Category Archives: The Story Mind

How stories and life relate

The Story Mind (Part 6) – Audience Reach

But who is that audience? And for that matter, does a single story structure affect all audience members equally? Let’s find out….

In Dramatica, there are some story points that deal directly with the structure and others that pertain to the collective impact of a number of story points. Audience Reach is one of these combined dramatics. It is also called an Audience Story

Point because it is concerned with the kind of reach the story has into the audience.

Specifically, it describes whether your readers/audience will empathize or sympathize with your Main Character. Empathy is when your readers/audience identify with your Main Character. Sympathy is when they care about your main character but feel more as if they are standing right behind the character, rather than in its shoes.

When audience members empathize, they suspend their disbelief and emotionally occupy the Main Character’s position in the story. When audience members sympathize, it seems to them as if the emotional maelstrom of the story revolves around the Main Character, making him or her the Central character of the story.

Audience Reach is determined by the effects of two story points: Story Limit and Main Character Mental Sex. Limit describes the story dynamics that force the story to a conclusion. Mental Sex describes whether your Main Character thinks like a man or a woman.

Story Limit has two variations – Time Lock and Option Lock. Time Lock stories are like the motion picture “48 Hours” in which a police detective has exactly two days before he has to return to jail a convict who is the key to solving another crime. When the time is up, the story reaches its conclusion.

Option Lock stories are similar to Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” in which a transformed prince must make someone love him before the last petal falls from an enchanted rose or he will remain a beast forever. When the last petal falls, the conclusion is reached.

Main Character Mental Sex also has two variations – Male and Female. Mental Sex does not refer to the physical gender of the Main Character but only to its mental gender. (Because none of us truly know how the opposite sex thinks, authors often can’t help but write all of their characters as thinking in their own sex, regardless of the character’s physical gender.)

Examples can be seen in the motion picture “Aliens” in which the Main Character (Ripley) was actually written for a man and changed only the character’s dialog when the role was cast with Sigourney Weaver. Alternatively, in the movie “The Hunt for Red October”, Jack Ryan is a female mental sex Main Character as he solves problems intuitively and emotionally, rather than by observation and logic. As one might expect, male and female readers/audience members empathize or sympathize with a Main Character for different reasons.

For men, they will empathize with Male Mental Sex Main Characters and sympathize with Female Mental Sex Main Characters, regardless of which limit is

invoked – time lock or option lock. Conversely, women will empathize in an option lock but only sympathize in a time lock, regardless of what mental sex the Main Character possesses.

Why the difference? Well, the reasons are in the physiology of the brain, and too deep to go into here. If you are really interested, you’ll find a complete description of what causes the mental differences between mean and women later in this program in a lesson devoted specifically to mental sex.

Still, for a quick visual, imagine a plain old clock face. Imagine that men’s minds sit at noon, and women at 9 o’clock. Thinking clockwise, men see women as being three quarters of an hour away. Women see men as only being one quarter of an hour away. This serves to illustrate that the sexes really aren’t opposite, but are more accurately sideways to each other.

When men and women converse, they are often speaking apples and oranges and are not really in conflict or disagreement. They simply don’t have a means of seeing things the way the other sex does. So, it is not surprising that men’s empathies might be drawn to those who think like them (also at noon on the clock) while women (seeing men as just one quarter hour away) would be more affected by the situation in which the main character finds itself. For women, and option lock is more like the way they think – trying to balance all the elements at once, just as in their own lives. But time locks (to women) are just deadlines and seem imposed from the outside rather than open to some degree of control.

Okay, let’s put that behind and see what we can do with this information.

If you want to create a story in which both men and women empathize with the Main Character, then you will want to limit your story with an option lock but employ a Male Mental Sex Main Character. On the other hand, if you want to explore a despicable Main Character, you may not want to disturb your readers/audience by making them empathize with such a cad. In such a case, you can ensure your readers/audience will only sympathize by writing a Female Mental Sex Main Character in a time lock story. The danger is that since nobody empathizes, nobody really gets into the story and it doesn’t sell very well.

Naturally, the other two combinations can also exist – Men Empathize (Male Mental Sex) and women Sympathize (Time Lock) or Women Empathize (Option Lock) and men only sympathize (Female Mental Sex).

