Inspiration for a novel or screenplay is all around you. Every day the mind naturally takes note of odd juxtapositions, inappropriate contexts and unlikely “what ifs” that crop up in overheard conversations, two television commercials that butt up against each other or folded over newspaper in which the visible part of the headline is “just not right.” Any time you encounter a “tilt” moment during your day, jot it down, as it might be fodder for your next story. For example, you might trip over a concept (computer geeks are transported to the old west), a plot twist (a detective discovers he is investigating his own murder), a situation (Ponce de Leon still lives today), a thematic topic (fracking), a character study (an aging rock star who is losing his licks) a line of dialog (“Just cuz somthin’s free don’t mean you didn’t buy it.”), a title (Too Old To Die Young) or any other creative notion that makes you think, that’s a good idea for a story! What’s more, any of these ideas might be a topic for conversation within your story, as opposed to the overall idea for the story itself. If you train yourself to jot down any unusual notion before it disappears into the block hole of the mediocrity that surrounds it, you’ll never be short of inspiration.
Beginning writers often look to other successful stories to learn how things ought to work. But so do all the other beginning writers. A book editor, agent, or script reader sees hundreds of manuscripts every year, all made up of the same pieces and hitting the same marks. You’ll never get noticed in that crowd. If you want your work to be discovered, break format, shake it up, do something different. Make your sheriff 8 years old, make your two lovers twins, set your gothic romance underwater. You’ll never be noticed if you don’t stand out.
What makes you a writer? Writing makes you a writer. Being a writer says nothing about how good you are, how prolific you are, whether you are published or not. When you write you are a writer. When you don’t, you aren’t. So practice your craft and proudly call yourself a writer.
My response to a Dramatica user who asked about the applicability of the theory for creative interactive fiction narratives:
Here’s the gist of using Dramatica for IF (we have made a number of presentations on this to various companies over the years, but never resulting in a contract for consulting, as of yet).
At the most basic level, consider how a story appears to an audience after it is completed. It ceases to be a linear experience and becomes a networked experience in which all dramatic elements of the storyform are appreciated at once, rather than revealed over time. Further, when you separate the storytelling sequence of linearity from the story structural temporal progressions of growth, for example, you can appreciate that growth in all its stages at once, after the story has been experienced.
Once an audience leaves a story, though they may replay certain sequences in their minds, they tend to consider the story as a whole – a world in which things happened rather than a pathway that was followed.
Consider, then, the first-person player perspective in a game is not necessarily to provide experiences in a sequence that will bring the MC to the point of potential change, but rather to explore all corners of the Story World until the nature of how all the elements and dynamics at work in that particular storyform are identified and understood.
Also consider just because the player is in first person in the game does not require that the player be the main character. In many stories there is a narrator. Narrators can be passive or active. The player, by choosing in what order to explore the world is much better put in the position of narrator, the interlocutor who determines for himself or herself the order in which the components of the story world are to be explored – much as one might make multiple trips to a buffet table or select items in dim sum and choose the order in which to consume them.
Sure, if one insisted the player were the MC, then you would be locked into a linear experience of being impacted by events and by the Influence Character in a particular order. But an IF in which the player is actually the narrator, then the MC appears from time to time in the story world, having experienced things in the proper order for him to make a choice, but likely in a different order than the player. For example, the MC in the story world shows up and the player says – “Let’s work together and head up to the badlands.” The MC replies, “Already been there, just before the big explosion. Change me in ways I’d rather not talk about, but it made me realize there may be another way of looking at the morality of this whole conflict.” And then he disappears back into the battle.
In this manner, the MC is separated from the Player and can go about his journey of discovery in the proper order.
So, while eliminating the MC may be a technique (as described in some of the propaganda entries in your message thread), I feel that for IF you simply don’t want your player as the MC but definitely want him in the game with the player as self determining narrator.
But, your questions go beyond this in two specific areas: One, how does one handle multiple narratives (storyforms) within the same narrative space and, Two, what about open-system IF worlds in which there is no fixed narrative, just a fixed subject matter story world in which the narrative is either open-ended (never-ending) or is closed but constantly reorganizing itself into a different form.
As for the first question, narratives are fractal by nature (see my articles and videos on narrative psychology). Even within a single narrative there are two fractal dimensions – that of the group mind and that of the individuals within the group mind. As you know, story structure came to be because storytellers were trying to document what goes on in our heads and hearts and also how we relate to one another. Each of us has certain built-in attributes such as Reason and Skepticism (as seen in the Reason and Skeptic archetypes). We use the full complement of these to solve our individual problems. But when we come together in a group to solve or explore an issue of common interest or concern, we immediately begin to specialize so that the individual best at reasoning becomes the Voice of Reason for the group. The most skeptical becomes the group’s resident Skeptic. In this manner, all the fundamental attributes of any individual mind are replicated and represented by individuals in the group mind. In this manner, group issues are explored from all essential sides and in greater depth by the specialists than could be achieved by a group of general practitioners who are all trying to do all the jobs at the same time.
