Narrative Structure and the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership)

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Narrative works in the real world as accurately and efficiently as it does in fiction.  Not surprising since fictional narrative is nothing more than our attempt to refine and understand how people are driven and how they behave in the real world.

At a most basic level, one can see real world narratives emerging in the news every day.  And, with only a little training, one can not only understand how things are, but even project where they will go from here.

A good example is the current news story that the United States will be pulling out of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

What follows is a non-political assessment of the narrative significance of that move, and where it will likely lead.

To understand this analysis, you need only know two tiny concepts out of the entire universe of narrative structure, and these are they:

  1.  Narrative is always structured in groups of four dramatic items.
  2. Of the four, three seem similar in nature and one seems not quite the same.

First, the narrative analysis of the TPP, followed by a more in-depth explanation of these two theory points so you might be better able to apply them to your own real world analyses and your story development as well.

Narrative Analysis of the TPP

There are four world players in the trade agreement narrative:

The EU, the Russian Economic Block, the TPP, and China.  As described above, three of these are trade partnerships and one is a single country, which satisfies both of the two theory points listed above.

The quick analysis is that with the United States pulling out of the TPP, there are now five players trying to fit into the world economic quad:  The EU, the Russian Block, the TPP (without the USA), China, and the United States.

The projection of where things will go from here is that the three trading partnerships will mostly hold fast (Brexit, notwithstanding), putting the United States and China in direct economic conflict with one another for the four place at the table.

Like a game of musical chairs, the USA and China will seek to push the other into economic decline through currency manipulations, tariffs, and individual deal-making.  In order to be economically strong enough to hold its own in this fight, the USA must pull back from its current economic and military commitments overseas.  We see this happening already in the stated plans of the current administration in Washington.

In the short run, we will be able to muster the wherewithal to stand toe to toe against China economically, but due to the pull back of United States influence in the world, China will step in to fill that vacuum and gradually form alliances with our allies, increasing their world influence at the expense of ours.  But, as they say, that is another narrative.

In short summary, by pulling out of the TPP we are effectively declaring a one-on-one economic war with China in the belief we can triumph on our own, rather than as a group of economically allied nations.

For the long view, here is more about this world economic quad, how and why it came to be, how it functions, and where it will likely go from here:

In our work using narrative analysis for all of the major United States intelligence organizations over the past five years, we learned a bit about the history of how these trade partnerships emerged, which informs this analysis.  (Knowing the back story always aids in understanding the current story).

When the old Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, it recognized it needed to shed many of its component republics, such as Chzechoslovia and the Ukraine.  In anticipation of this, it sought western assurances and received promises that the west would not move to exert any political or economic control over these republics.

However, once the Soviet Union dissolved, the Russian Federation discovered that the west was so tempted by the potential power and profits of eastern Europe that, gradually, both political and economic inroads were made.

The EU became the first of the world-size trading partnerships, and its formation clearly threatened the economic and political security of the Russian Federation.  In response, the Russian Federation began to sign up its former satellite republics into exclusive mutual trade agreements as part of a new Russian Economic Block.

Each of these became internally unified and emerged as major economic players on the world stage.  That left North America, South America and the Pacific Rim as of yet unorganized and trying to go it alone against these large trading partnerships.  It also left China on its own as well.

The TPP began as a result of the following reasoning – that China has virtually the same land area as the USA, as well as being almost identical in natural resources, economy, technological capability and trade.  They also have more than three times the population of the United States.  Further, our outreach through the financial and military support of other nations is a great drain on our economy, whereas the Chinese do not put nearly as much of their GDP into these kinds of endeavors and are growing faster that we are.  So, while we are near parity at the moment, the trend is for China to overtake us as the world leader in the next century, if not before.

In order to do economic battle with not only China but the two economic partnerships as well, we organized the TPP to gather all the remaining independent players into a third partnership that would, through its combined strength, be able to hold out against the growing Chinese power for the foreseeable future.

The problem is that in all of these partnerships, the economically stronger nations end up supporting the economically weaker nations in the hope that eventually, all the member nations will rise, even if the stronger nations have to carry the start-up costs for a while.  That makes the partnerships unpopular in the stronger nations leading to some defections from the ranks as with Brexit.

