Category Archives: Dramatica’s Origins

The Reasoning Behind Dramatica 2

Another installment in my ongoing series explaining why things are the way they are in Dramatica.

The Four Classes: Universe, Physics, Mind, and Psychology

As mentioned in the previous episode of this series, in our efforts to explore how story structure worked, we had early on determined that exploring the psychology of the main character might be the key to unlocking it, for reasons described there.

So, we began looking at many different kinds of stories for anything having to do with the main character’s motivations and manners of thinking, and whenever we found something that described such things, we put it on a post-it note and stuck it to the wall.

Eventually we saw patterns in the notes that had by now absolutely covered the wall in our conference room.  For example, we could see that some of theses psychological attribute seemed to be opposite attitudes such as Faith and Disbelief or to represent two ways of looking at things, such as Hope or Fear, or two approaches such as Pursue or Avoid.

So, we organized as much as we could of the notes we’d already gathered into pairs of opposites.  When we’d done that, we found we had a lot of single items left.  Naturally, we figured that once all the pairs were pulled aside, these remaining single that we had observed in stories probably also had opposites that we just hadn’t noticed or encountered yet.  Rather that go looking for them, which would take quite a while, we thought it would be a lot easier just to calculate what the opposite of a single item should be.

Now this is a pretty important decisions because it marked the first time we built a part of the model not just from observation but by extending patterns we had observed into new patterns never directly observed (at least not then, though all these “predictions” have now been verified in thousands of stories).

The notion was, in pulling together the initial pairs from data, we had developed a “feel” for the relationships between the two items.  Based on that feeling, we could take any of the single words and determine a pair for it so that the semantic relationship between the two words, between their meanings, would be just like the relationship between the pairs we had already observed.

The development of Dramatica is largely a story of seeing relationships in data, then extending the theory/model to fill in other patterns that were only partially complete.

As we continued, we saw that some of the pairs seemed like a counter-point to another pair, such as the pair of Support and Oppose seemed related to the pair of Help and Hinder – the first pair being more about attitude and the second pair more about action.

So, we started gathering as many pairs as we could  into groups of two related pairs.  As it turned out, the pairs from data did best as groups of just two pairs.  Any more pairs seemed unbalanced – again, based on intuition that story structure ought to be symmetrical.  I mean it just made sense, didn’t it?  We didn’t know, but it sure seemed that way so far, so we proceeded under that assumption, and having one pair counter-balance another pair played right into that.

We also found that some items that seemed like they were higher level concepts that were kind of like an umbrella word that described the family of two counter-balanced pairs.  In other words, our simple groups of four were now  beginning to be seen as the children of a parent post-it term.  Conversely, the parent terms might be seen as being made up of the two pairs within it – or even perhaps made up of the four items contained in the two pairs.

And then we found that two parents made a higher level  pair, and two pairs of parents were topped by an even higher level parent and so on.  Now, some of this was from observed data, some was from extending the patterns we found.  But all along, we were developing a sense of some underlying relationship that existed just beneath the surface of the patterns – we couldn’t see it, but we could feel it.

In his book about how they discovered DNA, James Watson (of Crick and Watson) describes how they had a feeling based on all the data that DNA might be some sort of helix, but had no proof and also no idea what kind of helix.  So, they ordered some molecular models, basically industrial tinker toys, and started assembling them into all manner of helices – singles, doubles, left and right handed, and also how many molecular bonds in each twist – stuff like that.

Eventually, they knocked off all the candidates but one because all the others failed to explain all of what little known hard data they had.  And that was the famous double-helix.  They were so sure they’d found it, just on the basis of its elegance and simplicity (and the lack of alternatives) that they announced their findings and, fortunately for their careers, they were soon proven right.

But we didn’t know that yet – hadn’t read the book.  We were just looking for patterns in the data we gathered from real stories, as seen through the notion of the psychology of the main character.

At some point, and I really can’t provide more information on that because we were constantly striking off in all kinds of directions simultaneously, but at some point, we realized the obvious: stories on not built from characters alone.  Duh.

As I recall, we already had some items on post-it notes we’d gathered that seemed more descriptive of plot than of characters or, perhaps, of the material world than of the mental world.

Taking a clue from the hierarchy we were building and expanding for the main character psychology,  we took those more external post-it items and started building a companion hierarchy of them.

At first, we worked the external hierarchy’s parents and children independently of the psychology.  An then, much to our surprise, we started to see that some items in one hierarchy had a  comparative item in the other.  For example, Memory in the psychology set had a counterpart in Past in the external set AND in the same relative position in external as Memory was in internal.

Now that pretty much knocked us on the floor.  It was looking as if each set was the same as the other, just with a different perspective – one looking out and the other looking in.  How?  Why?

Perhaps, we speculated, the relationships in each hierarchy represent what we see when we look at anything – all the available perspectives we have available to us.  When we look at the external world, we see things colored that way, and when we look inside ourselves, we see the very same things colored another.

But, we didn’t spend too much time getting all philosophic about it – not yet, anyway.  We were out to crack the code of story structure and make a name for ourselves – fame and fortune!

Now working with these evolving hierarchies on the wall was getting a bit cumbersome.  Everything was spreading laterally across the room.  So, Chris being (among his many talents) a graphics guy, started modeling our concepts and understandings in a more accessible form.

At first he tried putting each into a 3 D pyramid with Mind at the top of one and Universe at the apex of the other.  We discovered each was a four-sided pyramid because there were always for items in a set of two pairs.  And then their parents made two pairs that also made four items and so on.  Not making it up, just following the patterns inherent in the semantics of the words on the post-ii notes, originally discovered in stories.

And then we had the pair of Memory and Conscious in Mind and the equivalents of Past and Present in Universe.  After some work, we added Subconscious to Mind and Future to Universe.  But how could those be equivalent?  Well, perhaps, it is in the Subconscious from whence come our desires, which might be based on looking at what we want in the future?

Well, that turned out to be just wrong – at least as stated – but we had no time for that.  We were trying to finish the two hierarchies and discover a way to efficiently present them – not to try and  understand any of it yet, unless we couldn’t help it.

So, in time we got two pyramids visualized on paper, but they had a lot of problems, just like Crick’s and Watson’s tinker toy models.  For one thing, it was beginning to look like the bottom level of each hierarchy was using the same words as in the other hierarchy and in the exact same places, which was just weird: How could the external world and the internal world meet at the exact same things?

To help answer that, we attempted to put the two four-sided pyramids together, base to base.  But if things are in the same position at the bottom of each, they can’t possibly meet item to item, because you’ve flipped them over so they are at opposite sides.

Paradox.

So, we tried putting them point to point, but that provided no practical use at all.  Finally we just settled on two pyramids, side by side, where the bottom level was exactly the same in each.  Didn’t like it, couldn’t do anything about it, and at least it was easy to see equivalencies from one to the other.

Now how did we get from two classes to four?  Well as I said earlier, it’s hard to establish a clear linearity of evolution here since we were working on a myriads of things all at once, which muddies the water.  But basically, it is as follows:

Within each hierarchy, we had arranged each set of two pairs in what we came to call a “quad.”  This was designed as a visualization by Chris so that the most specific or tangible pair was put on a diagonal from the upper left, and the more ethereal of process-oriented was put on a diagonal from the upper right.  By doing this consistently, the natures of each pair and their relationship from pyramid to pyramid was easily seen.

And somewhere along the line, we realized everything in each pyramid was made of quads of four, but the top level only had two items – one pair – Universe and Mind.  If story structure was indeed symmetrical, there ought to be four.  So what would be the other two?  Well, by looking at the relationships of the pairs in the  hierarchies at all levels, we were able to determine that the pair of Universe and Mind needed a complimentary pair of Physics and Psychology.

As it turned out, we hadn’t been building a model of psychology but of mind – the tangible pieces of our inner world like Conscious, Memory, and Subconscious.  But the processes of the mind, the way it rolled, that would be in a hierarchy of Psychology.  And Universe had a process equivalent of Physics.

So, we realized what we were building were four perspectives on the reality that was the same thing at the bottom of each point of view.  We called them Classes to give a sciency ring to them.

And Chris, Graphic Man Extraordinaire, converted the pyramids to towers and eventually bound them into the 3D projection we all know and love and the flat table of story elements that holds our hearts to this day.

Again, a lot of things were going on at once, but I think this paints a good picture of where we were coming from and a glimpse at the order in which things happened.

Hopefully, this will help you adopt the same intuitive mind set to guide your logic in continuing to refine and expand the theory.

Comment from Irvaxis, a patron:

Since this post talks about the Table of Elements’ origins, there are some theoretical questions i’ve recently been debating with a friend of mine in regards to its construction. Therefore, here is my question: · In the Table of Elements, at rest, unjustified, does every quad there respect the traditional K A D T arrangement for every term/mental process placed in there, or rather, the K A D T arrangement follows a different logic for each quad, and in such case, which one? This is the closest thing i found to explain it, and it quickly became confusing beyond my comprehension. I was unable to map this onto the entire table: https://www.storymind.com/mental_relativity/mrmath2.htm Thanks in advance like always.

My response:

Hi, Irvaxis. Though I will be doing a “Reasoning” post specifically about the Table of Elements and several about the quad, let me answer your question with a few brief things to consider, and later I’ll hold forth more expansively.

First, the link you included explains part of the issue in the section entitled the non-linear form. It describes (in text and in the included graphic) how the KTAD equation iterates. Let me here address the salient points, not in a “reasoning behind” approach but, for efficiency and clarity, in a “this is what it is” approach.

First, the entire model is a K based system which means that of all the ways you could look at narrative structure, Dramatica was all built from point of view of definitive elements arranged in rigid relationships.

The “why” of this will be covered later, and there are many other ways to build a structure and an engine than this one that addresses the same thing, just as DNA can been seen as a double-heilx or under X-Ray will appear as a crystal. The Table of Story Element is the crystalline version of Dramatica.

Next – the quad is not a thing, it is a visual representation of a logic equation – even an equation of relativity. The primary equation is K/T = AD, which is from a K-base perspective. But the equation itself is designed to describe the relationships among four processes, each represented by one of the four letters, which are the four “bases” of the DNA of narrative.

When the equation iterates is is not just working like traditional iterative equations where the result is then plugged back into the variables of the equation to create expanding fractals. Rather, the quad represents an iteration in which the result of the equation changes the operations in the structure – essentially, changing the position of the variables in the equation but not the nature of the items nor the nature of the equation’s operations, just where specific variables reside in the operation.

Side note: this describes how the mind goes over the same ground again and again, but in different orders through the variables to understand the role of time (sequence) in affecting the results. i.e. : a slap followed by a scream has a different meaning than a scream followed by a slap.

From the top of the Tower of Dramatica, the K perspective (Spatial perspective) is maintained all the way down to the elements, and so, from that perspective, K is always in the upper left and KTAD maintain their relative positions.

But, laterally within the model, the horizontal levels represent the temporal aspect of the iteration, and so, as in the line you included, each quad iterates until it completes creating set of four states of the equation (or if you prefer four iterated equations of KTAD) .

But once that happens at the Type level, to create 16 types (four quads of four), then the temporal process iterates the entire set of 16 types through the same pattern as in the link to create a “chess set” of 64 variations. And so, the tower view has iterated not only horizontally but vertically as well.

As an aside, this is why we say Dramatica is a quad helix, because it is really two helices, each identical to DNA, but wrapped around each other in a super double helix, which reflects in the dynamics as the two different justifications. But finally, we reach the bottom where it all falls apart. There, Quads are broken apart into their original binary pairs and then recombined into new quads in a final iterative operation that takes into account how all four classes are ultimately looking at the same things, but by the time you get into the greatest depth of detail or granularity, the physics of it breaks down.

And at that place at which all four classes come together with the same items but in arrangements that bread the bonds of the physics of it in each of the other three classes, respectively, you are on the edge of atomic dissolution where it interfaces with the quantum realm, and that is the final step before you leave the K based system and move on to the next master perspective.

And when you have iterated through all four master perspectives down to the bottom, collectively, you have arrived at the point where you are no longer looking at structure and the relationships among items, but at dynamics and the influences that alter them – the mythical dynamic model. That is where I am working currently.

Irvaxis:

Let’s see if i got this right so far: · There are at least two perspectives we can hold in the static table of elements (with no component of time/sequence): A vertical one (i assume, top down), and a horizontal one (or also named lateral, which would be within the same floor of the towers). · The vertical view keeps the classic KADT arrangement as the equations themselves are represented with the same bias. · The lateral view of a floor is iterating through the equation positions. I assume this refers to each floor independently. The top floor is the base equation, the next floor is 4 iterations, the next floor is 16 iterations and the last floor is 64 iterations, that iterate according to the rules in that article of yours that i still can’t wrap my head around at this time. · The mix/combination of these two factors decides what the mental process in that place is. Or: · The top down view is the towers/Table of Elements. This is the “spatial” component. This also determines KADT arrangement in this perspective. · The lateral view is the result of justification / is basically for the “time” component. This also determines KADT arrangement in this other perspective. · The Dynamics from the algorithms would operate upon this temporal/lateral side in matching accordance to what’s what on the top down/spatial side. Would it be one of these two? Or something else entirely? Still, i might need a bit of a walkthrough to get how these equations iterate, especially as we go down to the element level, unless that’s planned for a dedicated post. Still, thanks in advance like always.

My response:

Interestingly, all of what you said above “or” is correct and some of what you said below “or” but not all.

For the first point below “or” – Yes, the top down view is the spatial perspective of the mind, which manifests itself in a repetitive KTAD pattern from top to bottom with no iteration.

For the second point – No, the lateral view is not the result of justification. Justification has not happened yet in the model. It is the temporal view of KTAD, unjustified, and from that perspective, the KTAD pattern flows through the iterations, seen as static shifts of meaning in the semantic model.

It can help to think of it this way conceptually – In our minds we have a time sense and a space sense. They do not and cannot see eye to eye. It is like trying to put a plastic ruler down on a pencil that has been laid on a table. If you press one side of the ruler to the table, the other side will move up from the table, like a seesaw. If you press the other side down, the first side will move up. There is not way to make it match on with both sides being down at the same time (though they can both be half-way up.

Down on both sides is a solved problem. Up in any balance between the sides is an inequity in the mind. The mind is driven by inequity and will never be balanced. Self awareness is the interference pattern between space and time. It does not exist within the brain but in the differential between our space sense and our time sense. It is that interference pattern that you see between the top down view, which makes total sense spatially, and the horizontal view, which makes total sense temporally.

But when you put them both in the same space/time construct (the tower) they are incompatible and in place contradictory. And yet they both exist in the same space/time.

