A Tale is a Statement

The Dramatica Theory

A Conversation on Story Structure

by Melanie Anne Phillips

1.2   A Tale is a Statement

The Story Mind concept is interesting, but how would such a thing have come to be?  After all, there was certainly never a convention at which authors from all over the world gathered to devise a system of story structure based on the psychology of the human mind!

Here’s one possibility….

Imagine the very first storyteller, perhaps a caveman sitting with his tribe around a campfire. The first communication was not a full-blown story as we know them today. Rather, this caveman may have rubbed his stomach, pointed at his mouth and made a “hungry” sound.

More than likely he was able to communicate. Why? Because his “audience” would see his motions, hear his sounds, and think (conceptually), “If I did that, what would I mean?”

We all have roughly the same physical make-up, therefore we make the assumption that we also think similarly. So when that early man encoded his feelings into sound and motion, the others in his group could decode his symbolism and arrive back at his meaning.

Buoyed by his success in communication, our caveman expands his technique, moving beyond simple expressions of his immediate state to try and describe a linear series of experiences. For example, he might relate how to get to a place where there are berries or how to avoid a place where there are bears. He would use sign language to outline his journey and to depict the things and events he encountered along the way.

When our storyteller is eventually able to string together a series of events and experiences he has created a tale. And that, simply put, is the definition of a tale: an unbroken linear progression.

We call this kind of tale a “head-line” because it focuses on a chain of logical connections. But you can also have a “heart-line” – an unbroken progression of feelings. For example, our caveman storyteller might have related a series of emotions he had experienced independently of any logistic path.

Tales can be just a head-line or a heart-line, or can be more complex by combining both. In such a case, the tale begins with a particular situation in which the storyteller relates his feelings at the time. Then, he proceeded to the next step which made him feel differently, and so on until he arrives at a final destination and a concluding emotional state.

In a more complex form, emotions and logic drive each other, fully intertwining both the head-line and hear-line. So, starting from a particular place in a particular mood, and driven by that mood, the storyteller acts to arrive at a second point, which then makes him feel differently.

The tale might be driven by logic with feelings passively responded to each step, or it might be driven completely by feelings in which each logic progression is a result of one’s mood.

And, in the most complex form of all, logic and feelings take turns in driving the other, so that feelings may cause the journey to start, then a logical event causes a feeling to change and also the next step to occur. Then, feelings change again and alter the course of the journey to a completely illogical step.

In this way, our storyteller can “break” logic with a bridge of feeling, or violate a natural progression of feelings with a logical event that alters the mood. Very powerful techniques wrapped up in a very simple form of communication!

We know that the human heart cannot just jump from one emotion to another without going through essential emotional states in between. However, if you start with any given emotion, you might be able to jump to any one of a number of emotions next, and from any of those jump to others.

Still you can’t jump directly to all emotions from any given emotion. If you could, then we would all just be bobbing about from one feeling to another: there would be no growth and no emotional development.

As an analogy, look at Freud’s psycho-sexual stages of development or consider the seven stages of grief. You have no choice but to go through them in a particular order. You can’t skip over any. If you do, there’s an emotional mis-step. It has an untrue feeling to the heart.

A story that has a character that skips an emotional step or jumps to a step he couldn’t really get to from his previous mood will feel unreal to the audience. It will feel as if the character has started developing in a manner the audience or readers can’t follow with their own hearts. It will pop your audience or readers right out of the story and cause them to see the character as someone with home they simply can’t identify.

So the idea is to create a linearity of unbroken emotional growth. But doesn’t that linearity create a formula? Well it would if you could only go from a given emotion to just one particular emotion next. But, from any given emotion there are several you might jump to – not all, but several. And from whichever one you select as storyteller, there are several more you might go to next.

Similarly with logic, from any given situation there might be any one of a number of things that would make sense if they happened next. But you couldn’t have anything happen next because some things would simply be impossible to occur if the initial situation had happened first.

In summary, 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 you have a head-line and/or a heart-line and it is an unbroken chain that doesn’t skip any steps, that constitutes a complete tale.

Table of Contents

Introducing the Story Mind

The Dramatica Theory

A Conversation on Story Structure

by Melanie Anne Phillips

1.1 Introducing the Story Mind

Every story has a mind of its own, as if it were a person.  Like each of us, this Story Mind has a personality and an underlying psychology.  Its personality is developed through the storytelling style, and its psychology is determined by the story’s structure.

