Narrative Space

“Narrative Space” describes the complete breadth and depth of subject matter in which you seek to define a story.

Simply put, most authors don’t come to a story with a complete structure immediately in mind.  Rather, they are attracted to the subject matter, which may include setting, time period, activities and events, personalities, snippets of dialog, situations and anything else that is not inherently part of the argument of a narrative.  For example, take Santa Claus.  You can have him be the main character or a victim or a villain.  You can make him a spirit or a man.  You can have him involved in a western, a science fiction, a romance, a buddy picture or a tragedy.  In and of itself, subject matter is not part of a structure but just the raw material from which a structure is formed.  That is part of the reason that in Dramatica theory we named a story’s structure the storyform as it brings form to story.

Think of subject matter as the interstellar gas and material from which solar systems are formed.  This is the narrative space.  Just because you carve out a piece of this space – enclose a particular cloud of star stuff – does not create planets that orbit in understandable patterns.  The job of an author is to look into the nebulous nature of an area of subject matter – a particular historic event, an aspect of human nature – and to coalesce that material into a tale or a story.  A tale in a given narrative space would simply explore the subject matter and make a statement about it.  A story would transcend that and make the case for the best (or worst) of all possible ways to organize (or live through) that material.

As you might expect, there does not have to be a just one single storyform within a narrative space.  In fact, there can be an infinite number of stories told within a given realm of subject matter.  Some of these may exist in different corners, completely separated from each other.  Some may overlap slightly, covering similar areas of subject matter with two complete different structures and messages.  In fact, two completely different storyform arguments may actually occupy the exact same portion of the overall narrative space but form the raw material toward two contradictory purposes, much as two scepters might fashion artistically incompatible statues from identical pieces of clay.

As a final thought in this brief introduction to the concept, consider that when you are developing your story’s world, who’s in it, what happens to them, and what it all means, just because there are parts of the narrative space subject matter that are the reasons you want to write this story does not mean that they can all fit into the same storyform.  Often, to make a complete argument, we must exclude favorite subject matter pieces that would have to be ham-handedly crammed into our story and would never truly fit.  Further, we may have to include additional elements that really don’t inspire us, because if we went with only the parts we truly care about, our overall argument would be full of holes.

Lastly, take solace that you can always write a second story or a series of them about the same narrative space (subject matter) until you have devised enough structures to powerfully explore them all.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

Develop your story’s world

with our StoryWeaver Software

If Dramatica’s Options Aren’t What I Want, What Then?

A new Dramatica user recently emailed to say she was stymied when she reached a point in the storyforming procedure and the options she wanted for a particular story point were grayed out and not available, even though she was structuring her already completed book and felt she had a solid “hero’s journey” arc.

My reply:

Here’s some info to set the stage, followed by some steps you can take to solve this problem after you are familiar with the concepts.

First off, story points in a structure are not independent but are interdependent. This means that story points don’t stand alone in a structure but have relationships with other story points. The result of this is that the “options” list only those remaining choices that are consistent with other choices already made that have a collective impact or interconnection down the line. In fact, when you don’t have options you want, this is Dramatica doing the very thing it was created to do: letting you know that the choices you’ve already made in your structure are not truly compatible with the choice you are trying to make now. In short – your structure would be inconsistent. This is the purpose of Dramatica – to alert you when you are drifting in your perspective and therefore undermining the strength of your own message.

You see, most authors come to write a given story because they are interested in the subject matter. But subject matter isn’t structure. Subject matter is the setting, style, background information about your characters and their affectations, for example. In contrast, structure is an argument you are making to your reader or audience that a particular path toward a solution is the best or worst one that might be employed in those particular circumstances that you are exploring. That is your underlying message that gives direction and backbone to everything that happens in your subject matter. But how many different stories – different structures might be created that are all set in the Old West? And just because they share the same subject matter doesn’t mean they belong in the same story.

As writers, we are coming to a story without really knowing how all the pieces will fit together. Even if we have completed a book or a screenplay without Dramatica that seems to work (to us), it may not be actually living up to its potential, or may in fact not really work as well for others as it does for ourselves. This is because people tend to think in terms of topics rather than in terms of structure. So, we look at our subject matter and we discover that a particular topic in that realm dovetails very nicely with another topic in the same subject matter. While this is likely true, that is just the superficial. Beneath that, do they structurally connect as well? It is almost impossible to see if it does with the “naked eye.” But Dramatica puts the structure under the microscope (or into the X-Ray machine) and looks at what’s holding it all together logically. It takes you choices as you make them and instantly calculates how each additional choice impacts all the remaining options – which support what you’ve done already and which work against it, dramatically. It grays out all the options that are not structurally consistent with the other options you’ve chosen.

In short, though your subject matter may be consistent from the opening page to “the end,” and though it make all seem solid and right on the surface, who knows what evil lurks beneath? Dramatica knows.

Now, what to do about it….

Well, the first point is that the StoryGuide (Quick Start) is a way to introduce new users to Dramatica but is not necessarily the best way to use it down the line. If you don’t see the options you want there is usually no single previous choice that can be changed to allow the options you want (as described earlier). But, there are two approaches that will work, one with your existing storyform and one that is a better way to start in the first place.

First, for the storyform you already have partially developed: Go to the Story Engine feature and see all the items that are chosen in your storyform. Find the story point you want to open up to more options. Click on the little lock boxes to the right of each story point you want to keep as is, leaving all the other story points that don’t matter so much to you with the lock box open. Then hit “clear.” This will wipe out all the constrictions other than those imposed by the story points you’ve locked. In this way, you can get rid of any previous choices that aren’t important, keeping only the ones that are essential to you. This should open up more choices on the story point for which you wanted more options. If it doesn’t open up more options, it means that some combination of the story points you locked are still inconsistent (structurally – dramatically) with that story point. Which means you’ll have to uncheck the least important remaining story point and hit clear again and repeat until those options open up.

Now, this is a bit of a pain in the neck, and also can be frustrating because Dramatica 4 doesn’t show all the story points in the Story Engine – just the most commonly addressed ones. So, if your story point isn’t there, or if you have made choices for other story points in the story guide that don’t show up in the Story Engine, then you’ll have to open those up by unchecking them in Story Guide – as described, a pain in the neck. Fortunately, Dramatica 5 (in programming) has an improved Story Engine that includes all the story points for a one-stop job.

