Your Thematic Message (Steps 29, 30, 31)
Your thematic message will explore a particular human quality such as greed, denial, or living in fantasy. The message need not be about something bad, but could be about the value of a positive quality. This value is usually wrapped around a personal issue expressed through your Main Character. In these steps, you’ll explore your Main Character’s personal issues and select one to be the focus of your novel’s message.
Useful for characters, writers and anyone:
It is extremely difficult to overcome a habit in one’s mind before one acts upon it. Those who try to change engage in a terrible inner fight in the internal realm. Further, whenever one fails to prevent the habitual action, it tends to cascade into a series of further habitual behavior, as if a dam has burst.
Essentially, we all have limited psychological capital that we can spend on battling with habitual attributes, and if we engage in the battle internally and lose, we will have squandered our complete reserves and have nothing left to stem the tide. Since we have lost spatially, we look toward time, toward our next psychological payday, usually the next calendar day, after a good night’s sleep. But until then, we simply stand back and engage in the habitual behavior, which actually reenforces it beyond its strength in the original battle, making it all the more difficult to overcome it the next day.
A better way is to move the battle to the external realm, allow the first instance of a bad habit to occur and then battle the second from happening. While an alcoholic or overeater may say the first drink leads to a binge, it is my opinion, based on narrative psychology, that only happens because all the power to resist was already spent in the internal battle.
Habits cannot be broken – the carry too much inertia. Rather, they must be diminished and diluted until they cease to be a force at play, dissolving back into the psychological stew from which they originally emerged. To this end, do not battle the first instance internally, but the second instance externally. By giving in, the habit plays itself out in the first instance before it has become a compulsion. Holding back and battling it just puts up a dam that will ultimately be breached, creating a far more powerful flood that does far more psychological damage, limiting further ability to resist.
Let the first instance happen, then fight the second. While you won’t always be successful, you will have a greater statistical degree of success, eventually leading to the gradual establishment of a new habitual pattern that hinders the original behavior rather than reenforcing it.
For characters, examine these struggles; for writers, use this method to get your work written, for everyone else, use it to clean up your act to your personal level of self-comfort.
Write Your Novel Step By Step
Step 27 – Your Thematic Topic
In this step, you’ll explore how a thematic topic provides the glue to hold your characters, plot and theme together. Then, you’ll identify the best candidates for a thematic topic in the story materials you’ve developed so far and incorporate them into your novel.
This morning/s thoughts on narrative:
1. In the real world, narratives exist in the caustic solution of society. They either continually replenish themselves or dissolve into a sea of memes.
2. Narrative structure operates as a difference engine, but one made of magnets rather than gears. As one turns, the other adjust due to polar attraction, maintaining narrative integrity. If, however, sufficient speed and/or force is applied to the turning of the magnets, they may slip past the poles of others without causing a correspond shift; this is the beginning of justification.
The Main Character represents the reader’s position in the story, but this is not always the Protagonist. While in a football game the Protagonist may be the quarterback, a story could be told through the eyes of any of the players on the field. The Protagonist is defined as the character who is the prime mover of the effort to achieve the story goal logistically. The Main Character, however, is the character with whom the readers most identify and around whom the passion of the story seems to revolve. It is the Main Character who must grapple with a personal or moral issue and is the center of the story’s message.
In this step, even if you are already completely sure of who your main character is, you’ll examine each character and look at the story through his or her eyes to see if there might be an even stronger viewpoint from which your readers might experience your story first hand.
Write Your Novel Step by Step (24)
Selecting Your Novel’s Cast from their Dossiers
In previous steps you created dossiers for each of your prospective cast members. Now you’ll reference that material in choosing the candidates you want to populate your novel.
When a child comes up with a false reason for some small transgression, we know he is just making an excuse to avoid punishment or to side-step a negative emotional response. Adults continue to make excuses; they just do it in a far more sophisticated way. What’s more, we often make excuses to ourselves, convincing ourselves that a particular course of action is best, even though deep down we know it really isn’t.
So how and why do we play these mental games? How exactly does this work in our own minds, and how should it work in the minds of our characters if their motivations are to come off as those of real people?
The answers to these questions lie in in a mental process called justification. Justification describes the internal mechanisms we use to shift the truth of a situation in order to create a more favorable interpretation. This can cover up a mistake, but it can also help us find a way around restrictions that really aren’t absolute.
