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What’s “Ability” have to do with story structure?<\/p>\n
In this article I’m going to talk about how the Dramatica Theory of Narrative Structure<\/a> uses the term “ability” and how it applies not only to story structure and characters but to real people, real life and psychology as well.<\/p>\n If you look in Dramatica’s “Periodic Table of Story Elements” chart (you can download a free PDF of the chart at\u00a0http:\/\/storymind.com\/free-downloads\/ddomain.pdf<\/a>\u00a0) you’ll find the “ability” in one of the little squares.\u00a0 Look in the “Physics” class in the upper left-hand corner.\u00a0 You’ll find it in a “quad” of four items, “Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire”.<\/p>\n To begin with, a brief word about the Dramatica chart itself.\u00a0 The chart is sort of like a Rubik’s Cube.\u00a0 It holds all the elements which must appear in every complete story to avoid holes.\u00a0 Conceptually, you can twist it and turn it, just like a Rubik’s Cube, and when you do, it is like winding up a clock – you create dramatic potential.<\/p>\n How is this dramatic potential created?\u00a0 The chart represents all the categories of things we think about.\u00a0 Notice that the chart is nested, like wheels within wheels.\u00a0 That’s the way our mind’s work.\u00a0 And if we are to make a solid story structure with no holes, we have to make sure all ways of thinking about the story’s central problem or issues are covered.<\/p>\n So, the chart is really a model of the mind.\u00a0 When you twist it and turn it represents the kinds of stress (and experience) we encounter in everyday life.\u00a0 Sometimes things get wound up as tight as they can.\u00a0 And this is where a story always starts.\u00a0 Anything before that point is backstory, anything after it is story.<\/p>\n The story part is the process of unwinding that tension.\u00a0 So why does a story feel like tension is building, rather than lessoning?\u00a0 This is because stories are about the forces that bring a person to chane or, often, to a point of change.<\/p>\n As the story mind unwinds, it puts more and more pressure on the main character (who may be gradually changed by the process or may remain intransigent until he changes all at once).\u00a0 It’s kind of like the forces that\u00a0 create earthquakes.\u00a0 Tectonic plates push against each other driven by a background force (the mantle).\u00a0 That force is described by the wound up Dramatica chart of the story mind.<\/p>\n Sometimes, in geology, this force gradually raises or lowers land in the two adjacent plate.\u00a0 Other times it builds up pressure until things snap all at once in an earthquake.\u00a0 So too in psychology, people (characters) are sometimes slowly changed by the gradual application of pressure as the story mind clock is unwinding; other times that pressure applied by the clock mechanism just builds up until the character snaps in Leap Of Faith – that single “moment of truth” in which a character must decide either to change his ways or stick by his guns believing his current way is stronger than the pressure bought to bear – he believes he just has to outlast the forces against him.<\/p>\n Sometimes he’s right to change, sometimes he’s right to remain steadfast, and sometimes he’s wrong.\u00a0 But either way, in the end, the clock has unwound and the potential has been balanced.<\/p>\n Hey, what happened to “ability”?\u00a0 Okay, okay, I’m getting to that….<\/p>\n The chart (here we go again!) is filled with semantic terms – things like Hope and Physics and Learning and Ability.\u00a0 If you go down to the bottom of the chart in the PDF you’ll see a three-dimensional representation of how all these terms are stacked together.\u00a0 In the flat chart, they look like wheels within wheels.\u00a0 In the 3-D version, they look like levels.<\/p>\n These “levels” represent degrees of detail in the way the mind works.\u00a0 At the most broadstroke level (the top) there are just four items – Universe, Physics, Mind and Psychology.\u00a0 They are kind of like the Primary Colors of the mind – the Red, Blue, Green and Saturation (effectively the addition of something along the black\/white gray scale).<\/p>\n Those for items in additive color theory are four categories describing what can create a continuous spectrum.\u00a0 In a spectrum\u00a0is really kind of arbitrary where you draw the line between red and blue.\u00a0 Similarly, Universe, Mind, Physics and Psychology are specific primary considerations of the mind.<\/p>\n Universe is the external state of things – our situation or envirnoment.\u00a0 Mind is the internal state – an attitude, fixation or bias.