In this episode I explore the structural reasons why men and women respond differently to the same story. Pretty controversial stuff, until you hear the details! Hint – it all has to do with the reasons men and women will empathize or sympathize with the main character.
Here’s the link to the video:
http://storymindguru.com/dramatica-unplugged/6%20Audience%20Reach.htm
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Few authors write stories without at least considering what it will be like to read the story or see it on stage or screen. As soon as this becomes a concern, we have crossed the line into Reception theory. Suddenly, we have more to consider than what our story’s message is; we now must try to anticipate how that message will be received.
One of the first questions then becomes, how do we want it to be received. And from this, we ask, what am I hoping to achieve with my audience. We may wish to educate our audience, or we may simply want to bias them. Perhaps we are out to persuade our audience to adopt a point of view, or simply to pander to an existing point of view. We might provoke our audience, forcing them to consider some topic or incite them to take action in regard to a topic. We could openly manipulate them with their informed consent, or surreptitiously propagandize them, changing their outlook without their knowledge.
No matter what our author’s intent, it is shaped not only by who we are, but also by who the audience is that we are trying to reach.
From the Dramatica Theory Book
From Dramatica Unplugged
Suppose your audience/reader and your Main Character do NOT agree in attitudes about the central issue of the story. Even so, the audience will still identify with the Main Character because he or she represents the audience’s position in the story. So, if the Main Character grows in resolve to remain steadfast and succeeds, then the message to your audience is, “Adopt the Main Character’s view if you wish to succeed in similar situations.” If the Main Character remains steadfast and fails, changes their view and succeeds, or changes and fails, completely different messages will be sent to your audience/reader.
Clearly, since either change or steadfast can lead to either success or failure in a story, when you factor in where the audience itself stands in regard to the issues of your story a great number of different kinds of audience impact can be created by your choice.
Do you want your story to bring your audience to a point of change or to reinforce its current view? Oddly enough, choosing a steadfast Main Character may bring an audience to change and choosing a change character may influence the audience to remain steadfast. Why? It depends upon whether or not your audience shares the Main Character’s point of view to begin with.
From the Dramatica Pro Software
In Dramatica, there are some story points that deal directly with the structure and others that pertain to the collective impact of a number of story points. Audience Reach is one of these combined dramatics. It is also called an Audience Story Point because it is concerned with the kind of reach the story has into the audience.
Specifically, it describes whether your readers/audience will empathize or sympathize with your Main Character. Empathy is when your readers/audience identify with your Main Character. Sympathy is when they care about your main character but feel more as if they are standing right behind the character, rather than in its shoes.
When audience members empathize, they suspend their disbelief and emotionally occupy the Main Character’s position in the story. When audience members sympathize, it seems to them as if the emotional maelstrom of the story revolves around the Main Character, making him or her the Central character of the story.
Audience Reach is determined by the effects of two story points: Story Limit and Main Character Mental Sex. Limit describes the story dynamics that force the story to a conclusion. Mental Sex describes whether your Main Character thinks like a man or a woman.
Story Limit has two variations – Time Lock and Option Lock. Time Lock stories are like the motion picture “48 Hours” in which a police detective has exactly two days before he has to return to jail a convict who is the key to solving another crime. When the time is up, the story reaches its conclusion.
Option Lock stories are similar to Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” in which a transformed prince must make someone love him before the last petal falls from an enchanted rose or he will remain a beast forever. When the last petal falls, the conclusion is reached.
Main Character Mental Sex also has two variations – Male and Female. Mental Sex does not refer to the physical gender of the Main Character but only to its mental gender. (Because none of us truly know how the opposite sex thinks, authors often can’t help but write all of their characters as thinking in their own sex, regardless of the character’s physical gender.)
Examples can be seen in the motion picture “Aliens” in which the Main Character (Ripley) was actually written for a man and changed only the character’s dialog when the role was cast with Sigourney Weaver. Alternatively, in the movie “The Hunt for Red October”, Jack Ryan is a female mental sex Main Character as he solves problems intutively and emotionally, rather than by observation and logic.
As one might expect, male and female readers/audience members empathize or sympathize with a Main Character for different reasons.
For men, they will empathize with Male Mental Sex Main Characters and sympathize with Female Mental Sex Main Characters, regardless of which limit is inoked – time lock or option lock. Conversely, women will empathize in an option lock but only sympathize in a time lock, regardless of what mental sex the Main Character posesses.
Why the difference? Well, the reasons are in the physiology of the brain, and too deep to go into here. If you are really interested, you’ll find a complete description of what causes the mental differences between mean and women later in this program in a lesson devoted specifically to mental sex.
Still, for a quick visual, imagine a plain old clock face. Imagine that men’s minds sit at noon, and women at 9 o’clock. Thinking clockwise, men see women as being three quarters of an hour away. Women see men as only being one quarter of an hour away. This serves to illustrate that the sexes really aren’t opposite, but are more accurately sideways to each other.
When men and women converse, they are often speaking apples and oranges and are not really in conflict or disagreement. They simply don’t have a means of seeing things the way the other sex does. So, it is not suprising that men’s empathies might be drawn to those who think like them (also at noon on the clock) while women (seeing men as just one quarter hour away) would be more affected by the situation in which the main character finds itself. For women, and option lock is more like the way they think – trying to balance all the elements at once, just as in their own lives. But time locks (to women) are just deadlines and seem imposed from the outside rather than open to some degree of control.
Okay, lets put that behind and see what we can do with this information.
If you want to create a story in which both men and women empathize with the Main Character, then you will want to limit your story with an option lock but employ a Male Mental Sex Main Character. On the other hand, if you want to explore a despicable Main Character, you may not want to disturb your readers/audience by making them empathize with such a cad. In such a case, you can ensure your readers/audience will only sympathize by writing a Female Mental Sex Main Character in a timelock story. The danger is that since nobody empathizes, nobody really gets into the story and it doesn’t sell very well.
Naturally, the other two combinations can also exist – Men Empathize (Male Mental Sex) and women Sympathize (Time Lock) or Women Empathize (Option Lock) and men only sympathize (Female Mental Sex).
You can predict whether a book or movie will attract more men or women, just by seeing who empathizes. Hollywood tends to favor Male Mental Sex / Option Lock stories most often. This has the entire audience empathizing, and therefore (since far more mixed mental sex couples go to movies that single individuals or same mental sex couples) it ensures the largest percentage of the audience is personally involved in the movie, thereby increasing its box office (all artistic merit aside).
