Dramaticapedia

Response to a Dramatica User:

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……

“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.

Excerpt from The Dramatica Theory:

So far in our journey we have explored the underlying concepts of the Story Mind, the elements that make it up, the forces that drive it, and the perspectives through which we can connect to it. But before we leave this esoteric territory for the more familiar ground of characters, plot, theme, and genre, let us stand back a bit, take in everything we’ve learned so far, and get a sense of what it all means for our stories and ourselves.

In our own minds we have a sense of who we are. In stories, that “sense of self”, essentially the identity or ego of the story, is represented by the Main Character. As readers or audience we tend to identify with that part of the Story Mind, either in empathy or sympathy, because it is the essence of the story’s humanity.

And just as within ourselves we sometimes must consider changing our point of view or our sense of what is right or wrong about a particular issue, so too does the Story Mind grapple with the possibility of change.

Our own survival instinct insists that we don’t recklessly abandon an old tried and true approach in favor of a new untested one without first engaging in some exploration of what such a change might mean in our lives.

After all, if we simply adopted a new mind set on a whim, we will have already changed and our allegiances would be to some other value standard, which may turn out to be contrary to our best interests.

So, essentially, we have it out with ourselves. We think about how our world looks to us at present, then imagine what it might look like if we altered some aspect of our outlook or personal code.

We think about how that other belief system – what does it hold, how does it work, what can we learn from it – while still maintaining the belief system we have. Only then, and only if we are convinced it is a better way to look at the world, we’ll jump over and adopt it.

At that moment we have changed at least some small aspect of what we call our “selves”. We have changed who we are in our own heads.

In stories, it is the Obstacle (or Influence) Character who represents this new person we might become. Functionally, this character might be very like the Main Character (and in practice often is) except in regard to the central message issue of the story regarding which these two characters are diametrically opposed.

The Subjective View – the perspective in which the Main Character and Obstacle Character duke it out over opposing belief systems – represents our inner struggle wherein we play devil’s advocate with ourselves, pitting who we are against who we might become.

In the end, we elect (or are emotionally compelled) to change or not. But whether that change will prove to be a positive choice will remain to be seen, as sometime we change for the good and sometimes we change for the worse. And just as certain, remaining unchanged can also end well or poorly.

And here we arrive once more at the Objective view. It is the one perspective we can never have of ourselves – from the outside looking in. Though we can apply that view to others, it is limited insofar as we can never really see what is going on inside their minds.

Stories, therefore, seem almost miraculous to us because they present us with more points of view in regard to a single central issue than we can perceive in real life. In a sense, the author provides us with a God’s Eye View of the Story Mind, enabling us to see the Big Picture even while we passionately share the Main Character’s inside experience.

The promise of a story is that it may tell us whether or not we should accept the way things are in our own lives or rise up to change them and, in the process, whether we should remain steadfast in our resolve or change our minds, abandon our proven methods and embrace the chance that new ones will serve us better.

In the end, it all amounts to the author professing to have some special knowledge of what is really best in a particular situation, regardless of how we may feel in the midst of it.

Another excerpt from the new book I am writing on the Dramatica Theory:

It should be noted that there is a big difference between reading a map and actually traveling the road in person.  While both have value, a map most clearly shows you the terrain; a journey gives you the most immediate experience.

If they are to fully captivate an audience, stories must be able to provide these contrasting perspectives.  In fact, they do so through an Objective View, which is like a wide angle look at the story as a spectator, much as one might watch a football game, and a Personal View which is like that of a participant on the field.

We are all familiar with the Objective View.  From it, we see a Protagonist and an Antagonist as if they are opposing soldiers in a battle.  We watch them fight it out over the effort to achieve a goal.  Sometimes they both want the goal, but only for themselves.  Other times, one wants to attain the goal and the other wants to prevent that.  Either way, though we may very well become all worked up in rooting for one side or the other, we are still sitting in the stands.

