Dramatica Unplugged Home

Dramatica Unplugged Home

Transcript of the soundtrack from this video:

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

Over the years there’s been so much sophisticated material written about how Dramatica deals with all kinds of complex story issues that it is easy to forget about the central purpose of Dramatica in the first place.

So, here’s a short article to help those of you new to Dramatica to get a grip on what it is and why its important.

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There’s two parts to stories – the part that gets us all excited (the subject matter and style) and the dry, frustrating part (the underlying structure).

Writers also come in two varieties – the intuitive writers who like to follow their Muse and the logical writers who like to build their stories from the ground up, according to plan.

There are very few folk who do both very well.  We usually call them “Master Storytellers” or John LeCarre or Shakespeare or Aaron Sorkin.

For the rest of us, we usually have some degree of talent in one of the two areas and a noticeable lack in the other.  Me – I’m great at following the Muse, but can’t structure a story worth a darn.

So, twenty years ago, a friend of mine and I went hunting for the answer to story structure.  Along the way, we invented a whole new theory of it called “Dramatica.”

Dramatica says that structure is like the platter on which you serve up your passion and ideas.  Structure is like the carrier wave in radio upon which the program is broadcast.

If structure is done right, it is invisible – just like that carrier way you never hear in a radio program.  But if it isn’t tuned properly, it gets in the way of the program, creating static and drop-outs.  And, you certainly don’t your readers dropping out of your story or stumbling over a logical problem when logic is the last thing you want them to be thinking about.

So, the Dramatica theory deals solely with that dry, uninteresting, but essential underlying “story argument,” because without that sound foundation, even the most interesting subject matter and most intriguing storytelling will collapse.

Well, that’s an introduction to the concept.  What I’m writing these days is like “doctorate level” dissertations – for the following of hard-core structuralists I’ve collected over the years.

Keep in mind, it is all about form, not formula.  It is more like studying good graphic design than paint by numbers.

If you are still interested, I can point you at some good videos and articles I’ve created over the years on the basic concepts.  Just let me know.

Melanie

Here is a link to the definitive explanation of the Dramatica theory (in PDF) from 1993, that explains all of the key concepts in text and graphics, including descriptions of non-story uses of the psychological model and the functioning of the model in terms of the dramatic circuit created by Potential, Resistance, Current, and Power (Outcome) and its relationship to the prediction of temporal story progression in terms of a quad-based 1 2 3 4 sequence.

http://storymind.com/free-downloads/sa_article.pdf

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 Dramatica Theory

A Conversation on Story Structure

by Melanie Anne Phillips

1.4 The Dramatica Chart

As a part of that book, we developed the Dramatica Chart of Story Elements which is not unlike the Periodic Table of Elements in chemistry. With it, you can create the chemistry of your characters, plot, theme, and genre.

Nonetheless, in chemistry it is not only knowing what the elements are but understanding how they can be put together that allows a chemist to design all of the amazingly varied substances we have today.  So fortunately, the Dramatica theory did not stop with the chart, but when on to discover and organize the dynamics of story as well.  We’ll cover these in later chapters, but for now a brief introduction to the structural side of Dramatica is that point at hand.

The Dramatica Chart

  Flat Projection

  3D Projection

The Dramatica chart lists and organizes all the psychological processes that must exist in a Story Mind (that, in fact, exist in the human mind).  The first thing you might notice is that the flat projection on the left really does look a lot like the familiar Periodic Table of Elements.  The 3D projection on the right is likely a lot more unfamiliar.

The reason there are two versions is that the flat projection makes it easier to see how the elements of story fall into families while the 3D projection will help us later when we explore how story dynamics twist and turn the model like a Rubik’s Cube to wind up the dramatic potentials that drive story.

At its most simple level, the chart can be seen as having four principal areas (called classes): Universe, Physics, Mind, and Psychology. These represent the four fundamental kinds of problems that might exist in stories (or in life!)

