Category Archives: Author & Audience

Storytelling Trick 1 – Building Size (Changing Scope)

 50 Sure-Fire Storytelling Tricks!

By Melanie Anne Phillips
Creator StoryWeaver, Co-creator Dramatica

Trick 1

 Building Size (Changing Scope)

This first technique holds audience interest by revealing the true size of something over the course of the story until it can be seen to be either larger or smaller than it originally appeared. This makes things appear to grow or diminish as the story unfolds.

Conspiracy stories are usually good examples of increasing scope, as only the tip of the iceberg first comes to light and the full extent is ultimately much bigger. The motion picture All The President’s Men illustrates this nicely. Stories about things being less extensive than they originally appear are not unlike The Wizard Of Oz in which a seemingly huge network of power turns out to be just one man behind a curtain.

Read All 50 Storytelling Tricks

The False Narrative

A false narrative is one in which a complete narrative pattern is perceived in a given situation, but it is not an actual narrative at work in the situation.  The perception of a false narrative can be due to insufficient or inaccurate information or to insufficient or inaccurate assessment.  The creation of a false narrative can be due to naturally occurring narrative patterns, transient contextual framing, inadvertent presentation or intentional deception.

Perception of False Narratives

Insufficient Information:

Like an iceberg, many of the elements of any given real-world narrative are often hidden from view, beneath the surface or around the corner.  Because narratives are fractal in nature, a portion of a larger narrative may appear to be complete in and of itself, much as a corner cut from a hologram will still present a complete image, just not from all angles that are available in the whole.  So, while the pattern of a narrative may be present, it may not be driven by its own internal dynamics, but by those of a larger narrative of which it is a part.

Inaccurate Information:

Narratives do not exist in a vacuum.  Rather, an infinite number of narratives are continually moving through the same narrative space, sometimes hinged, sometimes colliding, sometimes drawing each other off true by their contextual influence, sometimes passing each other without affect.

When there is some contextual effect, all narratives involved in this connection are warped by the presence of the others, leading to a lens-like phenomenon in which some elements are emphasized or deemphasized, or in the most severe instances may be completely hidden or may not really exist at all as they are no more than virtual images of no substance, established solely by the collective influence of the elements from other surrounding narratives.

Insufficient Assessment:

In social psychology the term fundamental attribution error describes a cognitive bias in which an individual interprets another person’s actions as driven primarily by intent while deemphasizing or disregarding any external or environmental conditions which may have influenced their actions.

Inaccurate Assessment:

The opposite bias is the actor-observor error in which an individual overemphasizes the impact of external factors on his or her own actions.  These two varieties of the human desire to find meaning illustrate that meaning is not so much found as imposed.  In fact, either of these biases generates a false narrative.

Creation of False Narratives

Naturally Occurring Narrative Patterns:

The human mind seeks meaning in its environment by imposing templates upon its perception until a pattern is found that, for desired purposes, fits observation sufficiently.  A byproduct of this attribute is that we see animals in clouds, gods in constellations, images in ink blots and narratives in random elements.  As a result, we continually create  false narratives which appear to be supported by the situations that surround us, rejecting them only when the course of events diverges from narrative prediction.

Transient Contextual Framing:

No narrative is forever.  As long as it maintains itself as an internally driven confluence of structure and dynamics, it may be perceived as a closed system, constant in its function.  In other words, a true narrative maintains its identity through internal mechanisms.  Conversely, a false narrative may appear internally driven when, in fact, it is externally maintained by forces outside the apparent narrative, like a puppet on a string.  Such an apparent narrative provides neither an accurate description of the nature of the elements it contains, nor accurately predicts the course they will actually take.

Inadvertent Presentation:

Any narrative element, by itself, may have an infinite number of meanings.  It is only when it is taken in conjunction with other elements that the range of possible meanings for that element becomes constrained.  Eventually, sufficient interconnections among elements may be established to limit the potential meanings to the singular.

