A Story is a Argument
Transcription of the soundtrack from this video:
Dramatica Unplugged
Class One: Introduction
1.3 A Story is an Argument
A tale is nothing more than a statement. A statement that ‘this lead to this lead to that’ and ‘here’s how it ended up’.
An early storyteller would be able to say ‘ok, I’m going to tell you about this situation, that 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 – but follow these series of steps from this starting point and you will end up with this thing that is good or bad.
There’s certain amount of power in that. You can fictionalize that statement to make it more human, and illustrate to people that ‘this is a path to stay away from because it’s bad’ or ‘this is a path to go towards because it’s good’. And so you end up with fairy tales and things of that nature which, literally, are often nothing more than a tale – they are not really complete stories.
But what kind of power could you get if you were able to expand that and say ‘this is not just true for this particular case but its 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, it wouldn’t be as good (or it wouldn’t be as bad) as the one that I’m showing you. 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 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’. That has a lot more power to manipulate an audience – a lot more leverage – because even though you have only shown the one path, you convince them it’s better than any of the others you didn’t show.
But have you really convinced them? After all, you are really just making a blanket statement and, in truth, an audience won’t sit still for a blanket statement. They will cry foul. They will at least question you. So, for example, if a caveman 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 author is to satisfy his audience and actually ‘prove’ his case to their satisfaction, he will 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 author’s point can be well made, the storyteller is 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 or the author will be able to stick it out and counter all those rebuttals and convince the audience, ‘yes that’s the case.’
Now you won’t have to counter every potential different way of doing it when you are telling the story live because the 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? In a recorded art form you have to anticipate all the different rebuttals that might come up about other potential solutions and show why these other potential solutions would not be as good or as bad as the one that you are proposing – proving therefore that if all reasonable and appropriate alternatives have been explored and yours is still the best or the worst, then you’ve made your case. You have successfully argued your point, and the blanket statement is now considered true.
In order to do that you have to anticipate all the ways the audience might look at the problem alternatively. In effect, you to think of all the ways anyone might think of solving that problem alternatively. Essentially, you have to include in your story all of the different ways any human mind might go about solving that problem. In so doing, you have automatically created a model of the mind’s problem solving process, the Story Mind. Ultimately, you have created an analogy to the mind itself.
Now you never set out to do that, it was a byproduct never intended. No caveman ever sat down and said, ‘you know I think I will create an analogy to a single human mind trying to deal with an inequity.’ No, it didn’t happen that way, but in the process of trying to communicate a recorded art form across a medium and successfully argue one particular situation is better than all potential ones, you need to put in all the potential ones, and you thereby create a model of the mind quite by accident.
Once that’s happened, once it’s recognized, one can now look to that model of the mind from a psychological perspective. Psychoanalyze the story, and you find everything that’s in the human mind represented tangible and incarnate in the story in some form or another in the structure.
That’s what Dramatica is all about. When we had that Rosetta stone we then threw ourselves into documenting the psychology of the story and we documented the Story Mind. We created the theory and then created the software to implement a major portion of the theory to allow an author to answer questions about the impact he or she wishes to have and have. Dramatica’s story engine then predicts the structure necessary to achieve that particular impact.
Transcribed by Marc O’Dell from
Dramatica Unplugged by Melanie Anne Phillips
A Tale is a Statement
Transcript of the soundtrack from this video:
Dramatica Unplugged
Class One: Introduction
1.2 A Tale is a Statement
Imagine the very first storyteller, maybe a caveman sitting around a campfire. Perhaps the very first communication was not really a story but just a physical need, like this caveman was hungry so he rubbed his stomach and he pointed at his mouth, and he said ‘ah-hah’. In addition to making an idiot of himself, he also might have communicated. He might have let the other cavemen around the campfire know that he was hungry, and why, because they would look at him and they look themselves; they’ve got two arms, he’s got two arms, and he looks like they look and they see him doing things physically and they think to themselves, ‘if I did those things, what would that mean to me?’, and they ‘decode’ his ‘encoding’, his symbolism, and they say, ‘well if I was doing that it would mean that I was hungry’ and they get his message, because there is a basic underlying similarity between the two.