It helps sometimes to think of the model without any words in it and without KTAD labels stuck on it. For this perspective the framework of the model appears to make total sense from the top down and total sense from the side across. That is the view from inside out minds because our self awareness cannot view things both spatially and temporally at the same time.

And so, we cannot see the paradox within – it looks good from space, then again looks good from time, then back to space and back to time and everything appears compatible, from the inside. But, from the outside, there is that discrepancy you are beginning to visualize.

Simultaneously, the model is consistent from the top and iterating from the side, which cannot be, yet is. This is expressed in the semantics. Each word in the model was chosen to represent simultaneously the best seesaw compromise between the consistent space down view and the progressive sideways across view. That is built into the matrix of the model itself BEFORE justification.

That is the view from outside the mind, as when we are looking at others, leading to why we say, “If I were you, this is what I’d do,” because from the outside their decisions make no sense. But from inside their minds, your advice makes no sense. As my mom put it to me as a teaching moment when I was young, “People say to me, ‘If I were you, I’d do this…” and I tell them, ‘No, if you were me, you’d do exactly what I’m doing, but if you were in you but in my shoes, you’d do the way you suggested.” Smart woman, my mom.

So, as I say, that paradox is built into the model at rest, BEFORE justification. Now, imagine we can only think at all because of that paradox, and it is the best we can get living inside our minds by virtue of how they are constructed, how they MUST be constructed.

And now in that mind at rest, filled with nothing but ready to operate, life experience enters the picture. In a practical world, we see things happen a certain way long enough and we assume givens – if this, then this, and when this, also this. Then the situation changes, but we are stuck with the givens. (We must adopt givens or we would have to refigure everything we know every time we considered anything at all – bad survival trait for the species. So, we establish givens which become the framework of how we see the world.

And then something changes and those givens don’t work any longer. For example, you understand when to use logic and when to use feelings to solve a problem, but now logic isn’t working any longer because of a different environment. So, you eventually give up on it and go with somebody’s advice to stop over thinking it and just go with your feelings and you do.

That’s the moment logic moves to the back burner for this kind of problem and feeling moves to the front. And now you’ve moved a mental process from its original position in the model matrix to another position in a flip. That is the beginning of the justification process, when something is either flipped spatially, or rotated temporally to adjust to experience altering either its position in the model or its sequence.

But, since time and space are interconnected in the model, when you flip or rotate one thing, the other goes with it and is also altered – space alters time and time space simultaneously. And this is how and when the justification process is applied to the model. It is not contained in the model – that is only the paradox of the interference pattern of space and time that creates self awareness in a mind (or model) at rest, carried to the the nth degree as far into the details as we can see within ourselves before we reach the point where if we look deeper, we lose a level of the upper view – the size of mind constant – so that the model is always the same size, no matter what kind of human issue we are looking at.

And it is upon that model of constant size and built-in paradox at rest that first one justification wind up is applied and then the other, in response to the eight dynamic questions. The final four questions of the total of twelve serve to position that effect upon the model in a particular place, but more on that later.

So, that’s why the model is as it is and where and when justification is applied and does not inherently reside within the model at rest and is not involved in the paradox in the vertical and horizontal levels. Good stopping point for now. 🙂

Irvaxis:

Alright, that is super-clarifying, thanks a lot! I feel like i have the gist of why the algorithm found coded in the patent and the apparent simplicity of “there are only 8 algorithms” seemed to mismatch. I have to ask one more thing, although this may need its own topic sometime: Is there a known representation of the temporal/lateral, unjustified perspective, with the corresponding KADT attachments/iterations? Because if there is, or if it can be created, this might heavily accelerate the process of recovering the algorithms and most especially the theory behind them, i conjecture. Because if these two are implemented as a single piece of code as i suspect, de-coupling them may prove to be crucial to get back the correct understanding of it.

My response:

In fact, I do not know. I was always on the theory side, not on the implementation side, so I’d come up with the concepts and the next thing I know they’d show up working in software. I see what you are saying – that if we could take the iteration “code” out of the software the justification code would remain, sort of. But, as far as I know, the iteration code isn’t in the software at all.

Rather, that’s just the concept that explains why you run into the semantic terms seeming like they don’t follow a strict KTAD pattern in the Table. But there was no need to code that part. All that was needed was the semantic terms that were used and their position in the model at rest, and then to run the two justifications on it.

So, essentially, that whole vertical/horizontal iteration “slip” it encoded in the semantics so that the semantic relationship among the four items in a quad gradually shifts as one moves through the at rest model, indicating the changing nature of KTAD through a gradual change in semantic meaning an the relationships among those altered meanings and relationship due to iterations.

Essentially, I imagine there is a semantic change in nature of the specific words from top to bottom and a change in the semantic distance between the words within quads from side to side across the model. This way, both the alteration in meaning of moving from top to bottom spatially through the four levels KTA and D and the alteration in the nature in the change of the relationships among KTAD within the evolving equations are combined in a single semantic shift, literally word by word. Therefore, both spatial and temporal shifts are unseen in terms of the toward and only contained in the semantic values. As a result, in the program it was not necessary to code either the spatial nor temporal shifts. All that was needed was:

1. Construct the matrix of the table.

2. Assign the semantic terms to their at rest position in the matrix.

3. Twist and turn the model with the two justifications based on the algorithms, including overlaying the PRCO and 1234 with the first and second justifications, which goes first depends on the algorithms.

That’s all that really happens with the model. Then the story point relationship table is overlaid so the engine can narrow the number of storyforms remaining by making choices, thereby providing more information about the structure than the author entered. And then you derive the PRCO and 1234 information and provide that to the author as well.

You know, when I stop to think about it, perhaps my greatest frustration is that to most folks, the elegance of the model is invisible. Of course, for writers, why would they want to bother with that anyway, as long as it works.

But there’s such a hidden beauty there, yet with many people, they perceive the Dramatica quad structure of the tower view as just a bunch of nested cubby holes that are just handy for holding dramatic topics that might show up in stories and have been grouped in quads of similar words.

Of course, as described above, the quads in the tower represent nested iterative equations at four different fractal levels as their variable are altered. And the iteration of the actual operations within each equation, not the variable values but the operations of the equation itself across the horizontal axis of the model CANNOT be included in the tower itself because they cannot co-exist with the top-down fractal approach – those two view are incompatible in the same space-time, must like real and imaginary numbers.

So the words in the model do the job of illustrating the gradual shift of temporal iterations (frictals) in the lateral plane, and in that way they transcend the limitations of the three dimensional representation of space-time in the model to separate out the fourth dimension of time into the semantics. And so, the model is space from the top down, but time in the iterations of semantic meanings laterally.

Now that’s pretty freaking elegant. But the real clincher is that the whole model with the space of the quads and the time of the semantics, both locked together is that they are twisted and turned through the process of justification to represent not the at-rest state of the mind, but the the potential of the mind’s experience-derived inequities, which are manifest in the potentials created through justification.

And then, of course, there is a second justification. One of the justifications occurs in the overall story mind. The other in the mind of the main character.

The main character is our self-awareness that exists without our mind. But our mind is so much more. Self-awareness is our Conscious mind, but there is also our Memory, our Subconscious, and our Pre-conscious.

And so, there is a fractal relationship between the main character and the overall mind, for the main character resides within it, but as an exact structural fractal – one tower of the complete four, a fractal of the totality.

But what’s more is that one justification is a frictal of the other – temporal fractals of one another that operate identically but one before the other. And so they are temporal fractals (frictals).

Finally, have you as of yet seen the quad that is made up of the two fractal structures (main character and overarching mind) and the two frictal dynamics (the first wind up and the second wind up)?

The structural fractals fall into the K and T positions within this master quad and the dynamic ones exist in the A and D positions. Armed with the understandings denoted above, anything within or without ourselves can be described and understood in the most accurate perspective available to us in our existence as the interference pattern between the mental world and the material world.

Perhaps “elegance” is too tame a word for this?

The Reasoning Behind Dramatica 1

I’m starting this new series of posts to provide a glimpse into our thought processes as we developed the Dramatica theory and the software implementation of the story engine.  It is my hope that sharing the reasoning behind key theory concepts will help provide perspectives others can employ to refine and expand the theory further.

Keep in mind the posts in this series are not intended to explain the concepts but to describe how we came to them.

The Story Mind

How and why did we come to the belief that the underlying structure of every story is the psychology of a single mind, that of the story itself, as if every story is something of a super character of which all the other characters are facets?

Here’s the quick version of how our thinking evolved, and below that a more detailed description of the pathway that got us there.

THE SHORT VERSION

Chris and I had been discussing story structure every morning over coffee for months before we each went off to our respective jobs. One day, Chris asked a question that would directly lead, years later, to the discovery of the story mind.  He asked, “If a characters, such as Scrooge, are the cause of a story’s problems, how come they can’t see it?”

We pondered that a bit and concluded that characters like Scrooge must have some sort of blind spot – a psychological filter that actually prevents them from seeing the real problem and in fact, causes him to believe the problem comes from somewhere else.  If that was true, how would something like that come to be, and more, how is that remedied by the end of a story?

At this point in our discussions we shifted gears from looking for structural patterns in stories to trying to understand the psychology of the main character, and when I eventually joined Chris at his company to work on the problem, that is where we focused.

So, we started looking at all manner of movies, books, plays, etc. to find anything in those stories that pertained to the main character’s psychology.  As we found them, we put each on on a post-it note and stuck it to the wall in the conference room.

Eventually that wall was plastered with these individual points.  But, as we mulled them over, we began to realize that some of them seemed like they belonged together, as if they belonged to the same family.  And so we grouped them as best we could, chipping away at all the remaining post-it notes that hadn’t been yet assigned to a group of similar items.

In time, it became clear that some of these psychological attributes of the main character were more like an umbrella under which a family of similar items resided.  We thought of them as parents and children.

We arranged and rearranged the notes, groupings, parents, and children, until we’d used up most of original notes on the wall.  But there was this one collection of all the remaining psychological aspects that just didn’t seem to be part of the psychology of the main character, though they were certainly psychological attributes within the story.

Our next thought was that perhaps these other points were part of one of the other kinds of characters than the main character – but which one, and how were they related.  I spent days staring at the notes on the wall, looking for a pattern that might explain what these orphan notes were and how they fit into stories.

And then, one day (and I actually recall this moment so very clearly) I was looking at all those loose notes and reading them over when I thought, no, those aren’t part of the main character’s psychology, and they really don’t fit with any of the other characters either.  So what are they?

And as I examined them more closely, reading the names of each attribute, I suddenly realized that what tied them all together as a group were that they were “higher-level” concepts than the ones in the main character group.  They were more broad stroke, more expansive.

And at that moment I said to myself, I wonder if these aren’t about the characters at all, but about the psychology going on in the story itself.  And then the next thought was the Eureka moment, it popped into may head that, “maybe the story has a psychology of its own.”

I snapped out of my thought as if out of a trance and ran down the hall to Chris’ office blurting out, “Maybe those extra post-its aren’t about the characters, maybe they are about the psychology of the story itself!”

As he often did when confronted with a wholly new concept, Chris said “Wait a minute…” got up from his desk, lay down on his back on the carpet, folded his hands on his chest and closed his eyes to let his subconscious wander around the new idea and take stock.

After what seemed five minutes (though was probably shorter) he opened his eyes saying simply, “I think you’re right.”  And from that moment forward we re-approached all the work we had previously done, dividing it into the psychology of the main character and the psychology of the story at large, which we came to refer to as the story mind.

Hopefully, that short (ish) description of how the story mind concept first emerged can help any of you who want to grok the wholeness of the theory.  It’s not so much about what’s i the theory but about how to have to see things to perceive the theory – the truth of it – to know when something is accurate to it and working as it should.  For in the end, the ability to almost intuit the structure and dynamics is what drives new concepts, rather than building them from extensions to a chain of logic alone.

THE LONG VERSION

Now, here’s how the evolution in our thinking that led to the story mind happened, step by step:

1.  In the early 1980s Chris and I had just finished producing a feature length horror movie and we about to start another script.  We recognized problems in our last story and decided to investigate if there were any truisms we might employ to solve those problems and prevent others.  So basically, we had no idea why problems in stories happened or how we might avoid them – no understanding of story at all – that’s where we were coming from.

2.  Our instructors at the USC Cinema Department didn’t seem to have a clue either.  Oh, they had some tips, but no system, no overview that hung together.  So, we weren’t sure if anybody anywhere really understood how stories work or even, for that matter, if there was any rhyme or reason to it.  We speculated that either no one had found the answer yet or maybe there was no answer and stories were just result of unfathomable intuition.

3.  We decided to cast a wider net and see what had been written about story structure throughout history.  We encountered Aristotle, of course, and his seminal work, Poetics, and we also ran into Jung and Joseph Campbell.  But we never went too deep before we became dissatisfied with inconsistencies, incomplete reasoning, and contradictions.  So, we figured we should either drop the who thing or strike out on our own to understand what was going on in stories a little better.  We were in our twenties, so of course we were filled with hubris and arrogance and decided to chase after the prize on our own.

4.  We were so full of ourselves that we decided not to read anything about story structure by anybody else, except for the little bit of skimming we’d done.  We reasoned that maybe we’d end up reinventing the wheel, but we might just go off in a direction everyone else knew would not be productive and actually find answers they never had because they had blinders on.  Yes, we actually had that conversation and then put our own blinders on to not look elsewhere while we worked on our own quest for understanding.

5.  We actually came up with a few good ideas (such as “the rule of threes” that you’ll hear about in a later post) by looking at stories that we knew worked (you could feel which stories worked or didn’t work without an inkling why).  We got lots of little original bit and pieces, but in the end, we stalled out and without any kind of an overview about structure.  We spent a few weeks stalled and then Chris wisely said we probably hadn’t had enough life experience, and perhaps we should put it all on hold until we later.  That made sense, so that is what we did, agreeing we wouldn’t pollute our virgin thinking in the meantime with other people’s ideas about story structure until we reconvened some time in the future.

6. About ten years later, Chris called me up and said, You know that old story structure project we were working on?  I think we’re ready.”  And so we met for breakfast at a booth near the door in the Coral Cafe near my home, and from that point we were off to the races and never looked back.

7. Our first order of business was to decide to meet over coffee at my home for about an hour every day before we went to our respective jobs.  Then, we went over all our old material from ten years ago, reorganizing it to suit our more experienced point of view, and beginning to ask new questions.

And that is where this long version of the story connects to the short version at the top.

Next time, we can dispense with a lot of this background material as we look into the thought processes behind the next Dramatica concept.

Dramatica – Where’d the Idea Come From?