This tendency to form group minds made up of specialists is what was observed by storytellers and documented in the conventions of story structure and is also what forms the basis for the fabric and framework of social interactions.
So, the first fractal dimension is the mind of the individual that is then replicated in the second fractal dimension of the group mind. But, one is not solely a member of a single group. We have one narrative role in our business, another perhaps as a parent, or in our political party, a proud resident of a state, of the nation, or even just as a fan of a particular television program or of a rock star.
Within the narrative space of our lives, we may belong to more than one group mind and these group minds may occupy completely different areas of the narrative space, may move through the narrative space gradually shifting the subject matter with which they deal, may share a sub set of content that is affected by both, may move through each other like galaxies colliding, may pass each other close enough to alter the storyform of each almost gravitationally (dynamically) even though they never actually share the same space, and some narratives may be satellites of other narratives or may be connected in additional levels of fractal association.
On that last point, for example, one may may be a member of a clique that is part of a club that is part of a movement that is part of political organization within a state that is in a collective effort within a country. Like nested dolls, all of what is at the top is determined by all that is at the lower fractal levels, but the top also defines the largest parameters of the group identity and therefore the personal identity of all individual members at the bottom of the fractal hierarchy, while each lower dimension contributes more refined subordinate traits to the lowest level individuals, defining them but also identifying them as different in some ways than other branches within the same general organization.
And so, people become groups and act as archetypes within them, then several groups band together within a larger group mind in which the smaller groups act as archetypes and so on, in a fractal manner, until the group reaches the maximum membership and number of levels it can sustain before collapsing from beneath due to the intrinsic differences of the lowest level members in which personal needs may outweigh allegiance and conformity to group ideals.
As for your second inferred question, storyforms can alter in an unlimited manner due to forces external to the storyform but in the same narrative space. And so, if you begin with a structure and that defines the nature and extent of the narrative, it provides an initial psychological matrix in which the player of an IF might come to be drawn into a game. But even after exploring a small portion of the initial storyform, you can provide choices to your player that would alter the storyform to create a new complete narrative that invalidates the old one. In the real world, we are always tearing down narratives and replacing them with new ones that better fit changing situations in a chaotic world. We may hold onto certain structural relationships in all of our narratives because we have found by experience that there are truisms worth maintaining. But much of what we hold as the principal driving stories of different aspects of our lives (and with different group minds) can be altered by brute force from the outside by a hostile take over, a powerful sub-group that rises to a position of leverage, or even by a change in circumstances such as an earthquake that destroys the power grid.
By nature, we try to maintain as much of the previous narrative as we can, for that is our experience base, but new rules come into play. And so, we accept the new that cannot be changed, then using that as a seed, go on to build a new narrative beginning with the elements from the old that are still possible within the new reality and that are most important to us. We add in as many of our most important narrative pieces as we can within the constraints of the new elements that have been imposed, and then make the best possible remaining new choices to create a new narrative. For without a narrative, we have no framework by which to evaluate our lives and ourselves or even to measure if things are getting better or worse.
So in conclusion (for now) consider that narratives are constantly creating new fractal dimensions at both the top when they form a new larger group mind and at the bottom when an individual department has grown so large it must cease to be an individual and become a group mind by sub-dividing into smaller departments. In addition, they are constantly affect by other narratives in the same narrative space, even to the point of having some of their elements and relationships altered so that the narrative must reform in a new form. And so, the ongoing expansion and contraction of fractals and cascading reformation through forces outside the limits of the closed system of individual narratives creates a vibrant and energetic dynamic environment in which IF can flourish.
Thanks for asking some interesting questions and pointing to an interesting message thread.
In the classes I teach on story structure we often point to Clarice Starling (Jody Foster) in “Silence of the Lambs” as a great example of a Success/Bad story in which the goal (save the senator’s daughter from Buffalo Bill) is achieved, but the personal angst of not being able to save that spring lamb remains, as evidenced by Lecter’s final conversation with Starling over the phone in which he asks, “Are the lambs still screaming?” Her silence in response (plus the somber soundtrack music even though this he graduation from the academy) both indicate she is still holding on to that angst.
We usually leave it there, having served our purpose of illustrating what Success/Bad means. Sometimes we go on to say that the reason she is trying to save all these people today – the reason she got into law enforcement (besides the fact her father was a sheriff) was because she can’t let go of that one lamb she couldn’t save and keeps trying to make up for it.
