Another episode from my video series on story structure recorded in 1999…
The Dramatica Chart of Story Elements is like the Periodic Table of Elements in Chemistry – only the Dramatica chart helps you build the chemistry of your characters, plot, theme and genre.
What is Dramatica?
Dramatica is a theory of story that offers both writers and critics a clear view of what story structure is and how it works. Dramatica is also the inspiration behind the line of story development software products that bear its name.
The central concept of the Dramatica theory is a notion called the “Story Mind.” In a nutshell, this simply means that every story has a mind of its own – its own personality; its own psychology. A story’s personality is developed by an author’s style and subject matter; its psychology is determined by the underlying dramatic structure.
The Story Mind
The Story Mind is at the heart of Dramatica, and everything else about the theory grows out of that. If you don’t buy into it, at least a little, then you’re not going to find much use for the rest of this book. So let’s take look into the Story Mind right off the bat to see if it is worth your while to keep reading…
Simply put, the Story Mind means that we can think of a story as if it were a person. The storytelling style and the subject matter determine the story’s personality, and the underlying dramatic structure determines its psychology.
Now the personality of a story is a touchy-feely thing, while the psychology is a nuts-and-bolts mechanical thing. Let’s consider the personality part first, and then turn our attention to the psychology.
Like anyone you meet, a story has a personality. And what makes up a personality? Well, everything from the subject matter a person talks about to their attitude toward life. Similarly, a story might be about the Old West or Outer Space, and its attitude could be somber, sneaky, lively, hilarious, or any combination of other human qualities.
Is this a useful perspective? Can be. Many writers get so wrapped up in the details of a story that they lose track of the overview. For example, you might spend all kinds of time working out the specifics of each character’s personality yet have your story take a direction that is completely out of character for its personality. But if you step back every once and a while and think of the story as a single person, you can really get a sense of whether or not it is acting in character.
Imagine that you have invited your story to dinner. You have a pleasant conversation with it over the meal. Of course, it is more like a monologue because your story does all the talking – just as it will to your audience or reader.
Your story is a practical joker, or a civil war buff (genre), and it talks about what interests it. It tells you a story about a problem with some endeavor (plot) in which it was engaged. It discusses the moral issues (theme) involved and its point of view on them. It even divulges the conflicting drives (characters) that motivated it while it tried to resolve the difficulties.
You want to ask yourself if it’s story makes sense. If not, you need to work on the logic of your story. Does it feel right, as if the Story Mind is telling you everything, or does it seem like it is holding something back? If so, your story has holes that need filling. And does your story hold your interest for two hours or more while it delivers it’s monologue? If not, it’s going to bore it’s captive audience in the theater, or the reader of its report (your book), and you need to send it back to finishing school for another draft.
Again, authors get so wrapped up in the details that they lose the big picture. But by thinking of your story as a person, you can get a sense of the overall attraction, believability, and humanity of your story before you foist it off on an unsuspecting public.
There’s much more we’ll have to say about the personality of the Story Mind and how to leverage it to your advantage. But, our purpose right now is just to see if Dramatica might be of use to you. So, let’s examine the other side of the Story Mind concept – the story’s psychology as represented in its structure.
The Dramatica theory is primarily concerned with the structure of a story. Everything in that structure represents an aspect of the human mind, almost as if the processes of the mind had been made tangible and projected out externally for the audience to observe.
Do you remember the model kit of the “Visible Man?” It was a 12″ human figure made out of clear plastic so you could see the skeleton and all the organs on the inside. Well that is how the Story Mind works. it takes the processes of the human mind, and turns them into characters, plot, theme, and genre, so we can study them in detail. In this way, an author can provide understanding to an audience of the best way to deal with problems. And, of course, all of this is wrapped up and disguised in the particular subject matter, style, and techniques of the storyteller.
Now this makes it sound as if the real meat of a story, the real people, places, events, and topics, are just window dressing to distract the audience from the serious business of the structure. But that’s not what we’re saying here. In fact, structure and storytelling work side by side, hand in hand, to create an audience/reader experience that transcends the power of either by itself.
Therefore, structure and storytelling are neither completely dependent upon each other, nor are they wholly independent. One structure might be told in a myriad of ways, like West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet. Similarly, any given group of characters dealing with a particular realm of subject matter might be wrapped around any number of different structures, like weekly television series.