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Here’s the “digest” version of the origins of Dramatica…

Chris Huntley and I began our exploration of story structure in 1980. He and I had met a few years earlier while we were both attending the University of Southern California and both making short films.

I had left school early to go to work in the industry and, frustrated by working on the periphery of the industry at that time, I put together a low-budget feature film project and enlisted Chris’ partnership in producing a movie.

The result was a horrible little film that suffered no so much from budgetary restrictions as from our lack of knowledge of sound story structure. So, when we began to consider our next production, we thought we’d first take a stab at trying to determine what a sound story structure ought to be.

We made lists and graphs and assembled everything we knew. And we discovered… that we didn’t know much about story structure! In fact, we put the whole project on hold until we could gather a little more experience from the industry and from life in general.

Chris went into motion control special effects work for Imax movies, and I went into the industry at large as a writer/producer/director and mostly editor of non-features, high budget industrials, and educationals.

Later, Chris become the co-founder of Write Bros. – the company that created the world’s first screenplay formatting software (and won a technical achievement award from the Academy).

One day in 1991, Chris asked me to breakfast and asked if I’d like to start up our old story structure project again. I was thrilled to do so. I was editing a feature film at the time so each morning before I went off to the editing room and before Chris went off to be V.P. of his company, we’d get together over coffee and try to crack the story structure nut.

We were both committed to this project, and it wasn’t long before we started having some insights that made sense to us but that we had never heard in any of our classes at USC.

After six months, we had created a number of understandings about story structure, but lacked a unifying concept that would tie them all together. We tried starting a book about our findings, but got bogged down. Eventually, Chris suggested that we present our work to his partner, Steve Greenfield.

Steve was completely taken with the ideas we offered, and he and Chris determined that rather than a book, perhaps our best approach was to create a new piece of software for writers that would help them employ our concepts in building sound stories.

I was asked to come to their company as a consultant, and as my editing job had just completed, I agreed. Thus began a three year full-time effort to redefine the nature of what stories are and how they work.

Few are those who have the luxury of being paid to spend three years sitting in a room pondering the mechanics of story structure to the exclusion of all else. But that was the situation I was provided.

We began with index cards and post-it notes, sticking every individual concept (and there were hundreds of them) all over all four walls of my office, and later of the entire conference room!

Seeing it all spread out like that made it possible to note certain patterns and connections among some of these notions. We began to see that psychology played a large part in stories.

This came about by Chris asking a crucial question: “If the Main Character (like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol) is actually the cause of the story’s problems, why can’t he see it and just change?”

Of course, this spoke of issues far beyond stories that were essential to our own psychological issues as a species.

We started to gather all the psychological material we had developed into one place on one of the walls. Some of it seemed to fit well with the main character, but other material, though clearly psychological in nature, seemed to pertain more to the story at large, though we had no idea what to make of this. There was no pattern that explained it.

One day, while staring for the nth hour at that wall, it just hit me – maybe the psychological material we had discovered in stories weren’t about just the main character – maybe they were about the story itself. Maybe the story itself had a psychology! In fact, perhaps story structure was a model of the story’s mind!

I ran down the hall to Chris’ office and hit him with the notion. As was his practice, he leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and fell into a meditative state, closing all else from his mind. After a few moments he sat upright and responded, “I believe you are right.”

From that point forward, everything we did was based on the Story Mind concept. We reorganized all of our material assuming that it referred to the psychology of the story’s mind. Suddenly, patterns appeared, relationships were suggested, and the various components we had discovered fell right into place.

Our arrangements became more and more complex until we found ourselves hard-pressed to make them work in a single chart. It was then that we tried putting the cards in levels, placing “smaller” units under larger umbrella units into which they seemed to fall.

But how to depict this nested structure? Chris played around with pyramid shapes, I tried twisting mobius strips around donut-shaped toroids. Eventually, we settled on the four towers – not as the only shape of story structure, but as the most convenient shape with which to appreciate its internal mechanisms and relationships.

Later, I read that Crick and Watson (the two fellows that discovered the double-helix shape of DNA) didn’t find it through observation. At the time, the best imagery available of DNA was made by bombarding DNA’s crystalline form with X-Rays.

But Crick and Watson had a gut feeling that the shape of “live” DNA was more elegant, perhaps some sort of spiral. They decided to play with a number of alternative shapes as candidates that might explain all the properties that had been observed about DNA. To this end, they ordered a set of custom-made industrial “tinker-toys” which were used by chemists to illustrate molecular bonds.

They play around with various combination until, while building a ladder shape, they twisted it to form the now-familiar double-helix. As soon as they actually saw this representation, then new intuitively that it was correct and ran off to share their work with colleagues.

Chris and I unknowingly followed the same process. In the years that followed, we came to the conclusion that the towers are like the crystalline form of DNA – it represents a mind’s psychology at rest. But the mind is a machine made of time – every component, every gear and widget is actually a process.

When you put it into motion to create a “live” model, like DNA it becomes a helix, but in the case of story structure it forms a quad-helix, rather than a double one.

That’s about as deep as I want to go into how the Dramatica Chart developed in the first place. But, as a special treat for those of you who are gluttons for punishment, here’s an explanation of the workings of the structure, conceptually (for now!).

Where to begin without getting all technical-ish… Well, that’s a good start already!

Okay. The Dramatica Chat has four levels. And it has four Towers. What do these represent? The four towers represent the four key elements of our minds. Just as DNA is made up of four bases: adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T), the structure of the Story Mind is made up of four bases: knowledge (abbreviated K), thought (T), ability (A) and desire (D).

Knowledge is the Mass of the mind. Thought is the mind’s Energy. Ability is the equivalent of Space and Desire is the counterpart to Time.

Just as mass and energy can relate in a simple way, such as when force slams one billiard ball into another, thought can rearrange knowledge and bring disparate pieces of knowledge together or move them apart.

Mass and energy can also interact in a more complex manner in which, for example, a small amount of mass can release a tremendous amount of energy in a nuclear explosion. Similarly, Knowledge and thought can interact so that a small amount of knowledge can generate an awful lot of thought (and conversely, it take a lot of thought to create a single bit of true knowledge!)

Ability is like space insofar as space defines the edges of what exists from what does not. Ability defines what we know from what we don’t know. It determines how much of anything is known vs. how much is unknown. It is from this that calculation that our minds assess our ability.

Desire is functions in the mind as Time does in the universe. Desire does not exist without a comparative between what was, what is, and what may be, just as time does not exist without an appreciation of past, present, and future.

So, the four towers are Knowledge, Thought, Ability, and Desire. (Which is which and why is for a later discussion. This, after all, is just an introductory section for a conversational book about story structure!)

But, the four levels represent Mass, Energy, Space, and Time directly. The four dimensions of the outer world are reflected by the four dimensions of the inner world. In fact, each set is a reflection of the other with neither being the origin.

Existence cannot be understood wholly from either a material or immaterial perspective. Perception is required to enable existence, and vice versa. Thus, the Dramatica chart isn’t just some stupid cutesy little made-up list of a few dramatic concepts. Nope. Its actually a material/immaterial continuum in which all that exists can be described by its co-ordinates within the construct.

Now, before I start sounding like the “Architect” from the Matrix Trilogy (assuming it is not too late already), I’ll put these topics to rest for a while, and think about the next practical article on story development I can write for you.

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Dramatica – How We Did It! (Part One)

As I approach my sixtieth birthday, I imagine the time is ripe to resolve some of the questions I’ve been getting in regard to the origin and development of the Dramatica Theory of Story and its principal concepts and implementations.  So, here is how it happened (to the best of my recollection).

The Beginning

Chris and I met at the University of Southern California.  I was a cinema major, and his room mate, Mark, was my partner in one of the required film production classes.  Chris was not a cinema major, but was taking some courses as part of wider “Thematic Option” program in which he was allowed to design something of custom degree and to choose his own classes.

The three of us became rather like the Three Musketeers – the two of them on campus, and as I was recently married just before going to USC, I lived off campus.  Partway through my degree, even though my dad was paying for the school and even offered to pay for our apartment, my sense of pride and ethics wouldn’t allow me to accept his generosity, so I quit school to work in the film biz.

I spent about a year at one job, as a production assistant and eventually editor, and then obtained another at a much larger production company.  I started as a camera assistant and had just worked my way up to full editor on segments for a television show called “Real People” when another of their shows was cancelled and I was demoted to manager of the shipping department – quite a let down, as I had been making movies since I was 12.  But, we needed the money.

I was pretty depressed, but I came up with a plan to raise money and direct my own feature film rather than just moan about the situation.  The company (Dave Bell Associates), now defunct, took pity on me and let me use their equipment and van at no charge on the weekends.

Chris and Mark became co-producers with me, and I directed.  Two of the other filmmakers at work became my sound man and cinematographer.  Eventually, the director of photography quit, and to fill the positions we enlisted the aid of another of Chris’ USC film friends, Stephen, with whom he was now rooming along with Mark in a Burbank rented home.  (They had come to like Burbank from visiting me there.)

Stephen, in fact, is the same fellow with whom Chris later formed Screenplay Systems, the company that eventually created the Dramatica software with Steve as company president and chief programmer of Dramatica.  (He had wandered onto a government facility at the age of 13 and they had put this self-taught budding genius to work helping to program Arpanet, which laid the foundation for the internet.)

Our movie, The Strangeness, (you can buy it on Amazon.com or look it up on imdb.com) was a pretty interesting atmospheric monster movie, especially considering the budget was only $25,000.  We built the set in my grandparent’s backyard in Burbank, and lit it with lanterns and road flares.  Stop motion monster.  Had a chapter devoted to it in the book Nightmare USA about 1980s monster movies.  (We finished the film in 1980).  We never got our money back, but we all formed a bond that holds to this day.

After completing our first feature, Chris and I decided to write another one.  We called it The Terminator before that title was picked up by someone else.  But, we realized that our first story had a lot of flaws and we didn’t want to make the same mistake twice.

One night at about 2 a.m. in the editing studio behind my home, we decided to put our heads together and see if we could find any truisms of story structure we could count on, at least for action films, that could form a better foundation for the screenplay to come.

This was the moment that the Dramatica Theory of Story was born.

We put in several weeks of solid effort in the project, beginning by asking ourselves, “Is there such a thing as story structure?”  Fact is, we really didn’t know.  Our instructors at USC had provided us with a few concepts that we could count on such as, “There must be a Protagonist and an Antagonist,” and “Three act structure,” and “The Main Character must have a leap of faith.”

But were these always true, or just in some contexts or some genres?  And were they the tip of a structural iceberg – the corners of a hidden network of interconnections that represented the holy grail of storytelling?

To find out, we reasoned we should start from scratch – put aside anything we had ever heard about structure, avoid reading or learning any more about other people’s ideas, and figure it out for ourselves from the ground up.

Now while this might seem pretentious, you have to put it in context of a time in which very little was actually known about story structure in a definitive sense.  So, there wasn’t that much previous knowledge to ignore if we went back to basics.  In fact, we thought, even if we re-invent the wheel, at least we’ll have the process by which we came to the same conclusion others had and that should help validate it.

But where to begin?  The decision was actually pretty simple.  We discussed how there seemed to be four major areas that impacted structure – characters, plot, theme and genre.  We knew nothing about genre or theme, we knew precious little about plot, but we did know a tad about characters.

To learn about characters we used Star Wars as our model.  Why?  It was made by a USC film graduate from whom we (in the cinema department) had been treated to a pre-release screening at Fox studios as a gift from Lucas to his old school.  (The producer of the first Star Wars, Gary Kurtz, hosted the event and answered questions afterward.  I asked, “What inspired you to make all the spaceships move so fast?” (as all previous movies had slows ships like 2001 or Buck Rogers clunky things).  His response, “Because it’s better that way.”)

Regardless, the movie was new, clearly worked well, and seemed to deal in archetypes.  By listing the principal characters in the movie, we figured we had a good list of characters from which to start.

So the first order of business was to list the characters that kept cropping up in Star Wars and then in other kinds of movies we wanted to write.

In each of these stories there was always a Protagonist and an Antagonist.  (We chose those terms simply because we just assumed that “heroes” and “villains” were kind of melodramatic, and our sense of reason was drawn to the more logically based Protagonist and Antagonist representing the character who was trying to achieve a goal and the character who was trying to stop him.  Pro and Ant – for and against.)

In Star Wars, Luke was clearly the Protagonist and (at first) we pegged Darth Vader as the Antagonist.  We then noted  that Princess Leia was Intellectual character (cold and driven by logic) and she had an opposite counterpart, Chewbacca, an Emotional character who openly expressed his passions, never making a plan.  We jotted down the droids as the faithful Sidekicks and identified a Skeptic character, Han Solo, who seemed to be diametrically opposed to the nature or outlook of the Sidekicks.  And then we found a Guardian character who protected the Protagonist: Obi Wan Kenobi.

This gave us a total of seven character types.  Kind of a magic number.  But we noted that the first six characters seemed to fall into pairs of opposite natures or approaches – Luke and Vader, Leia and Chewy, Droids and Han.  And then there was the Guardian, all by itself.

We got into a long debate about whether or not story structure (if it existed at all) was symmetrical or not.  Could it have some things that had counterparts and other things in the same set of things that just hung out there alone?

We wanted there to be symmetry.  It just felt better.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and a hanging character created a conceptual hole where its opposite “should” be.  So, what’s the opposite of a Guardian?  Well, it would be a character who “un-protected the Protagonist –  screwed things up for him, rather than protecting him.  Kind of like an Antagonist, but not directly opposed to the Protagonist – more like the monkey wrench in the works.

Was that character in Star Wars?  In fact it was: Darth Vader!  We had thought he was the Antagonist (like everyone else did – all black with flowing robes and the first evil figure to show up in the story).  But when you thought about it, Darth wasn’t the head bad guy – that was the Empire itself, as made manifest in the Gran Mof Tarkin.  Vader, in fact, was just a henchman for Tarkin, and a rather loose-canon type as well!

So we called this character the Henchman, since he was the sidekick to the bad guy just as the common “sidekick” was the faithful supporter of the Good Guy or Protagonist.  But wouldn’t that then made Vader the equivalent of the side kick droids, C3PO and R2D2?

Well, that’s true in the way they are used in that particular story, but in fact, Vader represented the Dark Side of the Force and was really the opposite to Obi Wan who represented the Bright Side – Obi Wan, the Guardian, vs. Vader, the…  well…, what should we call it?

Now I honestly don’t remember if it was at that time Chris coined the word “Contagonist” for that character type, or if it he came up with it about ten years later when we began a major effort to push our theory forward.  Either way, while we both discovered the function of the character, Chris named it.  In fact, a most of the names for things are his creations, though not exclusively so.

