prove (within reason) that all opposing points are less valid. Of course, this requires than an author anticipate any objections an audience might raise to his blanket statement. To do this, he must look at the situation described in his story and examine it from every angle an audience might consider in regard to that issue.

By incorporating all reasonable (and valid emotional) points of view regarding the story's message in the structure of the story itself, the author has not only defended his argument, but has also included all the points of view the a person would normally take in examining that central issue. In effect, the structure of the story now represents the whole range of considerations a human mind would make if fully exploring that issue.

As each of the points of view is explored and the argument is made, the structure of the story begins to resemble a map of the mind's problem solving processes, and (without any intent on the part of the author) has become a Story Mind. The more accurately the story's structure represents the Story Mind, the more powerful the story's argument.

And so, the Story Mind concept is not really all that radical. It is simply a short hand way of describing that all sides of a story must be explored to satisfy an audience. And, and if this is done, the structure of the story takes on the nature of a single character.

Armed with this information we are now prepared to examine the nature of the Story Mind, and to see how we might apply what we discover to meet the demands of a logical structure without sacrificing our passion.

What's In Your Story's Mind?

As with people, your story's mind has different aspects. These are represented in your Genre, Theme, Plot, and Characters. Genre is the overall personality of the Story Mind. Theme represents its troubled value standards. Plot describes the methods the Story Mind uses as it tries to work out it's problems. Characters are the conflicting drives of the Story Mind.

Genre

To an audience, every story has a distinct personality, as if it were a person rather than a work of fiction. When we first encounter a person or a story, we tend to classify it in broad categories. For stories, we call the category into which we place its overall personality its Genre.

These categories reflect whatever attributes strike us as the most notable. With people this might be their profession, interests, attitudes, style, or manner of expression, for example. With stories this might be their setting, subject matter, point of view, atmosphere, or storytelling.

We might initially classify someone as a star-crossed lover, a cowboy, or a practical joker who likes to scare people. Similarly, we might categorize a story as a Romance, a Western, or a Horror story.

As with the people we meet, some stories are memorable and others we forget as soon as they are gone. Some are the life of the party, but get stale rather quickly. Some initially strike us as dull, but become familiar to the point we look forward to seeing them again. This is all due to what someone has to say and how he goes about saying it.

The more time we spend with specific stories (or people) the less we see them as generalized types and the more we see the traits that define them as individuals. So, although we might initially label a story as a particular Genre, we ultimately come to find that every story has its own unique personality that sets it apart from all others in that Genre, in at least a few notable respects.

In the Genre section of this book, we'll describe how to get a feel for the personality of the story you wish to tell, how to create a Genre map describing your story's primary attributes, and how to develop your story so that its unique qualities surface and reveal themselves.

Theme

Everyone has value standards, and the Story Mind has them as well. Some people are pig-headed and see issues as cut and dried. Others are wishy-washy and flip-flop on the issues. The most sophisticated people (and stories) see the pros and cons of both sides of a moral argument and present their conclusions in shades of gray, rather than in simple black & white. All these outlooks can be reflected in the Story Mind.

No matter what specific thematic topic is explored, the key structural point about value standards is that they are all comprised of two parts: the issues and one's attitude toward them. It is not enough to only have a subject ( abortion, gay rights, or greed) for that says nothing about whether they are good, bad, or somewhere in between. Similarly, attitudes (I hate, I believe in, or I don't approve of) are meaningless until they are applied to something.

An attitude is essentially a point of view. The issue is the object under observation. When an author determines what he wants us to look at it and from where he wants it to be seen, he creates perspective. It is this perspective that comprises a large part of the story's message.

Still, simply stating one's attitudes toward the issues does little to convince someone else to see things the same way we do. Unless the author is preaching to the audience as choir, he's going to need to convince it to share his attitude. To do this, he will need to make a thematic argument over the course of the story which will slowly dislodge the audience from its previously held beliefs and reposition the audience so that it adopts the author's beliefs by the time the story is over.

In the Theme section of this book we'll outline how to discover your story's message and how to create a thematic argument that presents all sides of the issues. You'll find out how to make your point without hitting the audience over the head with binary statements of right and wrong, and how to lead the audience to your point of view.