This brings us to the current situation – the fore story – in which three trading partnerships are strong enough to claim a place in the quad and do business with each other, while the USA and China do economic battle with each other, weakening them both so that in the long run, each may lose its position or potential position as a world leader with the economic partnerships becoming political partnerships that then determine the destinies of all remaining independent nations.

Naturally, for the independent nations, the most practical solution is to sew the seeds of disruption in the three trading partnerships so that they fracture and eventually fail, leaving both the USA and China as the defacto world leaders, albeit in their weakened condition from the ongoing economic conflict between them.

While these outlooks appear bleak, narrative structure provides much more positive potential outcomes, including win-win scenarios in which all players might prosper.  But, as alluded to earlier, that is another story.

Contact me about real world narrative analysis

The Radical Story Mind

By Melanie Anne Phillips

The central concept of the Dramatica theory of narrative structure is the existence of a Story Mind – essentially the notion that every story has its own psychology and its own personality, as if the story itself were a character in its own right.

So it the Story Mind a radical idea, or a valuable new way of thinking about stories and how to structure them?

To answer this question, let us look into the nature of communication between an author and an audience, specifically into the telling of tales, the weaving of stories and the differences between the two.

When an author tells a tale, he 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 “here.” 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.

This structure is easily seen in the 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 simple 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 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. Of course, an audience is not likely to be moved to accept such a bold claim, regardless of how well the tale is told.

In the early days of storytelling, an author related the tale to his audience in person. Should he aspire to wield more power over his audience and elevate his tale to become a blanket statement, the audience would no doubt cry, “Foul!” and demand that he prove it. Someone in the audience might bring up an alternative path that hadn’t been included in the tale.

The author might then counter that rebuttal to his blanket statement by describing how the path proposed by the audience was either not as good or better (depending on his desired message) than the path he did include.

One by one, he could 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.

As a result, some authors opted to stick with simple tales of good and bad, but others pushed the blanket statement tale forward until the art form evolved into 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, when creating a story, and author starts with a tale of good or bad, expands it to a blanket statement of best or worst, and then includes all the reasonable alternatives to the path he is promoting to preclude any counters to his message. In other words, while a tale is a statement, a story becomes 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 anyone might happen to take 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 human mind would normally take in examining that central issue. In effect, the structure of the story now represents the whole range of considerations a person would make if fully exploring that issue.

In essence, the structure of the story as a whole now represents a map of the mind’s problem solving processes, and (without any intent on the part of the author) has become a Story Mind.

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.

Learn more about Dramatica and the Story Mind

The Influence Character

By Melanie Anne Phillips

What is an Influence Character?  First, let’s look at some wide-ranging examples of Influence Characters in well-known stories to show their use and effect, then a bit about how to put one in your story.

Example 1

In A Christmas Carol, the four ghosts – Past, Present, Future, and Progress (which is Marley, who tells Scrooge about the progress of his growing chain of sins) – share the role of Influence Character, each one taking one fourth of the story to try and change Scrooge, as if they were runners in a relay race.

Without the ghosts the story would just be about Scrooge learning on his own that maybe there’s a better way, but much of the passion of the story and the power of the message would be lost.  Message: Do well for yourself, but share some of your good fortune with the less fortunate.

Example 2

In the original Star Wars, the Influence Character is Obi Wan who eventually brings Luke to a point of change and trust in his new-found abilities with the force.  In Star Wars, Obi Wan’s Influence is very subtle and gradual and culminates with his disembodied voice saying to Luke just before Luke turns off the targeting computer, “Use the force, Luke.  Let go.  Trust me…”  And Luke is ONLY able to destroy the death star because he turns off the targeting computer and uses his new Jedi skills.  Message: We should also trust in our own abilities.

Example 3

In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is the Influence Character who forces Clarice Starling to confront her personal demons (the slaughtering of the spring lambs) that led her to try and save others with a job in law enforcement – “Tell me, Clarice, are the lambs still screaming?”  Clarice does not change, cannot let go of her pain “You know I can’t do that doctor Lecter” and so she remains steadfast in her belief system.  The Antagonist is not Lecter, but Jamie Gumm – the man who kidnaps the women including the senator’s daughter whom Clarice is trying to save.  Message: Let it go, or be forever driven by pain.