Later on, we will talk about how the Story Mind works because all of us have the same basic operating system; it’s just our experiences that are different. And because we have the same operating system it forms a carrier wave so that when we communicate and see in the Story Mind anything that’s the same as the operating system we can pull that out and get the information that was attached to that carrier wave which is the storytelling, the message.
Now this caveman communicates that way. After awhile he gets a little more sophisticated he is able to do such things as describe a linear series of experiences. Perhaps he wants to describe how to get to a place where there are berries or how to avoid a place where there are bears. Well he might say (with hand gestures) that he went down by the river and then he went over the hill and then he found these berries perhaps it took him several days to go from one place to another. Some sign language is complex; some is a lot easier to understand but it’s usually based on a representation of visual things that you find in the real world.
Eventually he is able to string a number of points together rather than just making a single point like pointing to his mouth and saying ‘ah-hah’. So, if he puts together a line of logic, that says ‘this happened and then this happened and then this happened’ and there are no breaks in it and there are no pieces missing, in that case, he has created what we call in Dramatica a “Tale”. That’s our definition of a tale: an unbroken linear progression. That’s a “head-line” because it deals with your logic.
But you could also have an unbroken progression of feelings; how he felt at one time whether he was happy or sad, whether he found something funny, whether he found something disgusting. This would be a “heart-line”. He might convey those emotions just to express what he went through without even talking about the territory that he covered and with no “head-line” at all.
So, a tale could be just an emotional progression, or it could just be a logistic progression, or a tale could be a logistic and an emotional progression running along side-by-side, perhaps affecting each other, perhaps not.
Let’s look at that in a little more depth. We know that the human heart cannot just go from one emotion to another without going through steps in between. There are feelings that you have to go through to get from one mood to another mood. Now if you start with one emotion you may be able to jump to any one of a number of emotions and then from any of those, jump to others, but you can’t jump to all of them. If you could, then we would just be bopping about from one feeling to another. There would be no growth, there would be no emotional development. But we know there is, and that’s an indicator that we can’t go from any one thing to any other thing but, rather, there is direction to it.
You look at Freud’s psychosexual stages; you look at the stages Seven Stages of Grief. You have to go through them in a particular order. You can’t skip over any. If you do, there is an emotional misstep. It feels untrue to the heart, and a story that has a character go through and miss a step, skip a step or jump to another emotion that they ‘couldn’t get there from here’, that will then feel wanky to the audience. It will feel like the character stopped developing in a way that they could follow with their own hearts and it will pop the audience right out of the story, and they will look at the character as being a fabrication rather than someone they identify with.
So the idea is to create this linearity. But doesn’t that linearly create a formula? Well it would if you could only go from one emotion to a particular next one to a particular next one and so on. Then there would be only one path you could take, but as mentioned earlier, from one emotion there are several – not all but several – that you might go to. When you go to one of those, there are several others you might go to next.
Similarly, in points of logic, from a single point there might be any one of a number of things that might happen next that would be Kosher to happen with what already happened, but you couldn’t have anything happen next because some things would just be impossible to happen if this had happened first. There would be missing steps, or this would preclude that from happening. Now, you can start from any place and eventually get to anywhere else, but you have to go through the in-betweens.
So as long as a tale has either a head-line or a heart-line and it’s an unbroken chain that doesn’t skip any steps, it constitutes a complete tale.
Transcribed by Marc O’Dell from
Dramatica Unplugged by Melanie Anne Phillips
Introducing the Story Mind
Transcript of the soundtrack from this video:
Dramatica Unplugged
Class One: Introduction
1.1 Introducing the Story Mind
Let’s look at the central concept in Dramatica: the Story Mind. It’s 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 what it really means is that every complete story is a model of the mind’s problem solving process. In fact, it says that all the elements of the story are actually elements of a single human mind – not the author’s mind, not the audience’s mind but a mind created symbolically in the process of communicating across a medium to reach an audience. It is a mind for the audience to look at, understand and then occupy. That’s the story’s structure itself.
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 go on in a Story Mind, in fact that go on in our own minds, made tangible, made incarnate, so that the audience might look into the mechanisms of their own minds – see them from the outside looking in – and thereby get a better understanding of the problem solving process, so when a particular kind of problem comes up in their lives, they’ll have a better idea how to deal with it.
Transcribed by Marc O’Dell from
Dramatica Unplugged by Melanie Anne Phillips
Dramatica and the Brain
Recently, a Dramatica user asked a question about the relationship of the Left Brain / Right Brain concept to Dramatica’s Story Mind concept. My reply (which follows) provides the nitty gritty, but is pretty dense and uses “short speak” because the Dramatica user is something of an expert with a lot of depth and pre-knowledge about Dramatica’s psychological underpinnings. So, this probably isn’t very readable and may even come off as word salad or bull crap to the uninitiate. Still, it has a lot of good information in a small space for those who are into such things. So, for the benefit of all you die-hard Dramatica groupies, here’ the durn reply, as is, take it or leave it….
**************
Ganglia are like tiny brains – they share a fractal relationship with the brain at large. Just as they are networks made up of individual neurons, the brain is a network made up of individual ganglia. The brain’s dynamic functioning is more directly connected to the output and more directly inputs to the ganglia than to individual neurons, just as the body, as a whole is more directly affected by the organs than by the individual cells that make them up. And so, we create, in essence, one magnitude of fractal distance between the brain and its tiny, similarly functioning ganglia. The operation of each defines, essentially one fractal dimension, so by considering them both simultaneously, we can see two fractal dimensions. Putting that aside for a moment, let’s just look at the brain in terms of left and right brainedness. Now we have two functions that operate within the same fractal dimension – a structural side (the left brain) and a dynamic side (the right). Jumping down to a ganglia, we see the same division within its fractal dimension – a left hemi-ganglion and a right-hemi ganglion. Now I haven’t kept up with the latest in neurology, but twenty years ago Mental Relativity theory predicted that there would be a structural and dynamic component to the ganglia as well. I original suspected it would be the same as the larger brain, based on left-ness or righted-ness. But then, I learned of L cells and R cells within each ganglion. And I began to wonder if perhaps these cells were what created two dimensions in each ganglia. I speculated that perhaps one of these kinds of cells produced mostly neuro-exciter neurotransmitters, and the other produced mostly neuro-inhibitors, similar to serotonin and dopamine. The influence of one would favor the structural (binary) firing of neurons and the influence of the other would inhibit that, allowing the biochemical environment around the body (axon) of the neuron to have more influence, thereby favoring slightly the more analog effects of the ebb and flow of the biochemistry within each ganglia. It occurred to me that perhaps that is where, physiologically, the differences between male minds and female minds actually resides. Perhaps before birth, the wash of hormones that occurs in the womb around the 12th week, as I recall (being no expert, mind you, and also twenty years out of date in research) – this wash of hormones “sets” the ratio of effectiveness of the L cells to the R cells throughout the brain, thereby making each little neural network any given ganglia a little more leaning-toward structural or dynamic processing. But, I digress. The specific physiology is way out of my pay grade. What I do expect is that the left and right brains work at the same level, but one structurally and the other dynamically. I expect this will be found (functionally) in each ganglion as well, but as one fractal dimension below that of the whole brain. The result is a relationship similar to that of Knowledge and Thought (using Mental Relativity Theory terminology) which are both at the same “fractal level” in concept, just as are Mass and Energy. This can be seen insofar as they can both directly interact such as with kinetic energy transfer in billiard balls, for example, but also they can transmute from one to another, such as in a nuclear bomb. In short, just as with Mass and Energy, it takes a lot of Thought to make a little bit of Knowledge, but a tiny bit of Knowledge can generate a tremendous amount of Thought! But to complete the Mental Relativity Quad of Knowledge and Thought, you also must include the other two elemental components of the mind, Ability and Desire. When you thing of them, they are at a whole different fractal level. They share the same relationship as Space and Time, respectively. Knowledge and Thought (or Mass and Energy) are a “Dynamic Pair” – meaning that they have something of an inverse relationship (the more you come from what you know, the less you think). Ability and Desire (or Space and Time) are also in an inverse relationship (hence, what is perceived as a space-time continuum, though I take some exception to that perspective). Space and Time belong together like Mass and Energy do, but each pair isn’t operating at the same fractal level as the other, just as the two sides of the big brain belong together, just as the two aspects of the little brain (ganglia) do, but big and little aren’t on the same playing field – they are in two separate leagues, operating similarly, but one is the minor league and the other the major. And yet, both leagues are dependent upon one another, one for new talent from below, the other for financial support from above. And so, collectively all four items, Mass, Energy, Space and Time or Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire, or Left Brain, Right Brain, Left hemi-ganglion and right hemi-ganglion all form quads, each a slightly different fractal harmonic of the others, but working internally with virtually the same structure and dynamics. We directly perceive four dimensions because our brains exist in four dimensions. Our brains exist in four dimensions because we perceive them. In fact, no such limitations exist and dimensions may easily extend both up and down the magnitude scale. But when perception becomes locked, dimensionally, to reality – or more poetically put, when mind and matter become dynamically locked in a structural interrelationship, they dance around the ring of reality like two boxers in a bout, covering all the ground in a universe and bound only by the limits of their own unbreakable inter-relationship. Hey – sorry I got carried away, but you asked! 🙂 – Melanie
Dim Bulb ~or~ The Foibles of an Eccentric Writer
When I was first starting out in the film business, still at USC cinema as a matter of fact, I heard a story of a famous writer who loved to use just one make and model of typewriter – couldn’t write a lick on anything else. He was so worried they’d stop making them that he bought 100 of them and put them all in storage.