Plot

Novice authors often assume the plot of a story is the order in which events unfold. In fact, the order in which events are revealed to an audience is seldom the same order in which they happened to the characters. Through exposition, an author unveils the story, dropping bits and pieces that the audience rearranges until the meaning of the story becomes clear. This technique involves the audience as an active participant in the story rather than simply being a passive observer. It also reflects the way people go about solving their own problems.

When people try to work out ways of dealing with their problems they tend to identify and organize the pieces before they assemble them into a plan of action. So, they often jump around the timeline, filling in the different steps in their plan out of sequence as they gather additional information and draw new conclusions.

In the Story Mind, both of these attributes are represented as well. We refer to the internal logic of the story - the order in which the events in the problem solving approach actually occurred - as the Plot. The order in which the Story Mind considers these elements as it develops a plan of action is called the Storyweaving.

If an author blends these two aspects together, it is very easy to miss holes in the internal logic because they are glossed over by smooth exposition. By separating them, an author gains complete control of the progression of the story as well as the audience's progressive experience. In the plot section of this book you will learn how to create a complete sequential treatment for your story and to develop an exposition plan that involves and captivates your audience.

Characters

If characters represent our conflicting drives yet they each have a personal point of view, where is our sense of self represented in the Story Mind? After all, every real person has a unique point of view that defines his or her own self-awareness.

In fact, there is one special character in a story that represents the Story Mind's identity. This character, the Main Character, functions as the audience position in the story. He, she or it is the first person experience of the story - the story's ego.

Earlier I described how we might look at characters by their dramatic function, as seen from the perspective of a General on a hill. But what if we zoomed down and stood in the shoes of just one of those characters, we would have a much more personal view of the story from the inside looking out.

But which character should be our Main Character? Most often authors select the Protagonist to represent the audience position in the story. This creates the stereotypical Hero who both drives the plot forward and also provides the personal view of the audience. There is nothing wrong with this arrangement but it limits the audience to always experiencing what the quarterback feels, never the linemen or the waterboy.

In real life we are more often one of the supporting characters in an endeavor than we are the leader of the effort. If you have always made your Protagonist the Main Character, you have been limiting your possibilities.

In the Character section of this book we will fully describe each of the Story Mind's drives, how to choose the right one as your Main Character, and how the Main Character needs to come into conflict not with the Antagonist but with an Obstacle Character who represents the opposite point of view.

Getting Our Mind Together

We've now established four key aspects of the Story Mind. Characters are the conflicting drives of the Story Mind, theme its reassessment of values, plot its problem solving techniques, and genre its overall personality. But how do these fit together in an integrated story?

When an audience sits down with a book, in a theater, or in front of a television, it is sitting down with a person to make conversation. In fact, it is a one-sided conversation. Your story must have a personality intriguing enough to hold the audience's interest until the show is over.

Is your story a good enough conversationalist, or does it need to go back to finishing school with another draft before it is ready for prime time? You have days, months, perhaps even years to prepare your story to exude enough charisma to sustain just one conversation. How disappointing is it to an audience when a story's personality is plain and simply dull?

As an author, thinking of your story as a person can actually help you write the story. All too often, authors get mired in the details of a story, trying to cram everything in and make all the pieces fit.

Characters are seen only as individuals, so they often unintentionally overlap each other's dramatic functions. The genre is depersonalized so that the author trying to write within a genre ends up fashioning a formula story and breaking no new ground. The plot becomes an exercise in logistics, and the theme emerges as a black and white pontification that hits the audience like a brick.

Now imagine that you are sitting down to dinner with your story. For convenience, we'll call your story "Joe." You know that Joe is something of an authority on a subject in which your are interested. You offer him an appetizer, and between bites of pate, he tells you of his adventures and experiences.

Over soup, he describes what was driving him at various points of his endeavors. These are your characters, and they must all be aspects of Joe's personality. There can be no characters that would not naturally co-exist in a single individual. You listen carefully to make sure Joe is not a split-personality, for such a story would seem fragmented as if it were of two or more minds.

While munching on a spinach salad, Joe describes his efforts to resolve the problems that grew out of his journey. This is your plot, and all reasonable efforts need to be covered. You note what he is saying, just an an audience will, to be sure there are no flaws in his logic. There can also be no missing approaches that obviously should have been tried, or Joe will sound like an idiot.

