No, it's not Robert Mackee's book. This is before that. Back in 1990 we started a book on story structure later to become "Dramatica". In the early days we simply called it "Story". The following PDF file (40 meg) contains the first 20 pages from a draft we were working on in November of 1991.
Click to download the file:
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
Two articles on "Justification"
Early articles describing the mechanisms by which we justify and rationalize.
1 - Justification
Download in PDF format:
1 - Justification
2 - Justification
Dramatica Theory Development Notebook
Here's a link to the Dramatica Theory Development Notebook I kept in the 90s when we were moving beyond Dramatica to more advanced areas
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Origins of the Dramatica Theory
Many people have asked how we came up with the Dramatica Theory. Well, it didn't happen all at once. In fact, it was a three year full-time effort, 8 hours a day. And the theory we now have is quite different than the concepts with which we started.
In going through my archives, I just discovered four hours of recordings we made in 1991 to document our very first attempt at a "complete" theory - kind of a unified field theory of story. Here are all four hours of audio in mp3 formt, divided into 8 parts. Enjoy!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Download Lost Recording of Dramatica Theory Development
From October 30, 1991 - A lost audio recording of Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley discussing their work as they develop the origins of the Dramatica theory of story. Click to listen or download.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
The Story Mind (free download ebook)
Here's the first 27 pages of a book in process that I'm writing about the Story Mind concept and how to apply it in your writing.
Just thought I'd share it since it may be years before I get around to finishing it:
Here's the download link:
The Story Mind - Download in PDF
Just thought I'd share it since it may be years before I get around to finishing it:
Here's the download link:
Storymind Basics 5
Returning to Star Wars, we can see the elements at work in each of the eight Archetypes:
Name Archetype Internal External
Luke Skywalker Protagonist Consider Pursue
Empire Antagonist Non-Consideration Prevent
Princess Leia Reason Logic Controlled
Chewbacca Emotion Feeling Uncontrolled
Obi Wan Guardian Conscience Help
Darth Vader Contagonist Temptation Hinder
Droids Sidekick Faith Support
Han Solo Skeptic Disbelief Oppose
Beginning with Luke, he has taken it upon himself to Consider
Let's get practical for a moment and build some characters using archetypes. Although the names and description of most of these archetypes are no doubt familiar to you, an exact definition of their functions in story structure may not be. In fact, if you ask any group of authors to define each of these characters by their role in a story, you are likely to get such a range of different descriptions that some are actually contradictory. In other words, most everyone has a "feel" for these archetypes, but few have an exact understanding of them.
Moreover, even if two authors agree on a definition, they often use a different name for that archetype. For example, the terms "Protagonist," "Main Character," "Central Character," and "Hero," are often used interchangeably, sometimes even by the same author, when in fact, each is a completely different dramatic attribute.
The Main Character represents the audience position in the story, from where they experience the pathos first hand. In our own minds, the Main Character represents our sense of self - essentially, where we are coming from. Every Story Mind must also have a sense of self, otherwise, the audience only comes to the story from the outside looking in, as if it were something outside themselves, and therefore they never empathize with any of the characters in the story.
The Main Character provides the audience a place to stand on the inside. And, just as with our own minds, where we are coming from may change with the situation and/or with with issue in question. So, we may spend varying amounts of time looking through the eyes of any number of characters in our story.
Still, there is always one character that feels like the "Main" character. What is it that makes this character feel special? As we shall soon see with our archetypes, each of the elements of character represents a different kind of concern - a different area of consideration in a complete map of the mind. One of these issues is the "message issue" of the story, the human quality around which the story's moral revolves. The character who contains that element represents that issue. So when we look through that character's eyes, we are standing at ground zero of the story's argument. It is this outlook which is being questioned in the story, the one that the author is trying to prove is better (or worse) than all the other approaches to the problem. Simply, that is why the Main Character feels so important, even if we actually spend more time looking through the eyes of other characters.