But let’s get back to the nature of the structure itself and to the elements that make up the Story Mind. If characters, plot, theme, and genre represent aspects of the human mind made tangible, what are they?
Characters represent the conflicting drives of our own minds. For example, in our own minds, our reason and our emotions are often at war with one another. Sometimes what makes the most sense doesn’t feel right at all. And conversely, what feels so right might not make any sense at all. Then again, there are times when both agree and what makes the most sense also feels right on.
Reason and Emotion then, become two archetypal characters in the Story Mind that illustrate that inner conflict that rages within ourselves. And in the structure of stories, just as in our minds, sometimes these two basic attributes conflict, and other times they concur.
Theme, on the other hand, illustrates our troubled value standards. We are all plagued with uncertainties regarding the right attitude to take, the best qualities to emulate, and whether our principles should remain fixed and constant or should bend in context to particular circumstances.
Plot compares the relative value of the methods we might employ within our minds in our attempt to press on through these conflicting points of view on the way toward a mental consensus.
And genre explores the overall attitude of the Story Mind – the points of view we take as we watch the parade of our own thoughts unfold, and the psychological foundation upon which our personality is built.
This article is drawn from the author’s
Dramatica Story Structure Software
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An episode from my video series on story structure recorded in 1999…
For all you Dramatica “theory hounds” out there, here’s one of the newest parts of the theory which grew out of my ongoing development of the new dynamic model of story structure.
Dramatica theory has always had eight equations that describe the relationships among elements in a quad. They are all based on permutations of the initial equation we discovered, which was T/K = AD.
Turns out, the dramatic nature of each of the eight archetypal characters in Dramatica is described by one of the eight equations. Now that’s pretty amazing – that characters who represent families of thought within our own minds can be described mathematically.
I’m writing a complete and lengthy article on this right now, but it will take a week or so, and I couldn’t wait to share this new insight with the Dramatica Theory Hounds. You guys are such avid and loyal students of the underlying principals of Dramatica, that I’ve decided to let you in on every new insight, even before I have time to properly work out the details and present a solid argument for it.
I’ll end by saying the while the eight equations describe the natures of the eight archetypes, they do not describe their functions. For that, eight other equations are needed. And these dynamic equations are at the heart of the dynamic model.
They are the process of justification and can be seen in how the quad of Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire evolves through three other quads beginning with Can, Need, Want and Should, on to Situation, Circumstances, Sense of Self and State of Being, and ending in Commitment, Rationalization, Responsibility and Obligation.
I’ve touched on this process of justification in previous articles, and in fact it was worked out even before we created the Dramatica Table of Story Elements some twenty years ago. But, we moved away from the justification process to focus on the structural elements and then flipped and rotated the structural model to show the effects of justification and how it influenced the relationships among dramatic elements to create a storyform.
But, in truth, it did not describe why those forces are at work, and that is the issue at hand in the dynamic model.
All for now, gotta go take a walk in the woods.
More for you DTH folk soon.
Learn More About Dramatica Narrative Theory…
An episode from my video series on story structure recorded in 1999…
An episode from my video series on story structure recorded in 1999…
Ever story has a mind of its own. It has a psychology, which is the story’s structure, a personality, which is the subject matter, and a persona, which is the storytelling.
Some time ago I wrote an article that described the difference between the two basic forms of story structure with the following phrase:
You spin a tale, but you weave a story.
The common expression “spinning a yarn” conjures up the image of a craftsperson pulling together a fluffy pile into a single unbroken thread. An appropriate analogy for the process of telling a tale. A tale is a simple, linear progression – a series of events and emotional experiences that leads from point A to point B, makes sense along the way, and leaves no gaps.
A tale is, perhaps, the simplest form of storytelling structure. The keyword here is “structure.” Certainly, if one is not concerned with structure, one can still relate a conglomeration of intermingled scenarios, each with its own meaning and emotional impact. Many power works of this ilk are considered classics, especially as novels or experimental films.
Nonetheless, if one wants to make a point, you need to create a line that leads from one point to another. A tale, then, is a throughline, leading from the point of departure to the destination on a single path.