In contrast, the Personal View is provided by the Main Character.  We, the readers or audience, walk in his or her shoes and look through his or her eyes.  We experience the story as if it were happening to us.

Often, the Protagonist is chosen by an author to also provide the Main Character View as well, and though that is common, it isn’t the only choice.  Any character can be the Main Character, just as we might attach a helmet-camera to any player on the field.

In addition to providing an avatar for the reader or audience, it is also the Main Character who grapples with some crucial inner problem or personal issue around which the passionate side of the story seems to revolve.

In the Story Mind, the Main Character represents our sense of self – that is, the awareness of our own identity as in “I think, therefore I am.”  Since the Story Mind is modeled after the human mind, it is not surprising that story structure must include such an essential component of being human.

Up to this point, we have referred to the readers or audience as if they were passive recipients of the author’s argument, but they are much more involved than that.  In fact, communication is a collaborative effort and the audience brings its own active participation to the process.

When a story presents an involving Main Character, the audience forgets itself and identifies with that character, heart and soul.  Certainly most of us have had the experience of being sucked into a story to the extent that we laugh when that character is happy and cry when they are hurt, almost as if it were happening to us in real life.

(It is often interesting to watch how many movie-goers recklessly drive out of a parking lot after having enjoyed an action picture, and how many people have dreams that draw on elements of a truly “moving” picture they had seen earlier in the evening.)

When the Protagonist is also selected as the Main Character, you have the beginnings of a typical “Hero,” as in “the hero’s journey.”  While there is nothing wrong with that arrangement, it is much overused, and in fact there are many other interesting stories to be told if those two types of character functions are not placed in the same person.

For example, in both the book and film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, those roles are not combined.  Rather, the character of Atticus (the righteous 1930s Southern lawyer played by Gregory Peck in the movie) is the Protagonist, for it is he who is trying to acquit the black man wrongly accused of raping a white girl.

The Main Character, however, is Atticus’ young daughter, Scout, for the story is told through her eyes – from her point of view.   As the reader/audience identifies with Scout, they are shown how the nature of prejudice appears to an innocent child – something that would not have been possible if the audience identified instead with Atticus.

In fact, there are far more reasons in Mockingbird why the Protagonist and Main Character attributes were split, and we’ll explore them all in the section of this book devoted to characters.  For now, consider that if you have only been creating typical heroes, you may have been limiting yourself from exploring other options.

Now before we leave this brief overview of perspective behind, there are two more critical points of view that need to be included in a story for the readers/audience to become completely involved in the story’s argument.

The first of these is called the Influence (or Obstacle) Character View.  To get a feel for this unfamiliar character, let us think (for a brief moment) of a story as if it were a battle between two great armies, one of them led by the author and the other commanded by the audience.

The author hopes to make a successful story argument in two ways: First, to make his case logically through the “headline” we spoke of at the very beginning of this book and second, through the “heartline” that is its compatriot argument.

On the field of battle, the Protagonist is leading the charge of the logistic argument as he or she attempts to achieve a goal, while the antagonist is rallying the forces of opposition, which include all those other ways of logically solving the situation that the audience might consider as alternatives.  By the end of the story, the author hopes to prove that the Protagonist’s approach is either the best of the worst of them all, depending upon the intended message.

Similarly, the Main Character heads up the passionate argument as he or she attempts to resolve a personal issue, while another character (soon to be introduced) opposes that approach philosophically, and marshals all the passionate arguments contrary to the Main Character’s attitude or approach.  Again, by the end of the story, the author hopes to sway the audience’s feelings to match his or her proposed message.

If successful, by the time the audience leaves the theater or the reader closes the book, the author will have swayed both their hearts and minds.

So who is this unnamed character who stands in philosophic opposition to the Main Character?  To answer that question, let me tell you a tale.

In this war for hearts and minds, the Audience is like a general on the hill, watching the maneuvers below.  (The author sits on a hill on the other side of the valley, pushing forth his argument).  The view from atop the audience’s perch is the Objective View with which we are already familiar – that of the spectator.