If, however, the initial element is misinterpreted in meaning, than each succeeding element may be cast into a another misinterpretation by the observer in the attempt to make it fit with the initial interpretation.  Individuals who do not provide sufficient ongoing clarification may inadvertently present a false narrative.  Individuals who do not intend to present a narrative may inadvertently present information that may be taken as one.

Intentional Deception:

False narratives may be created with the intent to deceive  by limiting the number of narrative elements provided so that the observer completes the bulk of the narrative themselves, thereby taking ownership of the narrative by personalizing it.  This can be accomplished by limiting the scope of information available and/or the time in which to consider it.  In this manner, the author establishes a constrained narrative space in which both content and context are controllable to a desired effect.

In Conclusion

In the end, no single narrative is ever completely true or completely false, except within the constraints of  a specified span of time and scope of .  As the philosopher David Hume  defined truth, while it works, it is truth, when it fails to work it is no longer truth.  Eastern philosophy holds that the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao, meaning that no truth can ever be so fully defined as to be universal Truth.  Zen professes that you cannot step into the same river twice, and American slang proclaims “that was then, this is now.”

Ultimately, rather than focusing solely on truth, awareness of the value and function of false narratives opens new perspectives by which one may become liberated from a singular point of view so that any consideration might be more flexible in the knowledge that while one narrative may appear to be definitive, there may be others which, even if in complete apparent contradiction with one another, may all, in fact, be equally and simultaneously both true and false.

The Authorless Narrative

Not every narrative has an author. Just as art may be in the eye of the beholder, the existence of a narrative may be in the eye of the observer.

We are all pattern makers. This is evident in everything from ink blot tests to seeing figures in constellations, faces in wood grain and images in clouds. The patterns we make and how we come to make them are reflective of the perspectives and processes of our own minds.

We project these patterns on the external world in the attempt to better understand and predict it.  Therefore, the patterns we see in the real world tell us as much about ourselves as about our environment.

Fictional narratives are our attempt to document the nature and essence of the way people think, feel, and interact as determined through observation and internal exploration.

Real world narratives are the patterns and systems into which we organize our thoughts, feelings our relationships with others, as evidenced through the patterns and systems we create.

Though one might expect all fictional narratives to be intentional, consider sub-text and patterns of meaning that illuminate the nature of the author, but were unintentional and unseen by the author in the process of creation.

A single work, be it a simple tale, a fully argued story, a song ballad or stage play, may have many multiple narratives operating in the same narrative space simultaneously.  Individual readers or audience members may tune into several, many or none of these additional narratives beyond the principal intended ones.

A good example of this would be a story that was taken very seriously by the author, but strikes most of the audience as laughable – a comedy in fact.  And, what’s more, the audience may actually believe that the work was intended as a comedy, though that could be diametrically opposed to the intent of the author.  What is a passionately argued point of view to the author may appear as simple pandering or propaganda to an audience.

In fact, two different audiences may interpret a given work’s narrative meaning differently, as experienced by stage actors whose performance as a company may be virtually identical from show to show, but is received completely differently by each audience that enters the theater.

Further, contextual changes in the real world may cast a narrative into a different meaning than its initial impact, or may even appear to reflect a different author’s intent.

In the real world, when people gather together for a common interest or purpose, they self-organize into a narrative pattern.  For example, we each possess reason and also skepticism.  These qualities are part of a palette of human traits we bring to bear in the making of narrative patterns.

When we assemble, we  tend to specialize with each individual focusing on applying one of our problem solving methods, rather than having a collection of people all acting as general practitioners.  In this way, each specialist is able to delve deeper into the method they fulfill as they do not have to consider the others more than superficially.

An automatic byproduct of specialization is that each individual comes to represent a different aspect of the mind so that, as a group, they form a representation of a single mind in which each attribute has been made tangible and incarnate in one of the members.

It is this self-organizing principal and this externally projected model of the mind that was observed, documented and refined by hundreds of generations of storytellings until they became fixed in the conventions of narrative structure.

To the point of this article, since there is seldom, if ever, a conscious decision among the members of a newly formed group to organize themselves into a model of the mind the narrative patterns they form are authorless.