You can predict whether a book or movie will attract more men or women, just by seeing who empathizes. Hollywood tends to favor Male Mental Sex / Option Lock stories most often. This has the entire audience empathizing, and therefore (since far more mixed mental sex couples go to movies that single individuals or same mental sex couples) it ensures the largest percentage of the audience is

personally involved in the movie, thereby increasing its box office (all artistic merit aside).

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica

The Story Mind (Part 5) – The Grand Argument Story

Over the years a number of my students have asked how the Dramatica chart can possibly describe the fullness of the human experience, especially since we, as a species, seem to have an unlimited supply of issues?

The quick answer is that even in chemistry there are a limited number of elements yet they combine to create the vast variety of materials in our world. Similarly, we only have a limited number of kinds of issues; they just manifest themselves in different combinations.

But there’s an even better (or at least a more technical) explanation how the vast panorama of our hearts and minds can be captured in a chart of finite size. Bear with me on this, and fasten your mental seat belts….

It is a well-known psychological fact that short-term memory can hold seven items (+ or – 2). We have seven days in a week, seven is considered a magic or lucky number, phone numbers are seven digits (minus the area code).

Why is seven so important? And more important still, what does this have to do with story and the size of the Dramatica Chart? As described above, the Dramatica Chart is built from eight items – the four external dimensions and the four internal ones. And that’s about as big a thought as the mind can hold at one time.

As an illustration, try this thought experiment. Picture a piece of twine. Easy to do. Now, picture that twine twisted along its length like a candy-cane. Again, pretty easy. Next, imagine that twisted twine again twisted into a spiral shape like a slinky. In your mind’s eye, you can probably still see the twists on the twine itself, even while you are also seeing the length of twine wrapped into that spiral shape.

Now, take that slinky-line twine, and spiral the spiral. You know, like you used to do as a kid. You take a slinky, stretch it out, then wrap it around your leg in a spiral. At this point, though it take a bit of work, you can probably still see the candy-cane twists along the body of the twine, even while simultaneously observing the slinky shape of the overall length of the twine and the bigger spiral as it wraps around your leg.

Finally, remove your leg from the center of the largest spirals and assume the twine holds its shape. Try to go one more level and twist the spiraled spiral into a larger spiral, even while maintaining the candy cane twists on the twine itself.

If you are like most people, you’ve reached your limit. You can focus on any part of this construct and see it clearly, as well as the twists one level larger and one level smaller. But to try and picture a three dimensional object that is twisting at four different levels – well that’s seven things to consider and is the limit of short- term memory.

Go any larger and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who could see the smallest twist all the way to the largest at the same time. Theoretically, it is not possible for a mind that exists in a three dimensional brain to go that far.

Why? Well, we have four dimensions in the external world and four dimensions in the inner world. (They really all exist in our minds, but we have four kinds of external measurements we can take to see how things are – Mass, Energy, Space, and Time – and four internal measurements available – Knowledge, Thought, Ability, and Desire.

This gives us eight places to look. But, at any given moment, our mind – the seat of our consciousness – has to be somewhere. So, our “self” sits on one of these areas to look at the other seven. That gives us one place to be and seven slots we can fill with information. And that is why our short-term memory is just seven items.

Getting back to the Dramatica Chart, because it provides all eight dimensions, it can produce with it as much detail as we can hold in our minds at one time without losing track of the big picture.

Recall our discussion of how a story structure needed to include all the ways the audience might consider to solve the story’s problem in order to prove to their satisfaction that the author’s purported solution is the best of the worst. What is to keep the audience from coming up with an infinite number of alternatives? Simply, for any given problem, the capacity of the audience mind is limited by the same seven dimensions (plus one to stand on) factor. If you satisfy all the potential solutions within those eight dimensions, you satisfy the audience because anything larger or small that goes beyond that scope would seem unreasonable or not pertinent.

In Dramatica Theory we call this limit, the Size of Mind Constant. And, we call any story that covers all the reasonable ways in which a given problem might be solved a Grand Argument Story.

Author’s arguments may be insufficient or may be overstated, but a Grand Argument story is one in which the argument is just big enough and no bigger than necessary to cover all reasonable alternatives as defined by the size of mind constant.

And that limit? Well, that’s what determines that the Dramatica Chart is four towers, each with four levels.