Now, imagine that the reader/audience could zoom down onto the field to stand in the shoes of and experience the battle through the eyes of a single soldier in the heart of the clash.  That soldier would provide the Main Character View with which we have also already become acquainted..

And so, to recap, the readers or audience can concurrently see what forces are awaiting the Protagonist and all his forces on the other side of the forest, while through the Main Character they can only see what is right in front of them.

In a nutshell, the General’s Objective View illustrates all the grand strategies and the overall flow of the battle, but the Soldier’s Main Character View gives the first-hand impression of what it is like to try and defend oneself while avoiding the bullets whizzing overhead.

The Main Character,then, is trying to accomplish his mission and save his skin at the same time as he marches forward into the fray when suddenly, through the smoke of dramatic explosions, he spies a murky figure standing right in his path. In this fog of war, the Main Character cannot tell if this other soldier is a friend or foe. Either way, he is blocking the road.

As the Main Character approaches, this other soldier starts waving his arms and shouts, “Change course – get off this road!” Convinced he is on the best path, the Main Character yells back, “Get out of my way!” Again the figure shouts, “Change course!” Again the Main Character replies, “Let me pass!”

The Main Character has no way of knowing if his opposite is a comrade trying to prevent him from walking into a mine field or an enemy combatant trying to lure him into an ambush. And so, he continues on, following the plan that still seems best to him.

Eventually, the two soldiers meet, and when they do it becomes a moment of truth in which only one will win out. Either the Main Character will alter course or his steadfastness will cause the other soldier to step aside.

This other soldier is called the Obstacle (and sometimes Influence or Impact) character. He represents that “devil’s advocate” voice we all have in ourselves that makes us consider changing our ways.

In our own minds we are often confronted by issues that question our approach, attitude, or the value of our hard-gained experience. But we don’t simply adopt a new point of view when our old methods have served us so well for so long. Rather, we consider how things might go if we adopted this new system of thinking.

We look at it, examine it from all sides and ask ourselves, how would my life, my self-image, my identity be if I were to become that kind of person by giving up my old views in favor of this new, unproven one that is only potentially better?

It is a long hard thing within us to reach a point of change, and so too is it a difficult feat in a Story Mind. In fact, it takes the whole story to reach a climax in which all the research has been done that can be done. And even then, both sides of the argument are so well balanced that the Main Character cannot see a definite edge to either.

Since logic cannot help the Main Character decide, he or she must ultimately rely on his or her heart – the culmination of the passionate argument of the heartlien.  This crucial moment leads to those weighty decisions where Main Characters step off the cliff into the darkness, hoping they’ve made the right choice – the classic “Leap of Faith.”

Of course, not all decisions are that cataclysmic. And as we shall later see, there are many other ways the differences between Main Character and Obstacle Character points of view can resolve in a gradual shift of opinion.

But for now, it suffices to acknowledge that a Story Mind that did not include an Objective view, a Main Character view, and an Obstacle Character view could not possibly feel like our own minds in real life as we seek to make the best choices based on our best information and guided by our feelings.

Many novice authors fashion only the first two points of view (Objective and Main Character), believing that providing an epic panorama and also a personal view is enough. But more experienced authors recognize the need to show an alternative philosophy to that of the Main Character, and they therefore include the Obstacle Character as well. But a surprisingly small percentage of authors ever realize that a fourth perspective is necessary or a story will feel incomplete.

What is that final view point? It is the actual passionate argument between the Main Character and the Obstacle Character that runs the length of the story, right up to the climax. You would think that if an Obstacle Character is included, that duel over philosophic ideals  would almost unavoidably occur in the course of the story.  In fact, this is not the case.

As an example, the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas has an overall Objective story, a Main Character with a problem, and an Obstacle Character.  Yet for all that, it is lacking any real interaction between Main and regarding their opposing views.  They simple take positions, describe them, and let it stand at that.

Specifically, in “Nightmare,” Jack Skellington is not happy with his true nature.  This is the Main Character View.  His girlfriend states that he should be content with who he actually is, and not to try and be something that really isn’t him.  (This is the Obstacle Character View).