The character through whose perspective is give the most time or attention in the story is the Central Character. Notice I wrote "time or attention" rather than just "time." The impact of a character is not due solely to screen time in a movie or number of pages in a novel. It is also dependent upon how strongly that character is drawn. It is the combination of the amount of exposure to a character and the intensity with which the author describes the character that determine its overall impact on the audience.
This concept is well-known in psychology, and they even have a name for it: Temporal and Spatial Summation. Simply put, it means that your response to the world is partly built on a life-time of experience and partly on those fleeting but intense moments that will live forever in your memory. (In fact, even the neurons of the brain respond to the collective energy of repeated exposure to the same information over and over again and to the sudden exposure to very intense momentary information.)
Just as the functioning of the brain's neurology is represented fractally in the mind's psychology, so too is it represented in the characters (and in fact in all the dramatics) of the Story Mind.
So, the terms "Main Character" and "Central Character" do not mean the same thing at all. Still, the player in a story that stands on the crucial issue is often given the most "play" by an author, and is therefore the Central Character as well as being Main. I just doesn't necessarily have to be that way. One character could be the "message character" and another the one who is most intense.
It should also be noted that you might present all of your characters in an equally intense manner. Who then is Central? As it happens, the term "Central" is not really about a single character, but is the measurement of how impactful on the audience each character is compared to the others. It is not a wasted question to ask of each character in a first draft you have written, "How Central is he (or she)?" The answer can give you a good idea how your audience's attention and empathy will be distributed.
Just being Central does not mean you are Main, and vice versa. In the human mind, and therefore in the Story Mind as well, we sometimes adopt a point of view looking at things from that perspective. We also look internally at our own attributes without necessarily adopting that outlook . The most important character whose point of view we share (the one possessing the trait at the heart of the message) is Main. The most important character whom we observe (the one most strongly drawn by the author) is Central.
When you have a Main Character who is also the Central Character, you have the beginnings of the traditional "Hero," who we will continue to explore in a moment. But first, what of the Protagonist? The Protagonist is the character who drives the plot forward. Note that while the Main Character is dealing with the judgmental aspects of the story's message regarding a particular issue or quality of human nature, the Protagonist is dealing with the practical issues of trying to achieve the story's Goal.
As with Main and Central, the Protagonist represents an aspect of the mind: our initiative. Within each of us is a drive to shake up the status quo, to make things different (for good/benefit or for bad/detriment). It doesn't matter if that drive is benevolently or malevolently applied. It is just the drive itself that the Protagonist represents.
You'll note that in the list of eight archetypes above, they are arranged in pairs, each associated with its most antithetical match. Reason is most directly offset to Emotion, and so on. And, as expected, Protagonist is set against Antagonist.
The Antagonist represents that force within ourselves that seeks hold things back or prevent them from happening WHETHER GOOD OR BAD. Note that in a structural sense, neither Protagonist nor Antagonist (nor the other six archetypes) are absolutely associated with any moral imperative, with right or wrong, kind or mean, positive or negative intent. Protagonist and Antagonist represent only our drive to make something happen and our drive to keep things as they are.
This concept is likely quite different than what you have encountered before, but it is absolutely essential to separating the function of a character in a story's structure from the moral judgment of the author.
When a character is made to appear to be moralistically correct or righteous, it is the author's opinion of the character's action, and is not directly dependent on whether the character is trying to instigate something or to block something.
Where then do the notions of right and wrong bear on the nature of characters? This occurs when we try to fashion a Hero. The stereotypical Hero is the Main Character who is also the Central Character, the Protagonist, AND is on the side of Good. His counterpart, the Villain, is the Influence Character (more about this concept later), who is also a Central Character (the second most impactful), the Antagonist, and is on the side of Evil.
Those other characters who are on the side of "right" are the "Good Guys" and those on the side of "wrong" are the "Bad Guys." And, of course, Good Guys can fall from grace and Bad Guys can be redeemed.
By separately defining Main Character, Central Character, and Protagonist, we have now opened up a whole world of possibilities for creating far less stereotypical characters that the standard Hero and Villian.
