Category Archives: Dramatica

Dramatica’s Semantics Explained

Some words about semantics…

The terminology used in Dramatica is extremely precise.  Each word is designed to convey a very particular meaning.  But this creates a number of problems from a rather obtuse lexicon to an unfamiliar taxonomy resulting in an almost impenetrable syntax.

See what I mean?  Even just talking about Dramatica’s semantics is something of a brain tilt!  So, my task in this article is to explain the purpose of all the different kinds of complex language in the theory and then provide a perspective from which all those words become tools, rather than obstacles.  To that end, let us begin….

Part One – Classification of Concepts (Taxonomy)

To start with, it is important to note that when we developed the Dramatica theory, we didn’t come to the process with a whole bucket of preconceptions about how structure worked, tried to impose them on stories, and then slapped tricky names on them to obfuscate the issues.  (It would be cool if we had, but we didn’t.)  Rather, we intentionally didn’t read or study any other previous theories of story structure, just so we could approach the field with fresh eyes and open minds.

So, we looked for patterns – things that existed in stories and processes that drove them.  We identified the things as being the building blocks of dramatics, the elements of structure.  We identified the processes as the forces that arranged those building blocks, the dynamics of structure.

As these concepts started to pile up, we began to organize them, just to keep it all from becoming a confusing mess.  We soon discovered that things were naturally falling into four broad categories: Structure, Dynamics, How Structure and Dynamics relate to one another, and How to Use Structure and Dynamics to build the underlying dramatic backbone or foundation of a story.  Let me take just a brief moment to elucidate on each of these four categories…

Structure

Here we grouped all of the dramatic building blocks of a story – the elements that make up character, plot, theme, and genre.  The end result was the now-familiar Dramatica Table of Story Elements.  Here’s a link to a downloadable PDF copy, if you don’t already have one (and, for that matter, even if you do, it is still a link):

Dramatica Story Structure Chart

As you can see, it is rather reminiscent of the good ol’ Periodic Table of Elements besmirched by generations of chemistry and physics students.  This similarity is not surprising.  Just as the chemical elements are organized in families of like traits, so too the Dramatica Table groups the elements of structure into families as well.  And just as the chemical elements can be combined to create all manner of substances, so too can the Dramatica elements be combined to create the chemistry of characters, plot, theme and genre.

I’ll return to the chart a little later to talk about the specific names of the elements and why they were chosen, but first let’s examine the remaining three categories into which we placed our dramatic concepts as we developed the theory….

Dynamics

Here we grouped  the forces that drove the story – such things as whether the main character would eventually change its essential nature or remain steadfast to its long-held ideals, and whether the effort to achieve the story goal would ultimately end in success or failure.  As with the elements in the structure chart, the dynamics, handily enough, also self-organize in sub-groups or families.  The most familiar of these dynamics (and arguably the most powerful) eventually became known as the 12 Essential Questions (a nice marketing phrase) and you can easily delve into them with a simple search on the internet.

By the time we were done, we had discovered, organized and named several dozen dynamics, each of which is something of a unique point of view from which the elements of structure can be explored.

Relationship of Structure and Dynamics

Our third category held all the dramatica concepts that explored how structure and dynamics could be fitted together to create the jelled structure of a specific story.  In other words, we found that structure just says what the pieces are, dynamics is the set of instructions for how they will come into play, and when you put them together in a particular way you end up the form of a particular story.  Not surprisingly, we called that a Storyform.  Rats!  I’ve jumped ahead and described an actual word.  Well, no matter, there will be plenty more of that to come.  For now, suffice it to say that everything from Acts and Scenes to Points of View and Perspectives fall into this category.

Usage

In our fourth box for story stuff we tossed all of the techniques we discovered for how to actually go about choosing which dynamic to be attached to which structural element in order to get a precise effect in the completed story.  We found four stages (or aspects) of communication between author and audience and identified many creative operations that could be applied in each of those four.

