Category Archives: Author & Audience

The Four Stages of Communication

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.

A Story Is An Argument

Dramatica Unplugged

Class One: Introduction

1.3 A Story is an Argument

A tale is nothing more than a statement. A statement that ‘this lead to this lead to that’ and ‘here’s how it ended up’.

An early storyteller would be able to say ‘ok, I’m going to tell you about this situation, that if you start here and you take this series of steps you end up there and it’s a good thing or its a bad thing to be there’. Large good, small good – little bad, big bad – but follow these series of steps from this starting point and you will end up with this thing that is good or bad.

There’s certain amount of power in that. You can fictionalize that statement to make it more human, and illustrate to people that ‘this is a path to stay away from because it’s bad’ or ‘this is a path to go towards because it’s good’.  And so you end up with fairy tales and things of that nature which, literally, are often nothing more than a tale – they are not really complete stories.

But what kind of power could you get if you were able to expand that and say ‘this is not just true for this particular case but its true for all such similar cases.’ In other words, if you start from here, no matter what path you try to take based on this particular problem you started with, it wouldn’t be as good (or it wouldn’t be as bad) as the one that I’m showing you.  Then the message of your tale becomes ‘this particular path is the best or the worst.’ It’s no longer just good or bad, it’s the best path or the worst path to take.

Now that has a lot more power to it because now you are telling everyone to exclude any other paths – ‘take only this one if you find yourself in this situation’ or,  ‘if you find yourself in this situation no matter what you do, don’t do that’. That has a lot more power to manipulate an audience – a lot more leverage – because even though you have only shown the one path, you convince them it’s better than any of the others you didn’t show.

But have you really convinced them?  After all, you are really just making a blanket statement and, in truth, an audience won’t sit still for a blanket statement. They will cry foul. They will at least question you. So, for example, if a caveman is sitting around the campfire and says, ‘this is the best of all possible paths that I have shown you.’, his audience is going to say, ‘hey wait a minute, what about this other case, what if we try this, this and this?’ If the author is to satisfy his audience and actually ‘prove’ his case to their satisfaction, he will be able to argue his point, saying, ‘in that case such and such, and therefore you can see why it would end up being not as good or better than this path that I’m touting.’

Another person brings up another scenario such as ‘what about going down this way and trying that.’ Then, if the author’s point can be well made, the storyteller is able to defend his assertion and say, ‘well that case, such and such, so you can see the point that the blanket statement I made is still true’. Eventually either something will be found that is better than what the author was proposing or the author will be able to stick it out and counter all those rebuttals and convince the audience, ‘yes that’s the case.’

Now you won’t have to counter every potential different way of doing it when you are telling the story live because the audience will only come up with a certain number of them before they are satisfied that the alternatives they think are most important to look into have been adequately addressed. But the moment that you record the story, the moment you put it into a song, stage play, a motion picture or a book, as soon as that happens, you’re no longer there to counter the rebuttals. You also don’t know exactly which potential rebuttals might come up. So if somebody looks at your story in the form of a movie in the theater and they see some pathway they think ought to be taken wasn’t even suggested, then they are going to feel that you haven’t made your case because maybe that would have been a better path than yours.

So what do you do? In a recorded art form you have to anticipate all the different rebuttals that might come up about other potential solutions and show why these other potential solutions would not be as good or as bad as the one that you are proposing – proving therefore that if all reasonable and appropriate alternatives have been explored and yours is still the best or the worst, then you’ve made your case. You have successfully argued your point, and the blanket statement is now considered true.

In order to do that you have to anticipate all the ways the audience might look at the problem alternatively. In effect, you to think of all the ways anyone might think of solving that problem alternatively. Essentially, you have to include in your story all of the different ways any human mind might go about solving that problem.  In so doing, you have automatically created a model of the mind’s problem solving process, the Story Mind. Ultimately, you have created an analogy to the mind itself.

Now you never set out to do that, it was a byproduct never intended. No caveman ever sat down and said, ‘you know I think I will create an analogy to a single human mind trying to deal with an inequity.’ No, it didn’t happen that way, but in the process of trying to communicate a recorded art form across a medium and successfully argue one particular situation is better than all potential ones, you need to put in all the potential ones, and you thereby create a model of the mind quite by accident.

Once that’s happened, once it’s recognized, one can now look to that model of the mind from a psychological perspective. Psychoanalyze the story, and you find everything that’s in the human mind represented tangible and incarnate in the story in some form or another in the structure.

That’s what Dramatica is all about. When we had that Rosetta stone we then threw ourselves into documenting the psychology of the story and we documented the Story Mind. We created the theory and then created the software to implement a major portion of the theory to allow an author to answer questions about the impact he or she wishes to have and have.  Dramatica’s story engine then predicts the structure necessary to achieve that particular impact.

