The "Grand Argument" Story

Scroll down for a streaming video on this topic

Why does the Dramatica Chart have a limited size, especially since we, as a species, seem to have an unlimited supply of problems? The quick answer is that we only have a limited number of kinds of problems, they just manifest themselves in different specifics.

But there’s an even better explanation. Bear with me…. It is a well-known psychological fact that short-term memory can hold seven items (+ or – 2). We have seven days in a week, seven is considered a magic or lucky number, phone numbers are seven digits (minus the area code).

Why is seven so important? And more important, what does this have to do with story and the size of the Dramatica Chart? As described above, the Dramatica Chart is built from eight items – the four external dimensions and the four internal ones. And that’s about as big a thought as the mind can hold at one time.

As an illustration, try this thought experiment. Picture a piece of twine. Easy to do. Now, picture that twine twisted along its length like a candy-cane. Again, pretty easy. Next, imagine that twisted twine again twisted into a spiral shape like a slinky. In your mind’s eye, you can probably still see the twists on the twine itself, even while you are also seeing the length of twine wrapped into that spiral shape.

Now, take that slinky-line twine, and spiral the spiral. You know, like you used to do as a kid. You take a slinky, stretch it out, then wrap it around your leg in a spiral. At this point, though it take a bit of work, you can probably still see the candy-cane twists along the body of the twine, even while simultaneously observing the slinky shape of the overall length of the twine and the bigger spiral as it wraps around your leg.

Finally, remove your leg from the center of the largest spirals and assume the twine holds its shape. Try to go one more level and twist the spiraled spiral into a larger spiral, even while maintaining the candy cane twists on the twine itself.

If you are like most people, you’ve reached your limit. You can focus on any part of this construct and see it clearly, as well as the twists one level larger and one level smaller. But to try and picture a three dimensional object that is twisting at four different levels – well that’s seven things to consider and is the limit of short-term memory.

Go any larger and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who could see the smallest twist all the way to the largest at the same time. Theoretically, it is not possible for a mind that exists in a three dimensional brain to go that far.

Why? Well, we have four dimensions in the external world and four dimensions in the inner world. (They really all exist in our minds, but we have four kinds of external measurements we can take to see how things are – Mass, Energy, Space, and Time – and four internal measurements available – Knowledge, Thought, Ability, and Desire.

This gives us eight places to look. But, at any given moment, our mind – the seat of our consciousness – has to be somewhere. So, our "self" sits on one of these areas to look at the other seven. That gives us one place to be and seven slots we can fill with information. And that is why our short-term memory is just seven items.
Getting back to the Dramatica Chart, because it provides all eight dimensions, it can produce with it as much detail as we can hold in our minds at one time without losing track of the big picture.

Recall our discussion of how a story structure needed to include all the ways the audience might consider to solve the story’s problem in order to prove to their satisfaction that the author’s purported solution is the best of the worst. What is to keep the audience from coming up with an infinite number of alternatives?

Simply, for any given problem, the capacity of the audience mind is limited by the same seven dimensions (plus one to stand on) factor. If you satisfy all the potential solutions within those eight dimensions, you satisfy the audience because anything larger or small that goes beyond that scope would seem unreasonable or not pertinent.

In Dramatica Theory we call this limit, the Size of Mind Constant. And, we call any story that covers all the reasonable ways in which a given problem might be solved a Grand Argument Story.

Author’s arguments may be insufficient or may be overstated, but a Grand Argument story is one in which the argument is just big enough and no bigger than necessary to cover all reasonable alternatives as defined by the size of mind constant.

And that limit? Well, that’s what determines that the Dramatica Chart is four towers, each with four levels.

So leaving theory behind (for quite a while we hope) all you need to do as an author is explore your story’s problem to full extent of the Dramatica Chart and your argument will be exactly the right size to convince any audience.

Video Clip - The Grand Argument Story

Dramatica - Where'd the Idea Come From?

A chapter from a book in progress about the theory that makes Dramatica work:

I don’t want to get too technical about how it all works – at least not this early in a book billed as a "conversational exploration of the Dramatica theory." Still, some of you may be wondering how we came up with such a thing as the Dramatica chart, and also perhaps if there is any significance to such an elegant design beyond the realm of story structure. So let’s take a break for a moment to explore the roots of the Dramatica Theory.

