Author Archives: Melanie Anne Phillips

Who’s Behind This Blog?

Who’s behind this blog?

Hi, I’m Melanie Anne Phillips – Owner of Storymind.com, creator of StoryWeaver, and Co-creator of Dramatica. I have two grown children, two grandchildren, and recently turned 65.

For 25 years I’ve taught creative writing and story structure, but there’s a lot more to me than that. I’m an avid photographer in the style of Ansel Adams, I hike in the back country of Yosemite, I write philosophy and personal journals (see my author page on Amazon) and I compose music – lots of music in lots of styles. Perhaps the best way to know the person behind this page is to hear a bit of my music, which is the voice of the soul.

ONE OF MY PIANO IMPROV SESSIONS

I find the best way to warm up my compositional skills is a little free-form invention on the fly for a short session. Often a new riff or an interesting chord progression emerges that eventually becomes a whole new song. The key is to walk out fearlessly among the notes, follow the Muse of whimsy and less loose the dogs of serendipity.

Choosing Your Main Character’s Resolve

The Main Character represents the audience’s position in the story. Therefore, whether he or she changes or not has a huge impact on the audience’s story experience and the message you are sending to it.

Some Main Characters grow to the point of changing their nature or attitude regarding a central personal issue like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Others grow in their resolve, holding onto their nature or attitude against all obstacles like Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive.

Change can be good if the character is on the wrong track to begin with. It can also be bad if the character was on the right track. Similarly, remaining Steadfast is good if the character is on the right track, but bad if he is misguided or mistaken.

Think about the message you want to send to your audience, and whether the Main Character’s path should represent the proper or improper way of dealing with the story’s central issue. Then select a changing or steadfast Main Character accordingly.

Excerpted from our Dramatica Story Structure Software

Try it risk-free for 90 days at Storymind.com

Finding Your Story’s Core

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Every story has a core – that concept at the center that pulls all of the story elements into a cohesive whole, establishes meaning and message, and provides the story with an overall identity.

There are four fundamental kinds of cores, though each has endless variations.

1. Universe stories that are all about a fixed situation people must grapple with, such as being stuck in an overturned ocean liner, locked in a high-rise building with terrorists, being handcuffed to a murder, being the only member of a group with a particular gender or race, having a physical deformity.

2. Mind Stories that are all about fixed mind sets such as exploring or overcoming prejudice, belief in something that defies all evidence to the contrary, an unreasonable fear, a determination to accomplish something even if the reason for doing it has vanished.

3. Physics stories that are all about activities such as a trek through the jungle to obtain a lost treasure, the attempt to build the first self-aware artificial intelligence, a race across a continent in the 1800s, the effort to find a cure for a virulent new disease.

4. Psychology stores that are all the the thinking process, such as trying to come to terms with personal loss, grappling with issues of faith, overcoming addiction, growing to become a true leader.

Which of these four kinds of cores best describes what you want your story to be about and how you want it to feel?

By picking a core, you will have a central defining vision for your story that will keep it on track during development, and your completed story will come across with a powerful unified impact on your readers or audience.

The “Core” concept is part of the Dramatica Theory of Narrative Structure

Read the Dramatica Theory Book for Free in PDF

Try Dramatica Story Structuring Software risk-free for 90 days

A Word About Inspiration for Writers

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.

One thing most inspirations have in common is that they are not stories, just the beginnings of stories. To develop a complete story, you’ll need a cast of characters, a detailed plot, a thematic argument, and the trappings of genre.

But how do you come up with the extra pieces you need?

In the questions that follow StoryWeaver will help inspire you, even if you can’t come up with an idea to save your life!

Learn more about StoryWeaver at Storymind.com

Writing Con Men, Shady Businessmen, and Seedy Politicians

Characters, as with real people such as con men, shady businessmen, and seedy politicians, will often use statistics to paint a false, yet plausible, picture.

For example, one such character might state that 12% of all high-school dropouts were beaten by their parents. What he doesn’t say is that 12% of high school graduates were also beaten by their parents.

By not providing statistics for the whole group, there is no comparative, and a causal relationship between beatings and dropping out is inferred.

To build your characters, read the news, see these techniques used in life and then apply that in fiction to believably drive your story forward .

Melanie Anne Phillips – Storymind.com

Message and Context

The message of a story comes from context. It is context that eventually convinces Scrooge that his way of looking at the world is incorrect. Yet, before he was shown the bigger picture, his personal experience presented quite a different picture.

The Influence Character in a story (the ghosts, in the case of A Christmas Carol) presents that alternative context, shifting their argument, act by act, as the Main Character tries to maintain his conclusions by side-stepping.

Eventually, the Influence Character will chase the Main Character’s reasoning around the block until there is nowhere left to side-step and he or she must face that bigger picture.

At that point – the point of climax in the personal journey of growth for the Main Character – he or she will either accept or reject this new context (either change or remain steadfast in their views) in a leap of faith, and the ramifications of that choice will determine if the story ends in success or failure.

To help with creating these context and developing the progressive conflict between the Influence Character and the Main Character, we developed Dramatica: the world’s only writing software with a patented interactive Story Engine that cross-references your answers to questions about your story to create a template for perfect story structure.

You can try it risk-free for 90 days at our web site at Storymind.com

— Melanie Anne Phillips

About Your Story’s Title

By Melanie Anne Phillips

What’s in a name? Having at least a working title will help you start your story, even if you ultimately change the title.

The title of your story may or may not have dramatic significance. In some cases, the meaning of the title may become apparent only during the course or even at the end of a story. There have even been stories in which the final understanding of the message is only achieved when the title becomes the last piece in the puzzle.