And here is where I explain how you can go about structuring your story much more efficiently from the get go. To begin, start with a new story file with no choices made. Then, go directly to the Story Engine OR to the Query System and find the single most important story point to you as author of the story. It might be the Main Character’s Problem (that drives him or her). It might be the Overall Story Domain (that determines if it will be an action story or one about soul-searching, for example). Naturally, this requires an understanding of what the story points are and how they show up in a story (which is why it wasn’t set up for new users). In the Story Guide you can read about each story point and use the helpview buttons to learn about the dramatic theory behind them, see them in context of real stories, learn about their usage in storytelling, and even call up examples of other well-known stories that share that same single story point.

The idea is, to begin with the single most important story point to you. Since it is the first one chosen, all options will be open. Next, you choose the second most important story point to you. Most authors don’t get into structural inconsistencies at this level, but only later when they get down to the less important dramatic choices. Since everyone has a different opinion about which story point is most important to them, there’s no way to set up a single pathway for everyone. Fortunately, Dramatica is nonlinear, so you can start with any story point and then go to any other next and so on.

As you go, story point by story point in order of importance, you’ve likely eventually run up against one in which the options don’t match what you want. That is Dramatica working again, telling you that what you wanted to do at that point is not consistent with what you’ve done already. At that point, you have a few directions to go:

1. Just ignore what Dramatica is saying. Often the passion of an author’s words is enough to carry readers or audience over structural flaws as long as they aren’t glaring. And, in fact, it is sometimes impossible to get excited about writing things in a way you don’t want that is perfect structurally, while it is inspiring to write about a particular part of your story the way you want it, even if it is structurally flawed. And this will translate into heightened involvement for your readers and audience. So, try to see why you are being inconsistent and why the options actually remaining would be structurally better, and then decide to chance your story or ignore that particular structural flaw because it isn’t a particularly critical story point.

2. Go back a ways, undoing choices, and try a slightly different path that may avoid closing down those options.

3. Recognize that structure is important to you at this point in your story, and that it is really shining a light on your structural flaws. Therefore, you change your story to whatever degree is needed to bring it into line dramatically.

In summary, however you decide to approach it, when the options you want are no longer available, that is in fact exactly why Dramatica was created and what it was designed to do: not to force you to conform to structure but to simply alert you to structural flaws and to show you the structurally sound options so that you can choose to fix the problem or let it slide for the sake of the Muse. But, at least you won’t be doing it unknowing and in the dark.

Hope this helps.

Melanie
Storymind

Do Stories Have 28 or 24 Scenes?

In the Dramatica Theory Book, we lay out a method of story development that results in 28 scenes, each with a component of Character, Plot and Theme.  We also describe a 24 scene perspective of story structure. 

Recently, a Dramatica user was having trouble seeing how the two apparently contradictory approaches related to one another.  I responded with an article ( Character Development and the 28 “Magic” Scenes ).

She just sent another email saying it still wasn’t quite clear.  So, here’s another stab at explaining how the 28 scene and 24 scene views peacefully co-exist:

Hi, Heather.

The 26 scenes only come up when looking at how plot and theme relate. In plot, when you have a single signpost, it is like looking at a single topic. The whole act is about that topic – for example, if the signposts are Learning, Understanding, Doing and Obtaining, then the second “act” is all about Understanding.

You see, there are two ways to look at stories and two ways to look at acts. When the audience looks at an act, they see it as a process that unfolds before them, so they focus more on the journeys, such as Understanding more and more until the characters are able to start Doing. But, when an author looks at a story, he or she will see the whole thing spatially, rather than temporally – see all the parts and pieces and how they fit together all in one view, all at one time.

So, the author focus is on the topics and how they relate to one another. So, he or she will focus more on the signposts, such as act one is about Learning, act two is about Understanding and so on. Both author and audience views are valid, just different because the audience doesn’t know the whole story until it is finished playing out, but the author does.

But, as a story plays out, the audience gradually builds up the same “after the fact” view of the author, act by act and scene by scene. So, the audience will see the journeys as they unfold, but will gradually see the topic shifts as act breaks when, for example, the characters have arrived at an Understanding and finally begin Doing. That marks the end of focusing on Understanding, which is no longer a topic of consideration in the story, having been fully explored.

When you consider the story as a done deal and look at the signposts as “topic acts,” then you can consider how theme relates to plot, act by act. Theme is not just a single item, such as Self-Interest. Nor is is just a simple conflict, such as Skill vs. Experience (the sort of story where a talented youth is pitted against a less-talented but far more experienced oldster). Those kinds of conflicts are explored over time, weighing one against the other, as described in the 28 scenes method.

But, in the spatial view of the story as a done deal, then you need to look at all four items in the thematic quad for each act. For example, the whole Skill quad, in addition to Experience, also contain Enlightenment and Wisdom. By Dramatica’s definitions, Enlightenment is knowing a higher truth, Wisdom is knowing when to use it.

You can see how all four fit together as part of a complete thematic exploration, Skill, Experience (externally based) and Enlightenment and Wisdom (the internal equivalents). In other words, Skill is to Enlightenment as Experience is to Wisdom.

If this is the thematic quad that was structurally associated with the signpost “act” of Understanding, for example, then all four of these thematic issues would be used to explore Understanding. In this example case, Understanding would be explored in terms of Skill, Experience, Enlightenment and Wisdom. But, in structure, the individual thematic issues are not applied to a signpost directly and individually – that is too cut and dried, too ham-handed, to unlike our own thematic investigations in our own lives in which we are constantly weighing one attitude or approach against another.

While in the 28 scene method, this “balance scale” is created when only the direct conflict between the thematic issue and its counterpoint (such as Skill vs. Experience) are measured against each other (though never directly against each other in the same scene), in the spatial view (the after-the-fact analysis of what the story means), every item in the thematic quad needs to be compared against all three of the others.

So, Skill will be weighed against not only Experience, but also directly against Enlightenment and Wisdom as well. This creates six different balance scales per act. In this case, they would be Skill vs. Experience, Skill vs. Enlightenment, Skill vs. Wisdom, Experience vs. Enlightenment, Experience vs. Wisdom and Enlightenment vs. Wisdom.

In real life, we just don’t see what the real thematic issue is directly, and there are always contextual considerations such as, it is wrong to steal, but it is right to steal bread for your starving child if there is no other way to feed him, but it is wrong to steal bread for your starving child if taking the bread will cause two other children to starve. The contextual considerations go on and on. That is why we have a jury of our peers – to cut some slack or conversely to throw the book at a criminal because of context.