Over the main course of poached quail eggs and Coho salmon (on a bed of grilled seasonal greens), Joe elucidates the moral dilemmas he faced, how he considered what was good and bad, better or worse. This is your theme, and all sides of the issues must be explored. If Joe is one-sided in this regard, he will come off as bigoted or closed-minded. Rather than being swayed by his conclusions, you (and an audience) will find him boorish and will disregard his passionate prognostications.

Dessert is served and you make time, between spoonfuls of chocolate soufflé (put in the oven before the first course to ready by the end of dinner) to consider your dinner guest. Was he entertaining? Did he make sense? Did he touch on topical issues with light-handed thoughtfulness? Did he seem centers, together, and focused? And most important, would you invite him to dinner again? If you can't answer yes to each of these questions, you need to send your story back to finishing school, for he is not ready to entertain an audience.

Your story is your child. You give birth to it, you nurture it, you have hopes for it. You try to instill your values, to give it the tools it needs to succeed and to point it in the right direction. But, like all children, there comes a time where you have to let go of who you wanted it to be and to love and accept who it has become.

When your story entertains an audience, you will not be there to explain its faults or compensate for its shortcomings. You must be sure your child is prepared to stand alone, to do well for itself and to not embarrass you. If you are not sure, you must send it back to school.

Personifying a story allows an author to step back from the role of creator and to experience the story as an audience will. This is not to say that each and every detail in not important, but rather that the details are no more or less important than the overall impact of the story as a whole. This overview is one of the benefits of looking at a story as a Story Mind.

The following is excerpted from
Dramatica: A New Theory of Story
by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley

The Four Throughlines
It is not enough, however, to develop a complete Story Mind. That only creates the argument the audience will be considering. Equally important is how the audience is positioned relative to that argument.

Does an author want the audience to examine a problem dispassionately or to experience what it is like to have that problem? Is it more important to explore a possible solution or to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of alternative solutions? In fact, all of these points of view must be developed for a story to be complete.

An author's argument must go beyond telling audience members what to look at. I must also show them how to see it. It is the relationship between object and observer that creates perspective, and in stories, perspective creates meaning.

There are four different perspectives which must be explored as a story unfolds in order to present all sides of the issue at the heart of a story. They are the Objective Story Throughline, theMain Character Throughline, theObstacle Character Throughline, and theSubjective Story Throughline.

The Objective Story Throughline
The first perspective is from the Objective Story Throughline, so called because it is the most dispassionate look at the Story Mind.

Imagine the argument of a story as a battle between two armies. The Objective Story view is like that of a general on a hill overlooking the battle. The general focuses on unfolding strategies and, from this perspective, sees soldiers not by name but by their function on the field: foot soldier, grenadier, cavalryman, scout. Though the general may care very much for the soldiers, he must concentrate on the events as they unfold. Because it emphasizes events, the Objective Story Throughline is often thought of as plot, but as we shall see later, plot is so much more.

The Main Character Throughline
For a story to be complete, the audience will need another view of the battle as well: that of the soldier in the trenches. Instead of looking at the Story Mind from the outside, the Main Character Throughline is a view from the inside. What if that Story Mind were our own? That is what the audience experiences when it becomes a soldier on the field: audience members identify with the Main Character of the story.

Through the Main Character we experience the battle as if we were directly participating in it. From this perspective we are much more concerned with what is happening immediately around us than we are with the larger strategies that are really too big to see. This most personally involved argument of the story is the Main Character Throughline.

As we shall explore shortly, the Main Character does not have to be the soldier leading the charge in the battle as a whole. Our Main Character might be any of the soldiers on the field: the cook, the medic, the bugler, or even the recruit cowering in the bushes.

The Obstacle Character Throughline
To see the third perspective, keep yourself in the shoes of the Main Character for a moment. You are right in the middle of the story's battle. Smoke from dramatic explosions obscures the field. You are not absolutely sure which way leads to safety. Still, before there was so much turmoil, the way was clear and you are confident in your sense of direction.

Then, from out of the smoke a shadowy figure appears, solidly blocking your way. The shadowy figure is your Obstacle Character. You can't see well enough to tell if he is friend or foe. He might be a compatriot trying to keep you from stepping into a mine field. Or, he might be the enemy luring you into a trap. What to do! Do you keep on your path and run over this person or try the other path instead? This is the dilemma that faces a Main Character.