Transcribed by Marc O’Dell from
Dramatica Unplugged by Melanie Anne Phillips

A Tale is a Statement

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

Both Sides of the Thematic Argument

Every powerful theme pits a “Message Issue” against a “Counterpoint”, such as “Greed vs. Generosity”, or “Holding On To Hope” vs. “Abandoning Hope”.

The Message Issue and Counterpoint define the thematic argument of your story. They play both sides of the moral dilemma. The most important key to a successful thematic argument is never, ever play the message issue and counterpoint together at the same time.

Why? Because the thematic argument is an emotional one, not one of reason. You are trying to sway your reader/audience to adopt your moral view as an author. This will not happen if you keep showing one side of the argument as “good” and the other side as “bad” in direct comparison. Such a thematic argument would seem one-sided, and treat the issues as being black-and-white, rather than gray-scale.

In real life, moral decisions are seldom cut-and-dried. Although we may hold views that are clearly defined, in practice it all comes down to the context of the specific situation. For example, it may be wrong to steal in general. But, it might be proper to steal from the enemy during a war, or from a large market when you baby is starving. In the end, all moral views become a little blurry around the edges when push comes to shove.

Statements of absolutes do not a thematic argument make. Rather, your most powerful message will deal with the lesser of two evils, the greater of two goods, or the degree of goodness or badness of each side of the argument. In fact, there are often situations where both sides of the moral argument are equally good, equally bad, or that both sides are either good nor bad in the particular situation being explored in the story.

The way to create this more powerful, more believable, and more persuasive thematic argument is as follows:

1. Determine in advance whether each side is good, bad, or neutral.

Do this by assigning an arbitrary “value” to both the Message Issue and the Counterpoint. For example, we might choose a scale with +5 being absolutely good, -5 being absolutely bad, and zero being neutral.

If our thematic argument is Greed vs. Generosity, then Greed (our Message Issue) might be a -3, and Generosity (our Counterpoint) might be a -2. This would mean that both Greed and Generosity are both bad (being in the negative) but that Generosity is a little less bad than Greed since Generosity is only a -2 and Greed is a -3.

2. Show the good and bad aspects of both the Message Issue and the Counterpoint.

Make sure the examples of each side of the thematic argument that you have already developed don’t portray either side as being all good or all bad. In fact, even if one side of the argument turns out to be bad in the end, it might be shown as good initially. But over the course of the story, that first impression is changed by seeing that side in other contexts.

3. Have the good and bad aspects “average out” to the thematic conclusion you want.

By putting each side of the thematic argument on a roller coaster of good and bad aspects, it blurs the issues, just as in real life. But the reader/audience will “average out” all of their exposures to each side of the argument and draw their own conclusions at the end of the story.

In this way, the argument will move out of the realm of intellectual consideration and become a viewpoint arrived by feel. And, since you have not only shown both sides, but the good and the bad of each side, your message will be easier to swallow. And finally, since you never directly compared the two sides, the reader/audience will not feel that your message has been shoved down its throat.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

Develop both sides of  your theme with

StoryWeaver Software

A Word of Warning About Propaganda

Propaganda is powerful but using it involves risks. It is like a virus or engaging in germ warfare. Once an audience is exposed to a propagandistic message, the only way they can neutralize it is to balance it with an equal but opposite force. Audiences frequently don’t like to think they are being manipulated. If the audience becomes aware of the nature of your propaganda, the equal but opposite force can take the form of a backlash against the author(s) and the propaganda itself. Look at the strong reaction against advertisers who “target” their advertising to specific demographic groups (e.g. African Americans, women, Generation X, etc.), particularly if they are trying to sell liquor, tobacco products, or other items considered “vices” in America.

Once released, propaganda is difficult to control and frequently becomes subject to real world influences. Sometimes propaganda can benefit from real world coincidences: The China Syndrome’s mild propaganda about the dangers of nuclear power plants got a big boost in affecting its audience because of the Three Mile Island incident; the media coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder case may not have tainted potential jurors, but Natural Born Killers’ propaganda against the media’s sensationalization of violence got a little extra juice added to its punch. Often real life or the passage of time can undermine the effectiveness of propaganda: it is possible that Reefer Madness may have been effective when it first came out, but audiences today find its propaganda against drug use obvious, simplistic, risible and, more importantly, ineffective.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Misdirection as Propaganda

The most subtle and possibly most effective form of propaganda from a single exposure is the use of misdirection as a way to impact an audience’s Subconscious. Like “smoke and mirrors” used by magicians, this form of propaganda requires focusing the audience’s Conscious attention in one place while the real impact is made in the Subconscious. Fortunately for propagandistic minded authors, this is one of the easiest forms of propaganda to create.