So leaving theory behind (for quite a while we hope) all you need to do as an author is explore your story’s problem to full extent of the Dramatica Chart and your argument will be exactly the right size to convince any audience.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica

The Story Mind (Part 4) – The Dramatica Chart

Excerpted from the Book ”Dramatica Unplugged”
By Melanie Anne Phillips, Co-creator of Dramatica

A part of the Dramatica Theory book, we developed the Dramatica Chart of Story Elements (which is not unlike the Periodic Table of Elements in chemistry). Download a free copy of the Dramatica Chart at Storymind.com. You can use it to create the chemistry of your characters, plot, theme, and genre.

The Dramatica chart contains all the psychological processes that must exist in a Story Mind. In fact, every human mind shares all of these processes. What makes one mind different from another is not the kinds of mental activities in each, but rather how the activities are interconnected.

Just as in chemistry, various elements might be combined to create an infinite number of compounds, so too the dramatic elements of the Dramatica Chart can be combined to create virtually all valid psychological structures for stories.

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

Universe is an external state

Physics, an external process

Mind is an internal state

Psychology, an internal process.

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

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

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

(Note that if having cancer is a problem – such as people being prejudiced against you because you are cancerous – that is a situation or Universe problem because it is a steady or fixed state: a condition. But if it is the spread of the disease that we see as a problem, then it is a Physics-style activity problem. It is important not to assume content in a story falls into a particular class until you determine how that content is actually problematic.)

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

Psychology is the Physics of the mind – an internal process. A “Psychology Class” problem would be someone who makes a series of assumptions leading to difficulties, or someone whose self-image and confidence are eroding. (Again, note that having a negative self-image is a state of “Mind” whereas the erosion of one’s self-image is a process that must be stopped or even reversed, and would therefore be a Psychology problem.)

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

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

Back when we were naming the concepts in the Dramatica Theory, we were faced with a choice – to either use extremely accurate words that might be a bit off-putting or to use easily accessible words that weren’t quite on the mark. Ultimately we decided that the whole point of the theory was to provide an accurate way of predicting the necessary components of a sound story structure. Therefore, we elected to use the terms that were more accurate, even if they required a little study, rather than to employ a less accurate terminology that could be grasped right away.

Returning to the chart itself, it appears as four towers, each representing one of the four classes and each class having four levels. As we go down the levels from top to bottom we subdivide each kind of problem into smaller and smaller components, thereby refining our understanding of the very particular kind of problem at the core of any given story.

The top level, being the most broad, describes the structural aspects of genre. Genre (in the traditional sense) is largely a storytelling or content-driven realm. But genre is not immune to structure. In fact, as we shall see down the line genre must be built upon a solid structural foundation or it will flounder.

The second level, slightly more refined, deals with the dramatic components that are most associated with plot, especially at act resolution. That’s an odd term, so let’s define it. An act is the largest building block of plot. Each act has a particular kinds of concern that defines all the action that goes on in that act. For example, one act may deal with looking for a lost object, the next act with trying to obtain it, and the last act with bringing it back against steep odds.

“Resolution” is a term we use in Dramatica to describe how big a dramatic component is. The Genre “classes” cover the whole story since each story falls within a particular genre. But the acts change over the course of the story,

shifting from one concern in a given act to another in the next. Therefore, we say that the components of the Dramatica Chart in the second or act level, are of a smaller resolution. Just as the genre level components are called “classes,” the act level components are referred to as “types.” So, we have classes of genres and types of acts.

The third level has the greatest structural impact on a story’s theme. Each of these components is called a Variation, as in “variations of a theme.” The Variations are of an even smaller resolution, and therefore provide more detailed information about the story’s problem.

A story’s thematic conflicts can be mapped in the Variation level. Story-wise, variations are sequence sized. “Sequences” are smaller than acts and are usually comprised of a number of scenes that deal with a particular moral issue or ethical topic.

The fourth and lowest level of the chart provides the greatest resolution on a story’s problem. It is comprised of components called Elements (in reference to their indivisible nature) and has the greatest structural impact on characters.

It is here in the Element Level that we find the plethora of human traits that make up our motivations or drives. It is the interaction among characters representing these various drives that constitute the scenes of our story. So, we say that the Element Level is at scene resolution.

So, like nested dolls, scenes fall within sequences within acts within a genre. In this manner, the structure of a story can be understood not as a simple sequence as one would find in a tale, but rather as a complex mechanism built of wheels within wheels.