This unclear view must be part of the Story Mind if it is to truly mirror the operation of our own minds. And so, for each of the four signposts in a given throughline, there will be all six balance scales for the thematic quad. By the end of the exploration of that signpost, the audience (and author) will know all there is to say about how, for example, Skill, Experience, Enlightenment and Wisdom stack up; how the affect and are affected by Understanding, for example. Then, it is on to the next signpost in which all six balance scales are played against Doing, for example.

By the end of a throughline, the thematic quad will have been played against all four signposts, and only then is there enough data to see how all the balance scale measurements add up, showing us which is the best (most effective) thematic item in trying to solve the story’s problem, and by how much it stands above the others, i.e. much better, or just a little better.

Six balance scales times four signposts equals twenty four “scenes” or more broadly put, twenty four sequences – twenty four thematic measurements. Now, with four throughlines that means there are 96 of those moments or thematic sequences. If you wanted to write a theme-focused story, that pretty much lines out all of the beats you need to create a complete story, especially when you consider you still have to add in character growth and plot progression, not to mention the structural components of genre as they develop act by act as well!

I hope this give you a better look at the twenty four “scene” approach to understanding the meaning and thematic message of a story, as opposed to the experiential 28 scene method of outlining your story’s progression.

As always, let me know if you have any other questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Melanie

Character Development and the 28 “Magic” Scenes

A Dramatica user recently asked a couple of questions about developing characters other than the Main and Impact (Obstacle) and also about Dramatica’s reference to “28 magic scenes” in one place and 24 scenes in another.
 
Here’s my reply – you’ll find the original questions at the end:
 
Hi, Heather.
 
Here’s some quick answers. First in regard to developing characters other than the main and obstacle. To begin with, every character has to do double duty – first, as having a real personality and psychology so we, the audience, can identify with them and – second, to fulfill a role as a facet of the larger Story Mind.
 
So, even objective characters can be explored as deeply as you like, even to explain how they came to act as they do as objective characters. But, these characters will not be on the cusp of a decision – they will simply have attitudes, approaches and depth. It is the main and obstacle characters who have the potential to truly change their natures and, therefore, their personalities are far more fluid and dynamic as they grapple with the pressures that would lead them to alter their very identities.
 
Still, even objective characters can been struggling with change if they are the main character in their own sub-plot or their own sub-story. For example, look at Han Solo in the original Star Wars movie (Episode IV). Luke is the main character, Obi Wan his Obstacle (or Impact or Influence character). Han is just an objective character – the “skeptic” archetype, in fact. But, Han has his own sub-story with the price on his head from Jabba the Hut. As a result, Han is a more developed character to the extent he will violate his “skepticism” to help Luke rescue Leia from the prison area, because his personal need to pay off his debt leads him to act in a way counter to his objective function.
 
Further, after Han leaves with his reward, he returns at the end putting his own life at risk to attack the empire ships that are targeting Luke. In other words, he has had a change of heart – he has grown and altered his nature. That is why in the next episodes of Star Wars, he can no longer function as a Skeptic since he has changed, and now he becomes a leader in the resistance.
 
Putting it all together, though the main and obstacle characters must always be very clearly the center of attention and the most developed so that the audience doesn’t lose sight of what the Big Picture overall story argument is about, as many other characters as you like can be developed considerably and with empathy, as long as they don’t muddy the overall waters.
 
As for your next question, here is why in some areas we speak of “28 magic scenes” and in other areas “24 scenes.” In short, the 28 scenes are a storytelling technique while the 24 scenes are a structural component.
 
First, the 28 “magic” scenes. In a story there are four signposts that represent milestones in the progression of the plot. For example, one overall story might follow the progression of Learning, Understanding, Doing and Obtaining. It is the journeys from one to the next that define the acts. So, the first act would be Learning until the characters arrive at an Understanding. Act two would be growing in their Understanding until they are able to begin Doing. And act three would be Doing more and more until they are able to Obtain. This means there are seven dramatic elements in each throughline – four signposts and three journeys. So, four throughlines “times” seven equals 28 plot scenes.
 
But, Theme can also be explored in 28 scenes. Here’s how it works. In each act, both sides of a throughline’s thematic conflict must be explored. But, they should never be in the same scene because if you compare them directly, it comes off as ham-handedly making your thematic point – essentially hitting the audience over the head with your own moral message. But, if you show each side of the thematic conflict in a separate scene, then the comparison is not direct and rather massages the audience instead. So, if the conflict is “greed vs. generosity,” for example, then you’d need six scenes (three for each side of the thematic conflict – one exposure of each for each act). But, you’d also need a final scene at the very end of the story where the two are finally compared side by side to verify your position as author and drive home the point you’ve more subtly made, act by act.
 
This leads to 28 scenes needed – here’s how. In each act of each throughline there are four signposts and three journeys. Each gets a plot scene. So, if you look at an act as a signpost followed by a journey, then each act has two plot-specific scenes per throughline. Therefore, you can put one side of the thematic conflict in the signpost scene and the other counter-point in the journey scene. This keeps them separate and gives each scene in that throughline a thematic component as well as a plot component, thereby making it richer. So, by the end of three acts, you’ve done six scenes and illustrated each side of the thematic conflict three times. The final signposts (signpost four) is the end of the story, the denouement or conclusion. It is there where you make the single side by side comparrison of both sides of the thematic conflict. This is the seventh thematic scene in each throughline, and with four throughlines, again you have 28 scenes – only this time they have an element in each of not only plot but theme at all, making them all the richer for it.
 
And finally, in the 28 scene realm, are the 28 character scenes. This only works if you are using archetypes. In fact, the whole 28 scene concept, as stated earlier, is just a story development trick – a way to quickly build scenes that can later be altered or added to. It provides nothing more than an initial spine to get you a framework from which to diverge.
 
So, to use archetypes to create 28 scenes, consider there are eight archetypes. They can be divided in pairs such as Protagonist and Antagonist or Reason and Emotion. These pairings create the greatest conflict. Now, each character has to be introduced – that’s eight scenes. And each character has to be dismissed at the end (how they fared, what happened to them) – that’s eight more scenes for a total of 16. And finally, each of the four pairs of conflicts but be introduced, interacted, and resolved. That’s four conflicts times three stages of conflict development and that equals (again!) 28!!
 