For example, suppose we have a character who is Main, Central, and Protagonist, but Bad to the bone. This character will stand at ground zero of the story's moral issue, because he is Main. He will also be the most strongly drawn and memorable character because he is Central. He will be the character who drives the plot forward as Protagonist. But, because he is Bad (moralistically) he will be an "Anti-Hero."
Or, a character might be Main, Central, and Good, but be an Antagonist. A well-known example of this is James Bond. It is the "Villian" of the story that has the agenda, instigates things, and tries to achieve a goal. Bond's function is to stop the Bad Guy, so, by definition, Bond is an Antagonist.
It is hard to disassociate the labels of Good and Bad from Protagonist and Antagonist, but doing so allows one to break out of formula ruts and to investigate a wealth of sound, new character types.
Returning to our list of eight archetypes,
In summary, if you have only been creating Heros and Villians, you
ve been severely limiting your storytelling opportunities.
Name Archetype Internal External
Luke Skywalker Protagonist Consider Pursue
Empire Antagonist Non-Consideration Prevent
Princess Leia Reason Logic Controlled
Chewbacca Emotion Feeling Uncontrolled
Obi Wan Guardian Conscience Help
Darth Vader Contagonist Temptation Hinder
Droids Sidekick Faith Support
Han Solo Skeptic Disbelief Oppose
Beginning with Luke, he has taken it upon himself to Consider
Let's get practical for a moment and build some characters using archetypes. Although the names and description of most of these archetypes are no doubt familiar to you, an exact definition of their functions in story structure may not be. In fact, if you ask any group of authors to define each of these characters by their role in a story, you are likely to get such a range of different descriptions that some are actually contradictory. In other words, most everyone has a "feel" for these archetypes, but few have an exact understanding of them.
Moreover, even if two authors agree on a definition, they often use a different name for that archetype. For example, the terms "Protagonist," "Main Character," "Central Character," and "Hero," are often used interchangeably, sometimes even by the same author, when in fact, each is a completely different dramatic attribute.
The Main Character represents the audience position in the story, from where they experience the pathos first hand. In our own minds, the Main Character represents our sense of self - essentially, where we are coming from. Every Story Mind must also have a sense of self, otherwise, the audience only comes to the story from the outside looking in, as if it were something outside themselves, and therefore they never empathize with any of the characters in the story.
The Main Character provides the audience a place to stand on the inside. And, just as with our own minds, where we are coming from may change with the situation and/or with with issue in question. So, we may spend varying amounts of time looking through the eyes of any number of characters in our story.
Still, there is always one character that feels like the "Main" character. What is it that makes this character feel special? As we shall soon see with our archetypes, each of the elements of character represents a different kind of concern - a different area of consideration in a complete map of the mind. One of these issues is the "message issue" of the story, the human quality around which the story's moral revolves. The character who contains that element represents that issue. So when we look through that character's eyes, we are standing at ground zero of the story's argument. It is this outlook which is being questioned in the story, the one that the author is trying to prove is better (or worse) than all the other approaches to the problem. Simply, that is why the Main Character feels so important, even if we actually spend more time looking through the eyes of other characters.
The character through whose perspective is give the most time or attention in the story is the Central Character. Notice I wrote "time or attention" rather than just "time." The impact of a character is not due solely to screen time in a movie or number of pages in a novel. It is also dependent upon how strongly that character is drawn. It is the combination of the amount of exposure to a character and the intensity with which the author describes the character that determine its overall impact on the audience.
This concept is well-known in psychology, and they even have a name for it: Temporal and Spatial Summation. Simply put, it means that your response to the world is partly built on a life-time of experience and partly on those fleeting but intense moments that will live forever in your memory. (In fact, even the neurons of the brain respond to the collective energy of repeated exposure to the same information over and over again and to the sudden exposure to very intense momentary information.)
Just as the functioning of the brain's neurology is represented fractally in the mind's psychology, so too is it represented in the characters (and in fact in all the dramatics) of the Story Mind.
So, the terms "Main Character" and "Central Character" do not mean the same thing at all. Still, the player in a story that stands on the crucial issue is often given the most "play" by an author, and is therefore the Central Character as well as being Main. I just doesn't necessarily have to be that way. One character could be the "message character" and another the one who is most intense.
