Starting today, in addition to new writing tips and old favorites, I’m going to be posting links to my entire 113 part twelve hour video program on the Dramatica theory, one part per day.
This page also allows you to download an mp4 video of each part and an mp3 audio of the soundtrack. Enjoy!
Link to Story Structure – Part 1 (video):
http://storymindguru.com/
Here’s a note from a Dramatica user and my reply.
(Careful, highly technical discussion follows that bears little connection to stories or writing)
Dramatica user:
Just as an experiement, I cleared the storyform, and opened the plot progression screen. I was struggling with whether my MC’s Signpost 1 was The Present or Contemplation — although I was sure that his Signpost 4 was either The Past or Memories.
When I gave him The Present as Signpost 1, and then The Past as Signpost 4, it reduced the number of possible storyforms to 288.
However, when I assigned Contemplation to his Signpost 1, and Memories to Signpost 4, ZING! Dramatica filled in all the other signposts for all throughlines, and the number of possible storyforms was only 32!
I went back to Signpost 1 being The Present, to see if I could get the same thing to happen with any of the other possible options for Signpost 4, but to no avail.
So, what is unique about the Contemplation and Memories combination? I’m truly interested in knowing what is going on in Dramatica’s feverish mind! 🙂
My reply:
Sorry to say, I can’t answer that one off the top of my head. Not to be impertinent, but that’s why we built the Story Engine. What I’m saying is that the complexities of the engine as to “why” any given combination might come up is a lot like looking at a pattern on a Rubik’s Cube and trying to answer how it got to that state.
Here’s a conceptual clue, though. Not everything in the Story Engine is symmetrical. You’d think it would be, at first blush, but it isn’t (and in a moment I’ll explain why). It is because of the asymmetry that you can think of it as an unbalance tire. Depending on your speed, instead of turning in a consistent manner the tire will develop a wobble under certain conditions – like an off-balanced washing machine in the spin cycle. What you are seeing with the different degrees of constraint is the product of such an intentional, designed-in unbalance.
Now, why would we do that? Or more to the point, why would Dramatica do that? Well, this comes down to the fact that the current implementation of Dramatica is a “K-based” system. As you are likely aware, Dramatica’s model is partially built from permutations of a KTAD quad – Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire. So, each should be treated equally to accurately represent all four “bases” in a story’s DNA.
But, in a four-demensional universe, you can’t monitor a four-dimensional constantly re-balancing model because you have to hold at least one of those items in check in order to use it as the yard-stick against which the movements of the other three are measured. It is kind of like trying to plot the up and down movements of the four corners of a sheet of plywood balancing on rock at the center. All four corners will move up and down so that the plywood maintains its integrity as a flat plane. From the outside, that’s easy to see. But we can’t step outside our own minds, which is what Dramatica is really a model of.
So, we are always in the position of actually standing on the plywood and moving up and down with it. From that point of view, the movement of each corner relative to the ground is no longer a simple predictive wave, but becomes a complex “unbalanced” series of up and down movements and no longer seems even from corner to corner because the corner you are standing on has been removed from the equation.
Therefore, in order to actually see the model work in four dimensions, we have to pick a corner upon which to stand. In the software model, that corner is K (Knowledge) since our Western logic-based mentalities are all geared to the definitive. When you choose to “bias” the model toward K, you can then use the engine to predict, because the bias is consistent from side to side and top to bottom. But, that bias has to show up some-place. And now we return to our unbalanced tire analogy. Most everything in a biased system will appear no different in operation than any other part. But, like the tire, under certain conditions of speed and road, you can see the wobble.
This wobble occurs because the human mind tries to keep things apparently flat and level, regardless of the bias. In a quad, we like to see it as flat. But, in fact, the temporal journey around the quad is a progression, and every time we move (even mentally) from one quadrant to the next, we also get a vertical rise. This is because it is not really a quad, but more like a “Slinky” kids toy (that spiral of coiled wire that walks down stairs). From the end, it looks like a circle. From the side (when stretched out) it looks like a sine wave. But it is really a helix, when seen from a 3/4 angle. So too, the quad form is like looking at the Slinky of our minds from the end, compressing time out of the picture as we seek (in a K-based system) to flatten it out so we can parse and define each piece.