Part Two – Vocabulary (Lexicon)

Now we get down to the nitty gritty of how and why specific words were chosen for different kinds of things.  I’ll do this by using examples  from the Dramatica chart.

First, look at the Dramatica Table of Story Elements (and if you didn’t bother downloading it earlier, you might as well stop reading now, or just bite the bullet and download the sucker).  You’ll note that the highest, most broad-stroke level the Table is divided into four families, each identified by a big boldface block letter name – Universe, Physics, Mind, and Psychology.

Now why in blazes are those names there?  Where in the world did we come up with such things in reference to story structure?  I’ll tell you.

When discovering all the new concepts we talked about in part one, in the structure category we had a whole jumble of words that described human qualities.  Things like faith, denial, learning, or manner of thinking.  At first we thought they were all of the same “weight” – that is to say, that you could put each of these qualities onto a different index card and then just use them almost as topics or aspects of human nature that came into play like playing cards in the course of a story.

But as we began to discover more of these qualities in story and to start to organize them, we discovered that some of them were traits we used to examine ourselves and some we used to interact with our environment.  So, we considered each trait individually to determine whether it belonged in the set of those that looked inward or those that looked outward.

Now we had two groups of traits.  The outward looking one we called “Universe” and the inward looking one we called “Mind.”  Why?  There is an old saying – “What’s Mind? No matter.  What’s Matter? Never mind.”  And that’s pretty much what we were thinking.  Each trait either pertained to something of the physical world or something of the mental one, hence, Universe and Mind.

As for the traits in each of these two groups, we found two interesting things.  One, they weren’t all the same weight.  in fact, some traits were like family names, and other traits were like members of that family.  When working in the Mind group, for example, it is filled with the mental processes we use to solve problems or work things through.  And sometimes certain areas of consideration are just parts of an even larger kind of consideration.  That larger consideration is an umbrella – a family name – for the similarity of the smaller kinds of considerations that fell within it – that made it up, just as individual member of the Smith family all have individual identities, yet also have roles within the family structure at large, making them all Smiths in on to their own identities.  In the Periodic Table of Elements, you have families such as the Rare Earth elements and the Noble Gases (like Argon and Neon) – similar enough to share a family name, individual enough to be separate elements.

The Dramatica Table works much the same.  If you scroll down through your downloaded PDF of the table to page 6, you’ll find a more “3D” view of the table, showing families and sub-families on different levels.  For example, you’ll see in the upper left that the Universe Class (as we call it – a class of elements, as one might classify plant or animal species) is divided into four sub-families: Past, Present, Future, and Progress.  Those sub-families appear in the second level down.  And each of those, in turn, is made up of even smaller (or more detailed) kinds of considerations at the third level.  And finally, you arrive at the bottom fourth level at which you encounter the quintessential elements of which all families are ultimately comprised.

For the moment, let’s go back up to the level just beneath Mind (the class in the lower right of the 3D table: Memory, Conscious, Subconscious, and Preconscious.  To show you how the chart works and why the names in it were chosen, note that the word Memory in the Mind class is in the same relative position to Mind (upper left) as the word Past in Universe (also upper left).  What this is saying is that Past is to Universe as Memory is to Mind.  In other words, position in the chart is indicative of semantic relationship.

Let’s put that in far simpler terms…  When we organized all the elements of structure into families and subfamilies we found that a pattern emerged (and this is the second interesting thing about Universe and Mind I earlier promised to explore): for every element (human trait) in Universe, there was a corresponding trait in Mind.  There was a one to one correlation!  Another example, Present is to Universe as Conscious is to Mind.  Each one deals with the momentary nature of the here and now, one outward-looking, the other inward-looking.

Well now.  Armed with this understanding, we began to organize and re-organize all of the various traits (elements) we had discovered, placing them in identical relative positions to each family and sub-family name.  When we were done, we realized two things: One, that in some cases we had two elements that were really the same thing, just with a different name.  So, we picked the best name and put that in the chart.  Two, that sometimes there was a term in one of the classes with no corresponding term in the other class.  Therefore, we needed to figure out what was that equivalent term that was missing, and then to give it a name.