A story, on the other hand, is a more complex form of structure. Essentially, a number of different throughlines are layered, one upon another, much as a craftsperson might weave a tapestry. Each individual thread is a tale that is spun, making it complete, unbroken, and possessing its own sequence. But collectively, the linear pattern of colors in all the throughlines form a single, overall pattern in the tapestry, much as the scanning lines on a television come together to create the image of a single frame.
In story structure, then, the sequence of events in each individual throughline cannot be random, but must be designed to do double-duty – both making sense as an unbroken progression and also as pieces of a greater purpose.
You won’t find the word, “throughline” in the dictionary. In fact, as I type this in my word processor, it lists the word as misspelled. Chris Huntley and I used the word when we developed the concept as part of our work creating the Dramatica theory (and software). Since then, we have found it quite the useful moniker to describe an essential component of story structure.
Throughlines then, are any elements of a story that have their own beginnings, middles, and ends. For example, every character’s growth has its own throughline. Typically, this is referred to as a character arc, especially when in reference to the main character. But an “arc” has nothing to do with the growth of a character. Rather, each character’s emotional journey is a personal tale that describe his or her feelings at the beginning of the story, at every key juncture, and at the final reckoning.
Some characters may come to change their natures, others may grow in their resolve. But their mood swings, attitudes, and outlook must follow an unbroken path that is consistent with a series of emotions that a real human being might experience. For example, a person will not instantly snap from a deep depression into joyous elation without some intervening impact, be it unexpected news, a personal epiphany, or even the ingestion of great quantities of chocolate. In short, each character throughline must be true to itself, and also must take into consideration the effect of outside influences.
Now that we know what a throughline is, how can we use it? Well, right off the bat, it helps us break even the most complex story structures down into a collection of much simpler elements. Using the throughline concept, we can far more easily create a story structure, and can also ensure that every element is complete and that our story has no gaps or inconsistencies.
Before the throughline concept, writers traditionally would haul out the old index cards (or their equivalent) and try to create a single sequential progression for their stories from Act I, Scene I to the climax and final denouement.
An unfortunate byproduct of this “single throughline” approach is that it tended to make stories far more simplistic than they actually needed to be since the author would think of the sequential structure as being essentially a simple tale, rather than a layered story.
In addition, by separating the throughlines it is far easier to see if there are any gaps in the chain. Using a single thread approach to a story runs the risk of having a powerful event in one throughline carry enough dramatic weight to pull the story along, masking missing pieces in other throughlines that never get filled. This, in fact, is part of what makes some stories seem disconnected from the real world, trite, or melodramatic.
By using throughlines it is far easier to create complex themes and layered messages. Many authors think of stories as having only one theme (if that). A theme is just a comparison between two human qualities to see which is better in the given situations of the story.
For example, a story might wish to deal with greed. But, greed by itself is just a topic. It doesn’t become a theme until you weigh it against its counterpoint, generosity, and then “prove” which is the better quality of spirit to possess by showing how they each fare over the course of the story. One story’s message might be that generosity is better, but another story might wish to put forth that in a particular circumstance, greed is actually better.
By seeing the exploration of greed as one throughline and the exploration of generosity as another, each can be presented in its own progression. In so doing, the author avoids directly comparing one to the other (as this leads to a ham-handed and preachy message), but instead can balance one against the other so that the evidence builds as to which is better, but you still allow the audience to come to its own conclusion, thereby involving them in the message and making it their own. Certainly, a more powerful approach.
Plot, too, is assisted by multiple throughlines. Subplots are often hard to create and hard to follow. By dealing with each independently and side by side, you can easily see how they interrelate and can spot and holes or inconsistencies.
Subplots usually revolve around different characters. By placing a character’s growth throughline alongside his or her subplot throughline, you can make sure their mental state is always reflective of their inner state, and that they are never called upon to act in a way that is inconsistent with their mood or attitude at the time.
There are many other advantages to the use of throughlines as well. So many, that the Dramatica theory (and software) incorporate throughlines into the whole approach. Years later, when I developed StoryWeaver at my own company, throughlines became an integral part of the step-by-step story development approach it offers.
How do you begin to use throughlines for your stories? The first step is to get yourself some index cards, either 3×5 or 5×7. As you develop your story, rather than simply lining them all up in order, you take each sequential element of your story and create its own independent series of cards showing every step along the way.
