Author Archives: Melanie Anne Phillips

The Most Important Article You’ll Ever Read on Story Structure

We think in narrative, but think about topics. Narrative is the operating system of our own minds, and we seek to impose that upon every topic we encounter. For if we can, then we have the most touch-points with our own awareness, and see the most we can of what we are exploring, as well as the forces that operate in that system and hold things together.

That which does not match the schematic of our minds appears to be chaos. But even chaos can be topically related.

The problem for the creative mind is that it wants to have topic and narrative come together in a perfect fit. It is like putting a pencil on a table, and balancing a ruler across it. Topic is on one side and narrative is on the other. If you push the topic side down to the table, like a seesaw, the narrative side will go up, and vice versa.

So, the truth of the matter is, that topic and narrative can never both be fully explored in the same work.

And so, some writers seek a perfect structure at the expense of the passion of their topic. And others seek to completely explore their topic, though it makes a shambles of narrative.

But if you can accept that structure should not be perfect and that topic will never be expressed, then you can find the balance between the two that optimizes the effect or personal satisfaction you are shooting for.

When creating, the Muse abhors structure. She wishes to romp free in the fields of experience. You must never try to bridle the Muse or she will run away from you never to return.

So, in any first draft, forget about structure. Let the story flow of its own topical organic nature.

At this time, you create a Story World – the universe of experience in which your story will take place. It is not your story, but is the realm in which your story’s journey will occur. But it should have no structure, because it is not even a narrative yet – just the narrative space in which the narrative will eventually form.

Next, after creating a story world, you create a storyline. This can be one or more journeys across your story world, with a point of departure, a destination, and meandering around and lingering at as manny different concepts as you like within your story world. Again, structure should not be specifically applied at this time, since your own mind is already automatically laying the embryonic foundations of structure in the background while your Muse creates.

Finally, in the third stage, you look at your finished storyline journeys and, regardless if there is just one story/journey or many, you go to the list of Story Points in Dramatica and make sure each journey has them all, as completely as is reasonable.

So, you ensure there is a goal, a protagonist, a main character, an influence character unique ability, and so on. BUT do NOT create a storyform yet! We aren’t interested at this stage what kind of goal it is, just to identify what the topical subject matter of the goal is – that each journey HAS a goal.

Finally, once you have revised your storylines to include as many of the story points as you reasonably can, THEN and ONLY then do you create a storyform. This storyform will provide a template to which you can aspire, but like the pencil and the ruler, you can never really achieve without short changing your topic and your passion.

So, in seeing what KIND of goal your story SHOULD have, for example, you can then consider if your goal is actually like that, similar to that, or worlds away from that. And, if it doesn’t match exactly, you can determine if you think that will hurt your story, or if it is close enough, or the story point minor enough, that you can just leave it as it is, in the most passionate and organic form, and ignore structure at that point.

No one ever read a book or saw a movie to experience a magnificent structure. The readers and audience are there to ignite their passions about a topic of interest to them. THAT is the bottom line and it is also King.  Never let structure get in the way of that.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

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The Main Character and Duality

Consider the Main Character and the Influence Character who, it would seem at first blush, are as opposite as they can be in regard to  some underlying philosophical perspective, world view, belief system or moral code.

But in fact, they are not 180 degrees apart but 90 degrees from the point of view of one, and 270 from the point of view of the other.  If you haven’t seen it recently, check out the following video clip called “You and I are both alike” that explores the relationship between Main and Influence characters.  Here’s the link:

http://storymind.com/video/examples/you-and-i.mp4

These two “opposing” viewpoints are not about arguing “apples and oranges” but about one arguing they are nothing alike because one is an apple and the other an orange, and the other saying no, we are both alike because we are both fruit.  You see, duality is misunderstood when it assumed to be “black or white,” “hot or cold,” “good or evil.”  It is really a matter of how we classify ourselves – as different people on the same team or as members of different teams.