We did this by looking at the neighbors of the missing term and comparing them to the neighbors of the term that did appear in the other class.  We could begin to sense the semantic difference between the existing term and those around it, and then to calculate what the missing term in the other class would have to be (conceptually) to fill that same space and function.  And so, bit by bit, we were eventually able to discard all the redundant terms and to fill in all the holes with appropriate names.

The end result was a balanced table in which a complete spectrum of human considerations had been mapped.  And position in the table indicated meaning.  In fact (for you mathematically inclined folk) you can draw a vector (line) between any two terms anywhere in the whole table and if you move that line so it connects two other terms completely unrelated to the first pair, the semantic difference between the second two terms will be identical to the semantic difference between the first two.  And that line doesn’t have to be just vertical or horizontal – it can be at any vector angle that connects two terms – even ones in different positions within families and at different levels.

Now that’s a hell of a thing.  Imagine!  We had a chart that mapped all of the principal kinds of considerations we make in our minds, organized into families and named and arranged with such precision that meaning from one space to the next equalled the same distance in meaning, regardless of where it occurred in the table.

We found about one third to one half of those terms in stories, then filled in the holes by comparing similar terms in each class and looking to the neighbors of each to cross-reference what the missing terms ought to be.  So, hundreds of generations of storyteller, though trial and error, had gotten us so close to an accurate map of the human mind that we were able to carry the baton the last leg, fill in the rest of the details in that sketchy image, and arrive at a precise Table of Story Elements.

Oh, and for those new to Dramatica who are wondering why I haven’t said anything about those other two classes in the Table (Physics and Psychology) – well, they were two of the holes we filled in.  At first we thought is was just external and internal with Universe and Mind.  And then we realized that it was also about seeing things in terms of space and time.  Simply put, when we take a flash-photo of our environment, we see the fixed state of things.  That’s what Universe is all about.  And then we turn that camera on ourselves, we get a photo of the fixed state of our minds – things like biases, attitudes, preconceptions or, at a most basic level, our mind set.  But, the mind doesn’t just exist as a bunch of attitudes.  It is also in constant motion, figuring things out, coming up with plans.  So, the mind is partly made up of relatively unchanging things, and also of processes.  Similarly, the external world is partly about how things are arranged (space) and the processes at work (time).

Back to the Table, we eventually had come to refine our notion of Universe and Mind by adding Physics and Psychology so that rather than lumping the substance and processes of external and internal into just two classes, we split it all out, so that Universe is an external state, Physics an external process, Mind and internal state, and Psychology an internal process.  If you stop to think about it, there’s nothing we can consider that can’t be described at the top most level as being either an internal or external state or process.  And that’s why those four class names are at the very top of the consideration table.

It should be pretty obvious that in such a refined chart, choosing just the right word so it fits in its family from the top down, matches the other same-positioned words in the other three classes and is even so precise as to be able to create those vectors of semantic distance I mentioned earlier – well, it was hard.  It took us about two years of full-time effort to polish up the vocabulary with the utmost in precision.

And herein lies both a strength and a weakness.  As it turns out, the English language isn’t evenly spread around all potential meanings.  In fact, it glops together in places where there are many words for the same thing, and then is quite threadbare in other places where there is actually no word at all for a meaning that clearly exists in a class because it exists in the other three.  What to do?

After much discussion, we decided there were only two things we could do: One, find the nearest word to the meaning we were trying to describe and then redefine that word more specifically to our target meaning.  Two, if there was no word of nearby meaning, just invent one of our own.  Depending on the situation, we employed both methods.

Of course, if you are redefining and inventing words, no one is going to know what you are talking about.  So, as part of the effort, we wrote a 150 page dictionary of every single term, including ones of common usage and understanding plus all those redefined and all those invented.  Problem is, so many words and so many alterations for the common understanding….  It creates quite wall to scale if you want to use the theory or the Dramatica software that implements the theory as a tool for story development.