It should also be noted that you might present all of your characters in an equally intense manner. Who then is Central? As it happens, the term "Central" is not really about a single character, but is the measurement of how impactful on the audience each character is compared to the others. It is not a wasted question to ask of each character in a first draft you have written, "How Central is he (or she)?" The answer can give you a good idea how your audience's attention and empathy will be distributed.
Just being Central does not mean you are Main, and vice versa. In the human mind, and therefore in the Story Mind as well, we sometimes adopt a point of view looking at things from that perspective. We also look internally at our own attributes without necessarily adopting that outlook . The most important character whose point of view we share (the one possessing the trait at the heart of the message) is Main. The most important character whom we observe (the one most strongly drawn by the author) is Central.
When you have a Main Character who is also the Central Character, you have the beginnings of the traditional "Hero," who we will continue to explore in a moment. But first, what of the Protagonist? The Protagonist is the character who drives the plot forward. Note that while the Main Character is dealing with the judgmental aspects of the story's message regarding a particular issue or quality of human nature, the Protagonist is dealing with the practical issues of trying to achieve the story's Goal.
As with Main and Central, the Protagonist represents an aspect of the mind: our initiative. Within each of us is a drive to shake up the status quo, to make things different (for good/benefit or for bad/detriment). It doesn't matter if that drive is benevolently or malevolently applied. It is just the drive itself that the Protagonist represents.
You'll note that in the list of eight archetypes above, they are arranged in pairs, each associated with its most antithetical match. Reason is most directly offset to Emotion, and so on. And, as expected, Protagonist is set against Antagonist.
The Antagonist represents that force within ourselves that seeks hold things back or prevent them from happening WHETHER GOOD OR BAD. Note that in a structural sense, neither Protagonist nor Antagonist (nor the other six archetypes) are absolutely associated with any moral imperative, with right or wrong, kind or mean, positive or negative intent. Protagonist and Antagonist represent only our drive to make something happen and our drive to keep things as they are.
This concept is likely quite different than what you have encountered before, but it is absolutely essential to separating the function of a character in a story's structure from the moral judgment of the author.
When a character is made to appear to be moralistically correct or righteous, it is the author's opinion of the character's action, and is not directly dependent on whether the character is trying to instigate something or to block something.
Where then do the notions of right and wrong bear on the nature of characters? This occurs when we try to fashion a Hero. The stereotypical Hero is the Main Character who is also the Central Character, the Protagonist, AND is on the side of Good. His counterpart, the Villain, is the Influence Character (more about this concept later), who is also a Central Character (the second most impactful), the Antagonist, and is on the side of Evil.
Those other characters who are on the side of "right" are the "Good Guys" and those on the side of "wrong" are the "Bad Guys." And, of course, Good Guys can fall from grace and Bad Guys can be redeemed.
By separately defining Main Character, Central Character, and Protagonist, we have now opened up a whole world of possibilities for creating far less stereotypical characters that the standard Hero and Villian.
For example, suppose we have a character who is Main, Central, and Protagonist, but Bad to the bone. This character will stand at ground zero of the story's moral issue, because he is Main. He will also be the most strongly drawn and memorable character because he is Central. He will be the character who drives the plot forward as Protagonist. But, because he is Bad (moralistically) he will be an "Anti-Hero."
Or, a character might be Main, Central, and Good, but be an Antagonist. A well-known example of this is James Bond. It is the "Villian" of the story that has the agenda, instigates things, and tries to achieve a goal. Bond's function is to stop the Bad Guy, so, by definition, Bond is an Antagonist.
It is hard to disassociate the labels of Good and Bad from Protagonist and Antagonist, but doing so allows one to break out of formula ruts and to investigate a wealth of sound, new character types.
Returning to our list of eight archetypes,
In summary, if you have only been creating Heros and Villians, you
ve been severely limiting your storytelling opportunities.