Are you familiar with the four kinds of character relationships – Dynamic, Companion, Dependent, and Associative?  That part of the Dramatica theory has much to inform a new way of looking at duality.  Here is a link on that concept, and then some more commentary:

http://storymind.com/content/79.htm

The relationship between the Main and Influence Characters is really that of the fourth kind of relationship – the Associative, in which its members are either seen as Components – Independent agents (apples and oranges), or as a Collective in which they are all part of the same family (fruit).

So duality does exist, but it is not as simple as saying for every ounce of good energy there must be an equal and opposite bad energy somewhere to balance it out.  Nothing is good or evil in and of itself.  It is all context dependent, but the sticking point is that conflicts occur because people don’t agree on which context to use in a given situation.  And that issue, in fact, is the core of what every story ever written is about: the author telling the audience that they have some special information or experience in regard to a particular kind of problem, and then promoting a particular context as the best one to use with that specific problem to have the best chance of solving, or at least lessening the effect of it.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

Visit our store for novelists & screenwriters

Duality and Dramatica

For fans of the Dramatica Story Structure Theory (and software):

Here’s part of a note I recently sent to a Dramatica user who is currently focused on the concept of Duality. Now, this note won’t make much sense if you don’t know anything about Dramatica, but you can get a pretty good crash course here at http://storymind.com/dramatica/ where you can download a free copy of the Dramatica Theory Book and learn all about the concepts behind this approach to narrative.

Here’s my note:

Duality holds initial increased clarity but is a dead-end if you stop there. The quad provides all of the perspectives necessary to see any situation or feeling under study as a dynamic, rather than just two perspectives on the same thing. Two of the elements of the quad are dynamics, and two are elements. This is exactly the same as Yin and Yang. Most people see the Yin Yang symbol as just two things, male and female. But it actually has four parts: each comma-shaped area, and within each a dot. The dots are the elements, the commas are the dynamics. In a quad, mass and energy are the dots – the binary and the immediate. Space and time are the commas – the higher dimension of dynamics in which the elements exist, but are also guided by the dynamics as water might flow around a rock.

Yeah, I know, pretty philosophic from someone who co-created the very definitive Dramatica chart that operates more like a Rubik’s cube. But Chris and I were always aware that the visualization we use to present Dramatica only expresses the digital side, at the expense of the additional analog truth that operates in the same space-time.

–Melanie Anne Phillips

Story Structure – Guidelines, Not Rules!

Of late, I’ve been working with the concept that perfect story structure is a myth – and should be! As they say in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, “it’s more of a guideline than a rule.”

In story creation, one should ignore structure up front because we all think in narrative to begin with, subconsciously – that’s what narrative is: the pattern or framework we use to find meaning.  And since narrative is how we think, every creative work we bring into the world already has an embryonic narrative structure forming in our subject matter.

The problem is that often subject matter may engender multiple potential narratives that are incompatible with one another at some or many levels. And the job of structuring is to find and refine those potential narratives so that one may be selected as the one round which you build your story.

This creative process tends to take place through four stages of story development:

1. Building your story world – who’s in it, what happens in it, what it all means.

2 Finding the path you want to follow through that world – basically your story’s timeline.

3. Adding in structural story points to act as the cornerstones and lynchpins of your story.

4. Determining the complete structural storyform that best matches your intent for the story.

In that final fourth stage, you use the storyform as a blueprint for your story, but have a lot of leeway in how closely you adhere to it. No one reads a book or goes to a movie to experience a great structure. They go because of their interest in the subject matter and a desire to have the expression of that subject matter ignite their passions.

And so, aside from the most crucial story points, an actual story (as opposed to a theoretical ideal story) can vary considerably from structural perfection whenever the process of making it more structurally accurate would undermine the flow of passion or short change the exploration of the subject matter.

Knowing, for any given story, which story points are crucial and how far one can drift, is a result of experience: the more you practice, the better you get.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-Creator, Dramatica

Learn more about Dramatica Story Structure Software

Lost in Alternative Plots

Do you remember the television series called Lost – about a plane that crashes on a mysterious island filled with contradictions and unanswerable questions? The series ran for something like five years and never really answered most of those questions.