This technique comes from omitting parts of the storyform from your storytelling. What you leave out becomes the audience’s blind spot, and the dynamic partner to the omitted storyform piece becomes the audience’s focus. The focus is where your audience’s attention will be drawn (the smoke and mirrors). The blind spot is where your audience personalizes the story by “filling-in-the-blank.” The story’s argument is thus linked directly to the audience’s subconscious, based on the context in which the story is presented.

Let’s look at some dynamic pairs of partners that appear in a storyform. The following pairs concern the nature of the impact on your audience:

Motivation <­p;> Purpose
Means of Evaluation <­p;> Methodology

Should you wish to impact your audience’s motivations, omit a particular motivation in the story . The audience, then, focused on the purpose they can see will automatically supply a motivation that seems viable to them (e.g.: Thelma and Louise ).

Here are the storyform dynamic pairs that relate to story/audience perspectives:

Objective Perspective <­p;> Subjective Perspective
Main Character Perspective <­p;> Obstacle Character Perspective

Combining a nature with a perspective gives an author greater control over a story’s propaganda. For example, if you wish to impact your audience in how they view the means of evaluation employed by the world around them, omit the Objective Story means of evaluation elements and the audience’s attention will be distracted by focusing on the methodologies employed (e.g.: Natural Born Killers).

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Conditioning as Propaganda

Presenting an audience with an alternative life experience is yet another way to impact your audience. By ignoring (or catering to) an audience’s cultural bias, you can present your story as an alternative reality. This impacts an audience by undermining or reinforcing their own personal Memories. By experiencing the story, the message/meaning of the story becomes part of the audience’s memory base.

The nature of the propaganda, however, is that the story lacks context, which must be supplied by the audience. Thus personalized, the story memory is automatically triggered when an experience in the audience’s real life summons similarly stored memories. Through repeated use, an audience’s “sensibilities” become conditioned.

In Conditioning propaganda, audience attention is directed to causal relationships like When A also B (spatial), and If C then D (temporal). The mechanism of this propaganda is to leave out a part of the causal relationships in the story, such as When A also B and If ?? then D. By leaving out one part, the objective contextual meaning is then supplied automatically by the audience. The audience will replace ?? with something from its own experience base, not consciously considering that a piece is missing because it will have emotionally arrived at the contradiction: When A also B and then D.

This type of propaganda is closest to the traditional usage of the term with respect to stories, entertainment, and advertising. For example, look at much of the tobacco and alcohol print advertising. Frequently the Main Character (the type of person to whom the advertisement is supposed to appeal) is attractive, has someone attractive with them, and appears to be well situated in life. The inference is that when you smoke or drink, you are also cool, and if you are cool then you will be rich and attractive. The connection between “cool” and “rich and attractive” is not really in the advertisement but an audience often makes that connection for itself. In Conditioning propaganda, more than in the other three forms of propaganda, the degree of impact on your audience is extremely dependent on your audience’s life experience outside the story experience .

Crimes and Misdemeanors is a film example that employs this conditioning technique of propaganda. The unusual aspect of the film is that it has two completely separate stories in it. The “Crimes” story involves a self-interested man who gets away with murder and personally becomes completely OK with it (a Success/Good story). The “Misdemeanors” story involves a well meaning man who loses his job, his girl, and is left miserable (a Failure/Bad story). By supplying two competing stories instead of one, the audience need not supply its own experiences to arrive at a false context while viewing this work. Audiences will come to stories, however, with a particular cultural bias. In our culture, Failure/Bad stories which happen to nice people are regrettable, but familiar; Success/Good stories about murderers are uncommon and even “morally reprehensible.”

The propaganda comes into effect when the audience experiences in its own life a Failure/Bad scenario that triggers a recollection of the Success/Good story about forgetting the grief of having murdered – an option that the audience would not normally have considered. Lacking an objective contextual meaning that sets one over the other, both stories are given equal consideration as viable solutions. Thus, what was once inconceivable due to a cultural or personal bias is now automatically seen as a possible avenue for problem-solving.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Awareness as Propaganda

Another method is to be up-front about the nature of the propaganda, letting your audience know what you are doing as you do it to them. This impacts an audience at a Conscious level where they must actively consider the pros and cons of the issues. The propaganda comes from controlling the givens on the issues being discussed, while the audience focuses on which side of the issues they believe in.