Identify each separate kind of throughline with a different color. For example, you could make character-related throughlines blue (or use blue ink, or a blue dot) and make plot related throughlines green. This way, when you assemble them all together into your overall story structure, you can tell at a glance which elements are which, and even get a sense of which points in your story are character heavy or plot or theme heavy.
Then, identify each throughline within a group by its own mark, such as the character’s name, or some catch-phrase that describes a particular sub-plot, such as, “Joe’s attempt to fool Sally (or more simply, the “Sally Caper.”). That way, even when you weave them all together into a single storyline, you can easily find and work with the components of any given throughline. Be sure also to number the cards in each throughline in sequence, so if you accidentally mix them up or decide to present them out of order for storytelling purposes, such as in a flashback or flash forward, you will know the order in which they actually need to occur in the “real time” of the story.
Once you get started, its easy to see the value of the throughline approach, and just as easy to come up with all kinds of uses for it.
This article is drawn from the author’s
StoryWeaver Story Development Software
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your novel or screenplay step by step
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Too many writers fall into the trap of making Structure their Story God. There’s no denying that structure is important, but paying too much attention to structure can destroy your story.
We have all seen movies and read novels that feel like “paint by numbers” creations. Sure, they hit all the marks and cover all the expected relationships, but they seem stilted, uninspired, contrived, and lifeless.
The authors of such pedestrian fare are Story Mechanics. A Story Mechanic is a writer who constructs a story as if it were a machine. Starting with a blueprint, the writer gathers the necessary dramatic components, assembles the gears and pulleys, tightens all the structural nuts and bolts, and then tries to make the story interesting with a fancy paint job.
But there is another kind of writer who creates a different kind of story. These Story Weavers begin with subjects or concepts about which they are passionate and let the structure suggest itself from the material. They see their players as people before they consider them as characters. Events are happenings before they become plot. Values precede theme and the story develops a world before it develops a genre.
A book or movie written by a Story Weaver is involving, riveting, and compelling. It captures the fullness of human emotion, and captivates the mind.
Although some writers are natural born StoryWeavers, there is still hope for the rest of us. In fact, you can become a StoryWeaver just by practicing a few select techniques until they become second nature.
First, clear your mind of any thoughts about characters, plot, theme, and genre. Avoid any consideration of character arc, hero’s journey, acts, scenes, sequences, beats, messages, premises, settings, atmosphere, and formulas. In short – don’t give structure a second thought.
Now work to create a world in which people live and interact, things happen, meaning can be found and the environment is intriguing. To do this, we’ll progress through four different stages of story creation: Inspiration, Development, Exposition, and Storytelling.
Stage One – Inspiration
Inspiration can come from many sources: a conversation overheard at a coffee shop, a newspaper article, or a personal experience to name a few. And, inspiration can also take many forms: a snippet of dialogue, a bit of action, a clever concept, and so on.
If you can’t think of a story idea to save your life, there are a few things you can do to goose the Muse.
First of all, consider your creative time. Some people consistently find inspiration in the morning, others in the afternoon, evening or even in the dead of night. Some people are more creative in the summer and can’t write worth a darn in the other three seasons. There are authors who work in cycles and those who come up with ideas in spurts. The key to using your creative time is to keep a log of your most fertile moments and then plan ahead to keep that kind of time open for further inspirations.
And don’t neglect your creative space either. There are authors who go off to a mountain cabin to write. Some like lots of noise or babble, like a city street below their open window or an all-news station on the radio as background. There are writers who prefer a cluttered room because it engenders chaos, which leads to serendipity. Others can’t think a lick unless everything is orderly, neat and in its place. Creative space includes the clothes you wear while writing. There are those who wear hats when developing characters and others who pantomime action sequences to get in the feel of it.
Open yourself to different writing media. If you only use a desktop computer, try a laptop, a palm organizer with a folding keyboard, long hand on a pad, or a digital voice recorder. And don’t be afraid to switch around any of these from time to time and mood to mood.
If you still can’t come up with an idea, try the Synthesis Technique. In brief, you want to subject yourself to two disparate sources of information. For example, put a talk radio program on while reading a magazine or watching television and let the odd juxtaposition spur your notions.