The tale of the Gordian Knot is a good illustration how justification can uncover a solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem. In the story, Alexander the Great encounters an intricately tied knot where the ends are worked inside so there is no apparent way to part the two ropes. Legend foretold that whomever could part the ropes was destined to become the emperor of all Asia. After examining the knot, Alexander simply drew his sword and cut the knot in half, thereby separating the two ropes, since there were no stated restrictions on exactly how the ropes needed to be parted.
Today, we call this “thinking outside the box,” meaning that we put aside the context normally used to frame an idea and look at it from a whole new perspective. But how does this work in stories? This exact same technique was employed in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the assassin comes at Indy with a sword and our hero just pulls his gun and shoots him.
The point here is that while justification can be used to make excuses, it can also open one’s mind to new solutions to previously unsolvable problems. But not all justifications are just about shifting perspective about a current situation. These same techniques can be employed when considering how a situation may change in time.
For example, of the three little pigs, the who built his house of brick put in a lot more work than was needed for any current problem, but considered what might be needed for an unknown problem in the future. Every squirrel that buries nuts for the winter, rather than eating them all now is justifying, and the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant (google it) illustrated the folly of paying attention only to the here and how.
In real life, every retirement fund or medical insurance policy is a justification that actually creates difficulties in the present by limiting resources in expectation of a future need that may never actually materialize.
Of course not all justifications are of such life-changing import. Imagine, for example, a person, we’ll call him Joe, who has a friend come to visit for the weekend. Joe has a great time with the visit but in the morning when he goes to water his plants, he discovers his friend has parked in such a way to block easy access and he must walk around the long way to do the job.
Joe’s first reaction is mild anger at his friend for the inconvenience. Almost instantly, he regrets feeling that way as he knows his friend was unaware of the issue. So, he is able to dissipate some of his negative feelings by re-contexualizing the issue spatially with the notion that he would rather have his friend visit and have the problem than have his friend not visit.
But, this only balances the emotional inequity by saying the benefits outweigh the costs. So, Joe is still left with negative feelings due to the emotional value of his friend’s visit that is now being lessened by deducting the emotional cost of the inconvenience. Then Joe, while watering, tries a another justification by considering that he is a little out of shape and the extra exertion will do him good in the long run.
This shift in context is based in truth, so Joe now feels good about the extra walk and along with his first justification that salved his feelings, he has finally fully eliminated his negative emotions and now has an overall positive cost-free perspective of both his friend’s visit and of the inconvenience.
But, there’s still a problem of a different sort remaining. Since the emotional inequity has now been eliminated, so too has the potential for further motivation also been removed. The end result is that Joe will not now consider buying a new hose to avoid the long walk around, which would have solved the problem once and for all for every visitor he receives in the future.
Bottom line – justification is neither good nor bad, except in context. It may eliminate emotional negatives, but it can also eliminate motivation. By understanding the mental mechanisms by which justifications are created, we can provide insight into our characters, furnish them with believable balanced motivations, and offer valuable understanding for our readers/audience through the voice of the Wise Author.
And, by turning this understanding upon ourselves, we can learn to recognize these mental patterns within ourselves as they happen, allowing us to make a conscious decision as to the best context for our purposes, rather than subconsciously falling into habitual patterns of justification, regardless of their effectiveness in the current situation and circumstances.
Writing Tip of the Day – Think of your story as having a mind of its own in which the characters are but facets. This helps you connect with your story as a living thing, rather than simply a structure.
I need some folks to compile my writings on Dramatica into topic-oriented documents so I can publish them in paperback and and Kindle. No pay involved, but you get to have your theory questions answered, you get a free copy of the finished paperback and it will help document all these ideas so writers can get to them.
All you do is go to articles I have on the internet that I direct you to, then gather them all in a word document in the best order for understanding, eliminating any duplicates or too-similar essays. I’ll take it from there. We may have up to 100 topic-oriented compilation books out of all this material!
If you are interested, let me know and I’ll direct you to a topic to start with. No obligation if you try it and don’t want to continue. I can use as many folks as would like to help. Thanks!
Step 22 Your Characters’ Points of View) is now available here.
You know how you see your story, but what does it look to your characters? In this step, you’ll have each of your characters write a paragraph in his or her own unique voice describing how your story looks from their point of view within it.
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