We then switched our attention to plot and found something we called the Rule of Threes.  Basically, it meant that everything in the plot had to happen three times.  First, to introduce something, then to interact it, and then to show the outcome.  Chris named that too: “Rule of Threes”.

We got a little way into that process of delineated steps in plot using index cards with typewritten titles like “Guardian Introduced,” “Skeptic States Motivation,” and “Contagonist vs. P.C. #2,” (P.C. stood for Primary Character – a term we came up with to describe the character the story revolved around from an audience perspective.  This, because we had noticed that some stories were about the Antagonist as the main character – the one trying to stop something, rather than being about the Protagonist who was trying to make something happen.  – I have the original cards next to me for reference as I write this.)

Alas, the Rule of Threes didn’t always hold up.  We ran into more and more exceptions – even in the narrow genres in which we wanted to work.  It often held true, but not always, which didn’t really help us define story structure in concrete terms at all.

After a few of weeks of growing frustration, Chris wisely put forth that we just didn’t yet know enough about life, the world, or stories to get beyond this point.  He suggested that we put our work on hold and come back to it some years later when we had more experience, and I agreed.

Chris graduated and went off to work as an IMAX cameraman doing special effects.  I went on into the business as an editor and later as a writer and director of industrials, educational films, television commercials, documentaries, a music video and one more low budget family feature in which Mark had a major role.

Fast forward ten years to 1990.  Chris and Steve have gone on to form Screenplay Systems and Steve programmed Scriptor – the world’s first screenplay formatting software (for which he and Chris later received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy).

I was editor on a PanaVision feature at the time, Prima Donnas, and Chris was buried neck deep in being V.P. of Screenplay systems as their company grew.  One day he called me on the phone and said, “You know that old theory of story structure we were working on a decade ago?  How about we have breakfast at the Coral Cafe and talk about starting it up again.  I think we’re ready.”

If not for that call, Dramatica would have died before it was barely born.  But, I was having a miserable time on that feature and really wanted to do something else for a while, so the idea was appealing to me to.

Over breakfast, we discussed where we had left off ten years ago, that we could already see some new directions to take, and that we’d like to get together at his place (or more often mine) for an hour of chat and coffee every morning before Chris went off to V.P. and I went off to edit.

Over the next six months we made all kinds of progress I’ll talk about in a moment, started a couple of books, one called “Wordsmith” – an adventure story about a fellow who learns about story structure from Dr. Wordsmith (a scientist), and another called “Story” (before THAT title was taken by someone else!)

We began to talk about our findings with other friends, and Chris told his partner, Steve, about them.  Screenplay Systems was considering creating story development software in conjunction with a known story “guru,” but the more he heard about our embryonic developing theory, the more Steve became convinced that it made a lot more sense and might be a better way to go.

Over many lunches we all discussed the ideas that were being created until Steve asked for a formal presentation of our work.  As sketchy as it was, we put it together as best we could and Steve then completely embraced it and he and Chris cancelled their other plans, and I came on board as an independent consultant to join Chris in developing it.

Chris, of course, still had to be the business operations manager for Screenplay System, but I put full time effort into advancing the theory.  In fact, every weekday for three years, I was basically shut in a room with stacks of post-it-notes of various colors, and a wall-size dry marker board to crack the story structure code.

Chris’ office was right down the hall so we compared notes all day long.  (I had an office too, but spent most of my time with the white board and post-it notes in the conference room.)  They hired two programmers to build the model we were developing, but one didn’t believe such a theory could be true, so he kept altering what we wanted him to do to match his own notions of what would make more sense.  We had to let him go.  Then, the next programmer was so much the opposite and bought into it so thoroughly that he used the model to analyze his own life, realized he really didn’t want to be a programmer and quit!  That left Steve, who took over and became the primary programmer on the project.

Once we had the computer model built, we went through several revisions of the software, but the theory and story engine never changed, not though all these two decades.  It is symmetrical, elegant, beautiful and accurate.

Now, we’re going to back track a bit – back to the time when Chris and I first started the project up again, ten years after putting it hold, because that is where the breakthroughs began.  And now you will learn who came up with what.

After we bopped around our old ideas for a while, Chris asked the question: “If a character, like Scrooge, is the cause of a story’s problems, why doesn’t he see that?”  It was a really good question!  What could be the mechanism by which a character wasn’t just consciously denying that he is the source of the troubles, but actually can’t even see it?  And to carry that forward, what brings him to the point where he does see it? And then what determines if he accepts it and changes or rejects it and keeps on going as he was?

Chris coined the phrase, Blind Spot, to describe a point in one’s mind where we cannot consciously see.  In fact, a place that is so dark it is invisible – we don’t even know it is there.  Next, Chris reasoned that if something was going on in the mind of the Main Character (as we were now describing the Protagonist) that blocked the truth from it, then it must be psychological in nature.  So, rather than plodding on ahead focusing solely on structure, we ought to take a side trip into the psychology of the Main Character.  Again, Chris’ ideas entirely.  In fact, he drove most of the innovation in the initial days and I was his sounding board.  As we progressed those roles became even and then reversed to a degree because he put his efforts into discovering ways to apply the theory to structuring stories, whereas I became fully focused on continuing to advance the theory itself.

From our investigation of the Main Character’s Psychology, Chris came up with the the notion that blind spots were caused by rationalization (which we later renamed justification because it involved more than just rationalizing).

The notion of rationalization led to a big ongoing debate about the difference between objective reality and subjective reality and especially as to whether there was an objective reality we all saw subjectively, or whether “objective” reality did not truly exist and was no more than the common areas of agreement among all of our subjective realities.

In essence, it was the old Socrates/Plato argument about whether our concepts such as “bed” exist  innately in our minds and all real beds are imperfect attempts to manifest the ideal, or that there is no perfect ideal and all of our functional attempts to construct beds create the concept of bed which continually refines itself.  Form follows function or function follows form.

In the end, we concluded that men and women see the answer to this differently.  Men, due to the way their minds are wired, tend to believe in an objective reality, while women tend to believe in a subjective reality.  Problem is, while women’s subjective relativity can admit that men can have a completely different but equally valid view of reality, men’s objective reality cannot accept that women can have a different view unless one of the sexes is wrong.  And it isn’t them because an objective reality is more logical and logic trumps intuition.

So, as a part of our little side trip, we discovered that men and women actually experience the universe (existence) in a different way, and Chris was forced by the logic of the argument to accept that the woman’s view is equally valid as his, but it is just as true that is is not as valid to him.

This was huge.  There were two different kinds of minds on the planet – almost as if we were living with aliens who accounted for half the population.  Of course, it often feels like that, doesn’t it, but now that conclusion was supported by a logical argument based on the process of justification of the Main Character that led to a blind spot.  Man, were we way off course if we wanted to understand story structure!  (Or so we thought at the time.)

Now this is the point beyond which we both started making equal contributions to the advancement of the theory.  We reasoned that if there were two primary views of reality, the male truth and the female truth, that both would be needed to triangulate  a big “T” Truth.

Armed with that expectation, we felt that if we could follow male and females Main Characters through a story and see what kinds of things they did and thought about, perhaps we could see some of the elements of structure and the order in which they occurred.  Then, by comparing this information from many stories, we might see repeating patterns and even, if we were lucky, absolutes that would be the most  solid and unchanging building blocks and “rules” of story structure – essentially, the elements of dramatics.

So, we set about watching a number of movies.  We still weren’t investigating to see if any of our ideas also applied to books or plays.  We wanted to make movies, and the whole reason for investigating story structure was to help us do that better.

We began to compile lists of words that described things like the subjects the main character was talking about, that described how they felt, what they thought, and what they did.

Aware of the differences between our two perspectives, we found that while sometimes we discovered the same concepts, other times we could see elements at work that the other hadn’t noticed.

In time, we had compiled quite a list between the two of us.  As we were looking specifically for the psychological processes at work within the mind of the Main Character and particularly for the processes of rationalization (still using that word at the time) we felt that those terms might indicate the nature of the how a blind spot functioned over the course of the story.

One of the first things we discovered was that the subject matter of most concern to the Main Character (the things that created the greatest internal conflict) was the difference between what he “could” do vs. what he “needed” to do and also between what he “wanted” to do and what he “should” do.

These words were refined to Can, Need, Want, and Should.  We realized that while conflict might exist between Can and Need and also between Want and Should, there was another equally valid way to pair them up that illustrated a different kind of potential conflict.

Can might be paired with Want and Need with Should.  In this arrangement, the conflicts would be between what you Can do vs. what you Want to do and also between what you Need to do and what you Should do.

So, as we understood it, Can/Need conflict is about ability measured up against what is required, Want/Should is about desire that come up against ethical considerations, Can/Want is about whether ability is sufficient to satisfy one’s desires and Need/Should is about logistic necessities vs. ramifications (emotional, ethical, or practical).

We decided that these four items were interconnected, something like a family of primary concerns.  And we found that if we organized them by putting into the four corners of a square, both kinds of pair relationships could easily be seen.  We put Can in the upper left, Want in the lower Right, Need in the upper right and should in the lower left.

So, the top horizontal pair represented Can and Need (both external or perhaps logistic) and the bottom  horizontal pair represented Want and Should (both internal or perhaps emotional).  The Can/Want diagonal represented the most basic drives, while the Need/Should diagonal represented the situational or contextual consideration.  We named this arrangement a quad.

So, we had one quad of psychological items that were driving the Main Character.  Were there others?  Surely there must be, for Can, Need, Want and Should are not a blind spot; we can all see those quite clearly within ourselves.  If they were part of the creation or psychological maintenance of a blind plot, there must be other components to the process that helped hide parts of ourselves from ourselves.  To discover them, we went back to stories and observed more of what the main character did and thought.

In time, we catalogued four more psychological attributes of a Main Character – Commitment, Responsibility, Rationalization and Obligation.  These seemed like they described the next step from Can, Need, Want, and Should in creating a blind spot.  It was as if they described aspects of ourselves we locked in place as a result of having determined Can, Need Want and Should.

Can motivated our Commitments while Need, determined our Responsibilities.  Want was the driver of our Rationalizations while Should generated our Obligations.  Since there was a direction path from our original quad to these four items, it was quite natural to arrange the new ones in the same pattern.

In fact, this new family of four items had the same arrangement among them as did the original family of Can and Want, Need and Should.  Well, we were pretty happy with ourselves.  To our knowledge, no one had ever described the way the items in these two quads related to one another before, much less how one family related to the other.

But, where there any more families?  We began to think about the relationships of one family to the other.  It seemed like the whole family of Can, Need, Want and Should was a little more basic and close to the immediate concerns of the Main Character than his Commitments, Responsibilities, Rationalizations and Obligations.  In fact, they seemed like they operated at two different levels of complexity.  In other words, the new quad of four seemed a bit father along the path to the creation of a blind spot.

So, we went back to analyzing films and simultaneously gave the question some good old fashioned head bashing such as, if Need leads to Responsibility, what does Responsibility lead to?  How about Commitments, Rationalizations and Obligations?

What’s more, if there is something farther along the path toward a blind spot, is there something at the other end of the path that is even more basic than Can, Need, Want and Should?

Eventually, we catalogued two other families – one more complex or of a higher order consisting of Situation, Circumstances, State of Being and Sense of Self.  Yep, that was pretty complex.  But it described the external logistic condition (Situation), the external emotional condition (Circumstances), the internal logistic condition, State of Being, and the internal emotional condition, Sense of Self.

Honest to gosh, this is what we really did, though talking about it now, it sure seems like we were making a lot of unsupported leaps.  Glad it worked out!

On the more basic side, we realized that what a character Can do was based on Ability, but limited by all the restrictions imposed by all elements in the more complex families.  Similarly, at the heart of Want (a lack) is Desire (an attraction).  At  the center of Should, essentially the driver that builds a sense of Should, is Thought (not just acting without thinking but considering the ramifications). And the kernel of Need is Knowledge – information, we can’t need what we don’t know about.  (Sure, you can argue that philosophically, but in terms of the Main Character’s drives, if all these things are descriptors of his personal considerations, then Knowledge of some problem or inequity leads to an assessment of Need – what is required to accomplish it; to get it done.

Now this almost seems counter-intuitive at times, and believe me it took a LONG time to get to the core.  But when we added that final family in consisting of Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire, we knew we had discovered a deeper insight into the psychology of story structure than anyone had before.  Or at least a different one, assuming we were actually deluded and barking up an interesting but ultimately useless tree.

Now we had a pathway to the creation of a blind spot: The Main Character first considers Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire.  When one of those indicates that a problem exists, the hunt is on to find a solution.  So, we (the Main Character) look outward toward the lack or limitation that is constricting these four basic concerns.  Knowledge tells us what we Need, Thought tells us what we Should, Ability tells us what we Can and Desire tells us what we Want.

If the problem is solved on the spot right there, great!  But if not, we realize it is going to take some time so we put some long-term motivations into play: We make Commitments based on what we Know, we lock out Thoughts in a pattern that will keep us moving forward – Rationalization.  We take on Responsibilities in response to what is Needed, and we Obligate ourselves because we Should.

If the problem is still not solved, we begin to question why.  We investigate who we really are, our State of Being which is defined by our Commitments.  We examine that in comparison to who we think we are, our Sense of Self, which is defined by our Rationalizations.  We question our Situation, which is defined by our Responsibilities, and we examine our Circumstances as defined by our Obligations.

By the time we get to this level which is most externally focused, we have shifted our view from ourselves to our environment, and in so doing we have created a blind spot of any initial inequity in our most element family of personal concerns, Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire.  We have come to look outward instead of inward and thereby no longer see ourselves as the cause of a problem but as if the problem exists externally to ourselves, just like Scrooge.

We had done it!  But was there more to learn about the process and how it related to the structure of stories?  And for that matter, what other element beyond the Justification process might be contained as part of story structure?

To find out, we decided to focus on that primary quad that we came to call TKAD – the essential quad of all – the one that most clearly illustrated the internal relationships of a quad family.  We called it TKAD instead of KTAD because we favored thought over knowledge.

I became convinced that the relationships in this family of elements could be reduced to an equation or equations. In fact, I became obsessed with it.  Chris was much more practically minded and wanted to move on, arguing that we already had so much useful material and that the elusive equation, while conceptually intriguing, was not immediately applicable and we could go back and work on it later.

We compromised.  I woud have one week to solve the equation or we would put it aside.  The week was to end on Friday.  I struggled all week – trying to boil down these relationships into a single mathematical formula – the horizontal and diagonal pairs, the path of Justification.  I explored all kinds of approaches, trying to conceptualize and refine – to get down to the essence.  Nothing worked.  Every idea fell short.