We’ll learn more about the Dramatica Chart and its workings later on, but for now, picture it as a cross between a three dimensional chess set, a Rubik’s Cube, and the Periodic Table of Elements, which can be used to build perfect story structures.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica

The Story Mind (Part 3) – A Story is an Argument

Excerpted from the Book “Dramatica Unplugged”
By Melanie Anne Phillips, Co-creator of Dramatica

So a tale is a simple linear path that the author promotes as being either a good or bad one to take, depending on the outcome. There’s a certain amount of power in that. It wouldn’t take our early storyteller long to realize that he didn’t have to limit himself to relating events that actually happened. Rather, he might carry things a step farther and create a fictional tale to illustrate the benefits or dangers of following a particular course.

That is the concept behind Fairy Tales and Cautionary Tales – to encourage certain behaviors and inhibit other behaviors based on the author’s belief as to the most efficacious courses of action in life.

But what kind of power could you get as an author if you were able to not merely say, “This conclusion is true for this particular case,” but rather “This conclusion is true for all such similar cases”?

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

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

That kind of statement has a lot more power to manipulate an audience. But, because you’ve only shown the one path (even though you are saying it is better than any others) you are making a blanket statement.

An audience simply won’t sit still for a blanket statement. They’ll cry, “Foul!” They will at least question you. So, if our caveman sitting around the fire say, “Hey, this is the best of all possible paths,” the audience is going to say , “What about this other case? What if we tried this, this or this?”

If the author was able to successfully argue his case he would compare all the solutions the audience might suggest to the one he is touting and conclusively show that the promoted path is clearly the best (or worst). Or, a solution might be suggested that proves better than the author’s, in which case his blanket statement loses all credibility.

In a nutshell, for every rebuttal the audience voices, the author can attempt to counter the rebuttal until he has proven his case. Now, he wont’ have to argue every conceivable alternative solution – just the ones the audience brings up. And if he is successful, he’ll eventually exhaust their suggestions or simply tire them out to the point they are willing to accept his conclusions.

But the moment you record a story as a song ballad, a stage play, or a motion picture (for example), then the original author is no longer there to counter any rebuttals the audience might have to his blanket statement.

So if someone in the audience thinks of a potential way to resolve the problem and you haven’t addressed it in your blanket statement, they will feel there is a hole in your argument and that you haven’t made your case.

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

In order to do this, you must anticipate all the other ways the audience might consider solving the problem in question. In effect, you have include all the ways anyone might think of solving that problem. Essentially, you have to include all the ways any human mind might go about solving that problem. In so doing, you create a model of the mind’s problem-solving process: the Story Mind.

Now, no caveman ever sat down by a fire and said to himself, “I’m going to create an analogy to the mind’s problem-solving processes.” Yet in the process of successfully telling a story in a recorded art form (thereby showing that a particular solution is better than all other potential ones) the structure of the story becomes a model of psychology as an accidental byproduct.

Once this is understood, you can psychoanalyze your story. And you find that everything that is in the human mind is represented in some tangible form in a story’s structure.

That’s what Dramatica is all about. Once we had that Rosetta Stone, we set ourselves to documenting the psychology of story structure. We developed a model of this structure and described it in our book, Dramatica: A New Theory of Story.   While that book is detailed and complete, it is also written like a scientific paper.  For decades folks have been clamoring for less daunting guide to the theory – something that covers all the key points but in a more conversational tone.  Hence, this book.  Better late than never, eh?

The Story Mind (Part 2) – A Tale is a Statement

Excerpted from the Book “Dramatica Unplugged”
By Melanie Anne Phillips, Co-creator of Dramatica

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

So, if the Story Mind concept is real and valid, how would such a thing come to be? Here’s one possibility….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this way, our storyteller can “break” logic with a bridge of feeling, or violate a natural progression of feelings with a logical event that alters the mood. Very powerful techniques wrapped up in a very simple form of communication!
We know that the human heart cannot just jump from one emotion to another without going through essential emotional states in between. However, if you start with any given emotion, you might be able to jump to any one of a number of emotions next, and from any of those jump to others. But you can’t jump to all of them. If you could, then we all just be bobbing about from one feeling to another. There would be no growth and no emotional development.

As an analogy, look at Freud’s psycho-sexual stages of development or consider the seven stages of grief. You have to go through them in a particular order. You can’t skip over any. If you do, there’s an emotional mis-step. It has an untrue feeling to the heart.