\u00a0 Physics looks at external activities – processes and mechanisms.\u00a0 Psychology looks at internal activities – manners of thinking in logic and feeling.<\/p>\n Beneath that top level of the chart are three other levels.\u00a0 Each one provides a greater degree of detail on how the mind looks at the world and at itself.\u00a0 It is kind of like adding “Scarlet” and “Cardinal” as subcategories to the overall concept of “Red”.<\/p>\n Now the top level of the Dramatica chart describe the structural aspects of “Genre”\u00a0 Genre is the most broadstroke way of looking at a story’s structure.\u00a0\u00a0 The next level down has a bit more dramatic detail and describes the Plot of a story.\u00a0 The third level down maps out Theme, and the bottom level (the one with the most detail) explores the nature of a story’s Characters.<\/p>\n So there you have the chart from the top down, Genre, Plot, Theme and Characters.\u00a0 And as far as the mind goes, it represents the wheels within wheels and the sprectrum of how we go about considering things.\u00a0 In fact, we move all around that chart when we try to solve a problem.\u00a0 But the order is not arbitrary.\u00a0 The mind has to go through certain “in-betweens” to get from one kind of consideration to another or from one emotion to another.\u00a0 You see this kind of thing in the stages of grief and even in Freud’s psycho-sexual stages of development.<\/p>\n All that being said now, we finally return to Ability – the actual topic of this article.\u00a0 You’ll find Ability, then, at the very bottom of the chart – in the Characters level – in the upper left hand corner of the Physics class.\u00a0 In this article I won’t go into why it is in Physics or why it is in the upper left, but rest assured I’ll get to that eventually in some article or other.<\/p>\n Let’s now consider “Ability” in its “quad” of four Character Elements.\u00a0 The others are Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire.\u00a0 I really don’t have space in this article to go into detail about them at this time, but suffice it to say that Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire are the internal equivalents of Universe, Mind, Physics\u00a0and Pyschology.\u00a0 They are the conceptual equivalents of Mass, Energy, Space and Time.\u00a0 (Chew on\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0for awhile!)<\/p>\n So the smallest elements are directly connect (conceptually) to the largest in the chart.\u00a0 This represents what we call the “size of mind constant” which is what determines the scope of an argument necessary to fill the minds of readers or an audience.\u00a0 In short, there is a maximum depth of detail one can perceive while still holding the “big picture” in one’s mind at the very same time.<\/p>\n Ability – right….<\/p>\n Ability is not what you can do.\u00a0 It is what you are “able” to do.\u00a0 What’s the difference?\u00a0 What you “can” do is essentially your ability limited by your desire.\u00a0 Ability describes the maximum potential that might be accomplished.\u00a0 But people are limited by what they should do, what they feel obligated to do, and what they want to do.\u00a0 If you take all that into consideration, what’s left is what a person\u00a0actually<\/em>\u00a0“can” do.<\/p>\n In fact,\u00a0 if we start adding on limitations you\u00a0 move from Ability to Can and up to even higher levels of “justification” in which the essential qualities of our minds, “Knowledge, Thought, Ability and Desire” are held in check by extended considerations about the impact or ramifications of acting to our full potential.<\/p>\n One quad greater in justification you find “Can, Need, Want, and Should” in Dramatica’s story mind chart.\u00a0 Then it gets even more limited by Responsibility, Obligation, Commitment and Rationalization.\u00a0 Finally we end up “justifying” so much that we are no longer thinking about Ability (or Knowledge or Thought or Desire) but about our “Situation, Circumstance, Sense of Self and State of Being”.\u00a0 That’s about as far away as you can get from the basic elements of the human mind and is the starting point of where stories begin when they are fully wound up.\u00a0 (You’ll find all of these at the Variation Level in the “Psychology” class in the Dramatica chart, for they are the kinds of issues that most directly affect each of our own unique brands of our common human psychology.<\/p>\n A story begins when the Main Character is stuck up in that highest level of justification.\u00a0 Nobody gets there because they are stupid or mean.