It was Friday afternoon.  The deadline was approaching.  It was the height of summer and our bedroom was in an add-on patio in the back of the house with an aluminum awning roof and no air conditioning.  Worse, I was in the middle of hormone therapy and had just been given an increased prescription by my doctor that I had started just a couple days earlier.

In frustration, I lay down on the bed in that back room and fell asleep.  Now – this sounds like some made up cockamamie story that one might use as the basis of a new religion.  But, honest to gosh, this is what really happened, as it happened, so put away all the mumbo jumbo shit and just accept the fact that sometimes things converge at just the right time and just the right way to make something happen.  Okay, here it is:

In my sleep, I dreamed.  I felt like I was on some spiritual plane (yeah, I know how it sounds) and I was shown all the secrets of the universe and I actually felt I understood them!  All the great secrets – is there a God?  What is the meaning of life?  Is there an after life?  Does the universe go on forever, or does it end?  How could we ever get to this point if time is infinite, including stretching infinitely into the past?

And a voice told me (yeah, I know how it sounds, but it was just a dream, so give me a break) – a voice told me I could take the answer to one question – but only one – back with me when I awoke.  I thought about it, but already knew what my answer would be.  I wanted that damned equation!

And in my dream, I saw the answer, as if it were a tangible thing.  i reached out, put my hands around it, pulled it to my chest and literally threw myself awake.  Just like the movies, I bolted upright from a dead sleep, my arms clutching air tightly to me.

But the answer was really there.  And it was fading fast.  So I leapt from the bed, grabbed a pen and paper I kept  nearby and quickly scrawled, “One side divides; the other multiplies.”  Wonderful!  Brilliant!  What did it mean???

It took only a moment to realize that the four items in a family are made up of two pairs, no matter now you slice it.  And the function of the process of problem solving / creating a blind spot is described by the relationship of what is going on  between the pairs, rather than among all four elements.

The equation, written down as a/b = c*d.  One side divides and the other multiples.  One pair is seen as separate items, the other as the blending of both items of the pair.

In talking it over with Chris, we determined this meant that when the mind is operating in any given quad family and it is seeking to find the source of (or solution to) an inequity or problem, it examines the elements of the family individually to see which might be the source (or solution).  “a” divided by “b” ,as in the equation above, means that “a” is being parsed or analyzed by “b.”  And the multiplying side, “c*d” means that “c” and “d” function like ends of a spectrum or a ruler – a base line against which the results of “a/b” can be measured.

This equation – this relationship among the pairs and elements of a quad – became the quintessential equation of story structure that not only described what we had already learned but opened the door to all future discoveries to come.

Applying it to the basic KTAD quad gave us T/K = AD – not a math equation but a logic equation – the essential relationship among the core elements, the four bases of the DNA of the mind.  Do a little algebra to solve for T by multiplying each side by K and you get the form T = KAD.  The form begins to look familiar.

Consider (as a loose analogy) that Knowledge is the Mass of the mind, Thought is its Energy.  Ability is the Space of the mind – bits of what you know (Mass) separated from each other by what is unknown (“not knowledge”, or Space in the outside world).  Desire is the Time of the mind – describing the comparison of what is to what was and what may be.  The relationships among TKA & D are dynamically identical to those of Energy, Mass, Space and Time.  And so, the equation is actually a comparative to E=MC2.  (C squared, of course, is the combining of Space and Time, just as “c” and “d” are blended in the Dramatica equation.  After all, E=MC2 is algebraically identical to E/M = C2, which again looks suspiciously like our story structure equation.)

Now, there’s all kinds of reasons for that that we figured out later, but if you wanted to know how the equation came to be, there it is.

Sounds kind of miraculous – like a message from the Divine.  But it wasn’t, really.  Or at least, even if it was, there was also a perfectly reasonable alternative explanation for it, as now described:

When I stood up from the paper, I realized the metal roof had raised the temperature in the room to well over one hundred degrees.  My mouth was dry and tasted awful, so I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and reached for the “red.”  And I stopped, and asked myself, why am I reaching for “red.”  And then I realized that I was going for the toothpaste, which had a red label on it.

But I had never done that before.  Previously, all of my life in fact, I’d always reached for the shape of the tube, not the color.  So I went outside in the front yard and the dry straw-like grass of summer seemed like a neon yellow, and the colors of the houses on the street and the sky glowed with fluorescent colors not unlike street lights at twilight.

And then it struck me – the amazing set of circumstances that had converged upon me at just the right moment – the deadline putting my mind under pressure – being halfway between sleeping and waking and therefore halfway between the conscious and subconscious – and being at just the right point where my increased dose of hormones shifted the operation of my mind from linear to a momentary perfect balance with holistic thinking, from linear logic-based to non-linear passionate logic.  And all of this in the stifling heat of that oven of a back room.

From that moment forward, I began to take more of a proactive lead on major theory breakthroughs, while Chris became more and more interested in pursuing practical applications of what we had discovered.  That is not to say that Chris didn’t continue to make his own breakthroughs in our joint journey of discovery, but simply that his interests were more in getting our concepts into a form folks could use.

As I recall, this was just a few weeks before I started working full time on the theory over at Screenplay Systems, which would make it sometime in June or july of 1991.  I may have jotted down the experience with a specific date in my writings somewhere, but I’ve generated so much text over the years that I wouldn’t know where to look.

In any event, things really started moving forward once I was putting my mind on this for eight hours a day.  The first thing I did was create post-it notes – one for each of the psychological terms we had discovered in story structure by watching films.  I put these on the wall of my office and started arranging them into families as best I could.

Sometimes, families were complete and other times they only had one, two or three items that we had actually observed.  After a while, enabled by knowing the basic TKAD quad and having completed quads as examples, I was able to start completing partial quads not by observation of stories from film, but by finishing the quad pattern in terms of the relationships among the items.

For example, if one quad had K type item, a T type item and an A type item than the fourth and final item must be a D type.  Since each quad must have a family “feel,” that suggested the realm in which each semantic (name) item should be put.  And then by seeing how (in the example above) K, T and A related to the missing quadrant in the quad, one could calculate the semantic name value that needed to be in that empty space.

It was really just a process of triangulation or, rather, quadrangulation, in which one simply cross referenced what was known to determine what was not known.  In fact, that is how one uses Dramatica’s Story Engine even today – answer questions about the story you want to tell or the real world scenario you wish to analyze based on what you do know, and the Story Engine will cross reference all that material to determine the rest of the underlying narrative psychology that must, therefore, be present.

While I did most of this work, it wasn’t really invention, just work.  And the only reason I did more was that Chris and Steve were fronting the money for my full-time effort while they both had a big company to run.

Still, Chris and I would confab several times daily, me filling him in on what I’d done since our last talk and he contributing to the process of filling in quads when he saw a connection I hadn’t.  Steve, Chris and I had lunch every day and discussed the broader implications as well.

Now one of the big goals of this project was to to see if there was a bigger pattern – an overall organizing factor that might show relationships among the quads themselves, rather than just among the element within each quad.

To look for this pattern, we started organizing the elements and the quads in categories on the wall, as you would in a spreadsheet.  Each category had a heading and under it fell the elements, like a periodic table of story structure elements.  Some of the elements were in quads, others were solo, but no real pattern had yet suggested itself.

We started to consider that perhaps four quads might also come together in a quad of quads – four quads that shared among themselves the same TKAD relationship.  And so, we added that additional layer of complexity which began to organize the items on the wall even further, except for the partial quads and the single items which still just hung out there on their own.

Now one problem we had was in many cases we weren’t sure we had the right words in a given quad.  On the one hand, they had the required TKAD relationship, but on the other hand, they each carried different weights.

For example, suppose you had a hypothetical quad that had Thought, Knowledge, Ability and Want.  At first this would make sense, but it would require realizing that Want was actually a conditionally limited version of Desire to determine that it was not really in the same quad family, but in a related family of Should, Need, Can and Want.

This may have been just work and not inspiration but it was hard work, exacting work, and extensive work as the list grew into scores and scores of items.  In many cases we weren’t even sure some items belonged on the wall at all!  For example, the word “psychology” itself was there at one point, until we realized that wasn’t an element but a description of what the elements meant, in terms of the main character, so we removed the word.

Similarly, we realized that the word “justification” didn’t belong in the quad of Commitment, Responsibility, and Obligation.  The proper word at that level was Rationalization while Justification described the process of moving away from core values to contextual ones.

So, we came to understand that the main character’s mind, at the purest understanding of its seminal motivations, was driven by TKAD, but then outside limiting concerns “justified” not acting on those basic drives and instead forming a plan of action based on Should, Need, Can and Want.  But, even those had limitations imposed by environment, and they evolved into Rationalization, Commitment, Responsibility, and Obligation.  (See how Thought becomes Rationalization and Ability becomes Responsibility, for example).  And finally, even that quad is further justified as it moves into considerations of Sense of Self, State of Being, Situation and Circumstances.

By the time the main character’s mind has made this journey of justification from the primary quad to the forth quad, it has shifted from a completely internal perspective driven directly by the elements of oneself to a completely external perspective driven by elements outside of oneself.

Psychologists call this projection, and we had (for the first time on the planet, as far as I know) actually created a flow-chart that described all the key steps in the process.  And all of this from looking for elements of the psychology of the main character in order to understand his blind spot and how it operated and then organizing those results in quad form guided by the TKAD equation.  Quite a distance from our starting point already, yet so much further to go!

Speaking of characters, we had not given up on our initial work with archetypes either.  While we were working with our quads and post-it-notes, we were also seeing if our set of eight archetypal characters could be found in every story that rang true, not just in Star Wars.

Almost immediately we ran into trouble.  Our next favorite film in the loose genre we liked was Wizard of Oz.  We matched our archetypes from Star Wars against those characters.  At first things looked great:  Protagonist – Luke and Dorothy, Antagonist – Empire (Tarkin) and Witch, Guardian – Obi Wan and Glinda, Contagonist – Darth and Wizard, Sidekick – Droids and Toto, Skeptic – Han Solo and the Lion, Resaon – Leia and the Scarecrow (who came up with the plans), and finally Emotion – Chebacca and the Tin Man (who cries and rusts himself).

Looked good.  In fact, we were pleased to now understand that while the Tin Man had no heart, he was the one who expressed the most emotion.  And while the Scarecrow had no brain, he was the one who did the most thinking.  (Even one of his first lines, “some people without brains do an awful lot of talking” proves that he is a thinking, even philosophical creature, belying his lack of a brain.)

So at first, elation, but then a growing sense that something was wrong.  Why?  The Scarecrow and Tin Man didn’t quite match up with Leia and Chewy.  While Leia was certainly the thinker, she was also very staid and controlled in her manner.  But the Scarecrow, while the thinker, was all over the place physically.  Similarly, Chewy was emotional internally and uncontrolled externally (matching the two) while the Tin Man was just as emotional internally, but very controlled, like Leia, externally.  Cleverly, or so we thought, we commented that the Tin Man was Leia on the outside and Chewy on the inside. (Rimshot, please.)

Clearly, we were missing something.  We discussed it endlessly and the only to options seemed to be that either there were more archetypes than the eight we had originally catalogued, or there was a deeper level – smaller components of character than the archetypes.

Since the differences between Star Wars and Oz characters seemed to be along an internal/external line (with the Start Wars characters being consistent in and out, while some of the Oz characters were one way inside and the opposite way outside, we decided to try and describe the internal and external characteristics of the eight archetypes we already had.

We asked questions such as, if the Protagonist is the one driving the effort to achieve the goal, what is his external nature.  Eventually, we settled on “Pursue” as the word to describe what he did externally.  No matter what happens to him, the Protagonist will Pursue the goal – he can’t help it; it is his nature.  And when it comes to the moral issue of the story, he pursues the answer to that too.  Internally, this manifests itself as Consider.

So, the Protagonist is the driver toward the external and internal solutions to the story’s external and internal problems, giving him the external and internal characteristics of Pursue and Consider.  That’s why he’s the Protagonist as opposed to say the Reason archetype who will always remain Controlled, his external characteristic, while relying on Logic, internally or the Emotion archetype who is Uncontrolled on the outside and is driven by Feeling on the inside.

We could begin to see why these character were archetypes – their external and internal characteristics were in alignment.  Protagonist pursued externally and pursued or considered internally.  Reason was controlled externally and controlled or logical on the inside.  Emotion was uncontrolled on the outside and uncontrolled or driven by feeling on the inside.

But what about the Oz characters?  Using the external and internal characteristics as a guide, we could see the Tin Man and the Scarecrow had swapped characteristics!  Tin Man was Controlled externally, but driven by Feeling internally, while the Scarecrow was Uncontrolled externally, but driven by Logic internally.

Buoyed by this insight, we divided all eight archetypes into two characteristics each, creating a set of sixteen.  Using these, other Oz characters and eventually characters from many other stories were analyzed, and followed the same kind of mix and match patterns as well.  In fact, we couldn’t find a character who couldn’t be described as being comprised of these basic characteristic building blocks we had discovered.  So, we named them “elements” as they were the smallest structural components into which characters could be broken down.

And then two things happened.  One, we found the sixteen characteristics could be grouped into four quads.  Each quad had four characters in it – one archetype and its opposite in each of the two pairs.  So, the elements of Protagonist and Antagonist shared a pair relationship in one quad, while Reason and Emotion shared the other pair relationship in the same quad.

From this we learned more about the relationships among the elements in every quad, which eventually led to our concepts about the Dynamic, Companion and Dependent pairs.  That particular concept is pretty complex, and since this article is not about explaining Dramatica but rather to document how we came up with it, just check out the Dramatica theory book and you can read all about it.

The second thing that happened was that we found some of the words in our four quads of characteristics were already in our wall of post-it notes.  So, it didn’t take long to start reorganizing the post-it notes to include the new characteristics and also to rearrange the notes along the lines of the way the archetype quads worked.

At this time, we were already realizing that while the Main Character was driven by psychology, these other characters, these archetypes, were driven like automatons – to act as their characteristics demanded.  We also realized that the Main Character was not separate from the archetypes, but was one of them.  In essence, the Main Character, while most usually built from the Protagonist, could and was frequently some other archetype.  So, the archetypes represented the kinds of approaches we might made and those were like personality types.  But, we (authors) effectively choose one of those types to explore more deeply in terms of their psychology, and that becomes the character the story seems to revolve around.  Whoa.  This was pretty good stuff.

Now who came up with all this?  Both of us.  It was the constant playing of these questions and concepts back and forth between us that led to tiny little advancements in understanding by one of us and then the other, often alternating for a long time before we arrived at the enlightenment at the end of the tunnel.