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

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

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

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

The Story Mind (Part 1) – Introducing the Story Mind

Excerpted from the Book “Dramatica Unplugged”
By Melanie Anne Phillips, Co-creator of Dramatica

Prologue

Dramatica is a theory of story structure and a method of developing stories. Since its debut in 1991, hundreds of thousands of writers have studied and applied Dramatica’s concepts on novels, movies and television.

Dramatica Unplugged is a conversational exploration of Dramatica with an emphasis on practical concepts you can instantly apply to improve your story’s structure and your storytelling techniques.

1.1 Introducing the Story Mind

The central concept in Dramatica is called “The Story Mind.” It is what makes Dramatica unique. Dramatica says that every complete story is an analogy to a single human mind trying to deal with an inequity.

That’s quite a mouthful, but all it really means is that a story structure is a model of the mind’s problem solving process. It means that all the dramatic elements of a story are actually psychological aspects of the human mind.

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

Moreover, characters, plot, theme, and genre are not just a bunch of people doing things with value standards in an overall setting. Rather, characters, plot, theme, and genre are different families of thought that occur in the Story Mind, in fact, in our own minds.

In story structure, these thoughts are made tangible, incarnate, so that the audience members might look into the mechanisms of their own minds, see them from the outside in, and thereby gain an understanding of how to solve similar problems in their own lives.

Conversational Inertia

Sometimes, no matter how one tries, a conversation cannot be turned.  Illustrating this in  conversations among characters is a way to illuminate the degree of power that is driving the conversation in a particular direction, or perhaps the magnitude of the potential behind it.

For example, my daughter is seven weeks pregnant and just posted the following note on Facebook with several additional responses:

Mindi (my daughter):  I thought pregnancy and pickle craving was a myth. I’ve nearly gone through a whole jar since yesterday.

My reply:  A jar of pregnancies?

Someone else’s reply:  pickled pregnancies?

Another person’s reply: Not even pregnancy made pickles taste good to me.

I tried to throw this conversation into a new direction, a new context, but the inertia of the social fabric drew the linear topics back to the original issue.  This is an initial indicator that those who follow my daughter on Facebook are likely not as interested in the branch in the process I moved down and are more interested in the more obvious subject of the original comment.

Conversational inertia is a hint – a whisper – that, while not definitive, is indicative of larger currents at work that move a conversation in a particular course no matter what winds blow across the surface.  The stronger and deeper the current, the greater the drive behind it.

Conversations may be between two people, in which case the inertia illustrates each individual’s underlying motivations.  In such a case, each may be speaking at cross purposes, as if two different conversations were chopped up and their pieces alternated linearly.  Such mechanisms can often be seen in the conversations between the Main and Influence characters as they each press forward with their own paradigms like two oarsman alternately rowing toward different destinations.

Conversations may be among several people in a group, in which case the inertia illustrates the underlying motivations of the larger Story Mind in which each individual represents a facet.  In such a case, there may be a single individual at odds with the group mind or the number of individuals may be split on which topic to follow, indicating that the Story Mind is literally of two minds, which functions as an analogy to our own individual mind’s when we can’t decide between two priorities or are torn between to equally attractive or equally unattractive alternatives.  In other scenarios, each individual may try to hijack the group conversation in his or her own desired direction, fragmenting the Story Mind and indicating that the collective is pulled in many direction or is simply directionless, is exploring or is going to pieces.

As a final thought for you Theory Hounds, this process is part of the Dynamic Model – the wave-driven undulations of narrative dynamics that give rise to growing motivations and repress or dissolve others.

You see it in your interactions with others and in the tides and eddies of your own mind and, therefore, you see it in stories as well.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica

Introduction to the Story Mind

Every story has a mind of its own.   It has a Psychology determined by its structure, a personality established by its subjective matter, and a persona developed through its storytelling style.

This Story Mind is not that of the author, the audience or the characters, but rather that of the story itself, as if it were an individual person with its own motivations, approaches, standards and outlook.

Within the story mind, characters represent its motivations, plot its approaches, theme its standards, and genre its outlook.  The story mind functions like our own minds but projected outward and made tangible in the characters, plot, theme and genre so that we might better understand ourselves.