When it concluded, everyone had been led to believe that all their questions would be answered. But, in truth, very few were, and certainly not any of the big ones. The audience was very disappointed. But if they HAD answered the questions – well, then, it would have been considered one of the most inventive and wonderfully produced series of all time.

Still, it is usually a very good thing to create questions in the mind of your reader or audience. These are the questions your they will be asking on their own, if you have set things up right. And if they are, then they are hooked, because they want to know the answers and will keep with you for this book or television series or even for a whole series of books that spring from the story world you have created.

Now you don’t have to know the answers to these questions going into the writing process. But you do have to know the answers by the time the series is done. You can answer some of the questions in each book or episode or season, but create more questions as well, until the final book or episode or season, which must bring all the parts together.

For example, in Harry Potter, it is only in the last book that you learn that Harry is one of the “objects” that holds a piece of Voldemort’s soul – all the others being inanimate objects. It is that knowledge in the last book that allows Harry to overcome Voldemort.

I don’t know if J.K Rowling worked that one out in advance, but she sure came up with a dilly of an answer to the questions of why Harry was “the one” and also was “the boy who lived!”

And in the Vampire Chronicles about LeStat by Anne Rice, she created an overarching issue for her main character who did not want to be a vampire, then came to revel in it, then to be impertinent, and then is finally presented with a way to become human again, takes it, and discovers he has lost himself, his identity, by no longer being a vampire. He spends that whole fifth and final book in that particular overarching story trying to regain his vampireness, which he eventually does – angst over, content bloodsucker.

Another example – do you know the author, Alistair MacClean, who wrote Where Eagles Dare and Ice Station Zebra, to name a couple of his 20+ books?

He reveled in creating a plot that turned out not to be the real plot, which also turned out not to be the real plot. Sometimes, by the end of a book, you had gone through six reasonable explanations of what was going on, only to discover none of them were true and it was really a seventh.

Now, think of the series Twin Peaks, in which there are so many odd goings-on and supernatural happenings. Once again, we all expected an answer in the last episode, but it didn’t happen. Still, the “ride” was exceptional, so we all let it go, but with an underlying sense of dissatisfaction and of being unfulfilled.

But you know, as a narrative analyst, it wasn’t too hard to come up with endings for both Lost and Twin Peaks that tied everything together.  In fact, I came up with an explanation for each that is simple, obvious once you know it, and would have tied everything together for each of the series.  But, I’m not going to delve into that here, because the point of this article is not the specifics, but that you really want to have your readers or audience asking questions to keep them on the hook but you are then REALLY obligated to come up with truly clever and unexpected answers to those questions.

It is very possible to do this, even if you don’t figure it out in advance.

 

My point is this. Keep your reader guessing and then satisfy at the end.

But how do you do that?

Here’s the plan.

While you are working out your story, you are likely to come up with a bunch of different potential plot turns and explanations for things before you settle on the one that you want.

Write down each different potential plot as a separate synopsis of a story, as if each was going to be your story in an alternate universe.

The synopses can be as long or as short as you like. One paragraph or ten pages.

Give each a name such as “Plot Explanation 1” or “Gordon is really a sentient Twinkie” and and so on.

In each, write about the plot as if it were the only one for the story in that universe.

As a byproduct, this will help clear your mind of the cacophony of all the completing plot ideas that are running around in your head.

It will also point out which ones are most developed and which are very thin.

It will also point out which are easiest to write for you and have the most creative impetus.

Now, list some questions at the bottom of each synopsis – things you don’t yet have the answers to – things that keep you up at night, looking for a reason for what you want you characters to do or for what happens to them.

As you have now likely guessed, you may not want to pursue all the different plot versions. But once you have them all written down independently, you can compare them, their ease of writing, their interest to you and motivation for you as the author, and so on.

From the list of all of them, you can select the one you want to pursue for this book, season or script and put the rest in mothballs for later.

Once you see all of the different plot options you have considered, and once each has been independently described, then you can determine if you want to do like MacClean or Lost and use several with one turning out to be true in the end, or if you want to just select one as your plot for a single story, create questions in the mind of your readers or audience, and not pursue the others at all.