But that vertical rise is still in there. (That’s why the Dramatica table has four levels and is not just a flat chart.) But since we mentally treat each item in the quad as being on the same plane as the next, we get an easier understanding of it, but by the time we get to the fourth item, we’ve been sweeping that vertical rise under the carpet until it has risen up so much that we can’t ignore it any more. So, we do a course-correction and throw all that extra vertical stuff into the fourth and final item in the quad. That, by the way, is why many quads seem to have three items that are quite similar and one that seems kind of “out of left field” – like “Past” Present” “Future” and “Progress” – Progress doesn’t quite fit because it is picking up all that vertical material in one quadrant. (Imagine now, how long it took to create the Dramatica chart so that this “fourth item difference” was consistent in every quad, thereby creating a consistent bias across the whole breadth and depth of the model! – In fact, it took two years for that alone.)
Now, since we elected to employ a K-based system in order to conform as well as possible to our logic-based culture, the farther away you get from K, the more the wobble shows up. But, because we hide it for the first three items, it tends to be invisible (thereby giving similar story points similar effects on the model) until we get to that last quadrant where the inconsistency appears (just appears, not really) to run amok. In a K-based system of logic, the farthest thing away (and home to the greatest wobble) is the Desire Quadrant. And, Desire is the center of female mental sex (now called “holistic” problem solving in the current version of the Dramatica software).
As you are no doubt familiar, “Problem Solving Technique” (previously called “mental sex”) describes the overall operating system of the mind in two flavors – space-based and time-based. A space-based mind is most compatible with Knowledge-based logic. In fact, a K-based model is totally biased to make the most “intuitive sense” to a spatial mind. As such, most of the wobble (though not all) goes into the Dynamics, rather than the structure. So, very often, such a wobble will occur because of a choice made in the dynamic questions, but the reverberations of that wobble will show up structurally, just like a jet flying by might rattle your windows.
One of the most powerful wobbles, then, is created in the Mental Sex (Problem Solving Technique) area. Now, I can’t say that’s where your story’s wobble is coming from, but I can say that it is likely due to some element of your dynamics that tends more toward a temporal view of story than a spatial view.
Here’s a final clue for you – (speaking generally in a bell-curve sort of way) – many men see women as being 180 degrees apart in how they think. Many women see men as being only 90 degrees apart, thereby expecting men to easily get in touch with and express their feelings. But in fact, men and women are 270 degrees apart, meaning that while women have it right (90 degrees of difference) men also have it right because to get there you have to go the other way ’round the quad making the direction to connect 180 degrees of difference.)
So, as you can see, this kind of “apples and oranges” differences in thinking spreads out all over the model. And when the two mental operating systems come into conflict in a K-based model, the wobble develops and manifests itself as a different impact for what seems ought to be the same.
Sorry I couldn’t just give you a quick answer, but the question you asked is one of the most complex.
Hope it at least clarifies the issue.
Melanie
Today is the birthday of my friend, writing partner, and co-creator of Dramatica, Chris Huntley! (All bow down and hail his Chris-ness!) To celebrate, here’s a link to an animated gif image of him starring in a movie we made about a third of a century ago…
http://web.me.com/chris_huntley/The_Strangeness/Welcome.html
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.
Thought: For a long time, I’ve wanted to write a book entitled “Abandoning the Logic” about the fact that while half of what we are is driven by reason, the other equally important half embodies our purpose and meaning. There is as much understanding and as many conclusions to be gained by one as the other, but of different flavors and varieties.
In our Dramatica theory of story we often say, “You can’t become the same as someone else just by being as they are are; you also have to “not be” as they aren’t.” But our mind’s don’t easily focus on the negative space, and so we strive harder and harder to achieve by adding to the mix, never considering that the recipe may not be achievable that way because it has an ingredient that must not be there.