Characters, plot, theme, and genre, therefore, must do double-duty.  For example, in storytelling characters depict real people so that the readers or audience might identify with them and thereby become personally involved in the entertainment and, perhaps, internalize the message.

Structurally, however, characters represent our own conflicting motivations, made tangible, incarnate, so that we might directly observe the mechanisms of our own minds, see them from the outside in, and thereby gain a better understanding of how to solve similar problems in our own lives.

Storytelling is an art, and while there may be generalized rules for how best to relate the content of a story, they are really more like guidelines.  In truth, there are as many different styles of storytelling as there are authors.

Story structure, on the other hand, is a science, and though there may be an extensive variety of possible structures, they all must abide by very specific rules as to which dramatic elements must be present and for how they may be cobbled together.

Table of Contents

The Dramatica Theory – Prologue

The Dramatica Theory

By Melanie Anne Phillips

 Part One

 The Story Mind

Prologue

When I wrote the first edition of “Dramatica: A New Theory of Story” in 1991, it was the intent of Chris Huntley and myself to introduce our model of story structure in text book format, so as to most accurately document our work.

With Chris’ editorial skills guiding my prose, and the inclusion of his charts and illustrations, we achieved our purpose: a dry, dense, technical manual fit for a college-level course in narrative theory.  Problem is, our approach was so academic in nature that it was a stunningly horrid read for the writing community to whom it was ostensibly targeted.

Through subsequent editions we sought to soften this stark presentation with real-world examples of novels, movies and stage plays and, with the inclusion of Chris’ own brilliant chapter on propaganda, the final edition elevated its overall manner from impenetrable to stilted.

Which brings us to the reason for this book.  While it is true that one could not improve on the specificity of the original, it is equally true that there are far more accessible ways to convey the same information.

And so, I offer you “The Dramatica Theory: A Conversation on Story Structure.”

Table of Contents

Dramatica & Non-linear Game Theory

In regard to non-linear video game story structuring, in fact, that is where Dramatica excels in ways no other system has been able to achieve.  To illustrate how, we need to take a few steps back and then work our way forward again to iterative gaming theory.

In the beginning, there was the tale – a simple logical step-by-step progression that described a journey from a point of inception to a destination, documenting the key events along the way.

This evolved into a more complex form that included not only the logical progression, but the passionate progression as well – a heart-line in addition to a head-line.

A head-line says, “This leads to this leads to that.”  A heart-line says, “This feeling evolved into this feeling resulting in that feeling.”

Either of these linear progressions is referred to as a simple “tale” in Dramatica theory.  There is also a complex tale form in which these two linear progressions interact and alter the course either would have taken on its own.  Such a complex tale would say, “Beginning here and feeling thus, we progressed here which made us feel thus, and based on that feeling we ended up going there.”

In other words, a complex tale is the intertwining of two causal linearities in which they do not run in parallel but alter the progression of each other.  Such a complex tale can have situations driving emotions, in which case the passionate side is derivative and reactive, or it can have emotions driving activities, in which case events are slaves to passion.  This establishes a causal hierarchy between our intellect and our feelings.

But, the most complex of all tales shifts between the two drivers to alternate which one is driving the other.  For example, starting at a given logistic and emotional state, it may be the logic that determines the first event, which then leads to a change in feelings which then determine the next course of action.

It is just such an arrangement that constitutes the essence of the “hero’s journey”.

All of these possibilities are still tales, and thus constitute what Dramatica considers to be the first order of storyform.

At the next level of magnitude, we encounter the linear story, as opposed to the linear tales I’ve just described.  As a quick and loose analogy, imagine a television picture on an old tube set.  A single complete frame of video is constructed by a series of scanning lines creating a horizontal stack of lines.  Each line in the stack varies in luminosity and color, much as an individual tale varies in logic and feeling over the course of its linear progression.

Stacked together, however, they collectively take on a greater meaning.  What appears to be almost arbitrary progressions in each individual tale are assembled like pieces in a mosaic until an overall image is formed that is more of a tapestry than a thread in degree of complexity.  That is why, in Dramatica, we say “You spin a tale but you weave a story.”

A story, therefore, is a far more demanding form, requiring every beat, scene, sequence, chapter and act to be part of a larger overall message.  Each piece must do double-duty, making sense in its own internal linear progression over time, and also filling in its proper place in the overall spatial understanding when the unfolding of the story is complete and the message made manifest.