Jack will have none of it, and sets a plan in motion (kidnapping Santa Claus) that causes all the problems of the story.  (This is the Objective View).  In the end, he realizes she was right and resolves from now on to be the best of what he truly is.  (This is the message.)

But the problem is that they never discuss these differing philosophies. They simply state their opposite beliefs and in the end, Jack changes course and she remains on the road where she started.

Though there is a message, without the give and take between the Main and Obstacle we are given no information on how to achieve that change of heart within ourselves. The author makes no passionate argument as to the pros and cons of either position.  So the message is simply acknowledged as being noble, but it isn’t personalized or taken to heart by the readers or audience.  As it is, the movie is strong.  If this other perspective has been included, it would have been even stronger.

This fourth perspective is called the Subjective View. It is the story of the battle over philosophies, the war of ideals, that explores the value of each belief system fully and completely, testing one against the other and pitting them against each other in all contexts. Only if this is seen in the Story Mind does it satisfy the part of the minds of the readers or audience that do the same thing when they consider changing their feelings in regard to an issue.  Only through the Subjective View will the audience become convinced that the message is of real value to them.

So, these four perspectives – Objective, Main, Obstacle, and Subjective are all required for a story structure to both make sense and feel complete. They likely seem pretty strange and unfamiliar in contrast to your usual way of approaching stories.  Fortunately, there is a much simpler way to get in touch with them.

The Main Character View comes across to us as the “first person” perspective: “I” (This is what I believe).  The Obstacle Character’s philosophy appears to us as “You” (That is what you believe). We consider the personal skirmish between himself and the Obstacle character as defining “We” (This is where we are coming from).  And finally, we see what all the other characters are doing in the overall story as “They” (That is what they are doing).

I, You, We, and They – the simpler, familiar equivalents of Main Character View, Obstacle Character View, Subjective View, and Objective View. They are the four perspectives we have in real life, in our own minds, and they must all be represented in stories through the Story Mind if an author is to successfully press home both the logistic and passionate arguments to the readers or audience.

The following  excerpt is taken from

The Dramatica Class Transcripts

Dramatica : I’m going to start tonight with the four stages of communication.

Pete P 432 : Okay

Dramatica : In Dramatica theory, we see all communication as having four distinct stages. Now, its important to realize we are talking about “communication” here. There are all kinds of artistic endeavors that are not attempts to communicate. For example, you might just want to follow your muse, document the path, and let the audience make of it what they will.

Many fine works are great not because the “communicate” but because they provide a fertile environment for conjecture. Dramatica deals only with the act of communication. Now to communicate, it means you must have an idea you want to get across. That idea may be a point of view on an issue, a logical conjecture, a feeling that you want to share, or an emotional result that will change your audience.

But only if you, the author, know what it is that you want to get across, (Hi Moon!)

MoonBailey : hi!

Dramatica : will you be able to figure out how to communicate it. Moon, we are working our way into plot, by way of the four stages of communication.

Stage one is to have an idea in the first place, that you want to communicate.

MoonBailey : OK, I’m interested to see how it works

Dramatica : This is true of ANY kind of communication. When we are talking about communicating through the medium of stories, Dramatica calls that first stage StoryFORMING. Storyforming is the process of working out just what it is you want to say. Once you have completely FORMED your idea, you move to the second stage of communication, StoryENCODING.

Encoding is where you symbolize what you are trying to communicate, so it can be transmitted over a medium, and understood by your intended audience. Now, what is this symbolizing process? Suppose you have a feeling that you want to impart, Well, then you know how you feel, that’s a Storyform. But what kinds of things do you have to show your audience, that will make them feel the same thing. You can’t just come out and say what you feel, as there is no single word for it.