Example 4

In The Fugitive with Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones (Federal Marshall Gerard) does not care if his target is guilty or innocent: Kimble: “I didn’t kill my wife!”  Gerard: “I don’t care!”  But Kimble does care.  In fact, he endangers himself and risks his freedom to help others whenever the opportunity presents itself.  In the end, it is Kimble’s steadfastness that convinces Gerard that Kimble is innocent.  And in the process, Gerard (the Influence Character) is changed.  Message: No matter what the risk, don’t give up your compassion.

So, as you can see, without an Influence Character there is no story-long passionate argument regarding which way of seeing the world is the better way, and therefore there is no clear message to the reader or audience.

Now an Influence Character is not necessarily the Antagonist.  The Antagonist is trying to prevent the Protagonist from achieving his or her goal.  The Influence Character is trying to convince the Main Character to change his or her world view, belief system, or outlook.

Similarly, the Protagonist is not necessarily the Main Character.  The Protagonist is trying to achieve the goal.  The Main Character is trying to grapple with a personal issue, and is also the character through whose eyes the reader or audience sees the story – in short, we identify with him or her.

Often, the Main Character is the same “person” in a story who is also the Protagonist.  In this case, we create a stereotypical hero in which the reader/audience position is with the same character who is leading the charge to achieve the goal.

There is nothing wrong with that combination, but it is like always making the story about the quarterback in a game of football but never telling the story of one of the linemen or the water boy or the coach or the quarterback’s wife.  So, if you want a typical hero, make your Protagonist also your Main Character.  But if you want to tell a story where the Main Character is allowing us to look at the Protagonist from the outside and to observe him, then you end up with a story like To Kill A Mockingbird in which Atticus is the Protagonist trying to defend the black man wrongly accused of rape in a 1930s town in the South but the Main Character is his young daughter Scout, who gives us a child’s-eye view of prejudice.

Again similarly, the Antagonist is sometimes also given the role of Influence Character, but if you also have a hero who is both Protagonist and Main Character, that can be dangerous because then the opposition to the hero’s goal efforts is the same person who is opposing the hero’s personal belief system.  You can do it, but if you have a hero and villain doing both jobs between them, the logistic conflict can easily get mixed up with the moral argument in the minds of the readers or audience.  And worse, as an author, you can get so wrapped up in the combined passionate lines between these two characters that you don’t fully connect the dots on either argument, leaving gaps that will be seen (or at least felt by your readers or audience.  If those gaps aren’t filled, you essentially have a melodrama in which you don’t make either argument completely yet profess your message at the end as if you did.

Often, authors avoid this problem by creating a dramatic triangle in which one of those two stereotypes (hero and villain) is split into the two parts and the other one remains combined.

For example, in the movie, Witness, with Harrison Ford, he plays the Protagonist – a cop trying to protect the only witness to a murder: the young son of an Amish Woman, played by Kelly McGillis, who is the Main Character: we see the story through her eyes, and through her eyes we observe Ford and consider leaving the Amish to go with him into the world of the “English.”  Ford, therefore, is the Influence character as well as the Protagonist, as it is his influence that draws her to a point of decision about leaving.  But, the Antagonist is Ford’s Character’s boss on the force, as he is the actual murderer.

And so, a dramatic triangle is created by making Ford both Protagonist and Influence Character with the other two points of the triangle being the Main Character of Kelly McGillis, and the Antagonist of his boss.  Fairly complex, it is, and yet it is also compelling and far from cliche, though still perfectly sound.  And the message is made: Sometimes it is better to stay in the safety of your extended family than to leave to explore the larger world.

The point being, without an influence character your story will lose the entire passionate argument leading up to the point of choice in which your story’s message should be made, but won’t be.

So how do you add an Influence character and message to your story?  Here are a few quick steps:

1. Make a list of all your characters

2. Write a one sentence description of how each characters beliefs or philosophy of life is in conflict with the Main Character’s view of the same thing.

3.  All of these different conflicts can be explored in your story, but one needs to be the central issue that will form your story’s overall message.  So, consider each, then pick one to be the primary philosophic of conflict of your story.