To completely explore the issue at the heart of a story, an Obstacle Character must present an alternative approach to the Main Character. The Obstacle Character Throughline describes the advocate of this alternative path and the manner in which he impacts Main Character.

The Subjective Story Throughline
As soon as the Main Character encounters his Obstacle, a skirmish ensues at a personal level in the midst of the battle as a whole. The two characters close in on one another in a theatrical game of "chicken," each hoping the other will give in.

The Main Character shouts at his Obstacle to get out of the way. The Obstacle Character stands fast, insisting that the Main Character change course and even pointing toward the fork in the road. As they approach one another, the interchange becomes more heated until the two are engaged in heart-to-heart combat.

While the Objective Story battle rages all around, the Main and Obstacle Characters fight their private engagement. The Subjective Story Throughline describes the course this passionate battle takes.
The Four Throughlines Of A Story You Know

Here are some examples of how to see the four throughlines of some well known stories. Completed stories tend to blend these throughlines together in the interest of smooth narrative style. From a structural point of view, however, it is important to see how they can be separated.
Star Wars
Objective Story Throughline: The Objective view of Star Wars sees a civil war in the galaxy between the Rebels and the evil Empire. The Empire has built a Death Star which will destroy the Rebels if it isn't destroyed first. To even hope for a successful attack, the Rebels need the plans to the Death Star which are in the possession of a farm boy and an old Jedi master. These two encounter many other characters while delivering the plans, ultimately leading to a climactic space-battle on the surface of the Death Star.

Main Character Throughline: The Main Character of Star Wars is Luke Skywalker. This throughline follows his personal growth over the course of this story. Luke is a farm boy who dreams of being a star pilot, but he can't allow himself to leave his foster parents to pursue his dreams. He learns that he is the son of a great Jedi Knight. When his foster parents are killed, he begins studying the religion of the Jedi: the Force. Surviving many dangerous situations, Luke learns to trust himself more and more. Ultimately he makes a leap of faith to trust his feelings over his computer technology while flying into battle as the Rebel's last hope of destroying the Death Star. It turns out well, and Luke is changed by the experience.

Obstacle Character Throughline: The Obstacle Character of Star Wars is Obi Wan Kenobi and this throughline describes his impact (especially on Luke Skywalker) over the course of the story. Obi Wan is a wizened old Jedi who sees everything as being under the mystic control of the Force. He amazes people with his resiliency and ability, all of which he credits to the Force.

Subjective Story Throughline: The Subjective Story throughline of Star Wars describes the relationship between Luke and Obi Wan. Obi Wan needs Luke to help him and he knows Luke has incredible potential as a Jedi. Luke, however, needs to be guided carefully because his desires are so strong and his abilities so new. Obi Wan sets about the manipulations which will help Luke see the true nature of the Force and learn to trust himself.
To Kill A Mockingbird
Objective Story Throughline: The Objective view of To Kill A Mockingbird sees the town of Maycomb with its horns locked in various attitudes over the rape trial of Tom Robinson. Due-process has taken over, however many people think this case should never see trial. As the trial comes to fruition, the people of the town argue back and forth about how the defense lawyer ought to behave and what role people should take in response to this alleged atrocity.

Main Character Throughline: The Main Character of To Kill A Mockingbird is Scout and her throughline describes her personal experiences in this story. Scout is a young tom-boy who wants things in her life to remain as simple as they've always been. Going to school, however, and seeing the town's reaction to her father's work introduces her to a new world of emotional complexity. She learns that there is much more to people than what you can see.

Obstacle Character Throughline: The Obstacle Character point of view in To Kill A Mockingbird is presented through Boo Radley, the reclusive and much talked about boy living next door to Scout. The mystique surrounding this boy, fueled by the town's ignorance and fear, make everyone wonder what he is really like and if he's really as crazy as they say.

Subjective Story Throughline: The Subjective Story view of To Kill A Mockingbird sees the relationship between Scout and Boo Radley. This throughline explores what it's like for these two characters to live next door to each other and never get to know one another. It seems any friendship they might have is doomed from the start because Boo will always be locked away in his father's house. The real problem, however, turns out to be one of Scout's prejudice against Boo's mysterious life. Boo has been constantly active in Scout's life, protecting her from the background. When Scout finally realizes this she becomes a changed person who no longer judges people without first trying to stand in their shoes.
Summary - The Grand Argument Story
We have described a story as a battle. The overview that takes in the full scope of the battle is the Objective Story Throughline.