Perhaps it is a feeling that you felt on a particular rainy day as a kid, and only then, never again. No single word or event in the world, will be able to handle that kind of description. So, you come up with some kind of setting or progression of events that makes it happen again for you. And then hope your audience will be similarly affected by what you have presented them. For the very first storytellers in ancient times, They might be hungry or looking for something in the distance, and have to find non-verbal symbols, like rubbing their stomachs while pointing at their open mouths, or holding their hands to shade their eyes and pointing, to symbolize what they meant.

And they would assume that any other human being would be able to tune in to that, and understand the meaning. But they were just describing things, or physical states. And because we all share the same basic physiology, and live in the same physical world, we can assume that the nature of our physical selves, being much the same, would lead to an understanding at an intuitive level of the symbols we use. But the minute you want to get across logic, or feelings, those are both internal. How can it even be possible?

In fact, the very fact that we CAN communicate such things, seems nothing short of miraculous. Unless…there is something just as similar about our minds, as there is about our bodies. And that is the case. We don’t all think the same things, but we think the same way. So, when we want to communicate, a society first begins to build symbols, that describe the basic feelings, and logical givens that are common in that society. We fashion words and scenarios, that each of us learns through cultural indoctrination, that generate within us, a predictable logical or emotional response.

MoonBailey : What about serendipity or having things emerge from the characters as you write?

Dramatica : Serendipity in message or symbol?

MoonBailey : message

Dramatica : As we write a work, in any format, we are telling about the pieces that make up our message, and also about the way they hang together to create the “big Picture” message of what it all means when the smoke clears. Since we do not write the story all in one moment, we are only describing a piece of it at a time, and because a partial message always has many options, that only close down as we add constraints through additional influences that we describe in our work, then we have the opportunity to change our message anywhere within the remaining options, without violating, the integrity of the finished product. But if we become “inspired” and do something that is not consistent, then we will either have a work with holes, or we will rewrite what came first or not do what we were inspired to do.

MoonBailey : Good. I agree with your premise, I just think there is also self-discovery in writing/art

Dramatica : Yes, self-discovery is very important to many, but not all, writers. For example, James A Michner, works out all of the details of what he wants to write about before he writes a word, then he just describes the outline he has created. But other writers like to explore their topic, until they understand how THEY feel about it, and then go back and either write from scratch, or rework what they have so far to conform to the way they now see what their message is. The final kind of writer, just wants to document the journey, and doesn’t care a hoot about internal logic. just wants to document the journey, and doesn’t care a hoot about internal logic. And that is just fine too, and can be very moving and entertaining. It just won’t come to a point.

MoonBailey : Yes, you must create consistency and internal logic.

Dramatica : Okay, so we have stage one as coming up with the message. Storyforming, whether it is done before you write or in rewrite, but ALWAYS before the work is given to the audience, if your purpose is to communicate. The second stage is Storyencoding. Where we symbolize what we want to communicate in culturally specific symbols that we have learned have a particular meaning in our society.

Narrative theory has it that stories are transportable from one medium to another. But as we all know, that doesn’t always work in practice. That is because each storyform, is the same in any culture or time, but the symbols used in the finished work, are culturally specific, and perhaps even medium or format specific. This is why books don’t always translate to the screen and vice versa.

Now, for stage three. Once we have these symbols, how do we unfold them for our audience. Suppose our goal is to Obtain the stolen diamonds… Do we have someone come out and tell us that in the first scene, or do we have a bunch of people involved in some unknown activity, and only make it clear what they are doing, as the story winds down to the end. Only in the last scene does our audience realize what everybody was after. And do we want to tell our audience the whole truth, or through them red herrings and put things out of context, so that they think things have one meaning, and then we spring a larger context on them that shows the friend was really the foe, etc.

Well, how and when we unfold the true dramatics of our story, is the stage three process, of StoryWEAVING. Now, it is important to note, that the internal logic of the storyform or message, REQUIRES a particular order and meaning for events. For example, a slap in the face followed by a scream, is not the same as a scream followed by a slap in the face! The order makes a difference. When we are constructing our story each series of events, scene by scene and act by act, scans across the mind of the audience, like the scanning lines on a TV set.