But now I’m thinking that while that may be true in an objective sense, nobody would carry that weight in their heart and act out that way for those reasons alone. You’d see it, you’d understand it and move on. Rather, I think the reason she does what she does is not to make up for that lamb but to avoid having to carry another similar sense of loss. So every extraordinary effort – even to the extent of putting herself at risk of death – is to keep from adding one more victim to the pain or failure she already carries.
It would seem, then, counter-intuitive to put oneself in a profession where the risk of failure in the exact same subject matter area as your angst. But consider – most of us need to pay penance when we feel we have screwed up. The risk of hurting herself emotionally even more by her choice of profession, therefore, is penance for the first lamb she lost, while the extra-human effort she puts into each case is the attempt to avoid adding another instance to the pain she already carries.
Pretty screwed up, really, but in actuality the only way a mind, a heart, can make up for failing another in a way that can’t be fixed is to try to help others in a similar way. But then the risk of failure is omnipresent, so we give up a life of our own to excel enough to avoid another failure.
It is a never ending cycle of emotional self-flaggilation: trying to make up for the failure by putting oneself in the situation most likely to create a repeat, then devoting one’s life to trying to avoid the failure and thereby punishing oneself for the original failure. That’s how we think and how we feel. Of course, the only way out of this vicious circle is to accept the original failure, call it a clean slate, and move on. But who can easily do that, and how?
Red herrings are false leads. In storytelling, red herrings are used to make something appear more connected than it really is. Several good examples of this technique can be found in the motion picture The Fugitive about a man, Dr. Richard Kimble, who is convicted of a murder he did not commit, and then escapes custody.
In one scene a police car flashes its lights and siren at Dr. Kimble as he is walking down the street, giving the impression he is about to be recaptured. But, in fact, the cops only want to tell him to move along as he is blocking the sidewalk.
In another scene, Kimble is in his apartment when an entire battalion of police show up with sirens blazing and guns drawn. It turns out they were really after the son of his landlord and had no interest in him at all.
In summary, red herrings can inject interest, suspense, and tension without altering the course of the story itself.
You can hold your reader’s or audience’s interest by revealing the true size of something over the course of the story until it can be seen to be either larger or smaller than it originally appeared. This makes things appear to grow or diminish as the story unfolds.
Conspiracy stories are usually good examples of increasing scope, as only the tip of the iceberg first comes to light and the full extent is ultimately much bigger. The motion picture All The President’s Men about exposing the Watergate Scandal illustrates this nicely. Stories about things being less extensive than they originally appear are not unlike The Wizard Of Oz in which a seemingly huge network of power turns out to be just one man behind a curtain.
A writer just asked, “Can I make my main character an Antagonist instead of the Protagonist?”
My reply:
The main character is the one through whose eyes the reader or audience experiences the story. It is the one around whom the personal issue or problem of the story seems to revolve. The main character is, essentially, the “first person” point of view in the story. It is through them we most passionately experience the story first hand by identifying with them.
Protagonist and antagonist are not point of view characters but are character functions. The protagonist is the one who is the prime mover of the effort to achieve the goal. The antagonist is all about preventing the protagonist from achieving the goal. In our own minds, protagonist represents our initiative – the motivation to affect change. Antagonist is our reticence – the motivation to maintain the status quo, or at least to return to it.
So, any character in a story can be the main character, not just protagonist or antagonist. it could be a by stander, simply providing a passionate point of view on the plot, just as if the story were a football game, the main character doesn’t have to be the quarterback (protagonist) or opposing quarterback (antagonist) but could be the half back or any of the linesmen, or ever then water boy. But, whomever is your main character, it is they who grapple with the underlying moral issue of the story, it is they who are brought to a point where they must either stick by their guns or change their ways in regard to some philosophical or moral point of view or manner. It is the main character who must make a leap of faith. And, their connection to the story at large is that as a result of their decision on the central message issue, either the protagonist or antagonist will succeed.
When you select one of your players as a protagonist and also as the main character you get the stereotypical hero – a character who grapples with the moral issue, represents the reader/audience point of view, and is also leading the charge in the logistics of the plot. But, the main character can be anyone. For example, in most James Bond movies, Bond is a main character antagonist – not a protagonist – because it is the villain who is affecting change due due their evil scheme, making them the protagonist, and it is Bond who seeks to prevent that change or return things to the status quo, even though we see things through Bond’s eyes, making him the main character with whom the reader/audience identifies. And what of Bond doing the other main character job of grappling with a moral issue? In a few movies he does, but the moral issue is actually a personal battle over what is proper between the main character and the influence character who represents the opposing moral viewpoint. They thrash out the message of the story between them, independent of whether either of them is a protagonist or antagonist. So, in bond films, he almost always remains steadfast on that issue, while it is the influence character who is changed in their moral point of view by Bond’s intransigence.
In the Dramatica software, you can assign the main character view and Influence character view to any of your characters in the Build Characters window.
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