Characters influence our own drives – plot, our methods – theme, our values – genre, our attitude toward life.  By manipulating these elements, an author is able to shape the audience as it becomes one with the story.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica

Birth of a Story Mind

For those of you familiar with Dramatica, you know the term “storyform” means a complete narrative structure – the logical framework that makes a story make sense.

But where do storyforms come from?  How do they begin, how do they form, and for that matter, how do they end, dissolve or die?

A strange thought, to be sure, until you consider what narratives really are.  Simply put, they are rather precise models of the way people actually organize themselves in real life.

How does that work?  Again, very simply, each of us has certain qualities that come in pairs and often play against each other like our initiative vs. our reticence, intellect vs. passion, conscience vs. temptation, skepticism vs. faith.

When we try to solve problems on our own, we bring all of these into play to look for the solution with all the mental tools we have.  When we gather together in groups to solve a common problem, we’ve learned to specialize so that, for example, one person focuses on the intellectual component and becomes the voice of reason for the group.  Another focuses on the passionate aspect of the problem and comes to function as the group’s heart.

Whenever enough people come together with a common purpose, they will automatically self organize into kind of a group mind (we call it a Story Mind) in which each person comes to represent a single facet of all the different perspectives we employ in our own minds.

The end result is that groups naturally evolve into an external projection of our own internal minds.  The relationships among people in such a group function dynamically in a very similar manner to the way each of these perspectives relate in our own minds.

And authors throughout history, seeking to understand the nature and mechanism of human society, established the characters and conventions of story to parallel those very same aspects of the Story Minds we see every day in the real world.

So narratives are not just fictions that have no real bearing on human nature.  On the contrary, narrative structure and dynamics are perhaps the most accurate representation of how actual people organize and interact in the actual world.

While that, in and of itself, is both intriguing and practical, it begs the question, “If authors create structures for stories, how do such narrative Story Minds come to be in the real world?  In other words, can we understand the birth of a Story Mind?

Absolutely we can!  Let me lay it out.  It happens like a solar system forming.  People, in volume, are like the gasses and dust from which a solar system forms – independent units with no pattern to their movements.  When they gather together, they begin to organize, much like the dust collecting into particles.

First they form relationships of two.  And, like the force of gravity, the gregarious nature of human attraction draws other to join them until the gathering, like a collection of particles, forms a growing mass.

Naturally, there isn’t one mass, but a lot of different ones of different shapes and sizes scattered throughout the dust and gas or throughout the population.  From time to time they converge, sometimes changing each other’s course without directly coming into contact, and occasionally (and more rarely), they actually collide.

Depending on the size and shape of the two masses (or two groups of folk), they may combine, have parts stolen by one of the other, lose mass as it is calved off by the force of the encounter, or they might just shatter each other back into the dust, gas, or general population from whence they originally came.

In time, the number of conglomerate groups will decline as more and more smaller ones are absorbed into a handful of larger masses.  And meanwhile, most of the gas gathers more and more densely in the center until it reaches a critical ratio of frictional heat and material until it ignites in a ongoing sustainable reaction that generates energy from the center of the solar system outward to the planets.

Societally, this is when a central identity, a sense of common self, forms in the middle of all the society groups so that while each has its own identity, the is a collective identity as well, such as in a political party made of factions or all the states in the United States feeling a national identity as being part of America.

Since societal organization mimics the mind, projected outward, then this sun at the center of the solar system must also have some parallel in the human mind.  And it does.  It is our sense of self – the “I” in “I think, therefore I am.”

That self-wareness that resides in each of us is not a facet like our intellect or passion.  Rather, it is the energy source at the center that holds all of our facets in stable orbits and around which they all revolve.

And, in a Story Mind in the real world, it is the group’s collective identity that functions as its sense of self so that all members feel a commonality as part of the whole.  I am a Virginian, or I am an alumnus of USC, or I am a Sci-Fi fan, are all statements of sharing an umbrella identity with all other members of the same group.

Naturally, a person can be a member of several groups at once.  And so, they shift between one sense of identity and another whenever their activities or involvement move from one realm into another, just as the moon orbits the earth but also revolves around the sun and also around the galactic center.