4.  Select the character who is in primary philosophic conflict with your Main Character as your Influence Character.

5. Find as many places in your plot as you can smoothly bring your Main and Influence Characters into conflict over their opposed philosophies, whether it be as advice from one to the other, as an argument, or just by example – having the Main Character see the Influence Character act in a different manner than he or she would in that situation.

6.  Over the course of your story, bring your Main Character to a point where he or she must choose either to stick by their guns and hold to their original outlook, believing that their troubles will be resolved if they just remain steadfast long enough,  or choose the Influence Character’s alternative view, believing that it holds a better chance to resolve the Main Character’s personal issue.

7.  In the end, your Main Character may grow in their resolve to remain steadfast or grow to a point of change.  But regardless of how they go, their choice may be right or wrong for resolving their personal issue.  This provides you with many ways to prove your message:
Change is good, Change is bad, Steadfast is Good, Steadfast is Bad.  Any of these are legitimate; it just depends on the flavor of the message you are trying to send.

8.  Don’t forget that if your Main Character Changes, your Influence Character will remain Steadfast, and vice versa.  The idea is that one philosophy will trump the other so that both character will, in the end, share the same philosophy.  And then you show your readers or audience if that’s was the right choice by showing how it all turns out at a personal level.

9.  Keep in mind that whether or not the goal is achieved in a story has no bearing on whether of not the Main Character resolves his or her personal issue.  So, you can have a happy ending in which success is matched with happiness, a tragedy in which failure is matched with personal anguish, or a bitter-sweet ending in which success is achieved but with personal anguish or failure is the result of the effort to achieve the goal but with the Main Character finding peace or joy in the end.

10.  Think of the passionate “argument” between the Main and Influence Characters about beliefs or philosophies as just as important and requiring just as many pages as the logistic “argument” of the plot about the best way to solve the situational problem of the story.

Now that you know a little more about the Influence Character and its function, hopefully you find a way to include one, as well as the passionate argument, in every story you tell.  For if you do, your stories will have heartlines as well as headines, and your readers or audience will be moved as well as entertained.

To ensure your story’s structure is sound,

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Story Structure for Passionate Writers

By Melanie Anne Phillips

We all know that a story needs a sound structure. But no one reads a book or goes to a movie to enjoy a good structure. And no author writes because he or she is driven to create a great structure. Rather, audiences and authors come to opposite sides of a story because of their passions – the author driven to express his or hers, 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 a 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 authors 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, our passions 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.

Structure, when created properly, 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 does not “hear” the author’s message.

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 or her passion and embrace logistics instead.

As a result, authors often becomes mired in the nuts and bolts of storytelling, staring at a blank page not because of a lack of inspiration, but because they can’t figure out how to make their passions 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?

Absolutely!  In fact, I created a new method of story development and a new web site to help free your Muse while ensuring your story is sound.  And best of all, the web site costs nothing.  How’s that for a little freedom?

Click here to learn story structure for passionate writers

Dramatica – Where’d the Idea Come From?

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Here’s the “digest” version of the origins of Dramatica…

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), I’ll put these topics to rest for a while, and think about the next practical article on story development I can write for you.

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A Story is an Argument

By Melanie Anne Phillips

There are two principal forms of story structure: the tale and the story.

A tale is a statement – a statement that ‘this lead to this lead to that’ and ‘here’s how it ended up’.

Using this technique, a storyteller can say “Ok, I’m going to tell you about this situation, in which if you start here and you take this series of steps you end up there and it’s a good thing or its a bad thing to be there”.

Large good, small good – little bad, big bad – that’s up to the author, depending on the message he or she wants to put forth.  But in a tale, the statement made is simply this: follow this series of steps from this starting point and you will end up with this thing that is good or bad.

That’s the whole basis for fairy tales and cautionary tales, and there’s certain amount of power in that. But what kind of power could you get as an author if you were able to expand that and say ‘this is not just true for this particular case I’m telling you about, but it is also true for all such similar cases?’

In other words, if you start from here, no matter what path you try to take based on this particular problem you started with, this is the best (or worst) path to take of all that might be taken.  Then the message of your tale becomes ‘this particular path is the best or the worst.’ It’s no longer just good or bad, it’s the best path or the worst path to take.  Now you are aren’t just making a statement about a particular case; you are making a blanket statement covering all similar cases.