One solution is just to require every user to learn our definitions.  While this is a perfect solutions for accuracy, it isn’t very practical as it makes the learning curve WAY too high to sell more copies than a handful.  So, over the years, some key terms have been replaced with more common usage ones, such as Mind becoming Attitude or Psychology becoming Manipulation.

Now for most story purposes, these work okay.  And this is because most structure is innately sloppy.  After all, no one reads a book or goes to a movie to experience a flawless structure.  Rather, we wish to excite our passions.  And, driven by our emotional involvement (especially in the storytelling, subject matter and style) we are apt to not even notice a few slightly false beats, as long as they are in the ballpark.  In short, show us a good time and we’ll forgive a few things that don’t quite ring true.  For purists, however, the original terminology is still there in the software and you can swap it in and out ’til your heart’s content.  There’s even two different versions of the Table of Story Elements – the accurate one I provided the link to and the revised, less accurate, more accessible one that I won’t provide a link to because I’m a freakin’ purist, okay!!!

There’s a move on now to make the software even more accessible by providing the capability to employ even more conversational and subject matter oriented language instead of the original terms for purposes of creating a storyform structure in the software.  This also has advantages and disadvantages….

Consider if a story is about a problem caused by trash that is left all over the place.  Well, the new approach would ask you what the problem of your story was and you’d type in “trash.”  The software would bring up all the common phrases that had the word “trash” in them.  So, it might then ask you, is your problem about the fact there is trash all over the place, or that people are leaving trash all over the place?  Most writers would just answer “yes” and have a hard time picking between the two because, in common usage, they seem pretty much the same.

But, if the problem is that the trash is all over, it is a Universe (fixed state) problem, while if the problem is that people are dropping trash all over, then it is a Physics (activity) problem.  In other words, picking one of the common usage phrases over the other could throw your whole story into a completely different class, which would alter where your main character was coming from, the kinds of story goals that might be appropriate to such a story and so on.

Now, add to that a long succession of such choices, each one based more on the subject matter than on the underlying structural position indicated by the original precise nomenclature and you can see the errors in meaning multiply until the final structure presented by the software bears no resemblance to story the user originally wanted to tell.

Still, using common language makes the theory and software so much more accessible an less daunting.  And so, many folks who would never buy the product with the difficult original names might be wholly drawn in with the replacement phrases, thereby getting over the rejection hurdle and giving them time to explore, learn, and eventually come to use and understand the accurate original language.

So, it is something of a paradox – the more accurate the terminology, the fewer people will try, stick with, or come to use these valuable concepts.  But, the more easily accessible the language becomes, the more inaccuracies will come into play.

The solution, of course, is that common language must be presented with the accurate terms side by side to at least provide guidance at the time the choices are made.  And, there needs to be a statement at the very beginning that, as with any complex endeavor, there are levels of skill and accuracy one can achieve.  You don’t learn about scarlet, cardinal and vermillion before you learn about red.  And you can do an awful lot with red before you find within yourself the need for any of those more refined colors.

And, perhaps it is just a justification on my part, but even with the inaccurate accessible language, Dramatica still provides a clearer picture of the underlying structure and how it works than any other system yet devised.

Part Three – Grammar (Syntax)

Now this section is going to be REALLY short – mostly because I’ve made my points and also because I’ve been writing this in one long marathon session and I’m getting tired and hungry.  So I’ll keep it to this – the grammar of story structure describes how you go about creating dramatic sentences.  In other words, every time you write a scene, movement, sequence or act you are structuring the dramatic equivalents of phrases, sentences, paragraphs and arguments.

Discovering the exact nature of those “rules” in story structure was another rather intense quest on our part, but it was only possible because we already had the Table of Story Elements to serve as a map.  In terms of semantics, suffice it to say that many of these rules were never observed before, and so a whole new set of terms was required to describe the parts and process of how dramatic elements are assembled in such a guided yet flexible manner as to create form without formula.