Certainly, the study and application of narrative is a popular endeavor of any larger organization these days, and justifiably so.  But the understanding of narrative is as a story, not as a self-organizing principal of society based on replication of internal patterns of psychology in an individual.

Let us then consider that when several narrative groups come together toward a common interest or purpose, the groups themselves will self-organize into a larger narrative – a fractal of the structural/dynamic patterns of each individual group.  Each group, then, become a character in the larger narrative, just as each individual in a single group is a character within that narrative.  This fractal replication may continue infinitely up one fractal dimension to the next until the very nations of the earth are acting a characters within a single global narrative.  I call this fractal psychology.

As each individual, group or group of groups operates, there are many free agents in the social petri dish who form the analog medium in which each narrative resonates.  Just as there may be two colonies of bacteria in a single dish or growth medium, there may be two social narratives in the same social venue or environment.

These multiple authorless narratives may stand alone and separate so that they do not interfere with or influence each other, or they may touch edges, overwhelm one another, combine, join together as members of a larger narrative, cancel each other out, or pass through each other like colliding galaxies traveling from here to there and sharing the same space, but never or rarely having any direct interaction or collision among their members.

Narratives, like galaxies or atoms are mostly open space.  Though they may rarely interact directly, each element of a narrative possesses some degree of the equivalent of gravitational pull and momentum so that, both as it components and as a whole, a narrative extends beyond its borders to exert social influence even where it has no actual connection.

Further, each element of a narrative may, in fact, be a member of another or several other narratives, so that each of us has many stories in our lives built around each individual relationship and function, be it as a parent, employee or club member.

It is the complex influences of the multiple magnitude overlapping narratives in any given social space the creates complex interference patterns as they operate, much like several stones dropped into a pond a the same time.

Some of these influences create standing waves of various durations: peaks, the shorter being thought of as memes and the longer being thought of as social conventions.  Similarly, there are troughs which become temporary social dead zones or transient restrictions of law, and in longer form fossilize into taboos.

But most important of all, because we (as both individuals and collectively as groups) create patterns, even from chaos (as in clouds and constellations), we seek to impose narrative forms on the peaks and troughs to find meaning that will provide understanding and prediction – a natural survival technique.

Though truly chaotic, the conjunction of the undulating influences of multiple narratives in a social space does create momentary truths that effectively represent the collection impact of all operating systems within the space, though the accuracy and duration of these truths varies.  And so, meta-narrative forms may be perceived that, though they have no author, still provide an organizing matrix for immediate decisions.

In addition, the manner in which the nature of an imposed narrative changes in the endless flux of the multi-narrative influences in the medium of the social environment may indicate collective inertia and collective acceleration, deceleration, sharpening or defocusing of narrative elements, not to mention the overall course and course-changes of the imposed narrative pattern.

And , since the human mind, and therefore the narrative mind, possess both a binary logical understanding derived from our neural networks and a passionate drive derived from the analog standing wave undulations of our own biochemistry projected into the personal interactions within the open space of a social group narrative group, narratives are imposed/perceived upon chaos both in reason and emotion and call us to action both in our individual and collective heads and hearts.

Finally, as we all (individuals and groups) have a conscious mind as well as memory, sub-conscious and pre-conscious filters, narratives may be imposed at any or all of these levels of consideration, and therefore acted upon both in calculated and responsive manners, both cognitively and affectively.

And so, the very fabric of culture truly has no author, for it is neither intended nor directed.  Yet ultimately, the broadest of these perceived narrative patterns are far beyond our ability to grasp in their entirety, and are therefore felt to possess universal truth, while the  perpetrator of these trans-human authorless narratives is assumed to be a deity.

The Relationship of Author to Audience (Theory)

Here are some scribbles Armando Saldaña Mora, Chris Huntley and I jotted down one day a couple years ago at Chris’ house.  I was staying over that night and at the time Armando (author of “Dramatica for Screenwriters” was a longer-term houseguest.  I thought it would be fun to include him in the development of some new theory, as previously only Chris and I had added to the edges of Dramatica.

So, I suggested we do some work on the TKAD (quad relationships at work among author, audience, and story).  We started in the upper left and worked to the right.  Along the way, Chris came downstairs and added his two-cents worth.