We’ll, I just bought 48 100w General Electric incandescent bulbs to hang over my desk – not all at once, mind you, but since it is now illegal to sell them in the USA, I wanted to make sure the warm glow in my creative space never snuffs out. Suddenly at least one wave of life’s ceaseless seething sea of stress has receded.
Concept for a Theme
Life is filled with opportunities to begin a story. Sometimes you encounter a bit of news, observe an interpersonal interaction, or simply see a post on Google+ or Facebook.
Today, for example, I was writing a private message on Facebook to my cousin about the ups and downs of life and when I re-read it I realized it was a fully developed theme for a story.
If you really are a writer – if you really have the natural instincts (and perhaps the chops) – then even casual conversations you have or that your post can inspire a whole exploration of a topic, concept, lifestyle or activity.
As an example, here’s the message I sent to my cousin:
When they say, “There is no greater gift than to lay one’s life down for another” most people think they are talking about dying, as in sacrificing oneself in war. But I often thought that when we dedicate ourselves to others – family, friends, a commitment to service – then we are, in a very real sense, laying down our lives for others – one moment at a time.
And which is the greater sacrifice – to have an instant of bravery in which one is not thinking about ceasing to exist and jumps almost instinctively in front of the bullet, the decision to stay behind to run the escape elevator, knowing you will slowly suffocate, or to choose everyday to lose your own life, dreams, even personality, for the benefit of those you love?
I personally believe that later choice is the most noble of all, for it is made alone, within oneself, over and over again each time you awaken.
Sure, we are able to pursue some of our interests to some degree, but the sacrifice is real as we watch the dreams that once drove us pale and fade into impossibility.
Still, the rewards are many – the smiling faces of our children, the peaceful face of our mate when he or she sleeps, the relief (expressed or simply exhibited) by those to whom we have been of service.
I believe we must come to realize that while we may wish our lives had evolved differently or that the choppy seas of fate might have cast us higher on the shore, life is not perfect nor is happiness a right, only the pursuit of it.
And, in the end, if we had chosen any other more self-oriented path we would find the sum total of our lives and the contentment of our hearts would be far less by a magnitude than it is by having laid it down for others instead.
The Dramatica Concept
Over the years there’s been so much sophisticated material written about how the Dramatica theory of narrative structure deals with all kinds of complex story issues that it is easy to forget about the central purpose of Dramatica in the first place.
So, here’s a short article to help those of you new to Dramatica to get a grip on what it is and why its important.
*************
There’s two parts to stories – the part that gets us all excited (the subject matter and style) and the dry, frustrating part (the underlying structure).
Writers also come in two varieties – the intuitive writers who like to follow their Muse and the logical writers who like to build their stories from the ground up, according to plan.
There are very few folk who do both very well. We usually call them “Master Storytellers” or John LeCarre or Shakespeare or Aaron Sorkin.
For the rest of us, we usually have some degree of talent in one of the two areas and a noticeable lack in the other. Me – I’m great at following the Muse, but can’t structure a story worth a darn.