When there was a big breakthrough, it was often arrived at simultaneously, and even spoken out loud simultaneously as we both took the last step of inspiration at exactly the same moment in synthesis.

But this wasn’t always the case.  For example, I was looking over our constantly revised wall of post-it-notes in the conference room one day, trying to rearrange some of the psychological elements of the Main Character and I just couldn’t make some of them fit.  It seemed as if they didn’t really describe the main character but actually described the psychological nature of the whole story.

I wondered, was this the psychology of the author?  Perhaps the psychology of the audience?  Maybe it was the psychology the author wanted to create in the audience?  And then I had my Eureka moment: It was the psychology of the story itself.  The story actually had its own psychology, as if it were a character, independent of the Main Character!

I ran down the hall to Chris’ office and blurted as much out to him.  He stared off into space for a moment (as he often did when considering a new concept) and after perhaps twenty seconds replied, “I believe you are right.”

Immediately, I returned to the wall to show him what I was seeing, and then we began the long process of yet again rearranging the notes, but this time by separating all the psychological elements into two areas – those that described the Main Character’s mind and those that described the story’s mind, which we called, obviously, the Story Mind.

Now, while it is true I’m the one who first thought of this, it is also true that rather than being a great insight, it was really the next step in the long line of thinking we had done together, precipitated by our recent work and the long hours I had to just stare at the wall looking for patterns.  So, it could have been either of us, and is based on the work of both of us, but I’m still kinda proud of it because I remember to this day what if felt like to think of it, and it was shattering, startling, like reality broke apart and revealed a bigger truth behind it.

Here’s another inspiration I had about this time (and I can’t recall if it was just before or just after discovering the Story Mind).  We already had the four quads that represented justification – the linear process of moving from essential internal issues to contextual external issues.  We also knew that some elements had greater “weight” than others and therefore that certain quads had greater weight then others.

And in this atmosphere I began using some of the post-it-notes as category names into which other elements or quads belonged, rather than using all the notes as equally weighted elements.

Along the way, i discovered that sometimes a single post-it-note was sometimes best understood as the name of a specific single quad.  For example, we had five words, Morality, Faith, Disbelief, Conscience and Temptation.  Which ones were equal weight and had the right relationship to be a valid quad?

After messing around with various combinations, we determined that the four that best went together as pairs were Faith, Disbelief, Conscience and Temptation, and that Morality was better used as the name for that quad.  In other words, Morality is the umbrella concept in which Faith, Disbelief, Conscience and Temptation operate, but it also worked equally well in reverse: Morality was created, in fact, by the existence and interactions of Faith, Disbelief, Conscience and Temptation.  It was commutative, and also described orders of magnitude.

And it was working with several of these newly named quads that I had my next inspiration: perhaps these quads were actually not on the same plane, as it were, but were nested so that elements made up quads, and the names of the four quads actually formed a higher magnitude of quad, and so on.

What a jolt!  What we had thought was a flat periodic table of story elements was actually multi-dimentional.  We needed a vertical axis to the thing – hard to do on a flat wall.  Still, by grouping elements into quads and then grouping them into quads of quads and so on, we were able to not only better organize the items and see the levels of magnitude, but also to see even better where semantic terms were missing – spaces in quads of all magnitudes that had not yet been observed directly in stories nor could be calculated by TKAD until unseen gaps became obvious by arranging all the quads on different levels.

Not as big an insight as the Story Mind concept, but just as useful in the ongoing construction of the chart and, as before, the result of our combined efforts, though I made that final mental step.  Not being overly humble or self effacing here.  I’m very proud of being the one to be the first to think of the model as being multi-level, but also ready to admit I stood on top of a mound of our joint body of work and just reached up one more step from where we both were.  And, Chris was still spending most of his time running the company while I could devote all day, every day to the project.

You see my thrill is not in competing with Chris, and we’ve never really done that.  My thrill is in being first on the planet to think of something.  Trodding new mental ground no one in the history of humankind had ever walked before.  That’s what excites me.  Then I lose interest and move on, while Chris has the capacity to make it all practical, both his insights and mine.

And along those lines, there may be a lot of the things I note as being “we discovered” or “we realized” when Chris actually had the first insight.  I don’t really recall a lot of it, and Chris would be the better source of his own recollections as to what he personally came up with.  Point is, that the only time I mention that I was the one to think of something is when I have a clear detailed memory of the actual moment when it occurred to me.  Otherwise, it was both of us or Chris.

So, here’s one of those things that was either Chris or us – in putting together the revised arrangement based on the Story Mind, the levels of magnitude and the elements from the characters, we came to see that there wasn’t just one collection of story elements, but two.  It was like the story’s psychology was of two minds – half of it about internal issues and half about external ones, just like our archetypes only at a much larger scale.

Then, we hypothesized that perhaps there were two things here, mixed together – a Story Mind we called “Mind” and a parallel structure pertaining to the external environment which we called “Universe.”  We felt that one represented how we saw the world and the other how we saw ourselves.  So, in a sense, they were both parts of the Story Mind, but one looked inward and the other looked outward.  Essentially, each set was a different perspective.

So, our next step was to separate all the post-it-notes into two independent sets, one with the internal perspective and the other with the external perspective.  This wasn’t as easy as it sounds because each perspective is built of many different elements which, because of the progression of TKAD, are more of a spectrum ranging in the Mind set from purely internal all the way to just this side of external.  And, naturally, the Universe perspective operates the same way.

In fact, by the time we worked our way from the highest magnitude perspective (pure Mind or pure Universe) to the elements of the “smallest” quads, like those containing the character elements, the two perspectives are almost looking at the same thing.

Consider – real Truth cannot be seen, but we approach it by looking within ourselves and also looking out toward our world.  What we see in each direction reflects what we see in the other.  And in the emerging Dramatica model, it seemed to us that the elements of each perspective were really the same items – just seen from two sides, an interface between the two.

So, we came up with a graphic representation of each set – two pyramids, one for Universe and one for Mind, with the same elements at the bottom of each because when you got that far down, it turned out the items in the quad one level up resolved themselves, were made up of the very same basic building blocks.

Problem was, that when you start at the top point, then go down to the quad beneath it (four items) and the four quads beneath that (sixteen items) and them to the bottom sixteen quads (64 elements), it turns out the elements aren’t in the same position as those in the Mind pyramid.

Then perhaps the element level was a shared level – a true interface between Universe and Mind.  That didn’t work either.  Our best explanation was that since these were two perspectives, perhaps it was like looking at the world through two different filters, and each distorted the view of the same central Truth.

As we continued, we began to feel that two pyramids were not sufficient.  This was due to a number of simultaneous influences.  First, if everything seemed to be based on the TKAD quad, shouldn’t there be four pyramids instead of two?  Second, we were still analyzing films and were discovering dramatic elements that did not easily fall into our two pyramids of quads.  One thing we would never allow ourselves was the luxury and false comfort of pretending something worked by forcing it to fit or by bending the logic by which we had developed our structure.  And finally, we began to see there were two kinds of elements in each pyramid – those that dealt with states of things and those that dealt with processes.

So, we kept Universe and split out all the external processes it contained into a new pyramid called Physics.  And we kept Mind and split out all the internal processes it contained into a new pyramid called Psychology.  We spent even more time filling in the gaps and spaces, sometimes having to re-define existing words and sometimes inventing new ones where no existing ones existed for the meanings we were discovering in our refined model.

Now we had four complete Domains, an external state and process and an internal state and process.  And from that point forward any dramatic element we observed in stories was properly described by an element in one of the four Domain pyramids.  In all, it took us nearly two years of full time effort to progress from that wall initial wall of post-it notes to the four Domains we now had.

Still, the pyramids were cumbersome and difficult to use.  So, Chris came up with an inspired re-design.  Rather than representing each element as a point in a pyramid, he re-drew each Domain as a tower with the top item, such as Universe the whole top level, and then beneath it an equal-sized level which was divided into four equal quadrants to make that second level a quad.  Below it was a quad of quads, and at the bottom level of each Domain tower were the sixty four elements.  Brilliant design, and the one we still use today, twenty years later.

We came to realize that one of the four Domains would describe the issues explored by the Main Character, one by the Obstacle Character who had a diametrically opposed philosophy to that of the Main Character, one Domain would be the Subjective Story in which the Main and Obstacle duke it out philosophically – essentially the course of their philosophic or message argument, and the final Domain would be the Objective Story in which all the other characters like Protagonist and Reason would go about their functions.

There were many other revelations from our work, such as that some Main Characters change to adopt the Obstacle’s philosophy and some would remain steadfast in their beliefs, be that good or bad.  We could chart the course of the Main Character’s Justification and the growth of its philosophic argument with the Obstacle character.  We could even chart story points such as Goals and Requirements.

But there was one thing the Dramatica structure could not do.  I could not tell us the order in which the elements in the quads would appear in a story.  We could observe that each primary quad around which a story centered would be explored over the course of a story until all four items in each central quad had been examined.  But the sequence eluded us.

We spent weeks and weeks trying to figure out the pattern.  We watched endless numbers of movies and found that if we plotted each item as it happened within a quad, it would generate different patterns in different quads.   We catalogued the patterns, compared them from film to film, but couldn’t crack the code.

This problem lingered on and on.  Chris created charts and graphs.  I rearranged more post-it-notes.  Chris built a series of blocks on a shoe string (not meaning a cheap price but threaded along an actual shoe string!)  I tried wrapping foil tape around a toroid (a one-foot in diameter styrofoam donut) in a quad helix, labeled with the elements of each Domain on a different color tape.  Still, no progress.

And then came another of those Eureka moments which, as often happens, is when the mind is primed for a solution and just needs some similar dynamic system to appear in every day life to suggest the solution to a problem in a completely different area of subject matter.

In my case, I was taking my daughter to the California Museum of Science and Industry in Exposition Park in L.A., near USC.  And we stopped at a hands-on display of twenty-one bar magnets mounted on metal rods so each could rotate independently like the needle on a compass.  You could rotate the magnets by turning the top of the pin that held them.

If you turned the first magnet in the row at just the right speed, it would make the second one turn, and if you got the speed just right, you could get all twenty-one magnets to rotate by just turning the one.

And that’s when it hit me.  The structure we had created,  first on a flat wall, then as pyramids and finally as towers wasn’t really static at all.  In fact, it wasn’t the patterns of the sequence in the story that were moving, it was the structure itself!

Right at that moment I knew I had the answer.  But, being a weekend, I couldn’t get into the office until Monday.  As soon as I did, I tried out a few combinations and realized that simply rotating the quads like magnets solved some of the patterns but not all of them.  And then I had another inspiration – that perhaps the quads also flipped along their axes, swapping the positions of the elements in the quad along the diagonal.

I soon discovered that by a combination of a single flip along one axis or the other in combination with a rotate one item to the left or one to the right, all of the patterns we had seen in stories could be replicated!  Problem was, what determined whether a given quad flipped one way or the other and whether it rotated to the right or the left?

I filled in Chris and Steve and started working on the issue.  But, damn it was hard!  I was still having my hormone doses adjusted and sometimes the frustration just drove me to tears.  What’s worse, costs were mounting on this multi-year development process and Screenplay Systems needed to release something soon or  they couldn’t afford to continue development.

It was almost Christmas and that is when Chris had to tell me that if I couldn’t figure it out in two weeks, they were going to pull the plug.  I was now under even more pressure than I had been when I came up with the equation.

So I went “all in” and took all of my mind, all of my self out of my mental “ram” and compressed it onto my mental hard drive.  i freed up all my mental processing space so there was nothing of me left for the duration of this effort.

And then, the answer began to emerge.  The flips and rotates represented the kind of tension that was being wound up in the model – the dramatic tension in a narrative.  Each kind of tension caused a flip or rotate of one sort or another in specific quads along the primary line of tension.

For example, a story that was driven by actions would have one effect and a story driven by decisions would have another.  A character who would eventually change was driven by one kind of tension (and therefore one kind of flip and/or rotate) and a steadfast character would be driven by another.

Determining what these kinds of tensions were was difficult, and Chris and I worked on that together.  But connecting particular kinds of flips and rotates to particular types of tension (which we named story dynamics) was my job.

Now, I don’t think I finished in the two weeks, but I did make enough progress to buy some more time.  And, as I recall, I completed it in about a month.  Keeping all those mechanisms, all of which interrelated and affected one another, in my head at the same time was the single biggest thought I had ever had.  It blocked out all the rest of me and took up all the space in my head.  It hurt.  But I did it.

In fact, I devised a system whereby the end product of all the flips and rotates was a “wind-up” of the Main Character’s domain and another of the Objective Domain so that it was, as Chris has described it, like winding up a Rubik’s cube in which all the pieces are connected by rubber bands.

When it was finished, all the patterns that had made no sense became simple and predictable, and we were actually able to determine the order of events in a story just by answering questions about the kind of tension in the story and where it was applied to the structural model.

Now I’m not sure if it was before or after I worked out the “Justification Wind-up” as we came to call it, but one other problem was locking down the pattern of the elements at the bottom of each Domain.

We knew they were the same elements, but in what pattern did they alter from one domain to the next.  The day I figured that one out I had all the elements cut apart in little squares spread out all over the carpet in Chris office while he worked at his desk.

I kept moving them around and rearranging them in different patterns until one pattern made me stop and stare.  It was an elegant pattern of symmetry and simplicity, just like the quad itself!  And, it was the touchpoint between a quad view of the world and a binary view of opposites.

The secret was that the individual elements didn’t shift around, but the binary pairs of elements did so that, for example, Faith and Disbelief would never be split or separated, but that pair might be separated from Conscience and Temptation as a pair.  The pairs moved, not the elements, but in what manner, in what pattern?

Again, I employed my understanding of the manner in which TKAD related to one another and translated that so that one Domain had the T pattern of pairs, another had the K pattern of pairs, and so on.  Finally, that problem was solved as well.

We were now getting good predictive results from the computer model of these relationships that Steve had built for the software.  But there were still some things that didn’t quite fit without forcing it or changing context to make them fit.

We figured that was as accurate as the model could be.  Now I think it was me that saw this, but it might have been Chris or the both of us, but just before we were going to master the software, we went to Steve and told him that we felt the elements were in the wrong places at the bottom level.  In fact, the entire element sets at the bottom of two Domains had to be shifted and exchanged with those from the other two Domains.

He asked why, and the answer was that while the TKAD rearrangement of the pairs of elements was correct, which Domain was the T or K arrangement, for example, was not as simple as just putting the T pairings in the T Domain and the K pairings in the K Domain.

What we had failed to consider was that from the top of Domain through all four levels to the bottom – this was also a quad.  And by the time you went from the top of the vertical quad of any Domain to the bottom, the effect of moving “around” that quad caused it to rotate ninety degrees like a helix.