Therefore, if you put one character element in each of your 28 magic scenes, you end up with each scene having an element of plot, theme, and character and a chicken in every pot. But keep in mind, this is just a story development technique. There’s nothing structural about it, though it is based on structure, and what you end up with is a story that is so balanced (every scene having plot, theme, and character equally) that it seems rather plodding and predictable. Still, if you can’t figure out how to create your story’s sequence and get all three aspects of your story completely laid out, this method provides a really good means of creating a “first draft” of your storytelling sequence which you can then expand and alter.
 
For more info on the 28 magic scenes, try these videos:
 

64. The 28 “Magic” Scenes (Part One)

65. The 28 “Magic” Scenes (Part Two)

66. The 28 “Magic” Scenes (Part Three)

67. The 28 “Magic” Scenes (Part Four)

 
Now, dealing with the 24 scenes in the structure, we find there are the same four signposts that delineate the sequence of topics that will be explored act by act. .
 
But each of the signposts must also be explored thematically. In other words, to make the story argument, the reflections or harmonics of the problem must be felt in the plot. To do this, you look at the thematic conflict for a given throughline (like the overall story) and then explore all of the thematic conflicts in each of the four signposts.
 
There are four thematic elements in the quad containing the thematic conflict. In every quad there are six different relationships that can be explored, so four signposts “times” six relationships to be explored equals 24 sequences per throughline. In the Dramatica Theory Book, chapter 18, available at http://dramaticapedia.com/contents/dramatica-theory-book/dramatica-theory-book-chapter-18/ about halfway into the chapter you’ll find a section on “Sequences.” Here’s a quote from the chapter that describes the six relationships in a thematic quad that explains it pretty well:
 

What Is A Sequence?

Sequences deal with a quad of Variations much as Acts deal with a quad of Types. The quad we will be interested in is the one containing the Range, as that is the item at the heart of a throughline’s Theme. Returning to our example story about an Objective Story Throughline in the Physics Class with a Concern of Obtaining, we shall say the Range is Morality, as illustrated in the quad below.

If Morality is the Range, then Self-Interest is the counter-point. Theme is primarily derived from the balance between items. When examining the quad of Variations containing the Range, we can see that the Range and counter-point make up only one pair out of those that might be created in that quad. We have also seen this kind of balance explored in the chapter on Character where we talked about three different kinds of pairs that might be explored: Dynamic, Companion, and Dependent.

Just as with character quads, we can make two diagonal pairs, two horizontal pairs, and two vertical pairs from the Variations in the Range quad. For the Morality quad, these six pairs are Morality/Self-Interest, Morality/Attitude, Morality/Approach, Self-Interest/Attitude, Self-Interest/Approach, and Attitude/Approach. Each of these pairs adds commentary on the relative value of Morality to Self-Interest. Only after all six have been explored will the thematic argument will have been fully made. It could go in a manner as follows:

Morality/Self-Interest
On face value, which appears to be the better of the two?

Morality/Attitude
When Morality is the issue, how do we rate the Attitude of those espousing it?

Morality/Approach
When Morality is the issue, how do we rate the Approach of those espousing it?

Self-Interest/Attitude
When Self-Interest is the issue, how do we rate the Attitude of those espousing it?

Self-interest/Approach
When Self-Interest is the issue, how do we rate the Approach of those espousing it?

Attitude/Approach
Overall, which should carry more weight in regard to this issue?

By answering each of these questions in a different thematic sequence, the absolute value of Morality compared to Self-Interest will be argued by the impact of the six different relative values.

How Sequences Relate To Acts

Three Act Progressions

With six thematic Sequences and three dynamic Acts, it is not surprising that we find two Sequences per Act. In fact, this is part of what makes an Act Break feel like an Act Break. It is the simultaneous closure of a Plot Progression and a Theme Progression. The order in which the six thematic sequences occur does not affect the message of a story, but it does determine the thematic experience for the audience as the story unfolds. The only constraints on order would be that since the Range is the heart of the thematic argument, one of the three pairs containing the Range should appear in each of the three dynamic Acts. Any one of the other three pairs can be the other Sequence.

Four Act Progressions

The three dynamic Acts or Journeys in a throughline’s plot represent the experience of traversing the road through the story’s issues. The four structural Acts are more like a map of the terrain. As a result, a more structural kind of thematic Sequence is associated with the Types directly.

Beneath each Type is a quad of four Variations. From a structural point of view, the Act representing each Type will be examined or judged by the four Variations beneath it. In our ongoing example, the Act dealing with Obtaining would be examined in terms of Morality, Self-Interest, Attitude, and Approach. The difference between this and the thematic sequences we have just explored is that Obtaining is judged by each Variation in the quad separately, rather than each Variation in the quad being compared with one another. It is an upward looking evaluation, rather than a sideways looking evaluation.

In this manner, a thematic statement can be made about the subject matter of concern in each of the four structural Acts. The six Sequences constitute an argument about the appropriateness of different value standards.

Scenes

By the time we get down to scene resolution, there are so many cross-purposes at work that we need to limit our appreciation of what is going on in order to see anything in the clutter. First, however, let’s touch on some of the forces that tend to obscure the real function of scenes, then strip them away to reveal the dynamic mechanism beneath.

Resolution and Sequence

Earlier we spoke of plot in terms of Types. We also speak of plot here in terms of four resolutions: Acts, Sequences, Scenes, and Events. Both of these perspectives are valid appreciations depending on the purpose at hand. Because all units in Dramatica are related holographically, no single point of view can completely describe the model. That is why we select the most appropriate view to the purpose at hand. Even though looking at plot in terms of Types is useful, it is true that “plot-like” twists and turns are going on at the scene resolution as well. However, these dynamics are not truly part of the scene, but merely in the scene. An Act, Sequence, Scene, or Event is really a temporal container — a box made out of time that holds dynamics within its bounds. Much like filters or gratings with different-sized holes, the resolutions “sift” the dynamics trapping large movements at the highest levels and allowing smaller nuances to fall all the way down to the Elements.

What’s in a Scene?

At the scene resolution, the effects of Types and Variations can be felt like the tidal pull of some distant moon. But scenes are not the resolution at which to control those forces. Scenes are containers that hold Elements — anything larger cannot get crammed in without breaking. So the richness we feel in scenes is not solely due to what the scene itself contains, but also to the overall impact of what is happening at several larger scales.

What then does a scene contain? Scenes describe the change in dynamics between Elements as the story progresses over time. And since Elements are the building blocks of characters, scenes describe the changing relationships between characters.