(If you aren’t curious about the origins of the theory and its implication, just skip ahead to the next section, eh?)

Chris Huntley and I began our exploration of story structure in 1980. He and I had met a few years earlier while we were both attending the University of Southern California and both making short films.
I had left school early to go to work in the industry and, frustrated by working on the periphery of the industry at that time, I put together a low-budget feature film project and enlisted Chris’ partnership in producing a movie.

The result was a horrible little film that suffered no so much from budgetary restrictions as from our lack of knowledge of sound story structure. So, when we began to consider our next production, we thought we’d first take a stab at trying to determine what a sound story structure ought to be.

We made lists and graphs and assembled everything we knew. And we discovered… that we didn’t know much about story structure! In fact, we put the whole project on hold until we could gather a little more experience from the industry and from life in general.

Chris went into motion control special effects work for Imax movies, and I went into the industry at large as a writer/producer/director and mostly editor of non-features, high budget industrials, and educationals.
Later, Chris become the co-founder of Write Bros. – the company that created the world’s first screenplay formatting software (and won a technical achievement award from the Academy).

One day in 1991, Chris asked me to breakfast and asked if I’d like to start up our old story structure project again. I was thrilled to do so. I was editing a feature film at the time so each morning before I went off to the editing room and before Chris went off to be V.P. of his company, we’d get together over coffee and try to crack the story structure nut.

We were both committed to this project, and it wasn’t long before we started having some insights that made sense to us but that we had never heard in any of our classes at USC.

After six months, we had created a number of understandings about story structure, but lacked a unifying concept that would tie them all together. We tried starting a book about our findings, but got bogged down. Eventually, Chris suggested that we present our work to his partner, Steve Greenfield.

Steve was completely taken with the ideas we offered, and he and Chris determined that rather than a book, perhaps our best approach was to create a new piece of software for writers that would help them employ our concepts in building sound stories.

I was asked to come to their company as a consultant, and as my editing job had just completed, I agreed. Thus began a three year full-time effort to redefine the nature of what stories are and how they work.
Few are those who have the luxury of being paid to spend three years sitting in a room pondering the mechanics of story structure to the exclusion of all else. But that was the situation I was provided.

We began with index cards and post-it notes, sticking every individual concept (and there were hundreds of them) all over all four walls of my office, and later of the entire conference room!

Seeing it all spread out like that made it possible to note certain patterns and connections among some of these notions. We began to see that psychology played a large part in stories.

This came about by Chris asking a crucial question: "If the Main Character (like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol) is actually the cause of the story’s problems, why can’t he see it and just change?"

Of course, this spoke of issues far beyond stories that were essential to our own psychological issues as a species.

We started to gather all the psychological material we had developed into one place on one of the walls. Some of it seemed to fit well with the main character, but other material, though clearly psychological in nature, seemed to pertain more to the story at large, though we had no idea what to make of this. There was no pattern that explained it.

One day, while staring for the nth hour at that wall, it just hit me – maybe the psychological material we had discovered in stories weren’t about just the main character – maybe they were about the story itself. Maybe the story itself had a psychology! In fact, perhaps story structure was a model of the story’s mind!

I ran down the hall to Chris’ office and hit him with the notion. As was his practice, he leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and fell into a meditative state, closing all else from his mind. After a few moments he sat upright and responded, "I believe you are right."

From that point forward, everything we did was based on the Story Mind concept. We reorganized all of our material assuming that it referred to the psychology of the story’s mind. Suddenly, patterns appeared, relationships were suggested, and the various components we had discovered fell right into place.

Our arrangements became more and more complex until we found ourselves hard-pressed to make them work in a single chart. It was then that we tried putting the cards in levels, placing "smaller" units under larger umbrella units into which they seemed to fall.

But how to depict this nested structure? Chris played around with pyramid shapes, I tried twisting mobius strips around donut-shaped toroids. Eventually, we settled on the four towers – not as the only shape of story structure, but as the most convenient shape with which to appreciate its internal mechanisms and relationships.