Within the fray is one special soldier through whom we experience the battle first-hand. How he fares is the Main Character Throughline.

The Main Character is confronted by another soldier, blocking the path. Is he friend or foe? Either way, he is an obstacle, and the exploration of his impact on the Main Character is the Obstacle Character Throughline.

The Main and Obstacle Characters engage in a skirmish. Main says, "Get out of my way!", and Obstacle says, "Change course!" In the end, the steadfast resolution of one will force the other to change. The growth of this interchange constitutes the Subjective Story Throughline.

Taken together, the four throughlines comprise the author's argument to the audience. They answer the questions: What does it feel like to have this kind of problem? What's the other side of the issue? Which perspective is the most appropriate for dealing with that problem? What do things look like in the "big picture?"

Only through the development of these four simultaneous throughlines can the Story Mind truly reflect our own minds, pitting reason against emotion and immediate advantage against experience in the hope of resolving a problem in the most beneficial manner.

Copyright 2001 Melanie Anne Phillips
http://storymind.com

Quick Tip....

2009-04-29T13:54:00.001-07:00

The best cure for Writer's Block is Writer's Cramp.

Is story structure a myth?

2009-04-29T09:01:00.000-07:00

A whole flock of Story Gurus (myself included) will tell you that stories have structure. Therefore, if you learn that structure you'll improve your stories. Ostensibly, this will lead to fame, riches, a keen sense of accomplishment, and the unparalleled pleasure of the act of writing itself.

But is that true? Do stories have a structure? And even if they do, is there really any way to figure out what it is? Based solely on the number of competing theories, one might suspect that either stories don't have structures or that even those who spend their entire lives trying to figure it out, can't!

But there's an alternative explanation - actually, a couple of them, and I'd like to share those with you now....

First of all, we have two questions:

1. Do stories have structures?

2. Can we ever really define what they are?

We'll take them in turn.

Stories have structure. There, I said it. But now I have to prove it. And so I'll say something else - not all written works are stories. And many of those other kinds of writing don't have any structure at all. In other words, when people use the term "stories" in a casual way to mean any durn thing an author writes, well, then it is impossible to agree if stories have structure or not, 'cause some of them do and some of them don't.

So the first thing we need to do is divide what we commonly think of as stories into two different camps. One includes all those written works that have structure and the other contains all the written works that don't.

Now its pretty silly to say that that any written work could exist that has absolutely no structure. So I'll go back a bit on what I said. Even a dictionary has structure, sentences have structure, and paragraphs follow the conventions of a particular gramatic form.

Every random collection of words with no intent behind them has structure. Why? As a species we see animals in clouds, mythic figures in glops of stars, and impose images on inkblots. From this we can surmise that the human mind tries to impose structure even on chaos. No matter what written work we might examine, no matter how fluid and free-form, there will be those who see a clear structure in the thing.

Let's no be so picky. If you see structure in everything, then you already don't think structure is a myth so my work is done here. But when most people think of structure in regard to writing, they are not talking about grammar or form. Rather, they have "formula" in mind. In other words, writers tend to equate structure with a rigid formula for telling a story - a list of requirements that must be met or the story will suffer.

So let's go with that and refine our first question to read as follows:

1. Is there a rigid formula that must be followed to write a successful story?

No.

Wait a minute! Didn't I just say "Stories have structure," and now I've turn 'round and proclaimed , "No they don't."

Yes. Yes I did. And here's why.... Stories have structure but that structure isn't a rigid formula; it is a flexible form. That's why its so hard to see - its never quite the same from one story to the next.

Yet, the elements remain the same: There are Characters, Plot and Theme. There are personal problems, and goals, and moralities. There are acts, and scenes and beats. We feel their necessity, we sense their consistency, yet these are just impressions. The actual nature of the structure remains elusive, seen only in glimpses in shadows, never showing itself clearly.

This is not surprising. It is like the old story of three blind men trying to describe an elephant: One feeling the trunk, "It is long and twisty like a snake". Another, examining the leg, "It is tall and round like a tree." The last, exploring the ear, "It is thin and flat like a rug."