Now that has a lot more power to it because now you are telling everyone to exclude any other paths – ‘take only this one if you find yourself in this situation’ or,  ‘if you find yourself in this situation no matter what you do, don’t do that’.

While a simple tale with a simple statement is designed to influence audience behavior in a specific case, a more complex tale with a blanket statement is designed to influence general behavior by an audience.

But when you make a blanket statement have you really convinced your audience to alter its behavior?  In practice, an audience won’t sit still for a blanket statement without at least some supporting evidence. They will cry foul. They will at least question you.

So, for example, if an early storyteller is sitting around the campfire and says, ‘this is the best of all possible paths that I have shown you.’, his audience is going to say, ‘hey wait a minute, what about this other case, what if we try this, this and this?’

If the storyteller is to satisfy his audience and actually ‘prove’ his case to its satisfaction, he will need to be able to argue his point, saying, ‘in that case such and such, and therefore you can see why it would end up being not as good or better than this path that I’m touting.’

Another person brings up another scenario such as ‘what about going down this way and trying that.’ Then, if the point can be well made, the storyteller is again able to defend his assertion and say, ‘well that case, such and such, so you can see the point that the blanket statement I made is still true’.

Eventually either something will be found that is better than what the author was proposing and the blanket statement is rejected or the author will be able to stick it out and counter all those rebuttals and convince the audience that yes, the message of this tale is true in all such similar cases.

In a practical sense, you (the storyteller) won’t have to counter every potential different path when you are telling the story live because your audience will only come up with a certain number of them before they are satisfied that the alternatives they think are most important to look into have been adequately addressed.

But the moment that you record the story, the moment you put it into a song, stage play, a motion picture or a book, as soon as that happens, you’re no longer there to counter the rebuttals. You also don’t know exactly which potential rebuttals might come up. So if somebody looks at your story in the form of a movie in the theater and they see some pathway they think ought to be taken wasn’t even suggested, then they are going to feel that you haven’t made your case because maybe that would have been a better path than yours.

So what do you do? Well, in a recorded art form you have to anticipate all the different rebuttals that might come up about other potential solutions and preempt them by showing in your message why all these other potential reasonable solutions would not be as good or as bad as the one that you are proposing.

If you can cover them all, then you will have proven that your purported solution is in fact the best or the worst, and your audience will accept your message.

Just as simply saying something is true is the essence of a tale, proving it is true by making an argument is the essence of story.  And that is why a tale is a statement and a story is an argument.

But how do you make such an argument?

Here’s a short video from my “classic” 12-hour program on story structure I recorded way back in 1999:

Make Your Story Argument with Dramatica:

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SECRETS of the Protagonist…

By Melanie Anne Phillips

The Protagonist is one of the most misunderstood characters in a story’s structure.  It is often assumed that this character is a typical “Hero” who is a good guy, the central character in the story, and the Main Character (the one through with whom the reader identifies).

In fact, the Protagonist is not any of these things, though all of these attributes may be added to what the Protagonist really is.  By definition, the Protagonist is nothing more than the Prime Mover or Driver of the effort to achieve the goal.  That’s it.  He or she is just the archetypal character who keeps pushing for the goal – that and nothing more.

So, sometimes the Protagonist is not a story’s Central character (the most memorable or charismatic character in the story).  Being the Central character simply means he or is is the most prominent to the reader.  For example, Fagin in “Oliver Twist” is perhaps the most prominent, but he is certainly not the Protagonist.  And Darth Maul is an extremely charismatic character in Star Wars, but was not at all the Protagonist.  Clearly, the actual Protagonist may in fact be less interesting than than the Central character, and may even be almost a background character if achieving the goal is not really the focus of the story but just the reason for the chase.

Similarly, the Protagonist is often not the Main Character of the story either.  The Main character is the one the reader identifies with – the character we are most connected to emotionally – the one whom the passionate outcome of the story revolves around.  It is the Main character who grapples with some personal issue they will ultimately try to overcome by the end of the story by making a choice in a leap of faith.