Finally, if all else fails, try using Nonsense Words. Just jot down three random words, such as “Red Ground Rover.” Then, write as many different explanations as you can for what that phrase might mean. For example, Red Ground Rover might be:
1. A red dog named rover whose legs are so short his belly rubs the ground.
2. The Martian Rover space vehicle on the red planet’s surface.
3. Fresh hamburger made from dog
Your list might go on and on. Now most of these potential meanings might be pure rubbish, but occasionally a good idea can surface. If the first three words don’t work, try three different ones. And, in the end, even if you don’t find an idea directly from your explanations of each phrase, you’ll have so stocked the creative spirit that you will find yourself far more prone to inspiration than before you started the exercise.
Use these inspiration techniques to come up with a log line for your story. A log line is simply a one- or two-sentence description of what your story is about in general. They are the same kind of short descriptions you find in TV Guide or in your cable or satellite TV guide.
A sample log line might be, “The marshal in an old western town struggles to stop a gang that is bleeding the town dry.”
Stage Two – Development
Once you’ve been inspired enough to create a log line, you can move into the second stage of Story Weaving: Development. Here is where you take your basic concept and flesh it out with lots more detail.
In Development you’ll begin to populate your story with people you might like to write about, work out some of the things that will happen in your story, and establish the world or environment in which it takes place. These efforts will ultimately result in your characters, plot, theme, and genre.
There are many Story Weaving techniques for the Development stage, but one of the most powerful is to project your world beyond what is specifically stated in the log line.
As an example, let’s use the log line from above: “The marshal in an old western town struggles to stop a gang that is bleeding the town dry.” Now let’s see how we can expand that world to create a whole group of people who grow out of the story, some of whom will ultimately become our characters.
The only specifically called-for characters are the marshal and the gang. But, you’d expect the gang to have a leader and the town to have a mayor. The marshal might have a deputy. And, if the town is being bled dry, then some businessmen and shopkeepers would be in order as well.
Range a little wider now and list some characters that aren’t necessarily expected, but wouldn’t seem particularly out of place in such a story.
Example: A saloon girl, a bartender, blacksmith, rancher, preacher, schoolteacher, etc.
Now, let yourself go a bit and list a number of characters that would seem somewhat out of place but still explainable in such a story.
Example: A troupe of traveling acrobats, Ulysses S. Grant, a Prussian Duke, a bird watcher.
Finally, pull out all the stops and list some completely inappropriate characters that would take a heap of explaining to your reader/audience if they showed up in your story.
Example: Richard Nixon, Martians, the Ghost of Julius Caesar
Although you’ll likely discard these characters, just the process of coming up with them can lead to new ideas and directions for your story.
For example, the town marshal might become more interesting if he was a history buff, specifically reading about the Roman Empire. In his first run-in with the gang, he is knocked out cold with a concussion. For the rest of the story, he keeps imagining the Ghost of Julius Caesar giving him unwanted advice.
This same kind of approach can be applied to your log line to generate the events that will happen in your story, the values you will explore, and the nature of your story’s world (which will become your genre).
Stage Three – Exposition
The third stage of Story Weaving is to lay out an Exposition Plan for your story. By the time you complete the Development Stage, you will probably have a pretty good idea what your story is about. But your audience knows nothing of it – not yet – not until you write down what you know.
Of course, you could just write, “My story’s goal is to rid the town of the gang that is bleeding it dry. The marshal is the protagonist, and he ultimately succeeds, but at great personal cost.”
Sure, it’s a story, but not a very interesting one. If you were to unfold your story in this perfunctory style, you’d have a complete story that felt just like that “paint by numbers” picture we encountered earlier.
Part of what gives a story life is the manner in which story points are revealed, revisited throughout the story, played against each other and blended together, much as a master painter will blend colors, edges, shapes and shadows.
As an example, let’s create an Exposition Plan to reveal a story’s goal. Sometimes a goal is spelled out right at the beginning, such as a meeting in which a general tells a special strike unit that terrorists have kidnapped a senator’s daughter and they must rescue her.
Other times, the goal is hidden behind an apparent goal. So, if your story had used the scene described above, it might turn out that it was really just a cover story and, in fact, the supposed “daughter” was actually an agent who was assigned to identify and kill a double agent working on the strike team.
Goals may also be revealed slowly, such as in The Godfather, where it takes the entire film to realize that the goal is to keep the family alive by replacing the aging Don with a younger member of the family.