This is the equivalent of a single storyform in Dramatica, and why the Dramatica Story Engine is able to translate and predict between what linear progressions are required to arrive at a given overall meaning, and, conversely, starting with a given overall meaning, to determine the order in which dramatic progressions of characters, plot, theme and even genre must occur.

In Dramatica, this is considered a second order storyform, as its complexity is one magnitude beyond the tale.

Now, we finally arrive at non-linear video game theory, which is yet one more increase in magnitude of complexity.

Referring to my earlier analogy to a television frame being loosely equivalent to a story, whilst it is comprised of individual tales described by scenes and sequences, picture now the progression of television frames that constitutes a broadcast program.  In Dramatica terms, this is equivalent to a series of fixed storyforms progressing from one to the next as if they were frames in a movie.

Each storyform represents a mind set – a flash photograph of all of the elements and vector dynamics of the intellect and passion of a mind at a frozen moment of time.  This is what we all commonly think of as a story in a novel, screenplay, or stage play.  It is the exploration of a mind set and the author’s judgment as to whether that state of mind should be maintained or abandoned in order to arrive at the best possible outcome, taking into account both logic (success or failure) and feeling (good or bad).

In interactive non-linear gaming, the goal is to create an experience in which each moment seems as ordered as a single storyform but is not bound by such an intractable arrangement.  Hence, by creating a series of storyforms, one is able to construct an ever-changing environment, driven by the user yet guided by the designer.

More specifically, the human mind (both intellectually and passionately) cannot jump willy nilly from any given mind set to any other directly – i.e. the stages of grief in which one will eventually experience all of the stages, but must pass through them in a specific, rather than random, order.  Conversationally put, we can eventually get to any logical or emotional point, but from any given point, you can’t necessarily get there from here.

Fortunately, the existing Dramatica Story Engine is designed to allow for the creation of such appropriate progressions that do not violate logical order nor emotional progression.  Here is how it works.  First, you create a storyform that represents the logical and passionate situation in which you want your non-linear story to begin.  In the Story Engine feature, Dramatica allows alteration of a storyform in order to game out “what-if” scenarios and to test the appropriateness and voracity of a given storyform against another.

This is accomplished by picking any given dramatic element in the Story Engine and “unchoosing” it by un-selecting a previously chosen item.  Since a storyform is fixed by having enough cross-referenced story point (dramatic elements) that all other points are determined, by “opening-up” the storyform through the removal of the constraints of a single dramatic element only, then other previously fixed dramatic elements now revert to having several available options once more.

You now create a second storyform by making specific selections among one or more of these newly opened-up story points until you once more arrive at a single fixed storyform.  This new storyform will be complete compatible with both logic and emotion as a next mind set in the ongoing progression of the game.

In actual play, the designer would choose in advance which story point to “open-up” by removing the previously chosen selection but the end-user would then choose from the available options to determine the next storyform scenario.  In simple systems, this choice would be a direct on from an options screen, but in more complex non-linear gaming, the choice of the next appropriate storyform in the progression would be determined by the manner in which the end-user had already progressed through the initial storyform, as the user has had the opportunity to select the order in which he or she has explored the elements of the initial storyform, and thus data can be gathered that indicates areas of lesser interest and therefore the best candidates to alter through opening up of the initial setting.

Well, there is certainly far more detail and specific development involved in such an undertaking, but hopefully this indicates the capability and usefulness of Dramatica, both as a theory and of the software tool in its current incarnation, for non-linear storyforms as well as traditional linear stores and even simple or complex tales.

Dramatica vs. McKee

Dramatica vs. McKee

Two Approaches to Creativity

A client recently wrote to me asking how followers of Robert McKee view Dramatica.  Here is my reply:

Usually, McKee students see his method and Dramatica as two sides of the same coin of creativity.

McKee focuses on the passionate side of story development – what makes a story have power, connect with an audience, and ring true, while Dramatica addresses the underlying mechanics of the structure.

As an analogy, picture McKee and Dramatica as two aspects of a radio signal. McKee is the program that is being broadcast, Dramatica is the carrier wave that transmits it.

When the carrier wave is tuned properly, the program gets through without interference. But if the carrier wave is flawed, no matter how good the program is, it will get lost in the static.

On the other hand, even if the carrier wave is perfectly tuned, a poor program will still be a poor program – it will just be clearly received.

So, in truth, McKee’s method and Dramatica are not at all in conflict nor do they work against each other. In fact, they don’t even cover the same ground. And yet, both are required for a powerful message accurately transmitted from author to audience.