So, twenty years ago, a friend of mine and I went hunting for the answer to story structure. Along the way, we invented a whole new theory of it called “Dramatica.”
Dramatica says that structure is like the platter on which you serve up your passion and ideas. Structure is like the carrier wave in radio upon which the program is broadcast.
If structure is done right, it is invisible – just like that carrier way you never hear in a radio program. But if it isn’t tuned properly, it gets in the way of the program, creating static and drop-outs. And, you certainly don’t your readers dropping out of your story or stumbling over a logical problem when logic is the last thing you want them to be thinking about.
So, the Dramatica theory deals solely with that dry, uninteresting, but essential underlying “story argument,” because without that sound foundation, even the most interesting subject matter and most intriguing storytelling will collapse.
Well, that’s an introduction to the concept. What I’m writing these days is like “doctorate level” dissertations – for the following of hard-core structuralists I’ve collected over the years.
Keep in mind, it is all about form, not formula. It is more like studying good graphic design than paint by numbers.
If you are still interested, I can point you at some good videos and articles I’ve created over the years on the basic concepts. Just let me know.
Learn more about Dramatica Theory
Fractal Psychology in the Real World
Here is an early article about a new aspect of narrative science I was developing. It is based on a previous concept from our Dramatica theory of narrative structure called the Storymind.
The Story Mind asserts that every story has a mind of its own, as if it were some sort of mega character with its own psychology and its own personality. Psychology is the deep structure, just as it is with real people, whereas personality are all the traits and attributes that stand on that foundation and give the story identity, again as with real people.
In the Story Mind theory, characters have two aspects. First, each represents a facet of the overall mind. That is their dramatic function, and it is from this function that we derive the archetypes, such as the Protagonist, Antagonist, Reason, and Emotion.
But characters also have their own personal stories as well in which they are complete human beings, each with his or her own psychology. And so, when we look at an individual character, we can see that the same attributes they use for problem solving within their own minds are fractally represented in the overall Story Mind, each by a different character.
This led to the notion of Fractal Psychology in which when people come together in a group toward a common purpose, they quickly self-organize so that one character becomes the protagonist in the group, another the antagonist, one emerges as the voice of reason and another as the passionate emotion archetype.
Yet beyond that, groups might come together to form larger organizations in which each group becomes an archetype within the larger organization, like departments in a major corporation, each with an identifiable story of its own.
Over the years, this initial concept has continued to evolve in detail and substance. But the seeds were first planted some five years ago as of this posting, and one of the first articles I wrote about how that theory was evolving is reprinted here:
Fractal Psychology in the Real World
What characters represent in the Story Mind is not their own psychology but rather just the small fragment of that overall entity. Essentially, in the story at large characters are nothing more than automatons – going about their functions as “intelligent agents” controlled from above (by the structure of the story as a whole).
The reason we do not easily see this is because we endow our characters with human qualities so that we might identify with them. In a sense, we must give each character at least a rudimentary psychology of its own in order for the reader or audience to empathize or sympathize with it.
But, that psychology does not drive what the character does in the story – it merely defines its personality. Personality is like subject matter or storytelling; it is not structure and does not give the character any psychology at all when it comes to its objective function in the overall story.
Another reason we do not easily see characters as objective is because of something I call “fractal psychology” (see my video on my Storymind YouTube channel). The concept is that when we gather in groups, we form a larger Story Mind as the underlying organization of that group and each adopt roles in the group that correspond to the objective characters. For example, one of us will take the role of the voice of Reason and another will be the Skeptic.
Just as characters can be subdivided into their component elements, so too, in larger groups, its members will refine their functions and specialize until all the elemental positions are taken. Then, if the group grows larger, something really intriguing happens. Individuals will form smaller story mind groups within the overall group. So, there will be one “click” or “faction” within the group that collectively act as the voice of Reason and another that functions as the Skeptical voice. Within each sub-group (sub-story) are similarly-minded individuals who all share the same basic attitude. BUT – within each sub-group, the individuals will take on other objective roles so that, for example, someone will become the Skeptic within the group that stands for Reason – essentially he or she will function as the Skeptical voice of Reason.
And finally, as the original large overall group encounters other similarly sized groups, each group will take on a function and collectively all the groups will form an even larger mind.