Now, armed with your basic story, you take your list of questions at the end of each synopsis you intend to employ, and focus on just one question at a time.  Turn off your reasonable mind and let your Muse run wild with all kinds of potential answers ranging from the reasonable to the ridiculous to the absurd.

Sometimes the most cockamamie answers are the most appealing to your readers or audience, because they would never think of them themselves.

Select the answer you want it to turn out to be, and then tease your readers or audience by making the answer appear to be something else along the way to the truth.  Give them several of the other answers as the explanation of the moment, then drop a little more information that makes that answer unreasonable within the rules of your own story universe.   Then, put another answer up as your explanation.  Rinse and repeat until all your really good Muse-provided answers have been run up the flagpole until, finally and at the very end, you spring the very best answer on them so they know it is going to stick.

Do this, and you’ll have the reading or viewing public eating out of your mind.

 

—Melanie Anne Phillips

In Search of Your Writer’s Identity

Sweet potatoes are the best.  And they are best described in Ralph Ellison’s story of a black man coming to terms with his identity entitled “Invisible Man,” in which he has always avoided eating his favorite childhood food, hot buttered yams, sold by street vendors, so he would not be stereotyped, as he now works in an office in a suit.  But he finally accepts his true love of the food, stops by a vendor, puts down his briefcase and eats the wonderful sweet salty treat with abandon, proclaiming in his mind, “I yam what I yam.”

Personally, in 7th grade art class, we were given an assignment to bring in pictures to illustrate how to show distance.  One techniques was loss of detail.  I brought in a picture from Mad Magazine where a little boy had just cut off the tail of a cat with a pair of scissors and labelled it “Loss of De Tail.”  He looked at it for a moment and said, “You want to add this to the other examples in your portfolio?”  Man had no sense of humor.  He lost it by living a life as someone he wasn’t.

In each of the two narratives above, one fictional and one a true story, two different people for completely different reasons had stepped away from who they really were to fashion lives that didn’t reflect them at all.  They felt justified in doing this when it started because they never imagined the path would lead them to where they ended up.

It starts with a single compromise to oneself – doing a job you hate to achieve something you want or putting your own art on hold to pay the bills as a teacher.  But to maintain that compromise, you need to make another, and another in support of it until you’ve built up a whole network of interconnected dependencies that form the bars of a framework behind which you are self-imprisoned.

You’ve put so much effort into building this damn thing called “your life” that you can’t bear to let it go – like a cancerous tumor you’ve become really attached to, to the point you won’t let anyone remove it from you.

Captain Kirk said, “I need my pain,” when he was offered the chance to become “magically” angst-free.  Our pain is the scar we wear, the badge of honor for all the suffering we endured on the way to the life we have fashioned for ourselves.  It defines our struggle, so it defines ourselves, or at least who we have become.

But is that who we really “are” much less who we would want to be?  Of course not.  But are we willing to change?  Hell, no!  We’d not only risk everything and everyone we have, but will then have to face that maybe those aren’t the things and people we really want.  And then there’s the kids, and all those who depend upon us, and our responsibility to future generations….

Shakespeare said,

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

But in this case, it is not the after-life we fear, but life itself.  Can we really face having to acknowledge we’ve spent years of our lives weaving a fabric with a horrible pattern that doesn’t reflect us at all?  And wouldn’t THAT be dandy, to not only have to face that knowledge, but then to crash it all down in order to be ourselves so all we end up with is lost time and nothing at all to show for it?  Gambler’s syndrome – if I spend a little bit more I’ll eventually score big enough to cover all of my loses and still come home a winner.

No, it’s not an easy place to go.  But as artists, we head right for that place like lemmings, subjugating our Muse “until later” or because we need to be “responsible.”  Seriously?  What kinds of lame excuses are these?

Don’t lie to yourself that it will happen someday, because it never will – not on its own.  It will only happen someday if you make it happen.  And there’s no time like the present.  Yeah, sure, okay,  you’re not going to abandon your family and head off to another continent to rediscover your Muse (though some have done just that).  But you probably won’t.  I never have, but I’m no freaking example of much of anything, ‘cept to myself, of course.

