Genre, Theme, Plot and Character: each of them is a different level of appreciation of story structure. But each one needs to be seen from four different points of view in order to fully explore them.
As described in previous classes, the four essential points of view in any story structure are Main Character (I), Influence or Obstacle Character (You), Subjective Story (We), and Objective Story (They). These represent the four “voices” we have within ourselves – First Person, Second Person, Second Person Plural, and third Person.
To completely understand any issue or problem, we need to consider it from all four of these points of view. But what are we really looking at? Again, as described earlier, there are four primary kinds of subject matter – External States, External Processes, Internal States and Internal Processes. In Dramatica, we call these Universe (the fixed nature of a situation), Physics (external activities), Mind (a fixed mind set such as an attitude, fixation or prejudice), and Psychology (a manner of thinking or path of thought).
So, when we examine one of these as the potential source of a problem and, therefore, where we might best look for the solution, we are going to see it from one of those four points of view. In other words, Universe might be the domain of the Main Character or it might be the domain of the Objective story or of the other two points of view.
Essentially, if Universe is the domain of the Main Character in a particular story, it means that we are looking at the external situation through the eyes of the Main Character – the most personal view point, the “I” which represents or provides the audience position within the story. This means that one of the other three remaining kinds of subject matter will be associated or attached to one of the three remaining points of view. In any complete story, therefore, all four points of view and all four kinds of subject matter will be explored.
In this way, every angle of the problem can be examined in the hunt for a solution. But, each point of view will only look at one of the four kinds of subject matter in any given story. It is this connection between where we are looking from and what we are looking at that creates perspective and therefore defines how the author positions the readers or audience in relation to the issues, thereby establishing the story’s message.
In this episode, I compare story structure to a joke and storytelling to the manner in which the joke is told. Understanding the difference betweeen story structure and storytelling is crucial to separating the two so structure can be built logically, step by step, while simultaneously the Muse of storytelling can be unshakled to run free. As long as these two essential aspects of a story are blended, structure is unclear and inspriation is hobbled.
In this episode I describe the battle between the Main Character and the Obstacle Character over their opposing philosophies at the heart of a story’s message.
In this episode, I describe the difference between story structure and storytelling. Story structure has no subject matter involved – it is simply a map of the relationships among concepts. For example, if two concepts are in opposition, it doesn’t matter if they are night and day or sweet and sour, protagonist and antagonist or conscience and temptation. Similarly, if a goal is to obtain stolen diamonds and another story’s goad is to obtain a secret code, they are both goals of obtaining something – the structure is the same, only the specifics of exactly what the characters are trying to obtain is different , and that part is therefore storytelling. It is hard, sometimes, to determine what is structure and what is storytelling, for example, if someone wishes to become more compassionate as a goal, that is different than someone wishing to obtain the quality of compassion. Why? Because in the first case, the character wants to become a different kind of person, while in the second case, the person simply wants to add an attribute to their list of traits. We have often described “becoming” as a goal by saying that to become something, you can’t simply be like it is, but you also must “not be” like it isn’t. So, someone who simply adds the quality of compassion does not necessarily become wholly compassionate. They might simply have achieved a duality of having both a sense of compassion and also still have a conflicting quality of not caring.
Of course, that’s all “black belt” level structural stuff – too nit-picky for most purposes. But still, consider Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story and give some thought as to how they differ and how they are the same. They differ in storytelling, they are very similar in structure.
Here’s the link to the video which covers the more practical story development considerations on the topic:
Starting today, in addition to new writing tips and old favorites, I’m going to be posting links to my entire 113 part twelve hour video program on the Dramatica theory, one part per day.
This page also allows you to download an mp4 video of each part and an mp3 audio of the soundtrack. Enjoy!
A tale is nothing more than a statement. A statement that ‘this lead to this lead to that’ and ‘here’s how it ended up’.
An early storyteller would be able to say ‘ok, I’m going to tell you about this situation, that if you start here and you take this series of steps you end up there and it’s a good thing or its a bad thing to be there’. Large good, small good – little bad, big bad – but follow these series of steps from this starting point and you will end up with this thing that is good or bad.
There’s certain amount of power in that. You can fictionalize that statement to make it more human, and illustrate to people that ‘this is a path to stay away from because it’s bad’ or ‘this is a path to go towards because it’s good’. And so you end up with fairy tales and things of that nature which, literally, are often nothing more than a tale – they are not really complete stories.