This is Fractal Psychology – a pet theory of mine. It explains why we are all in a constant complex web of interrelationships with our peers, our superiors and our subordinates, sometimes being driven by our own psychologies, but socially always acting as objective characters.
And so, we expect every character to have a psychology when, in fact, stories are not complex enough for that. Stories are about dealing with a single central issue with a single Story Mind and the agents that make it up. In this level of magnitude, the objective characters have no real psychology, and yet the reader or audience will expect it, for they see the story as a slice of real life in which everyone they know, themselves included, has a psychology. We, as storytellers, then humanize our automatons so that we fool the audience, sugar coat the functions to make it appear as if they are fully developed people when they truly are not.
There are, of course, two exceptions to this – the Main Character and the Influence Character. They are special because in addition to their objective functions, they also represent our sense of self and that small “devil’s advocate” voice within us with whom we argue about whether we should stick with the tried and true, even if it appears to be failing, or adopt the new and promising, even though it has never been tested.
So these two exceptional characters need to be fully developed with their own true internal thought processes. But that, alas, is another story……
Learn more about Narrative Science
Narrative Space in the Real World
In an earlier post I described how the term “narrative space” refers to the breadth and depth of the subject matter from which you will develop a story. Like a cloud, the subject matter is just the raw material – a nebulous realm in which many story structures might be found. Think of a story structure as a construct of tinker-toys about the size of a basketball. And think of a narrative space as your bathtub. With a tub full of subject matter, you can drop your tinker ball anywhere in it and encircle a different batch of water. Without changing the structure at all, you can move it just an inch and still change the nature of the particular subject matter you’ll use in making your point.
Now look at it another way. You have this tub full of subject matter than intrigues you. You’d love to cram it all into the same story. But, your ball just isn’t that big. In other words, you’d need a book the size of an encyclopedia to cover it all, or perhaps a movie 8 days long. Could it be done, of course! But should it? Not if you expect anybody to read it or go see it.
So, you assess your tub. You’d really like the rubber duck in your story so you put the ball around that. But, you’d also like that particular lump of suds – it just intrigues you. You gently push that little bubbly heap into your ball as well. In fact, you go all over your basin and pull all the water and floating things you’d specifically like into your ball. Eventually, you can’t get anything new into the ball without pushing something else out. That is the story equivalent of the speed of light constant. I call it the size of mind constant, because it describes the maximum size a story can be and still be held at one time in the mind of your reader or audience.
Of course you can always plop another ball into the same tub to gather in a different collection of subject matter. Thus, by writing a series of books, penning a television series, or hammering out a bunch of movie sequels, you might be able to get almost all the subject matter that interests you covered in one story or another – just not all in the same story!
(Naturally, you could create an over-arcing story structure in which each of the smaller stories becomes just an element in a bigger structure, but then the read or audience won’t be able to see the subject matter detail in the smaller stories at the same time that they appreciate the subject matter in the over-arcing story – just too many degrees of separation or magnitude from the biggest to the smallest to capture in a single glimpse.)
Some of your tinker balls might actually overlap in the tub, like galaxies colliding, in which they each share some elements of story structure. Others may carve out sections that are completely separated. And, some may nudge up against each other just close enough to have a topical point of connection. In the end, though, you need to decide for any given story what subject matter you will include and what you will exclude. Or, put inversely, you need to determine where in the tub to drop your ball.
Finally, to the point of this particular posting – narrative space in the real world. By this I do not mean the practical application of story structure in fiction, but the projection of story structure concepts into the actual, physical world of living, breathing people. Quite a departure, I know. But recall that Dramatica is a theory of the story mind. It holds that every story structure is a model of the mind’s problem-solving processes. Even more, it goes so far as to contend that story structure represents the underlying structure and dynamics of our own minds upon which our unique experiences fashion our singular personalities.
Hey – too talky… Let me try that a little more conversationally… What works in story structure works in understanding everyday life as well. The story mind is the same as our own minds. It is a fully functional model of how we think – how we organize things in our own heads. So it should not come as much of a surprise that the way we organize our stories is all the way we organize our lives.