Story Gurus are each describing the same elephant in the room. Each is seeing a portion of the truth. While the descriptions seem in conflict or at least disparate, they are really just parts of the same beast.

I'm not here to promote my particular view of the critter. Rather, I figure my "truth" is also just another facet of a greater "Truth". So in regard to the questions I posed, let me answer like this:

Yes, stories have structure. No, we'll never see the whole of it. But the more story gurus you study, the more sides you see of what stories are, what they can be, how they work, and how to build them.

Embrace what works for you, reject what feels wrong, and strive to develop your own take on story structure, always remembering that no matter how clearly it appears to you, its probably just another piece of the puzzle.

The bottom line is apply structure only in ways that enhance your productivity and your enjoyment in pursuing your craft. Anything else has no more place in your writing life than a rigid structure can be applied to every kind of story.

Melanie Anne Phillips

Do You Write Like an Actor or a Director?

2009-04-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

by Melanie Anne Phillips
creator StoryWeaver, co-creator Dramatica
Here are two ways to approach the craft of writing. The first is to step into the role of each character and write it very personally, as if you were an actor portraying a part. The second is to consider what each character must do to fulfill its purpose in the story, then orchestrate their interactions as if you were directing a movie or stage play.

Each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages.

On the plus side, the Writer-Actor exudes passion. His or her characters are alive with a personal perspective with which the reader or audience can instantly and deeply identify.

Each character is seen through the eyes of all the others, so the reader/audience feels as if they come to know the characters, not just as players in the Big Picture, but as real people who not only love and hate, but are loved and hated as well.

This creates a rich emotional fabric to a story. But the benefits of being a Writer-Actor don’t stop there. Indeed, even the narrative itself benefits from this approach. Small experiences and individual observations illuminate the environments through which the characters pass.

A Writer-Actor’s narrative is likely to be filled with sensory descriptions as to the temperature, background sounds, colors, textures, tastes, and smells that are present in each scene. In this way, not only do the characters feel real, but so does the world in which they move.

But what about the downside of such a personal approach? The greatest danger of allowing oneself to actually become a character while writing is that one loses site of the needs and structure of the overall story.

Characters tend to take on a life of their own and almost demand that they move in certain directions, even if those are in conflict with the purposes of the story at large. In addition, the benefits of some unifying overview are often lost in the cacophony of individual voices.

Having briefly explored the pros and cons of the Writer-Actor approach, let’s examine some of the benefits and drawbacks of the Writer-Director’s method.

In the plus column, the Writer-Director produces a vision. The characters take on a grand importance as pawns in a larger scheme, a greater meaning.

Each character is seen as a cog in an elegant machine, inexorably moving forward like clockwork toward a specific purpose which will ultimately be revealed. The natures of their interrelationships are discovered and defined as understandable threads in the tapestry of the tale.

In addition, characters are tied directly to plot, theme, and genre, integrating them into the story as a whole, illustrating their interdependence with the forces that shape their world and, by inference, ours as well.

But in the negative column, a Writer-Director tends to objectify characters, leading them to come across more as puppets than people. All the beats of character growth are precisely hit, yet the overall flow can feel forced and formulaic.

What’s more, the stage on which the characters strut can seem more Machiavellian than organic, and the story plods along in some sort of Calvinistic pre-destination rather than an unknown realm in which anything might happen.

If you have begun to think that perhaps neither of these approaches, by itself, is sufficient to the task of creating a passionate story that leads to a well-defined message, you are correct.

And that is the point of this exercise. By nature each of us tends to be one of these two kinds of writers. As a result, we excel in half of what readers/audiences are craving, yet fall short in the other side of their needs.

The solution, of course, is to learn to employ tools in the areas in which we do not have natural ability or inclination. That is, in fact, the concept behind learning the craft of writing. We study and exercise not to make ourselves more talented, but to supplement our effectiveness in those areas in which we are not as innately gifted.

So, the first step of the task at hand is to identify which kind of writer you are. The second step is to practice writing with the other method as well.

To this end it is pretty easy to determine whether you are a Writer-Actor or a Writer-Director. Just sit down to create a character from scratch. Pick a name, a gender, and age, and a job or vocation. Then try each of the following.