Further, in The Godfather, as in many Alfred Hitchcock films, the goal is not nearly as important as the chase or the inside information or the thematic atmosphere. So don’t feel obligated to elevate every story point to the same level.
Let your imagination run wild. Jot down as many instances as come to mind in which the particular story point comes into play. Such events, moments or scenarios enrich a story and add passion to a perfunctory telling of the tale.
One of the best ways to do this is to consider how each story point might affect other story points. For example, each character sees the overall goal as a step in helping them accomplish their personal goals. So, why not create a scenario where a character wistfully describes his personal goal to another character while sitting around a campfire? He can explain how achievement of the overall story goal will help him get what he personally wants.
An example of this is in the John Wayne classic movie, The Searchers. John Wayne’s character asks an old, mentally slow friend to help search for the missing girl. Finding the girl is the overall goal. The friend has a personal goal: he tells Wayne that he just wants a roof over his head and a rocking chair by the fire. This character sees his participation in the effort to achieve the goal as the means of obtaining something for which he has personally longed.
Stage Four – Storytelling
By the time you’ve created an Exposition Plan for each story point you worked on in the Development phase, you’ll have assembled a huge number of events, moments, and scenarios. There’s only one thing left to do: tell your story!
Storytelling is a multi-faceted endeavor. It incorporates style, timing, blending of several story points into full-bodied scenes, sentence structure, grammar, vocabulary, and good old-fashioned charisma.
Later in this book we’ll explore a number of different storytelling techniques in great detail. But in this introduction to StoryWeaving I want to address the primary storytelling problem writers encounter – a passionless presentation of what would otherwise be an intriguing story.
Story Mechanics often get stuck at this point in story development. They are so taken with the “perfect” structure they have created, they tend to anguish over the opening sentence when finally sitting down to write the story. Eventually, after writing with the problem for far too long, they write one great line and then become so intimidated by its grandeur they are afraid to write anything else lest it not measure up to that initial quality!
Fact is, you’re only as good as your own talent – GET OVER IT! Don’t grieve over every phrase to try and make yourself look better than you are. Just spew out the words and get the story told. Something not up to snuff? That’s what re-writes are for!
Another common problem is the inability to let loose, emotionally. Each of us is born a passionate human being. But we quickly learn that the world does not appreciate all our emotional expressions. In no time, we develop a whole bag of behaviors that don’t truly reflect who we really are. But, they do help us get by.
Problem is, these false presentations of our selves appear to be our real selves to everyone else. They cause others to give us presents we don’t really want, drive us to make friendships with people we don’t really like, and even marry people we don’t really love!
This false life we develop is a mask, but by no means is it always a well-fitting one. In fact, it chafes against the real “us.” The emotional irritation could be eliminated if we removed the mask, but then we might lose our jobs, friends, and lovers because they might find the actual people we are to be total strangers and not someone they like.
So instead, we just tighten the mask down so hard it becomes an exoskeleton, part of what we call “ourselves.” In fact, after a time, we forget we are even wearing a mask. We come to believe that this is who we really are.
Now, try getting in touch with your passions through that! The mask dampens any emotional energy we have and our writing dribbles out like pabulum. Even the most riveting story becomes dulled by such storytelling.
Want to really be passionate in your storytelling? Then try this: Lock the doors, take the phone off the hook, search for hidden video cameras, and then sit down to write. For just one page, write about the one thing about yourself you are most afraid that anyone would ever find out.
By writing about your most shameful or embarrassing trait or action you will tap right through that mask into your most powerful feelings, and a gusher of passion will burst out of the hole.
Once you know where to find the oil field of your soul, you can drill down into it any time you like. Of course, every time you draw from that well you put more cracks in the mask. Eventually, the darn thing might shatter altogether, leaving you unable to be anyone but yourself with your boss, your friends, and your lover. Downside risk: you might lose them all. But, you’ll be a far better writer!
And finally, go for broke. Exaggerate and carry everything you do to the extreme. It is far easier to go overboard and then temper it back in a re-write than to underplay your work and have to try and beef it up.
Remember, there is only one cardinal sin in Story Weaving, and that is boring your audience!
Having outlined all four stages of StoryWeaving, you are now ready to break away from the mechanics, and become a true StoryWeaver.
This article is drawn from the author’s
StoryWeaver Story Development Software
Try it risk-free for 90 days and write
your novel or screenplay step by step
Click for details and free bonus….