A filmic example of this technique can be seen in JFK. By choosing a controversial topic (the assassination of President Kennedy) and making an overly specific argument as to what parties were involved in the conspiracy to execute and cover-up the assassination, Oliver Stone was able to focus his audience’s attention on how “they” got away with it. The issue of who “they” were was suspiciously contentious as the resulting media bru-ha-ha over the film indicated. Who “they” were, however, is not the propaganda. The propaganda came in the form the story’s given which is that Lee Harvey Oswald had help. By the end of the story, audiences found themselves arguing over which of the parties in the story were or were not participants in the conspiracy, accepting the possibility that people other than Oswald may have been involved.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Shock as Propaganda

One tried-and-true method is to control what an audience knows about the story before experiencing the storytelling process so that you can shock them. Within the context of the story itself (as opposed to marketing or word-of-mouth), an author can prepare the audience by establishing certain givens, then purposefully break the storyform (destroy the givens) to shock or jar the audience. This hits the audience at a Preconscious level by soliciting an instantaneous, knee-jerk reaction. This type of propaganda is the most specific and immediately jarring on its audience. Two films that employed this technique to great effect are Psycho and The Crying Game.

Psycho broke the storyform to impact the audience’s preconscious by killing the main character twenty minutes or so into the film (the “real” story about the Bates family then takes over). The shock value was enhanced through marketing by having the main character played by big box office draw Janet Leigh (a good storytelling choice at the time) and the marketing gimmick that no one would be allowed into the movie after the first five or ten minutes. This “gimmick” was actually essential for the propaganda to be effective. It takes time for an audience to identify on a personal level with a main character. Coming in late to the film would not allow enough time for the audience member to identify with Janet Leigh’s character and her death would have little to no impact.

The Crying Game used a slightly different process to achieve a similar impact. The first twenty minutes or so of the film are used to establish a bias to the main character’s (and audience’s) view of reality. The “girlfriend” is clearly established except for one important fact. That “fact,” because it is not explicitly denoted, is supplied by the mind of the main character (and the minds of the audience members). By taking such a long time to prep the audience, it comes as a shock when we (both main character and audience) find out that she is a he.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Four Levels of Propaganda

Here are the things an author should consider while creating a propaganda story:

1. Nature of Impact

How you want to impact your audience? Do you wish to play with your audience’s:

  • Motivations (what drives them)
  • Methodologies (how they go about doing things)
  • Purposes (what they are striving for)
  • Means of evaluation (how they measure their progress – their personal yardsticks)?

Pick only one as the area of primary impact. This will become the area of the storyform that you purposefully omit when storytelling. The remaining three areas will be used to support your intent by drawing attention away from the missing piece(s).

2. Area of Impact

What part of your audience’s world-view do you wish to impact?

  • View of the world around them – “objective reality” (Objective Story)
  • View of relationships (Subjective Story)
  • View of themselves (Main Character)
  • View of others (Obstacle Character)

Choose one of the perspectives. This will be the domain in which to place the “hole” in the storyform. The area of impact determines which part of your audience’s world-view the propaganda will “infect.”

3. Type of Impact: Specific vs. General

Do you want the impact on your audience to be of a specific nature, or of a broader, more general nature?

The more specific you make the propaganda, the more specific and predictable its impact will be on an audience. The upside (from an author’s point of view) is that specific behavior (mental or physical) can be promoted or modified. The downside is that specific propaganda is more easily identifiable and therefore contestable by the audience.

Specific propaganda is achieved by intentionally not encoding selected story appreciations, such as the Main Character’s motivation or the story Outcome (Success or Failure). The audience will supply the missing piece from its own personal experiences (e.g. the Main Character’s motivation in Thelma and Louise.; what happened to Louise in Texas that prevents her from ever going back is specifically not mentioned in the film – that blank is left for the audience to fill).

The more general you make the propaganda, the less specific but all-pervasive its impact will be on an audience. Instead of focusing impact on the audience’s motivations, methodologies, purposes, or means of evaluation, generalized propaganda will tend to bias the audience’s perspectives of their world. The upside (from an author’s point of view) is that generalized propaganda is difficult for an audience to identify and therefore more difficult to combat than the specific form of propaganda. The downside is that it does not promote any specific type of behavior or thought process and its direct impact is less discernible.

General propaganda is achieved by intentionally not encoding entire areas of the story’s structure or dynamics. For example, by leaving out almost all forms of the story’s internal means of evaluation, Natural Born Killers forces its audience to focus on the methodologies involved and question its own (the members of the audience) means of evaluation.

4. Degree of Impact

To what degree do you wish to impact your audience? The degree to which you can impact an audience is dependent on many variables not the least of which are your storytelling skills and the nature of the audience itself. There are some basic guidelines, however, that can mitigate and sometimes supersede those variables when skillfully employed.

From the Dramatica Theory Book