For example of a story in which the Protagonist is NOT the Main character, consider To Kill A Mockingbird, in which we experience the story through young Scout’s eyes, and yet, it is her father (lawyer, Atticus Finch) who is the protagonist, trying to defend a  young black man wrongly accused of rape.

As you can see, while there are many attributes often given to the character who is the Protagonist, these don’t really have to be bundled together unless you are trying to create a stereotypical hero.

Just as in our own lives, we are the Main Character, but may not be the Protagonist on every single project or job in which we are involved, nor are we always the most prominent member of our team, department, or social group.

While it is fun to read books and go to movies in which we identify with heroes, stories that recognize all of those traits don’t have to be given to just one character help us to learn how to be heroic in our own lives.

So in developing your Protagonist, give the guy a break and see if you can’t distribute some of those other jobs to other characters to make them more interesting and your Protagonist more reflective of real life.

This tip was excerpted from StoryWeaver

I created StoryWeaver to guide you step by step
through the entire story development process
from concept to completion.

Click on the image to learn all about it….

Tear Your Story Apart!

By Melanie Anne Phillips

By necessity, authors are so focused on what they are putting into their stories that they often don’t think about what isn’t there.  Yet the early stages of story development only create a framework – a skeleton – and for a story to truly take shape, become organic, and take on a personality, many additional details will be needed.

Here’s a simple technique you can use to add depth and breadth to any story.

First, write a brief one or two sentence description of the core of your story.  For example, here’s a thumbnail description of a story my son and I for years have threatened to write:

Snow Sharks (Don’t Eat Red Snow)

Thumbnail for Snow Sharks:

The government has been developing a new breed of shark that lives in snow rather than water for use as mobile land mines in places such as Siberia or the Arctic.  A transport plane carrying them crashes in a storm high in the Rocky Mountains.

Now, we ask questions about each sentence in our thumbnail:

Questions about the first sentence:

The government has been developing a new breed of shark that lives in snow rather than water for use as mobile land mines in places such as Siberia or the Arctic.  

1. What branch of the government is involved?

2. Is this sanctioned or rogue?

3. Who is/are the scientists behind this?

4. How long has this program been going on?

5. How close are they to a final “product?”

6. Can the sharks breathe air?

7. Do they require cold (can they live in heat)?

Questions about the second sentence:

A transport plane carrying them crashes in a storm high in the Rocky Mountains.

1. What kind of plane?

2. How many sharks was it carrying?

3. Do they all survive?

4. Where was the transport taking the sharks?

5. Why couldn’t they wait until after the storm?

6. How many crewmembers are on board?

7. What are their jobs?

8. Do the crew members know what they are carrying?

9. Do any sharks survive?

10. If so, do the sharks kill all the survivors?

11. Is there anything in the wreckage that reveals the cargo, its nature and who is behind it?

12. Is the crew able to contact their command center before crashing?

13. Are they able to convey their location?

14. Is there a rescue beacon?

15. Does the plane carry a “black box.”

As you can see, each question is like a thread you can pull – a story thread that can open up a whole new aspect of your plot progression and character arcs.

If you were to answer each of these questions, your story would expand from that simple two-sentence thumbnail into a much richer story.

Then, you could ask questions about each sentence in the new, expanded story and grow it even larger very quickly.

If you already have a story, be it just an outline, a short synopsis, or even a complete draft, asking questions like these about key expositional sentences in your manuscript can help offer alternatives to what may be a cliche story line, or to add more detail or subordinate plot lines that enrich the fabric of your overall story.

In summary, the point is that you don’t have to bang your head against a blank page trying to come up with ideas.  Just tear your story apart with as many questions as you might reasonable ask, and it will grow like baseless rumor on the internet.

Need personalized story help?

Try my story consultation service for free!

Email me about your story, one page or less,
and I’ll give you some initial feedback and
create a customized story development plan.

The Creativity Two-Step

By Melanie Anne Phillips

It is easier to come up with many ideas than it is to come up with one idea.

Now that may sound counter-intuitive, but consider this… When you are working on a particular story and you run into a specific structural problem, you are looking for a creative inspiration in a very narrow area. But creativity isn’t something you can control like a power tool or channel onto a task. Rather, it is random, and applies itself to whatever it wants.