Characters and Scenes

Characters are made up of Motivations, Methodologies, Means of Evaluation, and Purposes. These terms also describe the four major sets of Elements from which the characters are built. The driving force of a character in a given scene can be determined, such as whether their argument is over someone’s motivations or just the method they are employing.

6 Goes Into 24 Like Theme Goes Into Scenes

We have spoken of the three and four act appreciations of story. It was illustrated how both divisions are valid to specific tasks. When dealing with scenes, we find that no scenes ever hang between two acts, half in one and half in the other, regardless of a three or four act appreciation. This is because there are exactly 24 scenes created at the Element level: six per act in a four act appreciation, eight per act in a three act appreciation. In both cases, the scenes divide evenly into the acts, contributing to the “feel” of each act break being a major turning point in the progress of the story.

Sequences, on the other hand, exist as a six part partition of the story. Therefore, they divide evenly into a three act appreciation but not into a four. Since the four act view is objective, sequences — as they define Thematic movements — are truly an experiential phenomenon in the subjective appreciation and lose much of their power objectively.

 

Here’s the original email from the Dramatica user:
 
Hi Melanie,

 

I’ve watched the 12 hrs. and just watched the storyweaving seminar. I was wondering if you could clarify a couple points for me please. I understand the four through lines, four P.O.V’s. M.C., O.C., S.S., O.S. (I, you, we, they) Can I write a scene(s) centred around a character that is not the main or obstacle character and is separate from all through lines. I realize I could do from the objective story P.O.V., but that limits me to an eagle eye view. For example, if my antagonist is not my obstacle character, can I include a scene(s) that is intimate from his/her P.O.V. without having either the main or obstacle character present in those scenes? It seems to me that would give my story/audience a disjointed feeling, but I would like clarification. My second question is, in the 12 hr. class you talked about the 28 magic scenes. I get that. It makes perfect sense to me. However, when I started rooting around your blog page I found an article that spoke of 24 scenes. That there are 6 scenes in each act for a 4 act body of work and 8 scenes in each act in a 3 act body of work. The latter makes sense, just add on the addition 4 scenes in the fourth act, but the six scenes each in 4 acts confused me. Could you please clarify. Or point me in the right direction for either of my questions.

 

Thank you,

 

Heather

 

Using Dramatica for a How-To Book

A Dramatica user recently asked:

I bought your Dramatica Pro software a couple of weeks ago and am finding it difficult to figure out how to use it for writing a how-to type of book. I’ve developed a few imaginary characters just so that I could work through your software and learn how it works, but now I’d like to drop these imaginary characters so I can better focus on all the topics I’d like to cover in my book and the sequence they need to have so that the audience can understand what I want to show them. Essentially I’m writing about the mind and behavior and happiness and destiny which is all very abstract, so I’m trying to make it concrete and understandable by linking cause and effect.

Any suggestions of how I can use your software to help me write this type of book?

Thanks
Sharon

My reply:

Hi, Sharon

One of the best places to explore those kinds of topics are in the Theme Browser, which shows you sort of a Period Table of Thematic Topics. In the Theme Browser, you can zoom in from a generalized topic to progressively detailed topics. You can also see how the concepts relate by their position in the grid, relative to one another.

Then, in the Dramatica Dictionary, you can find extended definitions and descriptions of each of these thematic items including synonyms and antonyms.

Another place to look is in the StoryGuide question paths. There, along the middle of the window from left to right is a “HelpView” bar with several buttons on it. These allow you to see all the thematic terms used in context as well as real-world examples of how they might come into play in life (or in stories).

Essentially, I would skip working with characters at the beginning and focus on building theme first. Then go to plot. then genre, then theme.

Now if you click on the Start Here tile on the main Dramatica desktop when you open the program, select the longer of the paths. Then, follow the instructions and make heavy use of the HelpView buttons which provide so much context and exploration of how these topics work with the mind and with inter-socialization. Skip anything that has to do with Characters the first time through. Then, after completing the path go to the Reports area and read some of the thematic reports to get a feel for the topics you’ve selected.

Finally, go back to the StoryGuide and create a Main Character to represent your own views of the information you’ve selected. Your Impact Character will be your audience that you hope to convince of your views. Answer the questions for the Main Character describing how you feel about the material, and for the Impact Character about how you want to focus them. Then check the reports for both characters and for the plot lines that have been laid out. These plot lines will provide a sequential guide that describes the progression of topics and sub-topics you will want to use to explore your subjects.

It is often handy to then reverse the process and adopt the role of the Obstacle Character and answering how you want to impact your reader who is now cast as the Main Character. In this way, you can see what things look at from your readers’ point of view and how you are coming across to them, topic-wise.

In the end, though the reports and structures are tremendous guides, the greatest value of this approach is that you have come to know your material in great detail, including contextual information about the perspectives of each topic you wish to explore and the order you’d like to approach it, as well as the impact you’d like to have.

That’s probably enough to get you started. Let me know if you have any further questions along the way.

Melanie
Storymind

Narrative in the Real World and the Mobius Doughnut

In the early 1990s we developed a new theory of narrative called Dramatica.  Since it touched on the psychology of story structure, we believed that it might also be applied to the psychologies of real people as well as fictional ones.

As background for this hypothesis, Dramatica theory holds that every story has a mind of its own. This Story Mind is made up of a personality created by the storytelling style and an underlying psychology represented by the story’s structure.

This one concept alone, if projected onto real people might help us understand an individual, be it a friend, stranger, or perhaps ourselves. But Dramatica also contends that fictional characters are not only personalities in their own rights, but also must play a second role as a facet or aspect of the overall Story Mind. In essence, each character is a complete mental system, but collectively they join together to form a larger mental system that is not unlike a fractal of the dynamics of each individual character.

From this notion, we developed the concept of fractal storyforms, meaning that not only would characters create a Story Mind when they came together, but a group of story structures coming together would create an even larger Story Mind in which each individual story functioned as a character.

In the real world, we hypothesized, when people come together in groups, they automatically slip into roles that represent different attributes we all possess. For example, one person might become the voice of reason in a group, assuming the role of the group’s intellect, just as there is a Reason Archetype in a fictional story. Another character might adopt the position of the group’s passion, speaking up whenever human feelings are the issue, essentially fulfilling the same character function as the Emotion Archetype.

What’s more, if a number of groups band together in a larger organization, automatically they will begin to adopt roles within the larger organization as if they were characters in a mind, thereby extending the phenomenon up one more fractal dimension. In the real world we call this “fractal psychology.”