Conclusion and Summary

I imagine by now you’ve got the idea.  We weren’t going out of our way to make Dramatica difficult or to put any layers of confusion into the mix to mask errors or faults with our model.  Quite the opposite.  We went out of our way to be accurate and complete and, in so doing, could not help but make the learning of Dramatica a daunting prospect.

Twenty years after we began this effort, none of the underlying concepts has changed.  Once the model was originally fully built, it was both elegant, complete and true.  It is only the wording we use to describe it and the concessions we make to provide the easiest possible entry into it that alter as we consider progressively better means of striking a balance between understanding and usability.

Fair enough.

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: Out of Balance

Here’s a note from a Dramatica user and my reply.

(Careful, highly technical discussion follows that bears little connection to stories or writing)

Dramatica user:

Just as an experiement, I cleared the storyform, and opened the plot progression screen. I was struggling with whether my MC’s Signpost 1 was The Present or Contemplation — although I was sure that his Signpost 4 was either The Past or Memories.

When I gave him The Present as Signpost 1, and then The Past as Signpost 4, it reduced the number of possible storyforms to 288.

However, when I assigned Contemplation to his Signpost 1, and Memories to Signpost 4, ZING! Dramatica filled in all the other signposts for all throughlines, and the number of possible storyforms was only 32!

I went back to Signpost 1 being The Present, to see if I could get the same thing to happen with any of the other possible options for Signpost 4, but to no avail.

So, what is unique about the Contemplation and Memories combination? I’m truly interested in knowing what is going on in Dramatica’s feverish mind! 🙂

My reply:

Sorry to say, I can’t answer that one off the top of my head. Not to be impertinent, but that’s why we built the Story Engine. What I’m saying is that the complexities of the engine as to “why” any given combination might come up is a lot like looking at a pattern on a Rubik’s Cube and trying to answer how it got to that state.

Here’s a conceptual clue, though. Not everything in the Story Engine is symmetrical. You’d think it would be, at first blush, but it isn’t (and in a moment I’ll explain why). It is because of the asymmetry that you can think of it as an unbalance tire. Depending on your speed, instead of turning in a consistent manner the tire will develop a wobble under certain conditions – like an off-balanced washing machine in the spin cycle. What you are seeing with the different degrees of constraint is the product of such an intentional, designed-in unbalance.

Now, why would we do that? Or more to the point, why would Dramatica do that? Well, this comes down to the fact that the current implementation of Dramatica is a “K-based” system. As you are likely aware, Dramatica’s model is partially built from permutations of a KTAD quad – Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire. So, each should be treated equally to accurately represent all four “bases” in a story’s DNA.

But, in a four-demensional universe, you can’t monitor a four-dimensional constantly re-balancing model because you have to hold at least one of those items in check in order to use it as the yard-stick against which the movements of the other three are measured. It is kind of like trying to plot the up and down movements of the four corners of a sheet of plywood balancing on rock at the center. All four corners will move up and down so that the plywood maintains its integrity as a flat plane. From the outside, that’s easy to see. But we can’t step outside our own minds, which is what Dramatica is really a model of.

So, we are always in the position of actually standing on the plywood and moving up and down with it. From that point of view, the movement of each corner relative to the ground is no longer a simple predictive wave, but becomes a complex “unbalanced” series of up and down movements and no longer seems even from corner to corner because the corner you are standing on has been removed from the equation.

Therefore, in order to actually see the model work in four dimensions, we have to pick a corner upon which to stand. In the software model, that corner is K (Knowledge) since our Western logic-based mentalities are all geared to the definitive. When you choose to “bias” the model toward K, you can then use the engine to predict, because the bias is consistent from side to side and top to bottom. But, that bias has to show up some-place. And now we return to our unbalanced tire analogy. Most everything in a biased system will appear no different in operation than any other part. But, like the tire, under certain conditions of speed and road, you can see the wobble.