Universe is an external state (any fixed situation)

Physics is an external process (any kind of activity)

Mind is an internal state (any fixed attitude)

Psychology is an internal process (any manner of thinking)

Essentially, whatever problem you might confront can be classed as either an external or internal state or an external or internal process.

Right off the bat this is a very useful concept.  It allows us to take the whole world of problems we might encounter in a story and initially classify them into one of four broad categories.  In one stroke, we are able to eliminate three fourths of the issues we might have had to explore and can center our search for solutions in a much smaller realm.

In later chapters, we’ll use the chart to continue to refine the nature of the story’s problem by sub-categorizing its nature into smaller and smaller sub-families in the chart until we get down to its elemental nature (the smallest units in the flat projection which also appear on the very bottom level of the 3D projection.

But for now, let us focus on those four broad categories at the very top of the chart so that we can get a sense for how the Dramatica organizes the elements of story.

Universe then is our external environment. Anything that is a problematic fixed situation falls into this category. For example, being stuck in a well, being held captive, or missing a leg are all situational “Universe Class” problems.

Physics, on the other hand, is all about activities that cause us difficulty. Honey bees dying off across the country, the growth of a militant organization, and the growth of a cancer are all “Physics Class” problems.

Mind is the internal equivalent of Universe – a fixed internal state. So, any prejudice, bias, fixation, or fixed attitude would be the kinds of problems found in the “Mind Class”.

Psychology is the Physics of the mind – an internal process.  A “Psychology Class” problem would be someone who makes a series of assumptions leading to difficulties, or someone whose self-image and confidence are eroding.

In stories, as in real life, we cannot solve a problem until we can accurately define it. So, the first value of the Dramatica Chart is to present us with a tool for determining into which of the four fundamental categories of problems our particular issue falls.

Now you may think that the terms Universe, Physics, Mind, and Psychology, are a little antiseptic, perhaps a bit too scientific to be applying them to something as intuitive as the writing of stories.  We think so too.

Back when we were naming the concepts in the Dramatica Theory, we were faced with a choice – to either use extremely accurate words that might be a bit off-putting or to use easily accessible words that weren’t quite on the mark.

Ultimately we decided that the whole point of the theory was to provide an accurate way of predicting the necessary components of a sound story structure. Therefore, we elected to use the terms that were more accurate, even if they required a little study, rather than to employ a less accurate terminology that could be grasped right away.  Sorry about that.

Returning to the chart itself, the 3D version appears as four towers, each representing one of the four classes we’ve just described and each class having four levels.

As we go down the levels from top to bottom we subdivide each kind of problem into smaller and more detailed categories, thereby refining our understanding of the very particular kind of problem at the core of any given story.

There is far more power, meaning, and usefulness to the Dramatica Chart than so far described, just as the understanding and application of the Periodic Table of Elements doesn’t stop at simply noting that it divides elements into families.

We’ll explore all of these aspects in later chapters, but in this introductory overview, suffice it to say that the Dramatica Chart accurately lists and organizes all of the dramatic elements necessary to contrast any effective story structure.

From The Dramatica Theory

The Dramatica Theory

A Conversation on Story Structure

by Melanie Anne Phillips

1.3   A Story is an Argument

To recap, a tale is a simple linear path that the author promotes as being either a good or bad one, depending on the outcome.

There’s a certain amount of power in that.  Still, it wouldn’t take our early storyteller long to realize that if he didn’t have to limit himself to relating events that actually happened he might wield even more power over his audience.

Rather, he might carry things a step farther and create a fictional tale to illustrate his belief in the benefits or dangers of following a particular course.  That is the concept behind Fairy Tales and Cautionary Tales – to encourage certain behaviors and inhibit other behaviors based on the author’s belief as to the most efficacious courses of action in life.

But what kind of power might you garner if you went beyond merely stating, “This conclusion is true for this particular case,” but rather boldly stated “This conclusion is true for all cases?”

In other words, you tell your audience, “If you begin here, then no matter what path you might take from that given starting point, it wouldn’t be as good (or as bad) as the one I’m promoting.”  Rather than saying that the approach you have described to your audience is simply good or bad in and of itself, you are now inferring that of all the approaches that might have been taken, yours is the best (or worst) way to go.

Clearly that has a lot more power to it because you are telling everyone, “If you find yourself in this situation, exclude any other paths; take only this one,” or, “If you find yourself in this situation, no matter what you do, don’t do this!”

Still, because you’ve only shown the one path, even though you are saying it is better than any others, you have not illustrated the others.  Therefore, you are making a blanket statement.

Now, an audience simply won’t sit still for a blanket statement. They’ll cry, “Foul!” They will be thinking of the other paths they might personally have taken and will at least question you.

So, if our caveman sitting around the fire says, “Hey, this is the best of all possible paths,” his audience is going to say , “What about this other case? What if we tried this, this or this?”

If the author had a sound case he would respond to all the solutions the audience might suggest, compare them to the one he was touting and conclusively show that the promoted path was, indeed, the best (or worst). But if a solution suggested by the audience proves better than the author’s, his blanket statement loses all credibility.

In a nutshell, for every rebuttal the audience voices, the author can attempt to counter the rebuttal until he has proven his case or at least exhausted their interest in arguing with him.  Since he is there in person, he won’t necessarily have to argue every conceivable alternative solution – just the ones the audience brings up. And if he is successful, he’ll eventually satisfy everyone’s concerns or simply tire them out to the point they are willing to accept his conclusions.

But what happens if the author isn’t there when the story is related?  The moment a story is recorded and replayed as a song ballad, a stage play, or a motion picture (for example), then the original author is no longer present to counter any rebuttals the audience might have to his blanket statement.

So if someone in the audience thinks of a method of resolving the problem and it hasn’t been addressed it in the blanket statement, they will feel there is a hole in the argument and that the author hasn’t made his case.

Therefore, in a recorded art form, you need to include all the other reasonable approaches that might be suggested in order to “sell” your approach as the best or the worst. You need to show how each alternative is not as good (or as bad) as the one you are promoting thereby proving that your blanket statement is correct.

A story, then, becomes a far more complex proposition than a simple tale.  Now the author must anticipate all the other ways the audience might consider solving the problem in question. In effect, he has to include all the ways anyone might reasonably think of solving that problem. Essentially, he has to include all the ways any human mind might go about solving that problem. In so doing, as an accidental by-product, generations of storytellers have arrived at our modern conventions of story structure: a model of the mind’s problem-solving process –  the Story Mind.

This is not the mind of the author, reader or audience, but of the story itself – a mind created symbolically in the process of communicating an argument across a medium. It is a mind for the audience to look at, understand, and then occupy.

Once this is understood, you can ensure perfect structure by psychoanalyzing your story as if it were a person. And in so doing, you find that everything that is in the human mind is represented in some tangible form in the story’s structure.

That’s what Dramatica is all about. Once we had that Rosetta Stone, we set ourselves to the task of documenting the psychology of the Story Mind. We developed a model of this structure and described it in our book, Dramatica: A New Theory of Story.

Table of Contents

The Dramatica Theory

A Conversation on Story Structure

by Melanie Anne Phillips

1.2   A Tale is a Statement

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

Here’s one possibility….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In summary, you can start from any place and eventually get to anywhere else, but you have to go through the in-betweens. So as long as you have a head-line and/or a heart-line and it is an unbroken chain that doesn’t skip any steps, that constitutes a complete tale.

Table of Contents

The Dramatica Theory

A Conversation on Story Structure

by Melanie Anne Phillips

1.1 Introducing the Story Mind

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

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

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

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

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

Table of Contents

The Dramatica Theory

By Melanie Anne Phillips

 Part One

 The Story Mind

Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

Table of Contents