By the time they have all been played out, the audience can stand back in retrospect and see the big picture created by the lines they had followed one by one. Each line must make sense in and of itself. Colors and shading must come in the right order that does not violate the “givens” of the story, nor the givens of the audience. But they also must do a double duty. When all the parts have been laid out, they HAVE to describe the message you started out to tell.

This happens in all linear-progressive art forms. You don’t see the finished product all in one moment, but strung out over time, and then you reassemble it. So, you start with the message, stage one, encode it into symbols, stage two, and then transmit it through storyweaving, stage three. But the order of transmission can be scrambled, so that the audience needs to decode it in time as well as space, to put the internal logic of the story back together. So, the storyform actually calls for the order of dramatic events, but storyweaving allows the author the ability to play with their audience by choosing what order and how much for these events in the telling.

And finally, we have stage four. Reception. We all see pictures in clouds. We make figures out of constellations, we look at ink blots in which there is no intended meaning, yet find some. This is because we seek order out of chaos. The mind IMPOSES patterns on that which it observes. So it is with the audience. An audience will seek to find meaning in the story being presented to it. BUT Each member of the audience is coming to the story with its own preconceptions, its own experiences. So, the symbols it sees, may not be interpreted the same as the author intended.

This means, that when you want to communicate, the more broad your symbols, the wider the audience that will see them the same way, but the more specific your symbols, the more narrow your audience. As a result, to get complex concepts and feelings across to a mass audience, we must use broad symbols, each of which, does not do the job, but taken together, in the order in which they are presented, build up an understanding in the audience, much like winding string in a circle will build a baseball.

We use our inexact symbols, to get all around the issue, like a dot to dot picture. By the end of the story, we hope our audience will connect the dots and then make the intuitive leap and say, “If this is where all these things are, then THIS must be what’s at the center of it.” And that thing at the center is what you wanted to communicate in the first place. Questions at this point?

Pete P 432 : not yet.

Dramatica : Okay,

Dan Steele : the film writer must also worry about how the chosen encodings could be changed during that last stage is Stage four: Reception.

Dan Steele : the production process

Dramatica : Yes, Dan, for the film writer, their audience is not the good folks that sit in the chairs in the theater, but the cast and crew. You tell your story to the artists and technicians, you hope they get your intent, and then they go out as your messengers and hopefully interpret your work correctly.

Dan Steele : which is why film writing differs from books, in part

Dramatica : It is one of the BIGGEST differences in writing for film vs. books. Okay, so with these four stages of communication, we can see how the StoryWEAVING phase is what is commonly thought of as plot, but is really only half of what is going on. The essential internal logic of the story contained in the StoryFORM, is the first part, and the order in which it is presented is the second.

Now when it comes to the Storyweaving part, Dramatica can make some suggestions, but it is really up to the desires of the author, because it is an unlimited opportunity to play around with the order of things. Like flashbacks or flash forwards for example. Take a flashback that moves the essential dramatics along, one in which the characters are aware they are “flashing back” or remembering, and it is part of the storyform, because the characters ARE aware and therefore, it effects them after they have flashed back.

But take something like “Remains of the Day.” The characters know nothing about the flashbacks. They are only seen by the audience. So flashbacks IN the story are Storyform, Flashbacks OUTside the story are Storyweaving. It is the storyforming part that Dramatica can be very specific about Do either of you have the structure charts?

Dan Steele : no

Pete P 432 : no.

Pete P 432 : ?

Dramatica : Well, there is a four level structure in Dramatica. Keep in mind, Dramatica is not just a structure, You might consider including the chart when you separately issue the book, by the way half of it is dynamics that rearrange the structure. Actually, Dan, the chart is in the book already, and the book is already available. Anyway, the top level of the structure is most akin to Genre, the next level down is most akin to Plot.

Pete P 432 : which book? The ones with the program?

Dan Steele : At end tell title and availability

Pete P 432 : I do then have the chart, but I haven’t looked at it. I will tonight.