But what kind of power could you get if you were able to expand that and say ‘this is not just true for this particular case but its true for all such similar cases.’ In other words, if you start from here, no matter what path you try to take based on this particular problem you started with, it wouldn’t be as good (or it wouldn’t be as bad) as the one that I’m showing you. Then the message of your tale becomes ‘this particular path is the best or the worst.’ It’s no longer just good or bad, it’s the best path or the worst path to take.
Now that has a lot more power to it because now you are telling everyone to exclude any other paths – ‘take only this one if you find yourself in this situation’ or, ‘if you find yourself in this situation no matter what you do, don’t do that’. That has a lot more power to manipulate an audience – a lot more leverage – because even though you have only shown the one path, you convince them it’s better than any of the others you didn’t show.
But have you really convinced them? After all, you are really just making a blanket statement and, in truth, an audience won’t sit still for a blanket statement. They will cry foul. They will at least question you. So, for example, if a caveman is sitting around the campfire and says, ‘this is the best of all possible paths that I have shown you.’, his audience is going to say, ‘hey wait a minute, what about this other case, what if we try this, this and this?’ If the author is to satisfy his audience and actually ‘prove’ his case to their satisfaction, he will be able to argue his point, saying, ‘in that case such and such, and therefore you can see why it would end up being not as good or better than this path that I’m touting.’
Another person brings up another scenario such as ‘what about going down this way and trying that.’ Then, if the author’s point can be well made, the storyteller is able to defend his assertion and say, ‘well that case, such and such, so you can see the point that the blanket statement I made is still true’. Eventually either something will be found that is better than what the author was proposing or the author will be able to stick it out and counter all those rebuttals and convince the audience, ‘yes that’s the case.’
Now you won’t have to counter every potential different way of doing it when you are telling the story live because the audience will only come up with a certain number of them before they are satisfied that the alternatives they think are most important to look into have been adequately addressed. But the moment that you record the story, the moment you put it into a song, stage play, a motion picture or a book, as soon as that happens, you’re no longer there to counter the rebuttals. You also don’t know exactly which potential rebuttals might come up. So if somebody looks at your story in the form of a movie in the theater and they see some pathway they think ought to be taken wasn’t even suggested, then they are going to feel that you haven’t made your case because maybe that would have been a better path than yours.
So what do you do? In a recorded art form you have to anticipate all the different rebuttals that might come up about other potential solutions and show why these other potential solutions would not be as good or as bad as the one that you are proposing – proving therefore that if all reasonable and appropriate alternatives have been explored and yours is still the best or the worst, then you’ve made your case. You have successfully argued your point, and the blanket statement is now considered true.
In order to do that you have to anticipate all the ways the audience might look at the problem alternatively. In effect, you to think of all the ways anyone might think of solving that problem alternatively. Essentially, you have to include in your story all of the different ways any human mind might go about solving that problem. In so doing, you have automatically created a model of the mind’s problem solving process, the Story Mind. Ultimately, you have created an analogy to the mind itself.
Now you never set out to do that, it was a byproduct never intended. No caveman ever sat down and said, ‘you know I think I will create an analogy to a single human mind trying to deal with an inequity.’ No, it didn’t happen that way, but in the process of trying to communicate a recorded art form across a medium and successfully argue one particular situation is better than all potential ones, you need to put in all the potential ones, and you thereby create a model of the mind quite by accident.
Once that’s happened, once it’s recognized, one can now look to that model of the mind from a psychological perspective. Psychoanalyze the story, and you find everything that’s in the human mind represented tangible and incarnate in the story in some form or another in the structure.
That’s what Dramatica is all about. When we had that Rosetta stone we then threw ourselves into documenting the psychology of the story and we documented the Story Mind. We created the theory and then created the software to implement a major portion of the theory to allow an author to answer questions about the impact he or she wishes to have and have. Dramatica’s story engine then predicts the structure necessary to achieve that particular impact.
Imagine the very first storyteller, maybe a caveman sitting around a campfire. Perhaps the very first communication was not really a story but just a physical need, like this caveman was hungry so he rubbed his stomach and he pointed at his mouth, and he said ‘ah-hah’. In addition to making an idiot of himself, he also might have communicated. He might have let the other cavemen around the campfire know that he was hungry, and why, because they would look at him and they look themselves; they’ve got two arms, he’s got two arms, and he looks like they look and they see him doing things physically and they think to themselves, ‘if I did those things, what would that mean to me?’, and they ‘decode’ his ‘encoding’, his symbolism, and they say, ‘well if I was doing that it would mean that I was hungry’ and they get his message, because there is a basic underlying similarity between the two.
