A Writer Asks...
Melanie, Thank you for responding with such thoroughness and with the speed that you
did. I highly appreciate both. Again, I highly enjoyed learning as much as I did,
pertaining to your book, Dramatica: a New Theory of Story,
and I look forward in reading your online book, Mental Relativity. I did ask
you for some information that you did not respond to and I am sure it was an accident. I
wanted information on the psychology of writing, the visual aspect of the reader, and the
"Whole Brain" theory of placing subject, space and so forth within the
sentences, paragraphs, pages etc. This interests me, as I am sure you can understand why,
greatly. Do you know anything about this? I thank you for your earlier response and look
forward to your future ones.
Melanie Replies...
Hi, Greg. The topic your are addressing has enormous ramifications which amount to an
entire approach to communication theory. The best I can do in a limited reply is refer you
to our Dramatica concept of the "Story Mind", as being that the underlying deep
structure of any complete story is an analogy or model of a single human mind as it tries
to deal with an inequity. In Dramatica theory, we see four stages of communication
(creating the conceptual Story Mind in "Storyforming", encoding the concept into
tangible symbols in "Storyencoding", transmitting those symbols over or through
a medium in "Storyweaving", and finally the attempt by an audience to discern
the symbols and pull them from the medium, decode them to their basic structural meaning,
and reconstruct the Story Mind in "reception". Clearly, the Story Mind is
present at all four stages, but in a different form. Similarly, we might look at the job
the audience does in interpreting the story experience as having it's own four stages.
When you talk about placing subject and space in the sentences and paragraphs, this can
occur in any single stage or any combination of stages. Each stage represents a different
kind of topic being looked at, or a different point of view from which a topic is seen.
Therefore, although we can say with confidence that subject and space are present in the
work, pinpointing exactly where it occurs is actually impossible for much the same reason
one cannot determine the location of an electron at the same time one is measuring it's
mass. It is the old particle and wave problem, and that stems from our own brains'
alternative organizations into spatial and temporal perspectives.
In fact, the issues you are bringing up are almost more pertinent to the psychology of
the author, as opposed to the psychology of the story. Rather than go into more detail
here, I suspect that you will find the information you are looking for by reading the
material regarding the psychology behind Dramatica which is available on the Mental Relativity pages.
Taking this in conjunction with the book, Dramatica: A New Theory of Story, should provide
you with a good parallax on the relationship between the structure and dynamics of our
minds and that of the stories we create.