Since 1997, Storymind has offered tools and resources to help writers get their stories told, ensure they are solidly structured, and to provide new insights into the emerging field of narrative science.
Storymind was founded by Melanie Anne Phillips, co-creator of the Dramatica theory of story structure and the software based upon it and creator of such products as StoryWeaver Step by Step Story Development software and Throughline Creative Index Card software.
This blog is an extension of our outreach mission to provide free writing tips, articles, streaming media and utilities to support writers’ efforts in the areas of story structure and storytelling.
We hope you find this new blog both informative and enabling, and look forward to your comments.
Storymind
Who are you, really? Do you even know? Or do you just think you know?
At the center of our beings, at the heart of our souls, can be found the truth of our identity: our compassion, our anger, the breeding ground of the very stuff that makes us love and hate.
Yet, though a lifetime of compromise in the attempt to garner approval and avoid rejection, most of us have hidden the true nature of ourselves so far behind the shield of a pseudo persona that we are no longer privy to the essence of our own selves.
Unable to tap directly into the firestorm of our Id, we live on second hand passions and pass them off in what we write as the gritty truth of personal reality. A writer can survive a career without ever becoming aware of his or her true essence.
What might you write if you became aware of your Passionate Self, and could tap into the primal force of your psyche?
The issue then becomes the effort to mount an inner expedition to the darkest reaches of your mind. It is dangerous territory. You may very well lose your sense of self in the process, discover you are a completely different person than you thought, and this knowledge may ultimately cost you your relationships, family, friends, job, and even your own peace of mind.
You don’t need to tap this cauldron of angst and elation in order to write interesting stories that captivate others. But as a writer, wouldn’t you like to be able to access it?
Let’s examine how and why we hide ourselves and then outline a method for recovering our first nature from the labyrinth of our second.
It all goes back to your childhood. You came from a loving, caring family, or from an antagonist family where you were always afraid of punishment, or were just ignored. Sure, there are many variations, but they all lead to the same syndrome.
If we are raised in a loving household, we learn compassion and empathy, and come to want to please others, even if it is at our own expense. Usually, we are accepted as ourselves in such a household, but when we arrive at pre-school or kindergarten, suddenly we are confronted by those who make fun of us because of inherent qualities that are expressions of our true selves. We quickly learn that to avoid displeasing others and to get the same kindness we have at home, we must hide certain traits and pretend to possess others. In short order, we establish a pseudo personality that no longer reflects ourselves, but reflects as nearly as possible the mean average of what we feel others would prefer us to be.
If we are raised in an angry recriminating household, we learn to hide any trait that could bring punishment or ridicule, and also create a mask we can wear to avoid pain and enhance pleasure. If we are just ignored as children, we invent an ersatz persona to attract attention, and/or as an attempt to make ourselves noteworthy.
It is almost an inevitable human endeavor.
As we grow, the mask must become more complex. We add to it whenever a new situation arises. We look to see how others act so we will know what to do in similar situations.
Slowly, we come to realize that it hurts not to express our true selves. And then we do one of two things: We break out of the mask and let it all hang out in a teenage rebellion, or we learn to stop looking inside at the real us, so that we don’t suffer the pain of suppression.
Even those who rebel, may later compromise their inner integrity to advance in a career, impress peers, or justify a lack of success to themselves. Very few of us reach full adulthood still knowing who we really are.
In most cases, we hide our true natures away from ourselves for so long that we forget how to find ourselves – we forget who we were, and have no idea who we have become down there in the darkness.
Our true selves are like ROM chips on a computer. They are preprogrammed with the essential elements of our personalities, and they are designed to load specific portions of that programming into our minds at various junctures, such as when we learn to walk, the onset of puberty, the arrival at childbearing age.
Our minds are like RAM in a computer. Into our minds we load our experiences. They sit on top of the ROM personality that has been loaded. In a sense, experiences are the data that is crunched by the personality program from our ROM.
But when you create a pseudo persona, you fill up RAM with another program. You create protected memory where nothing else can be loaded. And so, as you grow, the ROM personality tries to load, but sees that there isn’t enough space, and aborts the operation to try again at a later time.