This wobble occurs because the human mind tries to keep things apparently flat and level, regardless of the bias. In a quad, we like to see it as flat. But, in fact, the temporal journey around the quad is a progression, and every time we move (even mentally) from one quadrant to the next, we also get a vertical rise. This is because it is not really a quad, but more like a “Slinky” kids toy (that spiral of coiled wire that walks down stairs). From the end, it looks like a circle. From the side (when stretched out) it looks like a sine wave. But it is really a helix, when seen from a 3/4 angle. So too, the quad form is like looking at the Slinky of our minds from the end, compressing time out of the picture as we seek (in a K-based system) to flatten it out so we can parse and define each piece.

But that vertical rise is still in there. (That’s why the Dramatica table has four levels and is not just a flat chart.) But since we mentally treat each item in the quad as being on the same plane as the next, we get an easier understanding of it, but by the time we get to the fourth item, we’ve been sweeping that vertical rise under the carpet until it has risen up so much that we can’t ignore it any more. So, we do a course-correction and throw all that extra vertical stuff into the fourth and final item in the quad. That, by the way, is why many quads seem to have three items that are quite similar and one that seems kind of “out of left field” – like “Past” Present” “Future” and “Progress” – Progress doesn’t quite fit because it is picking up all that vertical material in one quadrant. (Imagine now, how long it took to create the Dramatica chart so that this “fourth item difference” was consistent in every quad, thereby creating a consistent bias across the whole breadth and depth of the model! – In fact, it took two years for that alone.)

Now, since we elected to employ a K-based system in order to conform as well as possible to our logic-based culture, the farther away you get from K, the more the wobble shows up. But, because we hide it for the first three items, it tends to be invisible (thereby giving similar story points similar effects on the model) until we get to that last quadrant where the inconsistency appears (just appears, not really) to run amok. In a K-based system of logic, the farthest thing away (and home to the greatest wobble) is the Desire Quadrant. And, Desire is the center of female mental sex (now called “holistic” problem solving in the current version of the Dramatica software).

As you are no doubt familiar, “Problem Solving Technique” (previously called “mental sex”) describes the overall operating system of the mind in two flavors – space-based and time-based. A space-based mind is most compatible with Knowledge-based logic. In fact, a K-based model is totally biased to make the most “intuitive sense” to a spatial mind. As such, most of the wobble (though not all) goes into the Dynamics, rather than the structure. So, very often, such a wobble will occur because of a choice made in the dynamic questions, but the reverberations of that wobble will show up structurally, just like a jet flying by might rattle your windows.

One of the most powerful wobbles, then, is created in the Mental Sex (Problem Solving Technique) area. Now, I can’t say that’s where your story’s wobble is coming from, but I can say that it is likely due to some element of your dynamics that tends more toward a temporal view of story than a spatial view.

Here’s a final clue for you – (speaking generally in a bell-curve sort of way) – many men see women as being 180 degrees apart in how they think. Many women see men as being only 90 degrees apart, thereby expecting men to easily get in touch with and express their feelings. But in fact, men and women are 270 degrees apart, meaning that while women have it right (90 degrees of difference) men also have it right because to get there you have to go the other way ’round the quad making the direction to connect 180 degrees of difference.)

So, as you can see, this kind of “apples and oranges” differences in thinking spreads out all over the model. And when the two mental operating systems come into conflict in a K-based model, the wobble develops and manifests itself as a different impact for what seems ought to be the same.

Sorry I couldn’t just give you a quick answer, but the question you asked is one of the most complex.

Hope it at least clarifies the issue.

Melanie

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.

Abandoning the Logic

Thought: For a long time, I’ve wanted to write a book entitled “Abandoning the Logic” about the fact that while half of what we are is driven by reason, the other equally important half embodies our purpose and meaning. There is as much understanding and as many conclusions to be gained by one as the other, but of different flavors and varieties.

In our Dramatica theory of story we often say, “You can’t become the same as someone else just by being as they are are; you also have to “not be” as they aren’t.” But our mind’s don’t easily focus on the negative space, and so we strive harder and harder to achieve by adding to the mix, never considering that the recipe may not be achievable that way because it has an ingredient that must not be there.