Naturally it follows that if Story Minds exist in the real world as well as the fictional world, then might we not best understand their elements and mechanisms by applying the same Dramatica model that has proven itself in the analysis of fictional stories?

Recently, an opportunity has emerged for us to explore the application of our methods for analysis of storyforms to actual situations and organizations. At first, the task seemed simple – just analyze the situations as if they were stories. But it quickly became evident that there are substantial differences in the two endeavors.

Most notably, while the narrative space of a story is a closed system, i.e. a book, a movie or a stage play, in the real world the narrative space is open, limitless. So unlike analyses of fiction, in the real world one must first find the storyform before one can analyze it.

Alas, this brings forth another difficulty. There is usually only one story in a fiction narrative space. Sometimes there can be a sub-story hinged to the main story that is almost wholly independent, yet touches at one point, such as a character who appears in both stories.

In such a case, the character is driven most strongly by its own story, yet still plays a function in the larger story. An example is the original Star Wars movie (Episode IV) in which Han Solo’s debt story with Jabba is hinged (but not part of) the main story about the empire and the rebels.

In this example, Han’s character would never allow him to march into the detention area to rescue the princess EXCEPT that his need for money for his sub-story provides enough sideways motivation for him to act out of character and do something that puts him at more risk. A useful tool for writers, but a complication for analysts of real-world situations.

Further, some fiction narrative spaces can contain more than one complete story, like raisins in rice pudding. For example, in Woody Alan’s movie, “Crimes and Misdemeanors” there is a crime story and a misdemeanor story, each with complete and different structures and different characters that do not affect or interact with the other story. The movie is designed to force the audience to compare the two stories side by side and arrive at a more conundrum.

In the real world, this means that any number of independent stories may co-exist in the same narrative space. One may even conjecture that some real world stories may be sub-sets of others, or perhaps even overlap each other containing some unique and some shared story points.

In short, single storyforms in fiction are idealizations in which there is a single central problem. The unfolding of the story is an argument about the best way to try and solve such a problem. But in real minds and real situations, many problems are constantly emerging, playing themselves out, and passing through each other, like stars in galaxies in collision. Add to this the fractal nature of nested storyforms and you end up with a veritable mess.

And so, the task of identifying and separating a single storyform in the real world, much less the one best suited to answer the questions at hand becomes a daunting proposition.

Decades ago, when we were first trying to model Dramatica’s conceptual structure in some tangible form, we experimented with several physical constructs to represent the elements and their attendant dynamics.

Nowadays, we are all familiar with the recognizable four-tower model representing the four Classes of stories and looking like an odd blending of a three-dimensional chess set and a Rubik’s cube. But how many are actually aware of why Dramatica ended up being presented in this form?

The real story, as it were is that in the very beginning, we began with lists of elements that we observed in story. Then we realized some were higher-level appreciations and others lower-level, like members of a family that all share the same higher-level family name as well as their own. Or, like families of chemical elements in which Fluorine and Chlorine are different elements but have properties similar enough to be in the same chemical family.

But how to build a model of that which satisfied all of the mechanisms that “chemically” connected the elements?

One of the first attempts I made was to get a toroid (a doughnut-shaped piece of Styrofoam about a foot across) and then to wrap a thin metallic foil tape around it in a helix. The foil wrapped around the circumference four times by the time it passed through all four quadrants and returned to the point of origin. This represented one of the four classes.

Three more foil tapes of different colors were added, spaced so that they also wrapped around the toroid in a four-loop spiral without overlapping the others. Each was slightly staggered, so that the beginning of the next color was at the ending of the last color, creating a continuously wrapping “quad-helix” around the toroid until the end of thye very last of the four colored foils connected back to the beginning of the very first, creating, essentially and endless loop.

This was useful because you could see the relationships among elements of different classes when written equally spaced along each of the four colors. But, it was hardly practical to ship a Dramatica Steering Wheel with each software box, it who could use the thing anyway? Besides, this was just an approximation. In fact, to be wholly correct, the toroid would have had to have been wrapped by a mobius strip to include the progressive shift of dynamics in a structure which we came to refer to (in verbal shorthand) as an “inverse with a twist.” Hence, the need for a mobius doughnut.

After that, we shifted to a much more doable visualization of the very same elements and mechanics as a pyramid for each Class of story (for each of the four towers you see today).

To illustrate that each pyramid represented a point of view that the peak that fanned out into a perspective of the “Truth” at the base, we decided to put two pyramids together at the base so they formed a crystal – real new age visualization, that!

This worked much better, but we came to realize that because both points of view were looking not at different sides of the same coin but at the same side from different places, then we ran into problems because the common base that was the interface between them couldn’t be itself and also its mirror image at the same time. And besides, there were four classes, so how could they all share the same interface in a three dimensional model?

We were pretty frustrated. So, we took a clue from Crick and Watson when they were trying to be the first to discover the molecular structure of DNA. At first, they were using X-ray micrographs of DNA to try and see the structure. From that method, DNA appears to be a crystal, just as our model could. And, as we all now know, DNA is a double-helix, while our temporal component is a quad-helix.

We figured with that kind of correlation we were probably on the right track. But, since all that was still too complex for writers, we ended up simply making four towers, sub-divided into smaller and smaller components to illustrate all the familial relationships among the story points. And when we flattened it down to a two-dimensional grid, we presented this alternative view as the Dramatica Table of Story Elements that tens of thousands of writers use today.

And here we were now, twenty years later, looking at an open-system narrative space in the real world, once more trying to visualize a storyform. But not the same as in the closed system of fiction – an inverse version of that. But worse. Because the in fiction, analysis is a closed set and creation is an open set, but in the real world analysis AND creation are BOTH open sets. So, it wasn’t just an inverse, but an inverse with a twist AGAIN! Durn concept keeps coming ‘round to haunt us.

Okay, let’s take that toroid again and stick it in the middle of the real-world narrative space. We have to make it a mobius doughnut in our minds because this doughnut is a very special doughnut because to see the storyform inside, you have to turn the doughnut inside out.

And here, then, is the real problem. You can see the data inside until you turn it inside out, but you can’t turn it inside out because it is genus one with no opening on the surface. You see, if you take an inner tube and take off the valve, you can actually (or at least theoretically) pull the entire inner tube through the valve hole until the inside is on the outside and vice versa. But without a hole, in a true doughnut, there’s no loose thread, no handle, no place to get a grip or begin the process of inversion.