This put the pairing arrangements ninety degrees out of phase with the TKAD nature of the top level of the Domain.  Stupid vertical quad!  Thank goodness we caught it before it was released, because after Steve made the change, accuracy was increased tremendously.  And that arrangement has never been altered as it is completely predictive of what actually happens in narrative.

Now there were a lot of other insights coming to us all in those heady days.  For example, I haven’t mentioned anything of the story points like Story Goal, Main Character’s Problem and Subjective Story Benchmark.  There are several score of them, and they were discovered when we were watching all those films.

At first, they were all lumped into the overall collection of Post-it notes, but eventually we realized they weren’t elements, they were contexts – they were descriptive of how the elements were employed.

For example, one item on the notes on the wall was Obtaining and another was Becoming.  A story might have a Goal of Obtaining or a Goal of Becoming or any of a number of other types of goals, but each one was a different kind of Goal and therefore drove the story in a different direction.

Goal, and all the other story points, contextualize the elements, showing how (as a result of the Justification process that build potentials and tensions in the narrative structure as it winds up) the meaning of an element changes, depending on whether the Story Mind employing it as a Goal or some other story point.

Now in the middle of all this, Chris came up with a couple of really big insights.  First, we had already tied the four Throughlines (I, You, We, and They as represented by the Main Character, Influence Character, Subjective Story and Objective Story) to one of the four Classes (Universe, Mind, Physics and Psychology) to create four Domains.  Which of those four points of view went to which Class was part of what determined the Justification Wind-up.

Chris went beyond that to consider the impact storytelling style on the way in which the four Classes came across to the audience.  He devised an understanding that there were four “flavors” of storytelling / audience impact – Drama, Comedy, Entertainment, and Information.  He built a table in which these four means of expression along one side and the four Classes along another created a grid where they overlapped.

For example, he could see that the Physics Class could be presented as a Drama (Action Drama), as Comedy (Physical Comedy), as Entertainment (Thrills) or as Information (How it Works).  Going along the Comedy line, Comedy and Universe created (Situation Comedy), Comedy and Physics created (Physical Comedy), Comedy and Mind created (Comedy of Manners) and Comedy and Psychology created (Comedy of Errors).

This grid of sixteen flavors of Genre revolutionized the understanding of what Genre really is and how to use it.  I added a couple flourishes, just as Chris often did with my work, which is how we both contributed to everything, no matter who thought of the kernel of it first.

Another of Chris singular contribution was a complete theory of Propaganda – how it works, and how to do it.  In fact, he wrote a whole chapter about it in the Dramatica Theory Book.

Speaking of which, here’s some information about how the book was written.  Basically, I wrote it, Chris edited it, created all the graphics and illustrations, and formatted it for printing.

Of course, it was really a collaboration in terms of the ideas, and Chris was a taskmaster when it came to anything I’d penned that was unclear, not in the best order, or missing a critical bit of reasoning.  And it was a good collaboration, as I’m pretty handy with a word (as you can tell from this article) and Chris is great at assessing linear impact of the development of a thought.

So, I wrote it, Chris contributed his chapter on Propaganda and did the illustrations and editing, and we both organized and arranged it to ensure that everything was in there, all necessary gaps and in-betweens were developed and filled.  And, as it turned out, just the process of trying to document our theory led to a better understanding of the theory and even the creation of new theory as needed to fill holes in our logic.

All that was left to do was print the book, duplicate the software and release the puppy.

Well, that pretty much brings us to the end of Part One of “How We Did It.”  Naturally, with a process this long and a theory this big, I’ve left out a lot of specifics and details.  But, I do believe I’ve documented the key breakthroughs and the logic behind them to satisfy (or at least mollify) a good chunk of the curiosity that’s been lingering around the edges of this thing.

Coming in Part Two is the description of how we were able to advance the theory from its use in fictional narrative to being an accurate tool of analysis and prediction in the real world and the ongoing development of the Dynamic Model – a complete system for understanding narrative in terms of the pressures and tensions at work within it.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica

 

Dramatica – Where’d the Idea Come From?

Chris Huntley and I began our exploration of story structure in 1980. He and I had met a few years earlier while we were both attending the University of Southern California and both making short films.

I had left school early to go to work in the industry and, frustrated by working on the periphery of the industry at that time, I put together a low-budget feature film project and enlisted Chris’ partnership in producing a movie.

The result was a horrible little film that suffered no so much from budgetary restrictions as from our lack of knowledge of sound story structure. So, when we began to consider our next production, we thought we’d first take a stab at trying to determine what a sound story structure ought to be.

We made lists and graphs and assembled everything we knew. And we discovered… that we didn’t know much about story structure! In fact, we put the whole project on hold until we could gather a little more experience from the industry and from life in general.

Chris went into motion control special effects work for Imax movies, and I went into the industry at large as a writer/producer/director and mostly editor of non-features, high budget industrials, and educationals.

Later, Chris become the co-founder of Write Bros. – the company that created the world’s first screenplay formatting software (and won a technical achievement award from the Academy).

One day in 1991, Chris asked me to breakfast and asked if I’d like to start up our old story structure project again. I was thrilled to do so. I was editing a feature film at the time so each morning before I went off to the editing room and before Chris went off to be V.P. of his company, we’d get together over coffee and try to crack the story structure nut.

We were both committed to this project, and it wasn’t long before we started having some insights that made sense to us but that we had never heard in any of our classes at USC.

After six months, we had created a number of understandings about story structure, but lacked a unifying concept that would tie them all together. We tried starting a book about our findings, but got bogged down. Eventually, Chris suggested that we present our work to his partner, Steve Greenfield.

Steve was completely taken with the ideas we offered, and he and Chris determined that rather than a book, perhaps our best approach was to create a new piece of software for writers that would help them employ our concepts in building sound stories.

I was asked to come to their company as a consultant, and as my editing job had just completed, I agreed. Thus began a three year full-time effort to redefine the nature of what stories are and how they work.

Few are those who have the luxury of being paid to spend three years sitting in a room pondering the mechanics of story structure to the exclusion of all else. But that was the situation I was provided.

We began with index cards and post-it notes, sticking every individual concept (and there were hundreds of them) all over all four walls of my office, and later of the entire conference room!

Seeing it all spread out like that made it possible to note certain patterns and connections among some of these notions. We began to see that psychology played a large part in stories.

This came about by Chris asking a crucial question: “If the Main Character (like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol) is actually the cause of the story’s problems, why can’t he see it and just change?”

Of course, this spoke of issues far beyond stories that were essential to our own psychological issues as a species.

We started to gather all the psychological material we had developed into one place on one of the walls. Some of it seemed to fit well with the main character, but other material, though clearly psychological in nature, seemed to pertain more to the story at large, though we had no idea what to make of this. There was no pattern that explained it.

One day, while staring for the nth hour at that wall, it just hit me – maybe the psychological material we had discovered in stories weren’t about just the main character – maybe they were about the story itself. Maybe the story itself had a psychology! In fact, perhaps story structure was a model of the story’s mind!

I ran down the hall to Chris’ office and hit him with the notion. As was his practice, he leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and fell into a meditative state, closing all else from his mind. After a few moments he sat upright and responded, “I believe you are right.”

From that point forward, everything we did was based on the Story Mind concept. We reorganized all of our material assuming that it referred to the psychology of the story’s mind. Suddenly, patterns appeared, relationships were suggested, and the various components we had discovered fell right into place.

Our arrangements became more and more complex until we found ourselves hard-pressed to make them work in a single chart. It was then that we tried putting the cards in levels, placing “smaller” units under larger umbrella units into which they seemed to fall.

But how to depict this nested structure? Chris played around with pyramid shapes, I tried twisting mobius strips around donut-shaped toroids. Eventually, we settled on the four towers – not as the only shape of story structure, but as the most convenient shape with which to appreciate its internal mechanisms and relationships.

Later, I read that Crick and Watson (the two fellows that discovered the double-helix shape of DNA) didn’t find it through observation. At the time, the best imagery available of DNA was made by bombarding DNA’s crystalline form with X-Rays.

But Crick and Watson had a gut feeling that the shape of “live” DNA was more elegant, perhaps some sort of spiral. They decided to play with a number of alternative shapes as candidates that might explain all the properties that had been observed about DNA. To this end, they ordered a set of custom-made industrial “tinker-toys” which were used by chemists to illustrate molecular bonds.

They play around with various combination until, while building a ladder shape, they twisted it to form the now-familiar double-helix. As soon as they actually saw this representation, then new intuitively that it was correct and ran off to share their work with colleagues.

Chris and I unknowingly followed the same process. In the years that followed, we came to the conclusion that the towers are like the crystalline form of DNA – it represents a mind’s psychology at rest. But the mind is a machine made of time – every component, every gear and widget is actually a process.

When you put it into motion to create a “live” model, like DNA it becomes a helix, but in the case of story structure it forms a quad-helix, rather than a double one.

That’s about as deep as I want to go into how the Dramatica Chart developed in the first place. But, as a special treat for those of you who are gluttons for punishment, here’s an explanation of the workings of the structure, conceptually (for now!).

Where to begin without getting all technical-ish… Well, that’s a good start already!

Okay. The Dramatica Chat has four levels. And it has four Towers. What do these represent? The four towers represent the four key elements of our minds. Just as DNA is made up of four bases: adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T), the structure of the Story Mind is made up of four bases: knowledge (abbreviated K), thought (T), ability (A) and desire (D).

Knowledge is the Mass of the mind. Thought is the mind’s Energy. Ability is the equivalent of Space and Desire is the counterpart to Time.

Just as mass and energy can relate in a simple way, such as when force slams one billiard ball into another, thought can rearrange knowledge and bring disparate pieces of knowledge together or move them apart.

Mass and energy can also interact in a more complex manner in which, for example, a small amount of mass can release a tremendous amount of energy in a nuclear explosion. Similarly, Knowledge and thought can interact so that a small amount of knowledge can generate an awful lot of thought (and conversely, it take a lot of thought to create a single bit of true knowledge!)

Ability is like space insofar as space defines the edges of what exists from what does not. Ability defines what we know from what we don’t know. It determines how much of anything is known vs. how much is unknown. It is from this that calculation that our minds assess our ability.

Desire is functions in the mind as Time does in the universe. Desire does not exist without a comparative between what was, what is, and what may be, just as time does not exist without an appreciation of past, present, and future.

So, the four towers are Knowledge, Thought, Ability, and Desire. (Which is which and why is for a later discussion. This, after all, is just an introductory section for a conversational book about story structure!)

But, the four levels represent Mass, Energy, Space, and Time directly. The four dimensions of the outer world are reflected by the four dimensions of the inner world. In fact, each set is a reflection of the other with neither being the origin.

Existence cannot be understood wholly from either a material or immaterial perspective. Perception is required to enable existence, and vice versa. Thus, the Dramatica chart isn’t just some stupid cutesy little made-up list of a few dramatic concepts. Nope. Its actually a material/immaterial continuum in which all that exists can be described by its co-ordinates within the construct.

Now, before I start sounding like the “Architect” from the Matrix Trilogy (assuming it is not too late already), we’ll put these topics to rest for a while and return to our happy-go-lucky free-wheelin’ conversational introduction to Dramatica Theory. So there.

Why Dramatica Works – Part 1

Over the past twenty years I have written innumerable articles and recorded over one hundred hours of video explaining what the Dramatica is , how to use it and even how it works, but I have never made a concerted effort to describe why it works.

Understanding the difference between “how” and “why” is both a subtle endeavor and a crucial one.  For the “how” just deals with the nuts and bolts of Dramatica’s model of story structure, but the “why” describes the reasons behind the form and elements of that model.  In other words, rather than trying to teach Dramatica for what it is, perhaps the best way to learn Dramatica is to understand why it is as it is.

To this end, I considered where to begin.  What concepts should I start with?  Perhaps an overview of the “big picture” view of the model or maybe with elements that most closely connect with more traditional approaches to story structure.  And then, the obvious slapped me upside the head: I should begin my explanation right where Chris Huntley and I began our exploration so many years ago.

At that time, we knew virtually nothing about how stories worked and came to the problem with fresh and ignorant eyes.  We dabbled in structure for a couple of months, then put it away for ten years before returning to it again, but this time in a nearly four year full-time effort.  Each day posed new questions about the elements and forces that drove the underlying framework of stories.  We struggled to make sense of what we saw, to grasp why it should be that way, and then to conceive of some manner of documenting it, modeling it, fashioning a function system that described, measured, and predicted it.

Still, I realized that the focus of this approach should not be to create a documentary of our efforts but rather to create an idealized path of discovery inspired by the steps we took but refined and guided by our current understandings having finished our journey and having arrived at the comprehensive perspective we enjoy today.

And so, while I will refer to the questions we asked and the answers that were ultimately revealed, the purpose of this initial article and its successive siblings is to seek the essence of story structure in its pure form, both by its nature and by the natural laws under which it self-organizes.  With this as our direction and destination, let us begin our journey….

Enigma

To set the stage.  In 1979 and on into 1980 Chris Huntley, Mark Sawicki and I wrote and produced a feature motion picture.  We had all met at the University of Southern California in the Cinema department.  I had left before completing my degree and was working in the industry.  Chris and Mark were still attending when we began.  The result was a modest horror movie called “The Strangeness” which, while something of an accomplishment for a budget of thirty thousand dollars, suffered from some rather glaring story problems.

Shortly after its completion, Chris and I decided to write the script for our next effort.  But before we did, we thought we should seek to understand what was actually wrong with our previous story so as not to repeat the same mistakes in the new one.  To that end, we reviewed our characters and plot.  Though we could clearly feel that it was sometimes diverging from some unseen track or dramatic river channel, it was far more a sense of something wrong than a true grasp of what was wrong.

So, we went back over our notes from writing classes we had taken while at the university.  What we soon discovered was that every instructor had their own vague notion of story structure, but in terms of anything truly definitive, they were all lacking.  The best they had to offer were specific tips, tricks and techniques for story development which they had derived from many years of personal trial and error.  In short, our instructors were as clueless as we were.

That being the case, we briefly considered studying the writings of famous investigators of the nature of story – folks such as Joseph Campbell and even Aristotle, not to mention a number of contemporaries who were proselytizing their own brands.  But before taking such steps, we determined that if our instructors (who were already familiar with these systems and explanations) had no clear answers, then perhaps it might be better to approach the subject untainted by the conclusions of others.  Though we might waste our time re-inventing the wheel, we argued, we also would have the best chance of uncovering something new in places everyone else “knew better” than to look.  And so, we met in a small one-room studio “granny house” in the backyard of the home I was renting to ponder the unknown and seek some better grip on the mechanics of story than we had so far encountered.