In Dramatica, we see characters who change by “starting” something new – adding a new trait they previously did not express. We also see characters who change by “stopping” something old – shedding an old trait they previously expressed.
This shows up in stories as characters who could solve their problem if only they would just…. Or, characters whose problem would be solved if only they just wouldn’t…. In the first case, the character needs a catalyst to get going. In the second, it needs an inhibitor to hold it back.
This same dynamic is harmonically reflected in the plot with two Dramatica story points called, not surprisingly, “Catalyst” and “Inhibitor.” The first acts like a gas pedal, accelerating the progress of the story forward. The second acts like a brake pedal, slowing the progress of the story down.
We see these dynamics everywhere in life, and yet, because ours is a culture based on observation, definition and reason, we focus on only one half of this dynamic couple – we explore, map, build our understandings and make our decisions on what we see, never considering that half the time our answers can only be found in what lies between the elements of the delineated world.
Have you ever seen that picture of a vase that turns out to be an optical illusion in which the “negative space” carved out on either side of the shape of the vase presents the silhouettes of two men facing each other? So what is the picture really of, the vase or the faces? Naturally, the answer is “both.”
And herein lies the problem. We look outward and see things – situations and activities (external states and processes) – then we look inside and see the in-betweens – attitudes and cogitations (internal states and processes), BUT we seldom look outward for the in-betweens and inward for the elements.
Dramatica broke new ground in seeking to apply logic to our feelings, to map the mind’s processes in a “Table of Story Elements” by casting each process as an object – a building block of the mental/emotional flow – so that mental equations might be written to describe the manner in which each process is called in a particular order to create the DNA code of each individual consideration.
Of course, this is well hidden under the skirt of story structure since our market was writers not psychologists. But it is there. In fact, we codified it aside from the story use and called it Mental Relativity, for it describes the relationships among Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire (the four essential “bases” from which all mental processes are built) the same way physics describes the relationships among Mass, Energy, Space and Time.
Knowledge is the Mass of the mind. Thought is the Energy. (This is conceptual of course – describing the ways in which they relate, not intended to equate them in substance).
An example of this relationship can be seen in the following… Mass and Energy can relate in two primary ways. First, Energy can be attached to Mass. We see this in the kinetic energy associated with a billiard ball in motion, for example. But, Mass can also be transmuted into energy, as in thermonuclear explosions.
Similarly, Knowledge can be moved around and assembled into large constructs by the expenditure of Thought. In other words, Thought can be attached to Knowledge to put it in motion. But, Knowledge and Thought can also be transmuted one into the other. But, as with E=MC2, it takes a lot of Thought to create a solid piece of Knowledge and, conversely, a single bit of Knowledge can generate an awful lot of Thought. Hence, the reason we named the psychology behind Dramatica “Mental Relativity.”
But having turned the same definitive techniques we employ in the external world upon our own minds, we have still left one final realm of our existence unexplored – to map out our external world in terms of the in-betweens – to see substance as process and time as an object, to document external processes as feelings and external situations as moods.
Now I realize this sounds pretty far out there. And it is. It it in the last place our logic would look – the last place it has looked. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced that logic can work in that world. It may be outside the realm of the set of real numbers and into the realm of the imaginary ones, such as the square root of -1.
Yet that, in and of itself, does not invalidate its importance. Rather, it elevates the value of seeking to understand (or, perhaps that is the wrong word) to “resonate” with the digital in terms of the analog.
This, I believe, is the last frontier of our efforts to understand ourselves and our world. And, quite frankly, I’d love to put some footprints in it in an area where no one has tread before.
Having spent a career employing the logical method, I’ve yearned to explore the passionate and to document it in a language not yet invented. But, time being what it is, and there being precious little of it, I figured I’d just give y’all the title and the concept for now so it will not be an idea wholly unexpressed. And if I ever do get both the time and the motivation, I’ll tackle the book itself.
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