The mobius strip aspect indicates that it would only lay flat upon the toroid if we had one more dimension than three in which to build such a visualization. But, we don’t – not for practical purposes.

And so, we bashed our heads against the wall for some time until after many days of conjecture, we realized that the key was not in finding the best storyform in the real-world narrative space by objective standards, but the best storyform by subjective standards.

In a world of infinite overlapping structures, none is more important than any other until you impose importance upon it. Essentially, as the singer/composer Don MacLean said, “The more you pay, the more its worth.”

As an analog, consider the story creation process in fiction. It is an open system for the subject matter of interest to the author has no limits. Theoretically, this makes it impossible to pick the best story structure because it cannot be objectively determined.

But in practice, who the hell is objective? Rather, authors come to the story creation process because of their subjective interest in the subject matter. Many years ago I used to teach authors that we all get excited by the subject matter, but in truth, all of those bits of information can’t possibly live together in peaceful coexistence in the same story structure. The job of the structuring author is to pick the most important subject matter first, boil it down to story points in the structure and then continuing picking until you hit the point where something you want won’t fit into the structure. This is when the Dramatica Story Engine in the software is doing its job by telling the author, “if you include that extra piece, you’re weakening your own structure – working against yourself.”

So, when Dramatica doesn’t match what you want to do at the lower levels, its not broken. In fact, that what it was designed to do – save you from yourself (save your subjective self from making a big objective mistake!)

Now if we apply that same principal to the open-system real world narrative space, then (using the inverse with a twist) analysis should work the same way. And durned if it doesn’t.

You can’t find a story form in the real world, you have to impose one, just like an author does in creating a fiction. Essentially, what is it you want to know? What question do you want to answer, what process do you want to explore?

In practice, you simply look at the narrative space and decide what you want to know first. Then you turn a data point into a story point that will explore that for you. Then you pick the next piece and the next. You continue picking pieces until you’ve fully populated a storyform.

Of course, in the real world, you’ll never get to a complete storyform before you run out of visible data points. But thanks to the Story Engine, by the time you’ve run out of data that belongs in your subjectively defined story structure, Dramatica will suggest the kinds of data that “should” be out there in the gaps.

If you are writing a fictional story about real events, these gaps will be filled by your own creation. But in an analysis of real world data, these gaps are already filled – you just haven’t observed that data yet, but its out there somewhere, hiding for now.

Therefore, Dramatica is able to tell you more about the real world than you can see for yourself.

In summary then, in both fiction and the real world, no storyform is better than any other until you have a preference for one. In either case, you need to look to the subject matter and build a storyform that best represents the subject matter you’d like to explore.

In short, when building storyforms in the real world, forget all the pyramids and towers and mobius doughnuts – all you have to do is make the one you want.

And in conclusion, it took us weeks of work and took me six pages to describe find and describe logically something every writer worth his or her salt knows intuitively:

Build the story you want to tell.

And Dramatica? It just keeps you honest when your own preference for the subject matter gets the better of making sense.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

Originally published in 2011

Learn more about Narrative Science

Using Character Names from Someone Else’s Story

A writer recently asked:

I purchased your Storyweaver, because I’ve had many stories rumbling around in my head for years. Several of them are adaptations of old tv dramas and old movies.

My stories are totally different from the originals, but use the same characters names.

I guess my main question is: am I legally allowed to write these stories?

I’m guessing there must be some sort of rights acquired in order to do so. If that’s the case, I’ll have to forget it. I can’t afford the possible hundreds of thousands it would cost to acquire rights to characters names… and without these characters, my stories wouldn’t be the same.

Thank you for any help you can possibly provide.

Respectfully yours,

SV

My reply:

Hi, SV

While a character name cannot be copyrighted, it can be trademarked. And, in copyright cases, character names can be taken into consideration as part of an overall argument of infringement.

For example, there is no doubt you cannot get away with calling a character Luke Skywalker, even if you were telling a story about an orange and an apple, and Luke was the apple.

At the other end of the scale, you couldn’t get away with publishing a story about a young farm boy in a galaxy far far away whose father turns out to be the villain, and both of whom use a paranormal power (know as the PP) to move objects and control minds no matter what you called them, even Fred and Ethyl.

And in the middle are character names such as Joe Smith, which don’t really ring a bell with most people as belonging uniquely to some previously published work. Those kinds of names can be used without concern, even if they have been previously published in some obscure fiction.

In the end, it is up to you to determine if the character names are so identifiable that using them would violate copyright or intellectual property rights, and if you run into trouble, then it is up to the courts.

Hope this helps.

Melanie

Act Order – Sign Posts, Journeys & Throughlines

A Dramatica user asks:

Hi Melanie,

In the [Dramatica] theory book you can find this text:

“Just because we have absolute freedom, however, does not mean our decision will have no effect on our audience. In fact, the order in which each scene crops up deter- mines which information is a first impression and which is a modifier. It is a fact of human psychology that first impressions usually carry more weight than anything that follows. It takes a lot of undoing to change that initial impact. This is why it is usually better to introduce the Main Character’s Signpost 1 before the Impact Character Sign- post 1. Otherwise, the audience will latch onto the Impact Character and won’t switch allegiance until much farther into the story. Clearly, if our weaving has brought the audience to think the Impact Character is the Main Character, we have failed to convey the real structure and meaning of our story. So, just because we have freedom here doesn’t mean we won’t be held accountable.”

I understand it.

My question: Is it possible to start out with the OS Signpost 1 before the MC Signpost 1?

Thanks al lot,
Eduardo

My reply:

Hi, Eduardo

Sure, in fact the only hard and fast “rules” are that you shouldn’t introduce a throughline’s journey before its sign post and that you should finish all sign posts and journeys of the same “act” (such as sign post 2 and journey 2) for all four of the throughlines before introducing any of the next act’s sign posts or journeys, such as sign post 3 or journey 3 of any of the four throughines. That way, acts are not fragmented from one throughline to another, and all throughline finish an act before any throughline begins the next act.

So, as for putting the OS Sign post 1 before the MC sign post 1 is just fine – it simply means you are choosing to open your story with the Objective story and then introducing your Main Character after the overall story subject is revealed.

Melanie

al Awlaki, the “Uncanny Valley” and Writing Empathetic Characters

Recently, al Awlaki (the infamous “American” Al Qaeda) was killed by American forces. He was viewed as a great threat because of his ability to speak to the domestic population of the United States in their own language and culture and to inspire terrorist acts by those susceptible to his message of jihad.