Later on, we will talk about how the Story Mind works because all of us have the same basic operating system; it’s just our experiences that are different. And because we have the same operating system it forms a carrier wave so that when we communicate and see in the Story Mind anything that’s the same as the operating system we can pull that out and get the information that was attached to that carrier wave which is the storytelling, the message.
Now this caveman communicates that way. After awhile he gets a little more sophisticated he is able to do such things as describe a linear series of experiences. Perhaps he wants to describe how to get to a place where there are berries or how to avoid a place where there are bears. Well he might say (with hand gestures) that he went down by the river and then he went over the hill and then he found these berries perhaps it took him several days to go from one place to another. Some sign language is complex; some is a lot easier to understand but it’s usually based on a representation of visual things that you find in the real world.
Eventually he is able to string a number of points together rather than just making a single point like pointing to his mouth and saying ‘ah-hah’. So, if he puts together a line of logic, that says ‘this happened and then this happened and then this happened’ and there are no breaks in it and there are no pieces missing, in that case, he has created what we call in Dramatica a “Tale”. That’s our definition of a tale: an unbroken linear progression. That’s a “head-line” because it deals with your logic.
But you could also have an unbroken progression of feelings; how he felt at one time whether he was happy or sad, whether he found something funny, whether he found something disgusting. This would be a “heart-line”. He might convey those emotions just to express what he went through without even talking about the territory that he covered and with no “head-line” at all.
So, a tale could be just an emotional progression, or it could just be a logistic progression, or a tale could be a logistic and an emotional progression running along side-by-side, perhaps affecting each other, perhaps not.
Let’s look at that in a little more depth. We know that the human heart cannot just go from one emotion to another without going through steps in between. There are feelings that you have to go through to get from one mood to another mood. Now if you start with one emotion you may be able to jump to any one of a number of emotions and then from any of those, jump to others, but you can’t jump to all of them. If you could, then we would just be bopping about from one feeling to another. There would be no growth, there would be no emotional development. But we know there is, and that’s an indicator that we can’t go from any one thing to any other thing but, rather, there is direction to it.
You look at Freud’s psychosexual stages; you look at the stages Seven Stages of Grief. You have to go through them in a particular order. You can’t skip over any. If you do, there is an emotional misstep. It feels untrue to the heart, and a story that has a character go through and miss a step, skip a step or jump to another emotion that they ‘couldn’t get there from here’, that will then feel wanky to the audience. It will feel like the character stopped developing in a way that they could follow with their own hearts and it will pop the audience right out of the story, and they will look at the character as being a fabrication rather than someone they identify with.
So the idea is to create this linearity. But doesn’t that linearly create a formula? Well it would if you could only go from one emotion to a particular next one to a particular next one and so on. Then there would be only one path you could take, but as mentioned earlier, from one emotion there are several – not all but several – that you might go to. When you go to one of those, there are several others you might go to next.
Similarly, in points of logic, from a single point there might be any one of a number of things that might happen next that would be Kosher to happen with what already happened, but you couldn’t have anything happen next because some things would just be impossible to happen if this had happened first. There would be missing steps, or this would preclude that from happening. Now, you can start from any place and eventually get to anywhere else, but you have to go through the in-betweens.
So as long as a tale has either a head-line or a heart-line and it’s an unbroken chain that doesn’t skip any steps, it constitutes a complete tale.
Let’s look at the central concept in Dramatica: the Story Mind. It’s 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 what it really means is that every complete story is a model of the mind’s problem solving process. In fact, it says that all the elements of the story are actually elements of a single human mind – not the author’s mind, not the audience’s mind but a mind created symbolically in the process of communicating across a medium to reach an audience. It is a mind for the audience to look at, understand and then occupy. That’s the story’s structure itself.
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 go on in a Story Mind, in fact that go on in our own minds, made tangible, made incarnate, so that the audience might look into the mechanisms of their own minds – see them from the outside looking in – and thereby get a better understanding of the problem solving process, so when a particular kind of problem comes up in their lives, they’ll have a better idea how to deal with it.
