Here’s a little tip from narrative psychology theory you can use in everyday life:
When pressure is put upon the heart, the mind, it is like pumping up pressure in any closed vessel – it heats up, in this case with psychological energy. And that energy softens the pre-existing shape of the heart/mind so that is can conform to the shape of the pressures, and thereby avoid further pain.
When the pain stops, the pressure stops, and like any closed vessel in which the pressure is released, it cools quickly, freezing the heart/mind into this new pattern, which will continue to sustain unending, even if the original source of the pain is gone.
Only by warming that pattern up, a small bit at a time, in a safe setting and under your own control can you soften the shape within you that you wish to change and gradually siphon off the pain as you re-mold it into a pattern of peace and self-acceptance.
Excerpted from the book, Dramatica: A New Theory of Story
How can essential concepts be communicated? Certainly not in their pure, intuitive form directly from mind to mind. (Not yet, anyway!) To communicate a concept, an author must symbolize it, either in words, actions, juxtapositions, interactions — in some form or another. As soon as the concept is symbolized, however, it becomes culturally specific and therefore inaccessible to much of the rest of the world.
Even within a specific culture, the different experiences of each member of an audi- ence will lead to a slightly different interpretation of the complex patterns represented by intricate symbols. On the other hand, it is the acceptance of common symbols of com- munication that defines a culture. For example, when we see a child fall and cry, we do not need to know what language he speaks or what culture he comes from in order to understand what has happened. If we observe the same event in a story, however, it may be that in the author’s culture a child who succumbs to tears is held in low esteem. In that case, then the emotions of sadness we may feel in our culture are not at all what was intended by the author.
Annotation
As I read this over, I think our intent was good, but we were a little off the mark. Here we state in the opening paragraph that to communicate a thought, concept, feeling or experience you need to symbolize it first. That’s not technically true. For example, suppose you want your friend to feel terror. Well, you could just throw him out of an airplane and I’ll bet he’d pretty much experience just what you had in mind. Nothing symbolic about that!
More accurately, we can communicate by creating an environment that causes our reader or audience to arrive just where we want them. In other words, we set up an experience that, by the end of the book or movie, positions our reader or audience into just the mindset we want them to have.
More sophisticated, or perhaps less end-product-oriented narratives are designed to position the reader or audience all along the way as well, so that the entire journey is an experience right along the logical and emotional path of discovery the author intended for his followers.
None of this requires symbols, however. It can all be done simply by creating a series of artificial environments presented in a given sequence. But, symbols can streamline the process. If you don’t have to build the environment for the reader or audience but merely allude to it, then you can get your point and passion across simply by invoking an element of common understanding.A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but a symbol is worth 1,000 experiences.
So, what we wrote above is not wrong per se, but rather is short speak that (though it communicates) is open to criticism because is skips over a number of steps to streamline communication. And that, is exactly what symbols do – they get the content to the recipient in the quickest fashion possible yet open the message – the story argument – to rebuttal because wholesale parts of the communication are truncated, leaving gaps in the actual flow, though if the author is in tune with the audience’s symbolic vocabulary, the complete extent of the original concept may, in fact, be fully appreciated.
Bottom line – know your audience and you will be able to put far more logical and passionate density into the pipeline than if you had to spell everything out.
The process of communication requires at least two parties: the originator and the recipient. In addition, for communication to take place, the originator must be aware of the information or feelings he wishes to transmit, and the recipient must be able to determine that meaning.
Similarly, storytelling requires an author and an audience. And, to tell a story, one must have a story to tell. Only when an author is aware of the message he wishes to impart can he determine how to couch that message so it will be accurately received.
It should be noted that an audience is more than a passive participant in the storytelling process. When we write the phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night,” we have communicated a message, albeit a nebulous one. In addition to the words, an- other force is at work creating meaning in the reader’s mind. The readers themselves may have conjured up memories of the fragrance of fresh rain on dry straw, the trem- bling fear of blinding explosions of lightning, or a feeling of contentment that recalls a soft fur rug in front of a raging fire. But all we wrote was, “It was a dark and stormy night.” We mentioned nothing in that phrase of straw or lightning or fireside memories. In fact, once the mood is set, the less said, the more the audience can imagine. Did the audience imagine what we, the authors, had in mind? Not likely. Did we communicate? Some. We communicated the idea of a dark and stormy night. The audience, however, did a lot of creating on its own. Did we tell a story? Definitely not!
Annotations
One of the early questions we grappled with was the relationship between author and audience (or reader). When you stop to think about it, not just superficially but deeply, the fact that we can communicate at all is something of a miracle.