Creative inspiration is always running at full tilt within us, coming up with new ideas, thinking new thoughts – just not the thoughts we are looking for. So if we sit and wait for the Muse to shine its light on the exact structural problem we’re stuck on, it might be days before lightning strikes that very spot.

Fortunately, we can trick Creativity into working on our problem by making it think it is being random. As an example, consider this log line for a story: A Marshall in an Old West border town struggles with a cutthroat gang that is bleeding the town dry.

Step One: Asking Questions

Now if you had the assignment to sit down and turn this into a full-blown, interesting, one-of-a-kind story, you might be a bit stuck for what to do next. So, try this. First ask some questions:

1. How old is the Marshall?

2. How much experience does he have?

3. Is he a good shot?

4. How many men has he killed (if any)

5. How many people are in the gang?

6. Does it have a single leader?

7. Is the gang tight-knit?

8. What are they taking from the town?

9. How long have they been doing this?

You could probably go on and on and easily come up with a hundred questions based on that single log line. It might not seem at first that this will help you expand your story, but look at what’s really happened. You have tricked your Muse into coming up with a detailed list of what needs to be developed! And it didn’t even hurt. In fact, it was actually fun.

Step Two: Answering Questions

But that’s just the first step. Next, take each of these questions and come up with as many different answers as you can think of. Let your Muse run wild through your mind. You’ll probably find you get some ordinary answers and some really outlandish ones, but you’ll absolutely get a load of them!

  a) How old is the Marshall?

a. 28

b. 56

c. 86

d. 17

e. 07

f. 35

Some of these potential ages are ridiculous – or are they? Every ordinary story based on such a log line would have the Marshall be some common age from our example list, such as 28 or 35: just another dull story, grinding through the mill.

Step One Revisited

But what if your Marshall was 86 or 7 years old? Let’s switch back to Step One and ask some questions about his age.

For example:

c. 86

1. How would an 86 year old become a Marshall?

2. Can he still see okay?

3. What physical maladies plague him?

4. Is he married?

5. What kind of gun does he use?

6. Does he have the respect of the town?

And on and on…

Return to Step Two

As you might expect, now we switch back to Step Two again and answer each question as many different ways as we can.

Example:

5. What kind of gun does he use?

a) He uses an ancient musket, can barely lift it, but is a crack shot and miraculously hits whatever he aims at.

b) He uses an ancient musket and can’t hit the broad side of a barn. But somehow, his oddball shots ricochet off so many things, he gets the job done anyway, just not as he planned.

c) He uses a Mini-Gatling gun attached to his walker.

d) He doesn’t use a gun at all. In 63 years with the Texas Rangers, he never needed one and doesn’t need one now.

e) He uses a sawed off shotgun, but needs his deputy to pull the trigger for him as he aims.

f) He uses a whip.

g) He uses a knife, but can’t throw it past 5 feet anymore.

And on and on again…

Methinks you begin to get the idea. First you ask questions, which trick the Muse into finding fault with your work – an easy thing to do that your Creative Spirit already does on its own – often to your dismay.

Next, you turn the Muse loose to come up with as many answers for each question as you possibly can.

Then, you switch back to question mode and ask as many as you can about each of your answers.

And then you come up with as many answers as possible for those questions.

You can carry this process out for as many generations as you like, but the bulk of story material you develop will grow so quickly, you’ll likely not want to go much further than we went in our example.

Imagine, if you just asked 10 questions about the original log line and responded to each of them with 10 potential answers, you’d have 100 story points to consider.

Then, if you went as far as we just did for each one, you’d ask 10 questions of each answer and end up with 1,000 potential story points. And the final step of 10 answers for each of these would yield 10,000 story points!

Now in the real world, you probably won’t bother answering each question – just those that intrigue you. And, you won’t trouble yourself to ask questions about every answer – just the ones that suggest they have more development to offer and seem to lead in a direction you might like to go with your story.

The key point is that rather than staring at a blank page trying to find that one structural solution that will fill a gap or connect two points, use the Creativity Two-Step to trick your Muse into spewing out the wealth of ideas it naturally wants to provide.

Need personalized story help?

Try my story consultation service for free!

Email me about your story, one page or less,
and I’ll give you some initial feedback and
create a customized story development plan.