\u00a0 They get there because their unique life experience has brought them repeated exposures to what appear to be real connections between things like, “One bad apple spoils the bunch” or “Where there’s smoke , there’s fire.”<\/p>\n These connections, such things as – \u00a0that one needs to adopt a certain attitude to succeed or that a certain kind of person is always lazy or dishonest – these things are not always universally true, but may have been universally true in the Main Character’s experience.\u00a0 Really, its how we all build up our personalities.\u00a0 We all share the same basic psychology but how it gets “wound up” by experience determines how we see the world.\u00a0 When we get wound up all the way, we’ve had enough experience to reach a conclusion that things are always “that way” and to stop considering the issue.\u00a0 And that is how everything from “winning drive” to “prejudice” is formed – not by ill intents or a dull mind buy by the fact that no two life experiences are the same.<\/p>\n The conclusions we come to, based on our justifications, free out minds to not have to reconsider every connection we see.\u00a0 If we had to, we’d become bogged down in endlessly reconsidering everything, and that just isn’t a good survival trait if you have to make a quick decision for fight or flight.<\/p>\n So, we come to certain justification and build upon those with others until we have established a series of mental dependencies and assumptions that runs so deep we can’t see the bottom of it – the one bad brick that screwed up the foundation to begin with.\u00a0 And that’s why psychotherapy takes twenty years to reach the point a Main Character can reach in a two hour movie or a two hundred page book.<\/p>\n Now we see how Ability (and all the other Dramatica terms) fit into story and into psychology.\u00a0 Each is just another brick in the wall.\u00a0 And each can be at any level of the mind and at any level of justification.\u00a0 So, Ability might be the problem in one story (the character has too much or too little of it) or it might be the solution in another (by discovering an ability or coming to accept one lacks a certain ability the story’s problem – or at least the Main Character’s personal problem – can be solved).\u00a0 Ability might be the thematic topic of one story and the thematic counterpoint of another (more on this in other articles).<\/p>\n Ability might crop up in all kinds of ways, but the important thing to remember is that wherever you find it, however you use it, it represents the maximum potential, not necessarily the practical limit that can be actually applied.<\/p>\n Well, enough of this.\u00a0 To close things off, here’s the Dramatica Dictionary description of the world Ability that Chris and I worked out some twenty years ago, straight out of the Dramatica diction (available online at\u00a0http:\/\/storymind.com\/dramatica\/dictionary\/index.htm<\/a>\u00a0:<\/p>\n Ability \u2022 Most terms in Dramatica are used to mean only one thing. Thought, Knowledge, Ability, and Desire, however, have two uses each, serving both as Variations and Elements. This is a result of their role as central considerations in both Theme and Character<\/p>\n [Variation] \u2022 dyn.pr. Desire<–>Ability \u2022 being suited to handle a task; the innate capacity to do or be \u2022 Ability describes the actual capacity to accomplish something. However, even the greatest Ability may need experience to become practical. Also, Ability may be hindered by limitations placed on a character and\/or limitations imposed by the character upon himself. \u2022 syn. talent, knack, capability, innate capacity, faculty, inherant proficiency<\/p>\n [Element] \u2022 dyn.pr. Desire<–>Ability \u2022 being suited to handle a task; the innate capacity to do or be \u2022 An aspect of the Ability element is an innate capacity to do or to be. This means that some Abilities pertain to what what can affect physically and also what one can rearrange mentally. The positive side of Ability is that things can be done or experienced that would otherwise be impossible. The negative side is that just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. And, just because one can be a certain way does not mean it is beneficial to self or others. In other words, sometimes Ability is more a curse than a blessing because it can lead to the exercise of capacities that may be negative \u2022 syn. talent, knack, capability, innate capacity, faculty, inherant proficiency<\/p>\n Melanie Anne Phillips<\/a><\/em> Author’s Note:\u00a0 Check out all our Dramatic products here<\/a>.<\/p>\n And here’s something else I created for writers….<\/p>\n
\nCreator, StoryWeaver
\nCo-creator, Dramatica<\/p>\n
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