In Dramatica, we see characters who change by “starting” something new – adding a new trait they previously did not express. We also see characters who change by “stopping” something old – shedding an old trait they previously expressed.

This shows up in stories as characters who could solve their problem if only they would just…. Or, characters whose problem would be solved if only they just wouldn’t…. In the first case, the character needs a catalyst to get going. In the second, it needs an inhibitor to hold it back.

This same dynamic is harmonically reflected in the plot with two Dramatica story points called, not surprisingly, “Catalyst” and “Inhibitor.” The first acts like a gas pedal, accelerating the progress of the story forward. The second acts like a brake pedal, slowing the progress of the story down.

We see these dynamics everywhere in life, and yet, because ours is a culture based on observation, definition and reason, we focus on only one half of this dynamic couple – we explore, map, build our understandings and make our decisions on what we see, never considering that half the time our answers can only be found in what lies between the elements of the delineated world.

Have you ever seen that picture of a vase that turns out to be an optical illusion in which the “negative space” carved out on either side of the shape of the vase presents the silhouettes of two men facing each other? So what is the picture really of, the vase or the faces? Naturally, the answer is “both.”

And herein lies the problem. We look outward and see things – situations and activities (external states and processes) – then we look inside and see the in-betweens – attitudes and cogitations (internal states and processes), BUT we seldom look outward for the in-betweens and inward for the elements.

Dramatica broke new ground in seeking to apply logic to our feelings, to map the mind’s processes in a “Table of Story Elements” by casting each process as an object – a building block of the mental/emotional flow – so that mental equations might be written to describe the manner in which each process is called in a particular order to create the DNA code of each individual consideration.

Of course, this is well hidden under the skirt of story structure since our market was writers not psychologists. But it is there. In fact, we codified it aside from the story use and called it Mental Relativity, for it describes the relationships among Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire (the four essential “bases” from which all mental processes are built) the same way physics describes the relationships among Mass, Energy, Space and Time.

Knowledge is the Mass of the mind. Thought is the Energy. (This is conceptual of course – describing the ways in which they relate, not intended to equate them in substance).

An example of this relationship can be seen in the following… Mass and Energy can relate in two primary ways. First, Energy can be attached to Mass. We see this in the kinetic energy associated with a billiard ball in motion, for example. But, Mass can also be transmuted into energy, as in thermonuclear explosions.

Similarly, Knowledge can be moved around and assembled into large constructs by the expenditure of Thought. In other words, Thought can be attached to Knowledge to put it in motion. But, Knowledge and Thought can also be transmuted one into the other. But, as with E=MC2, it takes a lot of Thought to create a solid piece of Knowledge and, conversely, a single bit of Knowledge can generate an awful lot of Thought. Hence, the reason we named the psychology behind Dramatica “Mental Relativity.”

But having turned the same definitive techniques we employ in the external world upon our own minds, we have still left one final realm of our existence unexplored – to map out our external world in terms of the in-betweens – to see substance as process and time as an object, to document external processes as feelings and external situations as moods.

Now I realize this sounds pretty far out there. And it is. It it in the last place our logic would look – the last place it has looked. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced that logic can work in that world. It may be outside the realm of the set of real numbers and into the realm of the imaginary ones, such as the square root of -1.

Yet that, in and of itself, does not invalidate its importance. Rather, it elevates the value of seeking to understand (or, perhaps that is the wrong word) to “resonate” with the digital in terms of the analog.

This, I believe, is the last frontier of our efforts to understand ourselves and our world. And, quite frankly, I’d love to put some footprints in it in an area where no one has tread before.

Having spent a career employing the logical method, I’ve yearned to explore the passionate and to document it in a language not yet invented. But, time being what it is, and there being precious little of it, I figured I’d just give y’all the title and the concept for now so it will not be an idea wholly unexpressed. And if I ever do get both the time and the motivation, I’ll tackle the book itself.

Ability – What it Means to Dramatica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ability – right….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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