When these multiple allegiances are nested, it functions rather smoothly.  In terms of the birth of a Story Mind, people from the general population form groups.  And then, these groups come to work together on an even larger issue, each group will eventually specialize so that one group becomes the voice of reason for the confederation while another evolves into the passionate voice of the confederation.  In time, a star will form at the center of the confederation, creating its own identity as well, so that one may be a Virginian and also an American simultaneously.  In this example, each state will have its own Story Mind, its own narrative, and they will also each be part of a larger narrative of the nation and its Story Mind.  We call this phenomenon fractal psychology, as it describes how the dynamic structure of a single mind is replicated in a series of nested psychologies of progressively larger confederate groups.

Sometimes, in the real world, things build from the grass roots up, starting with individuals, then creating associations, factions, movements, parties, local governments, regional governments, and ultimately national governments.  Even the planet as a whole is a Story Mind Narrative with its own global sense of self in which we all share.  And the nations of the world jockey to specialize as the different aspects of a single mind’s problem solving psychology, thereby establishing their own national identities and also contributing its unique spin on the issues that affect all of humanity.

Other times, in chaotic social environments such as after natural disasters, war, or revolution, Story Mind narratives may form at several levels at once.  But in either case, until that critical mass is reached in which the central star ignites in any group, thereby establishing a common sense of self for all its members, there is no organized functional narrative – no Story Mind.

Still, we can see the elements of a potential future mind begin to congeal as individuals and factions form into stable, definable attributes of the mind – the building blocks at an elemental level that will ultimately gather into families of like components that we recognize as the high-level aspects of psychology from faith to temptation.

In simple terms, Dramatica theory includes something of  Periodic Table of Story Elements called, not surprisingly, the Dramatica Table of Story Elements.  It had four levels.  The top level names the largest aspects of our minds into which we tend to categorize our thoughts – essentially, the biggest families of thought that go on in our heads.

Each of these is subdivided in the next level down into the smaller cognitive components that make it up – sub-families within each top-level family of cognitive function.  By the time we get down to the bottom level of the table, we are dealing with the elements – specialized mental functions that are the smallest we can perceive within ourselves as separate definable kinds of thought.  These elements are the tiniest building blocks of a story mind that have any real meaning for us as a comparative to our own internal attributes and processes.

So, in a chaotic social environment, we will first see the formation of elements within any potential Story Mind at whatever level we are exploring (from local to national).  Until all these essential elements are represented by some individual or group, even if the individual or group represents more than one, until they are all present there cannot be a complete narrative.

Yet, we can watch the elements form, and see the larger families form and those above them as well.  As they do, we can begin to get a sketchy sense of what the final nature of any potential Story Mind will be as more and more components gather and firm up into lines of energy that define dynamics that hold all the particles together into a narrative structure that is analogous to our own internal mental system.

But just as we can be member of multiple narrative minds when we are both interested in sci-fi an also Virginians or USC grads, so too in a chaotic social environment proto Story Minds may move through each other like galaxies colliding, disrupting (or perhaps enhancing) the storyforming process in each.

It is not until a Story Mind reaches that point of ignition that the gravity within it is sufficient to keep it stable against only a direct encounter or even a near encounter from another Story Mind, proto or complete.  Then, simple physics come into play to predict the result.  From psychology to physics in one sentence.  Sounds speculative.  And yet, it rings true to our understanding of both.

The specifics of how all this can unfold, the applications of how we might employ it to understand and perhaps even guide the emergence and evolution of narrative storyforms at all scales within our world – these are intriguing and powerful lines of inquiry.

But, for now, my purpose here was no more than to describe the birth of a Story Mind in the real world, and how that process is closely analogous to the formation of solar systems with the planets as characters and the star as the Main Character – the Story Mind’s sense of self with whom the audience identifies, through whom the audience experiences being in the story, and in the real world which provides the force of commonality that binds a narrative together.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator of Dramatica

Motivations, Methodologies, Evaluations and Purposes

Every story has a mind of its own, as if it were a single chcaracter, a single person.  The Dramatica theory of story structure includes a chart, sort of a “periodic table,” that maps out four different levels of consideration of the story mind. T

he bottom level (Elements) describes the story mind’s motivations, and has the greatest impact on character.  The next level up (Variations) represents the story mind’s value standards and is seen the story’s theme.  The third level from the bottom (Types) describes the story mind’s methods of problem solving and is made manifest in the plot.  At the top, the fouth and final lvel (Classes) ourlines the story mind’s purposes and has the greatests structural impact on genre.

Taken together, all four levels can be seen as a map of the topical or thematic aspects of all the dramatic elements in a story.