No, you’ll probably want to write the great American (or some other nationality) Novel or Screenplay, and you’ll “grunt and sweat under a weary life.” to try to make that happen while still trying to maintain everything else.  After all, J. K. Rowling did just that, didn’t she?

But honestly, how many J. K. Rowlings are in the world?  One, of course,  So give up the dream of writing what you want and expecting it to make mega bucks.  Could happen, but you’ll probably have better odds with the Lotto.  Besides, as soon as cold, hard cash enters the picture, your Muse seizes up in a mental charlie horse, all twisted up and contorted into a Gordian knot of creative deadlock.  Oh, yeah. That’s fun.

Listen my friends (I can call you my friends, can’t I?) if you want to be happy in writing, just write whatever you freaking want.  And write it how you want.  And tell it the way you want it told.  But never sell out your Muse for security – oh, no…  Just take a job on the side and realize it has nothing to do with your creative self.  Be truthful, it’s just for the money.  Differentiate between your worker-bee self and your inventive spirit self, and don’t ever, not now, never, under any circumstances lock the two together or they will both go down into the deep and you along with them, waving to yourself like Ahab on the whale of your reality as your inspiration sinks below the waves leaving no one to tell the tale because the damn writer in you just drowned in self-pity and was never heard from again (though some mindless husk continues to crank out text under the same name).

You yam what you yam.  Eat it.

Melanie Anne Phillips

An Argument Against Deadlines

By Melanie Anne Phillips

In story structure there is a dramatic element called the Story Limit.  It has two varieties: the time lock and the option lock.  Some stories come to a climax because they run out of time, others because they run out of options.

In a time lock story, you are rushed.  In an option lock story you are pressured (because the undesired situation remains an irritant until you finally find a solution).

The same thing applies to writing.  If you have a deadline for a publisher, then you are writing with time lock.  But if you are creating for yourself, you are writing with an option lock.

And so, it really doesn’t matter how big the ocean is, you have all the time in the world to paddle across it.  And, if you enjoy the process of writing, the more time it takes, the more you get to enjoy it.

A little effort every day will get you there.  Even if there are days that don’t produce much if anything, there are days that will produce a lot so that, in time, step by step, page by page, you will one day find yourself on the opposite shore with a finished novel.

Writing with a “Collective” Goal

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Some writers become so wrapped up in interesting events and bits of action that they forget to have a central unifying goal that gives purpose to all the other events that take place. This creates a plot without a core. But determining your story’s goal can be difficult, especially if your story is character oriented, and not really about a Grand Quest.

For example, in the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” all the characters are struggling with their relationships and not working toward an apparent common purpose. There is a goal, however, and it is to find happiness in a relationship. This type of goal is called a “Collective Goal” since it is not about trying to achieve the same thing, but the same KIND of thing. When considering the goal for your story, don’t feel obligated to impose a contrived central goal if a collective goal is more appropriate.

Plot vs. Exposition

By Melanie Anne Phillips

A common misconception is that Plot is the order of events in a story. In fact, the order in which events are unfolded for the reader or audience can be quite different from the order in which they happen to the characters.

Plot, then, is really that internal progression of events, while the reader/audience order is more precisely referred to as Exposition.

For an author, it is important to separate the two. Otherwise it is too easy to overlook a missing step in the logical progression of the story because the steps were put out of order in Exposition.

On the other hand, trying to separate the internal logic of the story from the Exposition order really inhibits the creative muse. When working out a story, many authors like to envision the finished work including the Exposition. This gives the best impression of how the story will feel to the audience.

So the key is to first create your plot as it will appear in the finished story. Once you have a handle on it, that is the time to put the plot in Character Order to see if there are any missing pieces.

If there are, fill in the logical gaps, then “re-assemble” the plot back into the order in which you wanted to unfold it for the audience, making sure to add the new gap-filling plot pieces into your exposition as well.

Using this system, you will ensure that everything that happens in your story is not only interestingly revealed, but also makes an unbroken chain of sense.