Dramatica : We have written the Dramatica Theory Book, which comes with the software, but is also available for $24.95, I believe, as a separate item. Now this plot level, consists of sixteen “Types”. These are called “Types” because they are the Types of things that will be going on in the plot at any given point. And in fact, all sixteen will show up in every complete story. Its just that they will show up in different orders, depending on the overall impact (big picture message) you are trying to create at the end.

These sixteen types are divided into four groups, called quads. One of the groups is in the Universe Domain, which just means they describe a situation. They are Past, Present, Future, and Progress.

Pete P 432 : okay, now I remember what you mean.

Dramatica : Good. There are four others in the Mind (or attitude) domain, Conscious, Subconscious, Memory, Preconscious.

Dan Steele : what would a parallel world correspond to in that scheme? It is not past, present or future, or progress but alternative, as in maybe Mad Max

Dramatica : Well, a parallel world would depend on whether you wanted it to be A: A situation in which the characters find themselves B: an activity where one world is taking over from another, pushing the first one out (that would be Physics Domain for B) C: an alternative world where the problem is created by two opposing attitudes by the leaders.. Which would be Mind (a fixed attitude or prejudice) or D: an alternative world that has supplanted the old world, and the problems are caused because the way one responds to problems, (psychology domain) is no longer appropriate to the new world.

As you can see, the concept of an alternative or parallel world is a storytelling one, as all “high concept” ideas are. For example, do you want to do a story about a State of war, which would be Universe, or the activity of waging war, which would be Mind. Either one is just fine, but Dramatica forces you to consider, just what kind of problem you are talking about that drives the struggle in YOUR story. At the Type level, we see groupings of these sixteen Types in four quads that help us see the kinds of concerns that will come up in each different domain, each different kind of story. And, in fact, all four domains will be in every complete story as well. One will be the Domain of the Objective Story. This is the area in which ALL the characters are involved. For the audience, it is the THEY perspective.

Dan Steele : so there are what, maybe 4×4×4×4=256 different basic story types?

Dramatica : Actually, Dan, by the time you get down to the element level where characters are created, there are 32,768 different unique storyforms. The other three perspectives are the Main Character Domain (Me, to the audience) The Obstacle character Domain (YOU to the audience) And the Subjective Story Domain about the relationship between the Main and Obstacle Characters. (WE to the audience)

All four Domains and therefore all sixteen types will be in each story, but with point of view gets involved in which TYPES of activities, describes the most broad stroke, overview of your story’s plot.

There is MUCH more to say about plot in Dramatica, but we’ve run out of time for tonight!

Dan Steele : how does Dramatica SW handle bookkeeping for subplots? whoops, okay

Dramatica : Here’s an answer, Dan.. Right now, Dramatica only carries you through encoding. To weave, you take out the old 3×5 cards and begin figuring out which “appreciations” from the Dramatica reports, you want to illustrate in which scenes. Then you can change the scene order around for your storytelling.

Dan Steele : so I would have to set up subplots as separate stories with Dramatica oh, I see

Dramatica : Yes, Dan, each subplot should have its own separate storyform. We are working right now on a future upgrade, that will allow all that kind of manipulation to be done within the program, with the goal of making Dramatica capable of carrying the author from forming through encoding all the way through weaving.

Pete P 432 : Great, when will we see it?

Dramatica : Well, I hope to see that version out this year. Its a lot of complex work, but we recognize the value.

Pete P 432 : One quick question?

Dramatica : Sure, shoot!

Pete P 432 : After Storyforming, when D asks me to illustrate something I’ve answered in SF, Do I think in very specific terms or more symbolically

Dramatica : Yes. Each storyform point needs to be illustrated in your story, or the audience won’t know about it. There will be a hole. Think specifically at this point for example, Suppose your goal is “obtaining” Obtaining WHAT? You must pick the specific way in which Obtaining is the goal in YOUR story. Once you know that, you know a great deal about a lot of other things that must happen to support and grow from that.

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

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