The result is documented in the scan below.  This was just a first stab at these relationships, and looking at it now, I’m pretty sure some of them are wrong.  Haven’t taken the time to figure out which ones though.

As always, the problem is keeping a consistent perspective throughout any section of the theory model so that it has a consistent bias, rather than a progressive one.  So, while these all look “okay,” I’m pretty sure the perspective is drifting.

You Dramtica Theory Hounds out there might enjoy working this out to completion, which is why I am publishing it.

Melanie

Relationship of Author to Audience Through Story

Dramatica Unplugged (Part 6) – Audience Reach

Men and Women generally respond to Main Characters differently. But, it is not a simple gender bias. Rather, all readers/audience members will sometimes empathize with the Main Character (stand in his or her shoes) and sometimes only sympathize with the Main Character (care about them but look over their shoulder rather than through their eyes). It is the factors that make each half of the audience empathize or sympathize that is the difference.

Deciphering Lost Languages with Dramatica

All language is based on narrative.  And since Dramatica maps narrative upon the structure of the Table of Story Elements, each narrative that might hold meaning in a language can be perceived as a pattern of interconnected story points.

Therefore, it is not too far a stretch to imagine that one might apply these narrative templates against previously indecipherable languages or even, perhaps, codes in order to   discover the particular narrative pattern at work in the language sample.

Once the specific narrative has been determined, story points can be associated with groups of words, symbols or pictographs, so has to assign meaning to such groups, and thereby arrive at an understanding of the underlying message therein contained.’

Just an idle speculation as we watch a national geographic special on Easter Island in which their lost written language of rongorongo came up for discussion.  See images of this language here, and consider the possibilities for yourself.

Conversational Inertia

Sometimes, no matter how one tries, a conversation cannot be turned.  Illustrating this in  conversations among characters is a way to illuminate the degree of power that is driving the conversation in a particular direction, or perhaps the magnitude of the potential behind it.

For example, my daughter is seven weeks pregnant and just posted the following note on Facebook with several additional responses:

Mindi (my daughter):  I thought pregnancy and pickle craving was a myth. I’ve nearly gone through a whole jar since yesterday.

My reply:  A jar of pregnancies?

Someone else’s reply:  pickled pregnancies?

Another person’s reply: Not even pregnancy made pickles taste good to me.

I tried to throw this conversation into a new direction, a new context, but the inertia of the social fabric drew the linear topics back to the original issue.  This is an initial indicator that those who follow my daughter on Facebook are likely not as interested in the branch in the process I moved down and are more interested in the more obvious subject of the original comment.

Conversational inertia is a hint – a whisper – that, while not definitive, is indicative of larger currents at work that move a conversation in a particular course no matter what winds blow across the surface.  The stronger and deeper the current, the greater the drive behind it.

Conversations may be between two people, in which case the inertia illustrates each individual’s underlying motivations.  In such a case, each may be speaking at cross purposes, as if two different conversations were chopped up and their pieces alternated linearly.  Such mechanisms can often be seen in the conversations between the Main and Influence characters as they each press forward with their own paradigms like two oarsman alternately rowing toward different destinations.

Conversations may be among several people in a group, in which case the inertia illustrates the underlying motivations of the larger Story Mind in which each individual represents a facet.  In such a case, there may be a single individual at odds with the group mind or the number of individuals may be split on which topic to follow, indicating that the Story Mind is literally of two minds, which functions as an analogy to our own individual mind’s when we can’t decide between two priorities or are torn between to equally attractive or equally unattractive alternatives.  In other scenarios, each individual may try to hijack the group conversation in his or her own desired direction, fragmenting the Story Mind and indicating that the collective is pulled in many direction or is simply directionless, is exploring or is going to pieces.

As a final thought for you Theory Hounds, this process is part of the Dynamic Model – the wave-driven undulations of narrative dynamics that give rise to growing motivations and repress or dissolve others.

You see it in your interactions with others and in the tides and eddies of your own mind and, therefore, you see it in stories as well.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica