Dramaticapedia

Appreciate the time you took clarifying Male & Female perceptions of time and space. Now, if you have time for another question… What is the difference between a female mental sex way of viewing the world and an animal’s way of viewing the world? To use your (lovely) blustery-day-big-puffy-clouds example, wouldn’t a kitty cat get a sense of the flavor of the day without thinking about or being aware of any patterns? Wouldn’t changes in acceleration affect the kitty cat’s energy level?

It has been suggested that the fact there are 64 dramatic Elements in the Dramatica Theory of Story is mighty suspicious.  After all, that’s a real convenient number if you are going to be creating a software program, such as Dramatica Pro.  Which naturally leads to the speculation that perhaps the Dramatica Theory is not so much about what’s really going on in story as it is about describing stories in terms of how software might best look at them.

Another unsettling fact is that you’ll find a lot of symmetry in Dramatica – pairs of things like Protagonist and Antagonist, quads of things like the four Domains: Objective Story, Subjective Story, Main Character and Obstacle Character, and so on.  Perhaps one of the most “disturbing” aspects of the theory is that everything is in even numbers – 2 Subjective Characters, 8 Archetypes, 4 Plot Signposts, etc. – Or, perhaps it just appears that way….

After all, there are 3 Plot Journeys that span the 4 Plot Signposts and give us the standard Three Act Structure.  But, you can also structure a story to emphasize the first Signpost, the three Journeys, and then the final Signpost, thereby creating the feeling of a 5 Part Plot Progression (handy for television programs and their commercial breaks).  In addition, you can clearly illustrate all four Signposts and all three Journeys in a throughline thereby cretaing 7 different dramatic movements along the way.

As a final example of odd numbers in Dramatica, there are four primary character functions: Protagonist, Antagonist, Main Character and Obstacle Character.  Protagonist and Antagonist fight over the goal, Main Character and Obstacle Character fight over moral values.  Often, stories will make the Protagonist the Main Character and the Antagonist the Obstacle Character so that only two players represent all four attributes between them.  In such a case, these two characters fight over the goal and also fight over moral values.  This can get pretty confusing, so often authors will split one of those character to create a “dramatic triangle” to make the two kinds of conflict easier to follow.  In such a case, you might have the Protagonist be the Main Character, the Antagonist fight with him (or her) over the goal and the Obstacle Character (often a “love interes”) fight with him or her over moral values.  Suddenly four attributes becomes three characters.

The point of all this is that you aren’t limited to exploring just even numbers or things in fours, eights, sixteens, or sixty-fours.  And yet, the Dramatica theory (and especially the Dramatica chart) does divide itself into these even number chunks based on multiples of four.  So why is that?!!!

Simple – because we all think in four dimensions: Mass, Energy, Space and Time.  There are no other dimensions we can directly sense (though we can consceive of all kinds of dimensions in M theory, for example).  But at the very top of that heap are the four dimensions we can sense directly.

Actually, Dramatica goes beyond that.  It sees those four external dimensions but also sees four internal ones as well: Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire.  What the hell?  Stay with me here…  Knowledge is the Mass of the mind.  It is “material” in the mind – the fixed and defined.  Thought is the Energy of the mind.  Just as Energy can rearrange mass or become attached to it as potential, so too can Thought organize Knowledge and also be attached to it as potential.

Ability is the “Space” of the mind.  Say, what?  Think about it.  Mass exists in Space; Ability exists in Knowledge.  And you can think about Mass and Space in terms of what is and what isn’t just as you can think about Knowledge and Ability in terms of what you know and what you don’t.  It is really the relationship between what you know and what you don’t that defines Ability just as the relationship between what is and what is not defines Space.

Now, Desire….  Desire as it equates to Time in the external dimensions.  Time can only be measured by comparing what was to what is and what might be – that is how we can experience the concept of motion – by comparing where something was to where it is and projecting where it might be.  Internally, Desire is determined by compairing how things were to how they are and how they might be.  And in this way we measure progress, which is how we see motion in our lives.

This isn’t just a lot of cute loose connections between hard physics and pop psychology – oh, no!  Well, not entirely anyway.  You see, in physics E=MC2, which is to say that Energy equals Mass time the speed of light squared.  How is speed measured?  in Space and Time (cm per second, in the case of Einstein’s equation).  So, even in the physical world, four things – Mass, Energy, Space and Time – can be combined into three (Mass, Energy and Speed).  Sounds a lot like Dramatica, don’t it?

Well, then you’ll love (or hate) this…

The primary equation of the Dramatica model of story from which the entire structure is built is quite simple: K/T = AD, or Knowledge divided by Thought equals Ability time Desire.  What the hell?  (again!)  Okay… when we think in logic, we are parlaying our Knowledge against our Thought.

Example:  Knowledge bends our thoughts in new trajectories because of what we know, just as Mass in Space bends energy (such as light waves) along the vectors of its gravity.  “Plain English, PLEASE!”  ‘Kay….

It take a lot of thought to make a little knowledge, just as a little bit of knowledge can generate an awful lot of thought.  Now…  isn’t this interesting…  That relationship between Knowlege and Thought is the same as the relationship betwen Mass and Energy in Einstein’s equation:  It takes a lot of energy to make a little mass but a little mass can generate an awful lot of energy.

What an interesting (or convenient) similarity between Dramatica and Relativity.  Well, here’s a little more then…  If you take the equation of Dramatica – K/T = AD and do a little rearranging using Algebra by multiplying each side by T you get K=T (AD).  Looks unnervingly like E=MC2, doesn’t it?

Of course, in Einstein’s version, Space and Time are combines into C2 (which is the Speed of light (Time) multipliled by the wavelength of light (Space), thereby combining Space and Time into a single C2.  Why is it a constant?  Because when the speed goes up the wavelength goes down so they are both on this cosmic seesaw and collectively never change their value, even when they keep rocking back and forth.

So too it is in Dramatica.  Ability and Desire are blended by our minds into “Desireability” so we can think logically in Knowledge and Thought.

Think about the ramifications – no matter how great our knowledge or thought, if either our ability or desire are zero, then nothing’s going to happen because it means all our considerations amount to naught.  But if every element in the equation has a value of more than zero, there will be some degree of motivation within us.

We all know that different frequencies of light have different speeds, but none of them have a speed of zero or light would have to have a wavelength equal to infinity.  And in our minds, there are many emotional flavors of desire, but none are really ever at a zero-level or Ability would have to be infinitely huge (like, God, say…) or we’d never move.

My but haven’t we drifted far afield from “The Number 64″ (the title of this article).  Alright, here’s another co-incidence for you – the IChing has 64 elements, just like the Dramatica Chart.  Honest to Madeline Albright, we didn’t know that until someone brought it to our attention once Dramatica was released.  But the really strange thing is that the pictograms in the I Ching line up exactly with the same mathematical progressions in Dramatica.

In fact, one Dramatica user was so intrigued that he created a whole explanation of how Dramatica’s archetypes correspond to the I Ching.  You can find it at http://storymind.com/dramatica/i_ching/index.htm  asumming you’re interested.  (It’s there even if you aren’t interested – like Schroedinger’s Cat)

Legend has it that the guy who originated the IChing got the idea from looking at the patterns on the back of a tortoise.  Not surprising.  If Dramatica and it’s equations are based on how the mind makes patterns, then any pattern we see is not so much generated by what we observe but by our projection of a pattern upon it from those available to our minds in order to understand it as fully as we can.  After all, a sprial in a teacup and a spiral in a galaxy have no similarity at all except in our own minds.

Oh, and as for the I Ching – to get the best interlock betwen the Dramatica Chart and the I Ching’s chart of Trigrams, be sure to use the “Pristine Yi King” rather than today’s common “I Ching” which was corrupted from the original byan acncient monarch seeking to bend the meaning of the grid to his own political motives.

So Dramatica deals with the concept of a Story Mind – that every story’s structure is the psychology of a SINGLE mind in which all the characters represent facets.  And, since Einstein’s equation was all about Relativity in the physical universe, we decided to name our equation and the model of psychology that grew from it, Mental Relativity.  I have a whole web site devoted to it, though it hasn’t been updated in years (no time, honest!)

Final thought for today – E=MC2 (and constants in general) appear as such only from inside the system being measured.  We always blend two items into a baseline from which to measure and observe the other two.  So, you stepped outside the universe you could clearly see time and space as separate and not locked to each other on that seessaw at all, thereby severing the space-time coninuum and making all kinds of things possible (like that two dimensional man on a piece of paper who can’t cross a straight line drawn across the page). 

Similarly, we think in threes, but one of the threes is really two things combined.  Looking at others we are observing their universe from the outside and so we see their thought processes in fours, leading us to easily see the solutions to their problems but not to our own.

And lastly, the equation K/T = AD is not the only one in Dramatica.  Sequentially, we go through all permutations such as A/K = TD.  Now that isn’t mathematically equivalent to the first equation, but it describes a particular mind set.  To get the best parallax on the universe, our minds adopt one equation (mind set) after another in order to see things in all possible contexts.  The benefit is that you get more “depth” on the issue, the drawback is that things are constantly changing so that by the time you go through all the mind-sets, the issue may no longer be the same as it was when you started, making your results inaccurate.

It is that inaccuracy that creates the dramatic potential that winds up the Dramatica chart into a single storyform, as all the permutations of the equation are represented in one quad or another – oh yeah – I should mention that each quad is a physical representation of one of the permutations of the equation.  They are twisted and turned to create dramatic potentials among them that describe the conflict between the way things are and the way we want them to be.

This whole system evolved as a survival trait, yet the devil is in the details.  But hey, aint that life.

What’s “Ability” have to do with story structure?

If you look in Dramatica’s “Periodic Table of Story Elements” chart (you can download a free PDF of the chart at http://storymind.com/free-downloads/ddomain.pdf ) you’ll find the “ability” in one of the little squares.  Look in the “Physics” class in the upper left-hand corner.  You’ll find it in a “quad” of four items, “Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire”.

In this article I’m going to talk about how Dramatica uses the term “ability” and how it applies not only to story structure and characters but to real people, real life and psychology as well.

To begin with, a brief word about the Dramatica chart itself.  The chart is sort of like a Rubik’s Cube.  It holds all the elements which must appear in every complete story to avoide holes.  Conceptually, you can twist it and turn it, just like a Rubik’s Cube, and when you do, it is like winding up a clock – you create dramatic potential.

How is this dramatic potential created?  The chart represents all the categories of things we think about.  Notice that the chart is nested, like wheels within wheels.  That’s the way our mind’s work.  And if we are to make a solid story structure with no holes, we have to make sure all ways of thinking about the story’s central problem or issues are covered.

So, the chart is really a model of the mind.  When you twist it and turn it represents the kinds of stress (and experience) we encounter in everyday life.  Sometimes things get wound up as tight as they can.  And this is where a story always starts.  Anything before that point is backstory, anything after it is story.

The story part is the process of unwinding that tension.  So why does a story feel like tension is building, rather than lessoning?  This is because stories are about the forces that bring a person to chane or, often, to a point of change.

As the story mind unwinds, it puts more and more pressure on the main character (who may be gradually changed by the process or may remain intransigent until he changes all at once).  It’s kind of like the forces that  create earthquakes.  Tectonic plates push against each other driven by a background force (the mantle).  That force is described by the wound up Dramatica chart of the story mind.

Sometimes, in geology, this force gradually raises or lowers land in the two adjacent plate.  Other times it builds up pressure until things snap all at once in an earthquake.  So too in psychology, people (characters) are sometimes slowly changed by the gradual application of pressure as the story mind clock is unwinding; other times that pressure applied by the clock mechanism just builds up until the character snaps in Leap Of Faith – that single “moment of truth” in which a character must decide either to change his ways or stick by his guns believing his current way is stronger than the pressure bought to bear – he believes he just has to outlast the forces against him.

Sometimes he’s right to change, sometimes he’s right to remain steadfast, and sometimes he’s wrong.  But either way, in the end, the clock has unwound and the potential has been balanced.

Hey, what happened to “ability”?  Okay, okay, I’m getting to that….

The chart (here we go again!) is filled with semantic terms – things like Hope and Physics and Learning and Ability.  If you go down to the bottom of the chart in the PDF you’ll see a three-dimensional representation of how all these terms are stacked together.  In the flat chart, they look like wheels within wheels.  In the 3-D version, they look like levels.

These “levels” represent degrees of detail in the way the mind works.  At the most broadstroke level (the top) there are just four items – Universe, Physics, Mind and Psychology.  They are kind of like the Primary Colors of the mind – the Red, Blue, Green and Saturation (effectively the addition of something along the black/white gray scale).

Those for items in additive color theory are four categories describing what can create a continuous spectrum.  In a spectrum is really kind of arbitrary where you draw the line between red and blue.  Similarly, Universe, Mind, Physics and Psychology are specific primary considerations of the mind.

Universe is the external state of things – our situation or envirnoment.  Mind is the internal state – an attitude, fixation or bias.  Physics looks at external activities – processes and mechanisms.  Psychology looks at internal activities – manners of thinking in logic and feeling.

Beneath that top level of the chart are three other levels.  Each one provides a greater degree of detail on how the mind looks at the world and at itself.  It is kind of like adding “Scarlet” and “Cardinal” as subcategories to the overall concept of “Red”.

Now the top level of the Dramatica chart describe the structural aspects of “Genre”  Genre is the most broadstroke way of looking at a story’s structure.   The next level down has a bit more dramatic detail and describes the Plot of a story.  The third level down maps out Theme, and the bottom level (the one with the most detail) explores the nature of a story’s Characters.

So there you have the chart from the top down, Genre, Plot, Theme and Characters.  And as far as the mind goes, it represents the wheels within wheels and the sprectrum of how we go about considering things.  In fact, we move all around that chart when we try to solve a problem.  But the order is not arbitrary.  The mind has to go through certain “in-betweens” to get from one kind of consideration to another or from one emotion to another.  You see this kind of thing in the stages of grief and even in Freud’s psycho-sexual stages of development.

All that being said now, we finally return to Ability – the actual topic of this article.  You’ll find Ability, then, at the very bottom of the chart – in the Characters level – in the upper left hand corner of the Physics class.  In this article I won’t go into why it is in Physics or why it is in the upper left, but rest assured I’ll get to that eventually in some article or other.

Let’s now consider “Ability” in its “quad” of four Character Elements.  The others are Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire.  I really don’t have space in this article to go into detail about them at this time, but suffice it to say that Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire are the internal equivalents of Universe, Mind, Physics and Pyschology.  They are the conceptual equivalents of Mass, Energy, Space and Time.  (Chew on that for awhile!)

So the smallest elements are directly connect (conceptually) to the largest in the chart.  This represents what we call the “size of mind constant” which is what determines the scope of an argument necessary to fill the minds of readers or an audience.  In short, there is a maximum depth of detail one can perceive while still holding the “big picture” in one’s mind at the very same time.

Ability – right….

Ability is not what you can do.  It is what you are “able” to do.  What’s the difference?  What you “can” do is essentially your ability limited by your desire.  Ability describes the maximum potential that might be accomplished.  But people are limited by what they should do, what they feel obligated to do, and what they want to do.  If you take all that into consideration, what’s left is what a person actually “can” do.

In fact,  if we start adding on limitations you  move from Ability to Can and up to even higher levels of “justification” in which the essential qualities of our minds, “Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire” are held in check by extended considerations about the impact or ramifications of acting to our full potential.

One quad greater in justification you find “Can, Need, Want, and Should” in Dramatica’s story mind chart.  Then it gets even more limited by Responsibility, Obligation, Commitment and Rationalization.  Finally we end up “justifying” so much that we are no longer thinking about Ability (or Knowledge or Thought or Desire) but about our “Situation, Circumstance, Sense of Self and State of Being”.  That’s about as far away as you can get from the basic elements of the human mind and is the starting point of where stories begin when they are fully wound up.  (You’ll find all of these at the Variation Level in the “Psychology” class in the Dramatica chart, for they are the kinds of issues that most directly affect each of our own unique brands of our common human psychology.

A story begins when the Main Character is stuck up in that highest level of justification.  Nobody gets there because they are stupid or mean.  They get there because their unique life experience has brought them repeated exposures to what appear to be real connections between things like, “One bad apple spoils the bunch” or “Where there’s smoke , there’s fire.”

These connections, such things as –  that one needs to adopt a certain attitude to succeed or that a certain kind of person is always lazy or dishonest – these things are not always universally true, but may have been universally true in the Main Character’s experience.  Really, its how we all build up our personalities.  We all share the same basic psychology but how it gets “wound up” by experience determines how we see the world.  When we get wound up all the way, we’ve had enough experience to reach a conclusion that things are always “that way” and to stop considering the issue.  And that is how everything from “winning drive” to “prejudice” is formed – not by ill intents or a dull mind buy by the fact that no two life experiences are the same.

The conclusions we come to, based on our justifications, free out minds to not have to reconsider every connection we see.  If we had to, we’d become bogged down in endlessly reconsidering everything, and that just isn’t a good survival trait if you have to make a quick decision for fight or flight.

So, we come to certain justification and build upon those with others until we have established a series of mental dependencies and assumptions that runs so deep we can’t see the bottom of it – the one bad brick that screwed up the foundation to begin with.  And that’s why psychotherapy takes twenty years to reach the point a Main Character can reach in a two hour movie or a two hundred page book.

Now we see how Ability (and all the other Dramatica terms) fit into story and into psychology.  Each is just another brick in the wall.  And each can be at any level of the mind and at any level of justification.  So, Ability might be the problem in one story (the character has too much or too little of it) or it might be the solution in another (by discovering an ability or coming to accept one lacks a certain ability the story’s problem – or at least the Main Character’s personal problem – can be solved).  Ability might be the thematic topic of one story and the thematic counterpoint of another (more on this in other articles).

Ability might crop up in all kinds of ways, but the important thing to remember is that wherever you find it, however you use it, it represents the maximum potential, not necessarily the practical limit that can be actually applied.

Well, enough of this.  To close things off, here’s the Dramatica Dictionary description of the world Ability that Chris and I worked out some twenty years ago, straight out of the Dramatica diction (available online at http://storymind.com/dramatica/dictionary/index.htm :

Ability • Most terms in Dramatica are used to mean only one thing. Thought, Knowledge, Ability, and Desire, however, have two uses each, serving both as Variations and Elements. This is a result of their role as central considerations in both Theme and Character

[Variation] • dyn.pr. Desire<–>Ability • being suited to handle a task; the innate capacity to do or be • Ability describes the actual capacity to accomplish something. However, even the greatest Ability may need experience to become practical. Also, Ability may be hindered by limitations placed on a character and/or limitations imposed by the character upon himself. • syn. talent, knack, capability, innate capacity, faculty, inherant proficiency

[Element] • dyn.pr. Desire<–>Ability • being suited to handle a task; the innate capacity to do or be • An aspect of the Ability element is an innate capacity to do or to be. This means that some Abilities pertain to what what can affect physically and also what one can rearrange mentally. The positive side of Ability is that things can be done or experienced that would otherwise be impossible. The negative side is that just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. And, just because one can be a certain way does not mean it is beneficial to self or others. In other words, sometimes Ability is more a curse than a blessing because it can lead to the exercise of capacities that may be negative • syn. talent, knack, capability, innate capacity, faculty, inherant proficiency

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