Consider: Two creatures, each with completely different life experiences can experience essentially the exact same understandings and passions as each other across a medium through abstract patterns of ink on a page or moving patterns of light, shadow and sound on a screen.
It was not long into our investigation of the nature of story structure that we realized the only way such communication could exist was if the underlying mechanisms of our minds were identical, as a species, regardless of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, culture or personal experience.
Story structure itself an artificial mind – a model, a replica of all the elements that make up this foundational mechanism we all share that form the framework upon which we hang specific information and particular emotions.
That framework is just a skeleton, however. And though it can be created in any language and through any medium, it is the development of commonly understood symbols that allows for communication between author and audience.
Still, while each symbol has a denotative meaning, it will differ in connotation from other symbols that might have been used to convey the same information. Further, each reader or audience member will expand upon each symbol and especially upon a continuing stream of symbols, seeking patterns not only in the order in which the symbols were received, but also in the potential manners in which they might be assembled into an overall understanding, much as one might follow the instructions on a kit step by step and end up with an assembled piece of furniture.
Pattern making is a survival trait. It allows us to note, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” in a spatial sense (when this, also that) and also allows us to project, “one bad apple spoils the bunch” in a temporal sense (if this, then this). As a result of pattern making, we are able to see dangers and opportunities that are co-existant with indicators in the here and now and also to anticipate the same in the future.
And so, when we write, “It was a dark and stormy might,” we not only convey the facts, but provide the seeds for our readers or audience members to create patterns that enrich the communication process, and immerse them into a world that is partially of their own creation.
A tale is a simple linear path that the author promotes as being either a good or bad one, depending on the outcome.
There’s a certain amount of power in that. Still, it wouldn’t take our early author long to realize that if he didn’t have to limit himself to relating events that actually happened he might wield even more power over his audience.
Rather, he might carry things a step farther and create a fictional tale to illustrate his belief in 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 might you garner if you went beyond merely stating, “This conclusion is true for this particular case,” but rather boldly stated “This conclusion is true for all cases?”
In other words, you tell your audience, “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.”
Rather than saying that the approach you have described to your audience is simply good or bad in and of itself, you are now inferring that of all the approaches that might have been taken, yours is the best (or worst) way to go.
Clearly 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!”
Still, because you’ve only shown the one path, even though you are saying it is better than any others, you have not illustrated the others. Therefore, you are making a blanket statement.
Now, an audience simply won’t sit still for a blanket statement. They’ll cry, “Foul!” They will be thinking of the other paths they might personally have taken and will at least question you.
So, if our early author sitting around a fire says, “Hey, this is the best of all possible paths,” his audience is going to say , “What about this other case? What if we tried this, this or this?”
If the author had a sound case he would respond to all the solutions the audience might suggest, compare them to the one he was touting and conclusively show that the promoted path was, indeed, the best (or worst). But if a solution suggested by the audience proves better than the author’s, 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 or at least exhausted their interest in arguing with him. Since he is there in person, he won’t necessarily have to argue every conceivable alternative solution – just the ones the audience brings up. And if he is successful, he’ll eventually satisfy everyone’s concerns or simply tire them out to the point they are willing to accept his conclusions.
But what happens if the author isn’t there when the story is related? The moment a story is recorded and replayed as a poem, a song ballad, a stage play, or a motion picture (for example), then the original author is no longer present to counter any rebuttals the audience might have to his blanket statement.
So if someone in the audience thinks of a method of resolving the problem and it hasn’t been addressed it in the blanket statement, they will feel there is a hole in the argument and that the author hasn’t made his case.
Therefore, in a recorded art form, a successful communicator needs to include all the other reasonable approaches that might be suggested in order to “sell” his approach as the best or the worst.
He needs to show how each alternative is not as good (or as bad) as the one he is promoting thereby proving that his blanket statement is correct.
A narrative, then, becomes a far more complex proposition than a simple tale. Now the author must anticipate all the other ways the audience might consider solving the problem in question. In effect, he has to include all the ways anyone might reasonably think of solving that problem.
Essentially, he has to include all the ways any human mind might go about solving that problem. In so doing, as an accidental by-product, generations of communicators have arrived at our modern conventions of narrative structure: a model of the mind’s problem-solving process encoded in the framework itself.
When an animal screams in pain, others notice, yet this is not communication as there was no intention involved. But when an animal calls out in alarm at an approaching predator it is more likely to be an intended communication.
Meaning may come from patterns recognized from previous experience or by translating the actions or sounds produced by others into what they would mean if one did those things oneself. But communication requires the intentional accurate transmission of information and/or passion from the author to the audience.
Communication likely emerged through raising an alarm, then quickly evolved to pointing at items to get the attention of others and direct it in particular direction or at a particular place.