Everything we do in life is represented in stories, at a structural level. I’m not talking about whether you like red or blue or whether you play football or go bowling – that’s all just subject matter. (And when I say “just” subject matter, yes I know that is where the passion lies. We only care intellectually about structure. In short, our heads are into structure but our hearts are into the subject matter. Still, we’re talking about the relationship between structure and subject matter here, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter much anyhow.)
Now one person will organize his life in many story structures. Your life is your tube and you’ll have lots of balls in it – some bigger (up to the size of mind constant, at times) but mostly smaller structures of various sizes. You’ll have a structure for your parents and one for your kids. You’ll have a structure for your job and, within that, one for your boss. You’ll have a structure for your future, one for each hobby, and one for the concept of hobbies in which each smaller structure is an element in the overall concept.
We don’t think about structure, we think in topics and organize in structure.
So, one person will have many nested and isolated structures all bouncing around in his or her head all the time, shifting around the the subject matter of our lives, driven by the passions of our personalities. But underneath it all, logistically, organizationally, there is sense in the midst of the chaos when you recognize the structures of your life and don’t try to create a “life story” but more like a “life pageant” of the ongoing progression, collision and evolution of all the little stories that make up your pitiful existence. Oops… got a little carried away there with the rhetoric….
Point is, one person has many stories. And within themselves, they can see all the characters you find in stories – the Reason character who represents our intellect, the Emotional archetype who stands for our passion, the Protagonist who is our initiative, the Antagonist (our reticence), the Sidekick (our confidence) the Skeptic (doubt), the Guardian (conscience), and the Contagonist (temptation).
But here’s the fun part – when we get together in groups, us humans take on the role of characters in the group story. In short, we organize ourselves as part of a a larger group-story because story structure is how we organize. Sounds recursive, but when you consider that the whole point of stories is to show us how to deal with situations that reflect (at some tiny or grandiose level) our own lives, add to that the notion that story structure evolved because it represents the way we think, and add to that the fact that of course we try to organize our world they way our heads are organized – well then maybe it isn’t so much recursive as it is fractal. In fact, when I first thought of this concept, I called it “fractal psychology” – that’s my name for it and I’m sticking to it! (Check out my videos on fractal psychology on YouTube.)
Every time you join a club, participate in a class, get involved in a political party or show up to work, you are taking a role in a bigger story than yourself, but completely like the way your own mind is organized. So, one of us will be the voice of Reason, another the Emotional (passionate) perspective. By each taking a role, we cover all the ways we can possibly think about the issues the group faces, we create a “big giant head” a la the old television show Mork and Mindy and populate its roles.
Now if you join an already existing organization, there might not be the position open to which you are best suited. And, because of seniority (or lack thereof) you have to take a role that isn’t all that natural to you. But if you don’t, you won’t have a place at the table. So, you cram yourself into that position as best you can in the hopes that if somebody else leaves or dies or gets kicked out or whatever, when the musical chairs of reorganization occurs you may be able to snag yourself a better seat.
Though these things are always to some degree in flux (like molecules, heated, agitating and vibrating to one extent or another), there is a general inertia to each story system that holds the group together. In time, like a person, a group may grow old and die, lose its vibrancy, or simply go to pieces. And then, the pieces will gather together or be sopped up by other groups (again like solar systems forming from the remnants of a super nova) and the process will begin all over.
Now the last notion I’ll lay upon you (hallelujah!) is that even groups gather together in groups. Cities become States become Nations. Factions become Movements become Parties. All of humanity is arranged as nested or separated groups, vibrating and evolving and overlapping as they pass through one another in the great subject matter tub of life. Seems largely like a mess (if you watch the evening news or try to find a job) but beneath it all, very sound, stable, predictable and consistent patterns are a work, all fractally related to that little bitty brain stuffed into each of our puny heads. A world within and a world without.
Finally, just to poke the bear one more time, go ahead and write your fictions, shoot your movies, and tell your tales. But wouldn’t it be interesting to try and apply these same Dramatica principals not only to the realms of your creation but to all creation? What’s the story with your spouse? Your job? Your future? Which of those countries is the Skeptic in this particular international melee? How does what happens in my town fit in with what happens in my county, and how does it mesh with the next burg over?
You want to think about it. You know you do. (That’s just me falling into the role of Contagonist….)