In regard to our movie’s story, we sensed that our plot, while not excessively clever, wasn’t too far off “the mark” – whatever that was.  But when it came to characters, though we had an interesting assortment of personalities, there was something false about the way they acted and interacted with each other.  No fault of the actors – we could clearly see that in some cases parts of their scripted personalities seemed to be missing, while in other cases their conversations and actions seemed unmotivated, untrue or inconsistent.

Now we come to the first “why” we asked -“Why do characters ring true in some stories and ring false in others?”  We gave it some thought, but try as we may, we could not fathom what was wrong, we could only sense it.  So, we attacked the other side of our question and decided to look at  really successful characters in other stories that were in a similar genre to ours.  It was our assumption that perhaps we might solve our problems by measuring our characters against the template of characters that worked.

To this end, we decided to first investigate the characters in what wast the most popular film of our time: the original Star Wars movie (now called “Episode IV –  A New Hope). As a first step, we listed the principal characters – the ones who seemed to be central to the forces that drove the story – the ones the story seemed to revolve around.

Our initial list included the following:  Luke Skywalker, Obi Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, C3PO and R2-D2.  In our writing classes we had been taught about the Protagonist and the Antagonist – two archetypes that we were told must be present in every story.  It made sense to us, so we figured we’d look over our list and identify the Protagonist and Antagonist, which seemed a pretty easy task with something as melodramatic as Star Wars.

It seemed pretty obvious to us and the rest of the movie-going world that Luke was the Protagonist and Darth the “over-the-top” villain.  For now, let’s go with that, as it was our initial understanding though it later proved to be massively incorrect in regard to Darth.  Turning our attention to the other principal characters in our list, we wondered if the fact that there was a Protagonist and Antagonist in every story might indicate that there were also other character types that must, or at least commonly exist in stories.

As we had not read historical explanations of archetypes, we had no grounding from which to begin our considerations, so we simply set about trying to ascertain the “essence” of each character.  In my notes from a writing class I took from Professor Irwin Blacker, he proposed the concept that every character in a screenplay should be a “one hundred percent” character, meaning that each character should embody some essential human quality so that all that it thought or did was exemplary of that quality.  For example, one character might be 100% “hate” while another was 100% “hope.”  In this way, Blacker explained, we are able to examine the value and flaws of all our own shared traits.

With this small thread as our guide, we sought to label each of the characters in Star Wars as to that quintessential quality they represented and explored.  Beginning we those we knew, Protagonist represented our drive to achieve a goal at all costs.  Antagonist represented our drive to prevent that effort from succeeding – an enemy with an agenda in total opposition to that goal.  Now, this didn’t quite ring true to us, even then, for the Protagonist was for something (destroying the empire) but the Antagonist wasn’t so much trying to prevent the empire from being destroyed as to destroy the rebel alliance.  In other words, they were both protagonists, weren’t they?  What was the difference?  What different human qualities did they represent?

For a moment we thought maybe it is as simple as Hero and Villain – that the Protagonist was just a good guy while the Antagonist was a bad guy.  But that also didn’t hold up since there were many characters who represented the quality of “goodness” and quite a few who represented “badness.”  So, we left that one unresolved for a while and moved on to other characters figuring that just identifying Luke and Vader as Protagonist and Antagonist was sufficient for now and we could work out their specific qualities later more easily, perhaps, once we discovered what the other characters’ 100% qualities were.

Obi Wan, for example, appeared to be a mentor, teacher, or protector.  But this confused us, as those labels didn’t really describe human qualities so much as the jobs he did.  Han Solo, on the on hand, was pretty much a cut and dried skeptic.  He didn’t believe in the force, didn’t believe in the rebel’s cause, and was only out for himself.  So skepticism and perhaps selfishness were in his potential trail list.

Around this time we began to suspect that perhaps not all characters were 100% but might be fifty/fifty such as Han might be half skepticism and half selfishness.  If so, then things were a bit more complicated than we had been led to believe.  (If we had only know JUST how much more complicated, we would likely have given up right then and there and taken jobs in some other industry where we had some natural talent!)

We strove on, however, and considered the other principal characters.  Chewbacca seemed to be all emotionally driven and wild, in contrast to Princess Leia who was the “ice-princess” – pretty much devoid of emotion and also the opposite of wild: staid and controlled as the two hairballs on the side of her head.  Perhaps we were onto something here.  Just as Protagonist and Antagonist were opposites, maybe Chewbacca and Leia were also opposites.  But who was Han’s mirror image?  Well, it had to be Obi Wan or one of the droids, C3PO or R2-D2.

It might be Obi Wan.  After all, he believed in the force and Han didn’t.  And the two of them argued a lot, so it made a certain amount of sense.  Yet they didn’t particularly seem a balanced pair.  And then there were the droids.  What quality did each represent?  And though they bickered, were they really in opposition? For that matter, did characters always have to be in opposition?  Did each character need a mirror image opponent who exemplified the opposite human quality, such as greed and generosity or kindness and meanness?  And finally, did all human qualities have an opposite one, or did the human mind itself have “orphan” qualities that stood alone, without opposition.  In short, is there symmetry in stories; is there symmetry in the mind?

Well these questions were clearly too tough for us to answer, so we put aside characters for a bit to focus on plot instead.  And here we also made some progress.  One of the first things we discovered was something we called the “rule of threes.”  This notion was that when you had two characters in opposition, they would meet three times in a story: First, to introduce their conflict, second to engage in conflict and part with no clear winner, third to have it out in a battle royal until only one remains alive, or in power, or simply just left standing.

After trying out the rule of threes we discovered that opposing characters might meet more than three times if their relationship and/or opposition was extremely powerful or complicated, but they had to meet “at least” three times or there would be a plot hole.  So we revised our rule to so state.

And then we hit a brick wall.  We couldn’t get a step farther in understanding plot and couldn’t see anything new in characters.  After a few hapless days, Chris wisely suggested we simply hadn’t had enough life experience to crack this nut, so we should put it aside for a few years until we did and then revisit it.  I agreed, and we turned our attention to that second screenplay which, when completed, contained most of the same problems as our first script and even some new ones we hadn’t had before.  While interesting, we kinda figured that our time trying to understand story structure was wasted.  And so it lay for almost ten years while Chris and I went on to our individual careers in the business.

That’s the end of this first installment in “Why Dramatica Works.”  It illustrates how structure is not easy to see and, prior to Dramatica, was more an intuitive endeavor than an intellectual one.  Now I may have gotten a few incidental facts out of order or perhaps ahead of where we actually were at the time, but give me a little slack – it was almost a third of a century ago.  The important thing is noting the questions that arose:  Is there a fixed structure to stories, or at least a fixed set of dramatic building blocks?  Do things have to be in opposition (is there symmetry)?  Do characters represent jobs or human qualities or both, and which is best used to identify them?  If there are other archetypes beside Protagonist and Antagonist, what are they, and do they have to be in all stories or just CAN be in any story?  And finally, are there rules of plot that determine how things will come into conflict, how conflicts will resolve, and the order in which events should or even must happen?

In the next installment we’ll come back ten years later in 1991 when we once more picked up the quest which, within six months, had turned into a full-time effort lasting three more years and become (so far) a twenty year career of finding new ways to explain and employ the Dramatica model of story structure we ultimately designed.

 

 

 

Dramatica – Where’d The Idea Come From?

Chris Huntley and I began our exploration of story structure in 1980. He and I had met a few years earlier while we were both attending the University of Southern California and both making short films.

I had left school early to go to work in the industry and, frustrated by working on the periphery of the industry at that time, I put together a low-budget feature film project and enlisted Chris’ partnership in producing a movie.

The result was a horrible little film that suffered no so much from budgetary restrictions as from our lack of knowledge of sound story structure. So, when we began to consider our next production, we thought we’d first take a stab at trying to determine what a sound story structure ought to be.

We made lists and graphs and assembled everything we knew. And we discovered… that we didn’t know much about story structure! In fact, we put the whole project on hold until we could gather a little more experience from the industry and from life in general.

Chris went into motion control special effects work for Imax movies, and I went into the industry at large as a writer/producer/director and mostly editor of non-features, high budget industrials, and educationals.

Later, Chris become the co-founder of Write Bros. – the company that created the world’s first screenplay formatting software (and won a technical achievement award from the Academy).

One day in 1991, Chris asked me to breakfast and asked if I’d like to start up our old story structure project again. I was thrilled to do so. I was editing a feature film at the time so each morning before I went off to the editing room and before Chris went off to be V.P. of his company, we’d get together over coffee and try to crack the story structure nut.

We were both committed to this project, and it wasn’t long before we started having some insights that made sense to us but that we had never heard in any of our classes at USC.

After six months, we had created a number of understandings about story structure, but lacked a unifying concept that would tie them all together. We tried starting a book about our findings, but got bogged down. Eventually, Chris suggested that we present our work to his partner, Steve Greenfield.

Steve was completely taken with the ideas we offered, and he and Chris determined that rather than a book, perhaps our best approach was to create a new piece of software for writers that would help them employ our concepts in building sound stories.

I was asked to come to their company as a consultant, and as my editing job had just completed, I agreed. Thus began a three year full-time effort to redefine the nature of what stories are and how they work.

Few are those who have the luxury of being paid to spend three years sitting in a room pondering the mechanics of story structure to the exclusion of all else. But that was the situation I was provided.

We began with index cards and post-it notes, sticking every individual concept (and there were hundreds of them) all over all four walls of my office, and later of the entire conference room!

Seeing it all spread out like that made it possible to note certain patterns and connections among some of these notions. We began to see that psychology played a large part in stories.

This came about by Chris asking a crucial question: “If the Main Character (like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol) is actually the cause of the story’s problems, why can’t he see it and just change?”

Of course, this spoke of issues far beyond stories that were essential to our own psychological issues as a species.

We started to gather all the psychological material we had developed into one place on one of the walls. Some of it seemed to fit well with the main character, but other material, though clearly psychological in nature, seemed to pertain more to the story at large, though we had no idea what to make of this. There was no pattern that explained it.

One day, while staring for the nth hour at that wall, it just hit me – maybe the psychological material we had discovered in stories weren’t about just the main character – maybe they were about the story itself. Maybe the story itself had a psychology! In fact, perhaps story structure was a model of the story’s mind!

I ran down the hall to Chris’ office and hit him with the notion. As was his practice, he leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and fell into a meditative state, closing all else from his mind. After a few moments he sat upright and responded, “I believe you are right.”

From that point forward, everything we did was based on the Story Mind concept. We reorganized all of our material assuming that it referred to the psychology of the story’s mind. Suddenly, patterns appeared, relationships were suggested, and the various components we had discovered fell right into place.

Our arrangements became more and more complex until we found ourselves hard-pressed to make them work in a single chart. It was then that we tried putting the cards in levels, placing “smaller” units under larger umbrella units into which they seemed to fall.

But how to depict this nested structure? Chris played around with pyramid shapes, I tried twisting mobius strips around donut-shaped toroids. Eventually, we settled on the four towers – not as the only shape of story structure, but as the most convenient shape with which to appreciate its internal mechanisms and relationships.

Later, I read that Crick and Watson (the two fellows that discovered the double-helix shape of DNA) didn’t find it through observation. At the time, the best imagery available of DNA was made by bombarding DNA’s crystalline form with X-Rays.

But Crick and Watson had a gut feeling that the shape of “live” DNA was more elegant, perhaps some sort of spiral. They decided to play with a number of alternative shapes as candidates that might explain all the properties that had been observed about DNA. To this end, they ordered a set of custom-made industrial “tinker-toys” which were used by chemists to illustrate molecular bonds.

They play around with various combination until, while building a ladder shape, they twisted it to form the now-familiar double-helix. As soon as they actually saw this representation, then new intuitively that it was correct and ran off to share their work with colleagues.

Chris and I unknowingly followed the same process. In the years that followed, we came to the conclusion that the towers are like the crystalline form of DNA – it represents a mind’s psychology at rest. But the mind is a machine made of time – every component, every gear and widget is actually a process.

When you put it into motion to create a “live” model, like DNA it becomes a helix, but in the case of story structure it forms a quad-helix, rather than a double one.

That’s about as deep as I want to go into how the Dramatica Chart developed in the first place. But, as a special treat for those of you who are gluttons for punishment, here’s an explanation of the workings of the structure, conceptually (for now!).

Where to begin without getting all technical-ish… Well, that’s a good start already!

Okay. The Dramatica Chat has four levels. And it has four Towers. What do these represent? The four towers represent the four key elements of our minds. Just as DNA is made up of four bases: adenine (abbreviated A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T), the structure of the Story Mind is made up of four bases: knowledge (abbreviated K), thought (T), ability (A) and desire (D).

Knowledge is the Mass of the mind. Thought is the mind’s Energy. Ability is the equivalent of Space and Desire is the counterpart to Time.

Just as mass and energy can relate in a simple way, such as when force slams one billiard ball into another, thought can rearrange knowledge and bring disparate pieces of knowledge together or move them apart.

Mass and energy can also interact in a more complex manner in which, for example, a small amount of mass can release a tremendous amount of energy in a nuclear explosion. Similarly, Knowledge and thought can interact so that a small amount of knowledge can generate an awful lot of thought (and conversely, it take a lot of thought to create a single bit of true knowledge!)

Ability is like space insofar as space defines the edges of what exists from what does not. Ability defines what we know from what we don’t know. It determines how much of anything is known vs. how much is unknown. It is from this that calculation that our minds assess our ability.

Desire is functions in the mind as Time does in the universe. Desire does not exist without a comparative between what was, what is, and what may be, just as time does not exist without an appreciation of past, present, and future.

So, the four towers are Knowledge, Thought, Ability, and Desire. (Which is which and why is for a later discussion. This, after all, is just an introductory section for a conversational book about story structure!)

But, the four levels represent Mass, Energy, Space, and Time directly. The four dimensions of the outer world are reflected by the four dimensions of the inner world. In fact, each set is a reflection of the other with neither being the origin.

Existence cannot be understood wholly from either a material or immaterial perspective. Perception is required to enable existence, and vice versa. Thus, the Dramatica chart isn’t just some stupid cutesy little made-up list of a few dramatic concepts. Nope. Its actually a material/immaterial continuum in which all that exists can be described by its co-ordinates within the construct.

Now, before I start sounding like the “Architect” from the Matrix Trilogy (assuming it is not too late already), we’ll put these topics to rest for a while and return to our happy-go-lucky free-wheelin’ conversational introduction to Dramatica Theory. So there.

Definitive Scientific Article on Dramatica Theory

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