Consider the value of these example titles such as The Verdict (which refers to the story’s climax), Alien (which refers to the subject matter), and The Silence of the Lambs (which refers to the Main Character’s personal problems).

Whether or not a title plays into the story itself, it will always frame the first impression it has on your readers or audience. To illustrate this, imagine all the other titles the original Star Wars movie might have had. In actuality, Star Wars was originally titled The Adventures of the Starkiller, then Episode One of the Star Wars, Adventures of Luke Starkiller, and even The Journal Of The Whills. Now, of course, it has been renamed Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Clearly, you can immediately feel the impact a change in title has on the reader/audience first impression of your story.

Also from Melanie Anne Phillips…

The Four Stages of Story Development

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Authors differ in many ways in how they approach the creation of a story, yet there are four stages in the process through which each author must travel:

1. Inspiration

2. Development

3. Exposition

4. Storytelling

In the Inspiration stage, you come up with your basic ideas for your Plot, Characters, Theme, and Genre.

In Development, you flesh-out these ideas, adding details and making all the bits and pieces work together in harmony.

In Exposition you determine how to reveal your narrative to your readers or audience over time, story point by story point.

In Storytelling you establish your style, pacing, and voice.

Also from Melanie Anne Phillips:

The Story Mind (Part 10) – The Four Throughlines

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

The structure of a story, then, is the psychology of a single mind made tangible. For the story to be sound and ring true, the psychology must be complete and valid.

But to make a complete argument, it is not enough to simply reproduce the Story Mind structure. We must go beyond that and move into a larger realm that involves the audience.

In a nutshell, the audience will not be satisfied until they see the Story Mind presented to them from four different points of view – the Objective Story, the Main Character, the Obstacle (or Influence) character, and the Subjective Story. Simply put, imagine the goings on in a story as a battle. We can watch that battle from up on a hill overlooking the field, as a General might. This is what we call the Objective view of the story, since it is seeing the story from the outside in. Though from this perspective we care about what happens, it is not as if it is happening to us. Rather, we are simply watching it happen to others. Because we see the big picture, we can tell if a soldier is headed into an ambush, or how he might best achieve his goals. We can evaluate decisions made on the field as being good or bad in the grand scheme of things.

The Objective view is the same perspective we have in real life when we see others trying to deal with their problems. It is easy for us to think we see the best course, not being involved ourselves, and we often offer advice and comments like, “Why don’t you just…” or “How could you possibly have….”

Of course, this ignores how that person might feel, and dismisses any attachments or emotional needs they may have. Because we have no vested interest in the outcome, we can consider the situation dispassionately. After all, we don’t have to wake up in the morning having to deal with the consequences of their actions.

But if we zoom down onto the field and stand in the boots of one of the soldiers, we get a completely different point of view – the Main Character perspective. From here we experience the most passionate appreciation of the battle, rocked by the concussion of dramatic explosions all around us, stumbling across the field without that objective overview, just trying to do our job and survive the clash.

The Main Character view represents our own sense of self – the Story Mind’s self awareness. It is the view from the inside looking out. Though we can clearly see the situation surrounding others, that is a perspective we cannot get of ourselves. Rather, we must try to deduce the “big picture” based on the little personal glimpses of it we get while we grapple with our problems.

For an audience to feel that all the angles of the story’s problems have been explored, both of these real life points of view must be included in the structure. And yet, even they are not sufficient: there are two more perspectives required as well.

Also from Melanie Anne Phillips…

The Story Mind (Part 9) – The Story Mind Revisited

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

So what, exactly, is the Story Mind made of? Dramatica says that “Every complete story is an analogy to a single mind trying to deal with an inequity.” Now that’s very scientific, but what does it really mean? It means that characters, theme, plot and genre are not just people with value standards doing things in an overall setting – rather, character, theme, plot and genre are different families of thought that go on in our own minds, mad tangible, incarnate as character, thematic arguments and plot points.

So a story is as if an author took the mechanism of our minds, made it tangible and put it out there for us to look at so we could examine the problem solving process. Rather than having to be involved in it subjectively, we are told by the author that he or she has the benefit of insight or experience, and that even though it may feel one way to us on the inside, there is a more objective understanding of how we should proceed.

In fact, the Main Character represents the reader/audience position in the story. It represents our own position in our own heads. We know who we are at any given time. In regard to any given issue, we know where we stand.

In essence then, the Story Mind concepts says, “Think of a story as if it were a person.” There’s only one Main Character in a story because there’s only one “I” in our own minds. Further, we all have the same emotion and logical considerations, and each of these must appear as characters in a story for it to feel complete as well. If any parts are missing, the story’s argument will feel incomplete.

Dramatica also says that this Story Mind system came into being as a natural by- product of the process of communication. If you want to state that the approach you are promoting in your story is either the best or worst of all that might be tried, that you have to actually show all the other approaches that might reasonably be taken and illustrate why they aren’t as powerful as yours.

When you create a story argument that has no holes, then you have included all the ways a human mind might consider to solve a problem. In effect, you have created a model of the mind’s problem solving process – a Story Mind.
No one set out to build this model directly. But through centuries of trial and error in storytelling, conventions were developed that worked because they built an analogy to the psychology of the mind.

With this in mind, every once in a while, stand back from your story and think of it as a single person. It is so easy for an author to get so lost in the details of making all the parts work that he or she loses sight of the big picture – the overall impact of the story as a whole.

By taking time to examine whether your story has a sound psychology that makes it feel like a functional person and that the personality of the story itself is both human and interesting as well, you’ll create a consistency that can’t be achieved simply by looking at the structural elements through a microscope.