Later, I read that Crick and Watson (the two fellows that discovered the double-helix shape of DNA) didn’t find it through observation. At the time, the best imagery available of DNA was made by bombarding DNA’s crystalline form with X-Rays.

But Crick and Watson had a gut feeling that the shape of "live" DNA was more elegant, perhaps some sort of spiral. They decided to play with a number of alternative shapes as candidates that might explain all the properties that had been observed about DNA. To this end, they ordered a set of custom-made industrial "tinker-toys" which were used by chemists to illustrate molecular bonds.

They play around with various combination until, while building a ladder shape, they twisted it to form the now-familiar double-helix. As soon as they actually saw this representation, then new intuitively that it was correct and ran off to share their work with colleagues.

Chris and I unknowingly followed the same process. In the years that followed, we came to the conclusion that the towers are like the crystalline form of DNA – it represents a mind’s psychology at rest. But the mind is a machine made of time – every component, every gear and widget is actually a process.

When you put it into motion to create a "live" model, like DNA it becomes a helix, but in the case of story structure it forms a quad-helix, rather than a double one.

That’s about as deep as I want to go into how the Dramatica Chart developed in the first place. But, as a special treat for those of you who are gluttons for punishment, here’s an explanation of the workings of the structure, conceptually (for now!).

Where to begin without getting all technical-ish… Well, that’s a good start already!

Okay. The Dramatica Chat has four levels. And it has four Towers. What do these represent? The four towers represent the four key elements of our minds. Just as DNA is made up of four bases: adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T), the structure of the Story Mind is made up of four bases: knowledge (abbreviated K), thought (T), ability (A) and desire (D).

Knowledge is the Mass of the mind. Thought is the mind’s Energy. Ability is the equivalent of Space and Desire is the counterpart to Time.

Just as mass and energy can relate in a simple way, such as when force slams one billiard ball into another, thought can rearrange knowledge and bring disparate pieces of knowledge together or move them apart.
Mass and energy can also interact in a more complex manner in which, for example, a small amount of mass can release a tremendous amount of energy in a nuclear explosion. Similarly, Knowledge and thought can interact so that a small amount of knowledge can generate an awful lot of thought (and conversely, it take a lot of thought to create a single bit of true knowledge!)

Ability is like space insofar as space defines the edges of what exists from what does not. Ability defines what we know from what we don’t know. It determines how much of anything is known vs. how much is unknown. It is from this that calculation that our minds assess our ability.

Desire is functions in the mind as Time does in the universe. Desire does not exist without a comparative between what was, what is, and what may be, just as time does not exist without an appreciation of past, present, and future.

So, the four towers are Knowledge, Thought, Ability, and Desire. (Which is which and why is for a later discussion. This, after all, is just an introductory section for a conversational book about story structure!)
But, the four levels represent Mass, Energy, Space, and Time directly. The four dimensions of the outer world are reflected by the four dimensions of the inner world. In fact, each set is a reflection of the other with neither being the origin.

Existence cannot be understood wholly from either a material or immaterial perspective. Perception is required to enable existence, and vice versa. Thus, the Dramatica chart isn’t just some stupid cutesy little made-up list of a few dramatic concepts. Nope. Its actually a material/immaterial continuum in which all that exists can be described by its co-ordinates within the construct.

Now, before I start sounding like the "Architect" from the Matrix Trilogy (assuming it is not too late already), we’ll put these topics to rest for a while and return to our happy-go-lucky free-wheelin’ conversational introduction to Dramatica Theory. So there.

The Dramatica Chart

Scroll down for a streaming video on this topic

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.  (Download a free copy of the Dramatica Chart in PDF)

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.

Video Clip - The Dramatica Chart

A Story is an Argument

Scroll down for a streaming video on this topic

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 their 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.

Video Clip - A Story is an Argument

Own the entire 12 Hours of Video Lessons on DVD for just $19.95 (Click for Details)

Introducing the Story Mind

Scroll down for streaming video on this topic

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.

Video Clip - Introducing the Story Mind

Own the entire 12 Hours of Video Lessons
on DVD for just $19.95 (Click for Details)