Based only on that limited information about that character try to put yourself in the character’s shoes. Imagine you are them, they are you. Then see if you can come up with a problem in their lives, a description of how it affects them and what they are thinking of doing about it. Who are the other people in their lives, and how are they affected at a personal and/or emotional level by the problem and by the potential solutions?

If you found that exercise easy, perhaps even fun, then you are a Writer-Actor by nature. If you found it tedious, uninspiring, and fruitless, you’re a Writer-Director.

To be sure, try the other method: Start with the same bare-bones information about the character. Ask yourself, who are the other characters with whom this person would be interacting. What kinds of conflicts might occur among them. What kinds of problems would result from this conflict, and what would it lead your character to do?

If this was the easier one, then you are a Writer-Director without doubt. You see, both approaches are trying to get to the same place, but they come to it from a different creative mind set. And in so doing, they miss different things along the way.

The remedy is obvious. To enhance your abilities as a writer, you need to be fluent in both approaches, using them in a complementary fashion to fully ignite the fires of passion within a solid logistic framework. And even if you have a great built-in sense of one or both of these, it can only help to fine tune them so that your story development and storytelling become even more powerful.

Here are two plans to help you find both. Well call this strategy, “Hats and Charts”.

A surprising number of authors actually wear different hats while writing different characters. I’m not speaking metaphorically here, they actually wear physical hats. This helps them imagine themselves as a given character, such as a cop or a chef.

Not surprisingly, the extension of this is to wear costumes – the clothing you expect your character might brandish. It can be as simple as a scarf, the way you comb your hair, your make-up, perfume or cologne, or all the way to a full wardrobe.

It is really not as silly as it sounds. Do you not feel differently depending upon the kind of clothing you wear on a given day? Does not a uniform influence the way a person thinks? It is not any less true that a writer’s work will very depending upon what he or she is wearing while creating.

Try music that a character might play, put on a television show or movie your character might watch. Tack pictures your character might have in their home to a cork board in your line of sight as you write. Perhaps add pictures that seem like the realm in which they move – a desert island, a ship, the dark dungeons below the Vatican.

All of these ideas grow from the “Hats” concept. You can and should give some time to thinking about other similar ways of making yourself feel like your character feels.

To become a better Writer-Director, you need a completely different plan – “Charts”. The idea here is to objectify your characters – to see them as components in the store, elements with which you will build the tale.

You can begin my making a chart of each character and listing as many details about them as you can. For example, where did each character go to school? What hobbies does each have? What are their religious affiliations, if any? To what political party do they belong? How strongly do they subscribe to the philosophies in these groups? What are their physical abilities/disabilities? What are their hair colors, skin texture, skin color, weight?

Create a time-line graph for each characters’ emotional journey through the story. Use different colors for different moods or feelings and plot the intensity of those emotions. By examining these passions analytically, it helps you see patterns and uncover skipped or missed beats in the flow.

Using index cards and colored yarn show all the relationships among your characters including familial, professional, historical, philosophical, and so on.

Try writing a description of each character as if you were a private detective hired to follow them for a day. You have no personal interest in the character, but your job is to document everything they do (and even how they act) in as much detail as possible.

Each of these exercises helps you step out of a character’s shoes and see them in a functional manner, both as themselves and also how they interact with others.

As you have no doubt surmised, the perspectives of the Writer-Actor and Writer-Director are so divergent that it is virtually impossible to do both at the same time. In the writing process, therefore, you should use them in succession.

Begin with the approach to which you are naturally inclined for this will provide you with the greatest raw inspiration. When you have finished a section or your Muse comes up for air, use the opportunity (which would otherwise be wasted down-time) to apply the exercises from your secondary approach to the material you have just written.

By revisiting the material while it is still fresh in your creative spirit, but from an alternate point of view, you can reprocess the material and fill in the gaps left by your initial creative burst.

Once you have finished the complete story, go back and run it through both approaches again to ensure that not only do the individual scenes sing like a Spring bird, but that the entire work unfolds smoothly, like the passage of a fine season.

In the end, if you take the time to learn, practice and employ both methods of developing characters, your stories will be far more well rounded and well received.

Story Title Idea

2009-03-13T10:27:00.001-07:00

Every once in a while I publish some of my own creative work and notions. This is an idea for a story title I added today to my writer's notebook:

Title for a detective story or a mystery:

"The Quality of the Crime"

Alternative:

"A Crime of Quality"