As our minds expand with growth, there would be enough room for the ROM, but we also expand our personas so that there is never enough room. So our ROM personalities – our true personalities – can never load. And we become stunted in our emotions; never advancing past the development of the year we first invented our mask. And our true selves, hidden deeply in the ROM, remain only a potential, not an actualized self.
We meet a mate, we get married, we have children, we advance in our careers, and all with people responding to our personas, not to the true selves, which have never been realized, even to ourselves.
So the mate we attract is one who loves the false us. The children we raise associate love and comfort with a fake person who is not us. And they support that image with their holiday gifts, secret glances, and tender moments.
It becomes a web of lies from which we dare not attempt to escape lest we lose the love and respect of others when we reveal our actual essence and expose the person they thought they knew to be no more than a sham.
But you are a writer. And as a writer, you peddle emotions. And if you are a worthwhile writer, you want your wares to be honest and true. Yet how can they be, if you aren’t true to yourself?
If you are game then, how can you discover that inner person? Simply put, you have to pass through pain. You will need to come to feel the lack of all of your ROM programming. You will need to see your everyday self as a lie. You will explore the pain until you can stand it no more. And when you are ready, you will take a leap of faith and dump your RAM persona by unprotecting its files – files you have spent a lifetime building. When you do, the ROM will notice. It will rush in and overwrite your false self with all the past due sections of your self that should have been loaded along the way. And in one electric moment you will feel your old self vanish as if you had been exorcised, then feel perhaps a second or two of emptiness, followed by the force of your embryonic actual self-rushing in to fill the void.
You will then realize that the old files are gone. You cannot recover them, no matter how much you may want to. You make the leap of faith and there is no going back – ever. You cannot even rebuild them. You would have to start all over from scratch, and there probably isn’t enough lifetime left to do that.
But the consequences! You are now a different being, a more vibrant being, a creature of foundational power that we all have the potential to experience. So will your loved ones, and those you depend on find you acceptable and embrace the “New You,” or will they recoil, feel betrayed, abandoned, and perhaps mourn the loss of the person they thought they knew through all the seven stages of grief?
No one can predict the response of others, but positive or negative there will be a response from everyone you encounter once you have crossed to the other side?
If you are willing to take this risk, how to you get to that magic moment when you can shift over to a new reality? Through your writing: you need to keep a personal journal. You need to express your deepest thoughts and feelings in it daily.
My personal journal has sometimes resulted in 17 typewritten pages in a single day. More often, it amounts to a page or two. There have been years when I kept no journal at all. But I have always found that when I do keep a journal, angst is discovered become one with, and evaporated – eventually.
Usually, this major sea-change occurs in a time of extreme mental pressure – loss of a business or a loved one, or some impending change of lifestyle, situation, or relationship that rocks the very foundations of your soul.
These are the times to keep a journal without fail. The words you write will help you work it through, keep you sane, and in time reveal the actual issues that drive you.
Still, you don’t have to take that path. You can content yourself with the comfortable life you have fashioned around your pseudo self, and continue to write intriguing stories populated by compelling characters engaged in riveting action. You may find that sufficient. You may, even after all of this, believe that is all there is, “as good as it gets.” But what if there is something powerful within you – something basic and honest and true. Are you prepared to go to your death bed never knowing who you really are?
I leave you with a poem I wrote some years ago that touches on some of these issues:
Lulladie
by Melanie Anne Phillips
My emotions are dead
and lack any resistance
to the onslaught of logic’s
relentless persistence.
I’m malleable, moveable,
flexible, still.
I succumb with aplomb,
as I alter my will
to conform to the pressures
that weigh on my soul
without motive, or method,
opinion, or goal.
They reach for the stars,
as they stand on our hearts,
and they sell us off piecemeal,
parcels and parts.
They slice us to mincemeat
and padlock the door,
while our blood runs quite freely
through holes in the floor.
But nothing is wasted,
tho’ everything’s lost.
So our blood is recycled
to offset the cost.
We huddle in darkness
yet shy from the fire
to howl at the moon
with the rest of the choir.
And when the glow wanes,
we stoke it with dreams
in hopes that the crackle
will drown out our screams.
You sleep in your bed
and you doze in your chair.
Your cushions are comfy
and so is your air.
But your heartache grows heavy,
as well as your head,
’til you nod away, nod away,
nod away, dead.
This article is drawn from the author’s
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