While these allegations are certainly true, they alone do not explain the intensity with which Awlaki was both feared and despised. In fact, there is another quality he possessed that amplified the trepidation and derision he precipitated: he fell into the “Uncanny Valley.”

“Uncanny Valley” is a term generally used to define any non-human entity whose attributes are just human enough to be disturbing. For example psychological test have been run that chart an empathy line against robots whose features range from fully mechanical to completely human in appearance. At first, the results were predictable: the more human the robot appeared, the more empathetic people were to it.

But, as the human qualities reached a point where they became “almost human” there was a sudden drop-off in empathy as steep as a cliff. In fact, the reaction to such an entity reached a point where it plummeted below zero empathy into the realm of negative empathy, documented as “revulsion.”

The same test was also run using stuffed animals and the results were essentially the same – our empathy increases as human likeness increases until a sharp break point is reached where additional increases quickly reverse the trend. Once the line hits bottom and as human similarity continue to increase, eventually empathy rises again into the positive, and ultimately reaches maximum when the non-human entity appears absolutely identical to a human, even though one knows it really is not.

Now this aspect of human psychology has tremendous implication for writers, especially in the creation and development of characters. While it has been explored directly in such works as the I, Robot novels by Asimov (and especially well handled in the movie, Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams) it is always at work in the relationship between an audience and the fictional entities that populate the stories it reads and watches.

Let me propose that the Uncanny Valley not only pertains to the visual qualities of non-human entities, but to how we intuitively sense their humanity, almost as if we were automatically and subconsciously performing a Turing Test on every person we meet.

I believe we are. I believe we are prepared to accept something totally alien as a risk of unknown potential, while any creature we can identify as of human essence is a known quantity and, therefore, a predictable risk at worst. But some one or some thing that is just off-kilter enough is loose-canon when it comes to threat. We might find ourselves lulled into complacency only to be set-upon when our guard is down.

For example, we are afraid of an earthquake or tornado because it is random and chaotic. We are afraid of bears in a different way because they share our emotions and we understand what they might do. But a Terminator or a demonic spirit is far more terrifying for while we are able to frame it as an entity in our minds, we are unable to fathom its motivations or to predict its behavior, which are often contrary to humanity.

In contrast, consider animated cartoons in which cars, cattle, or cantaloupes may all engender empathy from an audience because they are carefully (albeit intuitively) crafted to fall far enough from human-looking to avoid the Uncanny Valley on one side, and close enough to human in spirit to avoid the Uncanny Valley on the other.

Many of the disfigured humans of fiction are often drawn to revolt us in appearance while connecting to us in their humanity. And, of course, many characters are written to illustrate that even the most beautiful can have revolting souls.

Now for the sake of a mental exercise, consider how this holds true in real life. For example, most of us find the Elephant Man uncomfortable to look at, yet empathize deeply with his heart. But what of those in our own live who have been badly burned or born with physical defects? What must that life be like when you are constantly reminded, subliminally, that others shun you as non-human? There are lessons here for our spiritual growth and stories to be told.

Let’s shift gears, for a moment, and go to the opposite extreme – the science of mind, the neurology of psychology. If you go to Wikipedia and look up Uncanny Valley you’ll find graph that shows the sudden dip and re-rise of the empathy line.

I was immediately struck by how similar that line is to the “action potential” of a neuron in the brain. After a neuron fires, it is chemically inhibited from firing again immediately. Rather, the “action potential” goes from maximum, down a steep cliff during the actual firing to a negative action potential until the forces that lead to the ability to fire recharge.

I’m going to make a leap here and share with you an aspect of the psychology behind Dramatica – a theory we call Mental Relativity. As part of the theory we propose (because of what we have observed in our model of story structure) that dynamics in the electro-chemical operations of the brain are reflected, almost as fractals, in the high-level dynamics of psychological processes. Simply put, psychology exhibits sympathetic vibrations of the patterns of physical brain function.

Now, I realize there are no studies (to my knowledge) that explore this, but is absolutely is a prediction of the Mental Relativity theory. But why would this be? Consider one potential explanation…

It is one of our most essential survival tools to be able to recognize objects, patterns, edges, what is part of something and what is not. The same curve we see in neurons or in the Uncanny Valley actually is just a reflection of our ability to define the limit of things.

We use this to see a rock in our path or to determine if figure coming through the mist is a friend or foe. It is what allows us to describe the nature of an object or a person and the scope of an argument or a story.

And so, with an aspect of our minds that is so foundational and all pervasive, a wise author would give it heed when building characters to be attractive or off-putting, a wise person would think twice about from whom they turn away (and why), and as for al Awlaki, well, he was American enough to connect with those who felt isolated, but just a little bit too non-American to avoid our ire.

Questions About Act Order in Different Cultures

A writer asked the following question regarding my earlier article, “Changing Dramatica’s Suggested Act Order.”

How does one go about sussing this out? What approach would you recommend if I were trying to figure out which argument is primary in Mexico or Argentina or Norway?

Here’s my thoughts:

Alas, there’s no specific methodology developed at this time to help make such a judgment.  The best approach I’ve found is to look to existing stories that are popular and long-lived within the culture in question. 

All stories seek to provide both order and sequence.  Order is spatial and is the equivalent of “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” – in other words, what conditions co-exist – a focus on relationships.  Sequence is temporal and is the equivalent of “one bad apple spoils the bunch” – in other word, what conditions lead to another condition. 

All cultures will explore both, and stories for (or about) men will largely look at deadlines and linear progressions while stories for (or about) women will largely look at restrictions and conflicting forces.  This, of course, further clouds the issue. 

And, naturally, some cultures are more balanced between the two while others are at the extremes of the bias.  Further, the intensity of how strongly a culture is attached to accuracy is a variable as well.  In such a case, even a strong bias might not be so crucial. 

Remember also that all cultures most appreciate stories that are fully accurate in both aspects, for that is what our human minds most seek.  Therefore, the only importance in knowing the cultural bias is if you want to intentionally break structure for personal reasons, which is always the equivalent of saying, “I know it is better THAT way, but I just want it THIS way.” 

So, in the end, it is a judgment call, but the good news is, if you can’t decide the relative importance of time or space or the overall importance of either to a given culture, then the culture probably doesn’t care all that much either, making it pretty safe for whatever you do.

Melanie