Following these lines, continued progress would likely center on making sounds or movements to indicate issues about oneself, such as rubbing one’s stomach and pointing at one’s mouth to indicate hunger.
Success in achieving communication would illustrate its value and drive a fairly quick expansion of conventions of symbolic language that would be taught to the young and sustained (with gradual morphing) from generation to generation.
Once a sufficient collection of symbols had been developed, it would be natural that the more inspired communicators would come up with the notion of stringing two or more symbols together in linear form to communicate a succession of events or concepts.
In this manner, the foundational form of sentence structure and grammar would coalesce while simultaneously the beginnings of narrative structure would emerge as a byproduct.
For example, an early communicator 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 communicator became able to string together a series of events and experiences he has created a tale. Simply put, the definition of a tale is an unbroken linear progression of symbols that communicates meaning through sequence.
We call this kind of tale a “head-line” because it focuses on a chain of logical connections without emotive content. But you can also have a “heart-line” – an unbroken progression of feelings. For example, our communicator might have related a series of emotions he had experienced in a flow of feelings not connected to of any logistic progression.
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 might begin with a particular situation in which the communicator (henceforth author) relates his feelings at the time. Then, the author might proceed to the next step, which made him feel differently, and so on until he arrives at a final destination as well as 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 author 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 early author 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 the 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 narrative 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 uncomfortable to the audience. It will feel as if the character started developing in a manner the audience members cannot follow with their own hearts. It will pop your audience right out of the story and cause it to see the character as someone with whom it simply can’t identify.
So in tales the idea is to create linearity. But doesn’t that linearity create a formula as well? 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.
Communication requires the transfer of understanding and/or passion from one person to another. The process of communication involves both transmission and reception across a medium. Whether intentional or not, this process self-organizes into a narrative form which is the framework upon which the information, be it logic or feeling, is conveyed.
The word “narrative” is bandied about today as a catch all for stories, both fictional and in the real world. But what does it really mean? In fact, “narrative” means four distinctly different things that share the same root.
The four faces of narrative can be thought of as Creative Writing, Story Development, Story Structure and Narrative Science. These labels describe a spectrum that runs from the passion of self-expression at one side to the logic of self-awareness at the other. Let’s briefly stare into the face of each….
Creative Writing
As human beings, we are all driven by the desire to share our passions and understandings with others. We want them to empathize with our feelings and follow our logic: to know who we are and to see the world from our points of view.
While these drives are true for any means of communication, creative writing is the process of expressing ourselves through words. What we create might range from a simple emotional juxtaposition of words intended only to represent what is in the heart (the written equivalent of modern art) to a highly structured story with a fully developed argument and a clearly defined point.
Regardless of the balance between passion and point, this first face of narrative is the Muse itself.
Story Development
Most written communication does not flow onto the page devoid of consideration. Rather, the words come forth at times, and at other times one gives thought to how the concepts expressed are hanging together and where they might best lead next.
When an author, be it a personal diarist or successful screenwriter, cogitates either in advance of writing, during the process, or after the fact in order to improve the work in another draft, he or she is wearing the face of Story Development.
Story Structure
Unless wordplay is random, unless there is no intent involved, then the face of Story Structure rears its head. And the head, not the heart is where it belongs. Story Structure describes the underlying mechanics of a story, the cogs and processes that lead an audience down a path and bring them to embrace (or at least understand) a message about life and the best way to lead it.
Story structure exists because those cogs and processes provide all the essential techniques and points of view that we, as humans, use in our own minds and in our associations with others to identify problems, refine our understanding of them, and seek to discover the solutions that will resolve them.
Narrative Science
If we look beyond the conventions of story structure to ask why these same cogs and processes appear repeatedly in narrative after narrative, we discover that story structure is a model of the mind itself. Every character, plot point, thematic issue or genre mood is a facet of our own minds, isolated in nature and made tangible so that we might better understand ourselves.
At the most basic level, narrative science allows us to understand human psychology, both of individuals and how when we come together toward a common problem, we self-organize into group minds in which each individual comes to specialize in once aspect of our narrative selves in order to bring the greatest clarity to the group as a whole. In essence, when we gave into the face of narrative science, we stare into a mirror.
Though I might conclude this brief introduction to the four faces of narrative with some grand intellectual framework, my own Muse calls at the moment. And so I rather bring this to a close with a short bit of my own creative writing, pertinent to the subject:
In Verse
by Melanie Anne Phillips
If you could look into infinity,
all you’d see was the back of your head.
And if you were living forever,
you’d clearly be nothing but dead.
But if you step out of the universe,
where time is the flip-side of space,
You could be everywhere,
though you’d never been there,
and you’d stare,
right back into your face.
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