Storymind Basics 4
Archetypal Characters in Star Wars
Describing archetypes conceptually has its place, but it is much easier to get a feel for them in an actual story. One of the best examples of archetypal characters can be found in the original Star Wars movie, "Episode IV - a New Hope." It should be noted that these arechetypes are NOT maintained in any of the sequals or sequals.
In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is the Protagonist, for he is the one driven by initiative. Although it might appear at first that Darth Vader is the Antagonist, it is actually the Empire itself, in the form of the Gran Mof Tarkin (and all the Storm Troopers) that seeks to maintain the status quo (its own totalitarian hold on the galaxy).
The reason Darth seems to be the Antagonist is that he is the first of the "bad guys" we see. He enters with his flowing, black robes, and is clearly the leader of the evil minions. But, this is just the opening teaser of the story. Once the main plot gets going, Darth is relegated (in this first movie) to the role of glorified henchman.
Darh, in fact, is the Contagonist - the Temptation of the Dark Side of the Force - and the opposite of Obi Wan Kenobi's representation of Conscience.
Princess Leia is the cold force of Reason, the counterpart of the Emotional Chewbacca.
And finally, where the Droids are the faithful supporters or Sidekicks, the Skeptic is Han Solo (who doesn't believe in the Force, and verbally opposes every plan with which he is presented.
Again, the differences between the Droids' personalities and the bickering between them is part of a minor sub-plot. But, in the main plot, they function together as joint sidekicks.
In practice, very few stories use archetypal characters exclusively. A frequent method is to employ a mix of both archetypal and Complex characters. A good example of this technique can be seen in "The Wizard of Oz."
In the cast of Archetypal characters, Dorothy (like Luke) is the initiating Protagonist. Glinda, the good witch, fills Obi Wan's role as the helpful force of Conscience. Toto is the standard Sidekick, balanced by the Skeptical, doubting, Cowardly Lion.
The remaining principal characters (Scarecrow, Tin Man, Wicked Witch, and the Wizard himself) are close to being archetypes, but actually "swap" some elements among them that make them mmore complex. The remaining archetypes from which they will draw are Reason, Emotion, Antagonist, and Contagonist.
Although the Scarecrow (who always has a plan) might appear at first glance to be the equivalent of Leia's Reason archetype, he differs in that Leia is exceendingly controlled in her physical activities, whereas the Scarecrow is frenetic and uncontrolled (more like Chewbacca).
Similarly, though the Tin Man (who crys and rusts himself) seems to be the Emotion archetype like Chewbacca, externally, he is controlled like Leia.
It is almost as if the Scarecrow is internally like Leia, and externally like Chewbacca, whereas the Tin Man is just the reverse! In fact, we are on the verge of seeing how Archetypes are made up smaller elements of character which can be combined in different ways.
The Reason Archetype (as illustrated by Princess Leia) uses Logic internally, and is Contolled externally. The two elements work hand in hand as members of the same family, each a different spin on the same basic approach to problem solving. The Emotion Archteype (as illustrated by Chewbacca) is driven by Feelings internally, and is Uncontrolled externally.
The Scarecrow takes the internal quality of Logic from the Reason archetype, but matches it with the exterenal trait of Uncontrolled from the Emotion archetype. In the same manner, the Tin Man posseses Emotion's internal quality of Feeling and pairs it with Reason's external Control.
This "swap" makes Scarecrow and Tin Man each half of one archetype and half of another. We note that each character still has one internal and one external characteristic, just like the archetypes, but "flipped." As it turns out, this is not the only way to split an archetype.
The Wicked Witch and the Wizard also swap elements from the Antagonist and Contagonist, but not in the same way. The Antagonist, externally, tries to Prevent the Protagonist from upsetting the status quo. It's internal equivalent is Non-Consideration (simply, don't even think about it!) The Contagonist, internally, represents Temptation and externally is the fly in the ointment or the Hinderer.
In The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch gets both external elements and the Wizard takes both internal ones. So, the Witch tries to Prevent Dorothy (the Protagonist) from fulfilling her quest with the Ruby slippers, and also gums up the works whenever she can, just to make things more difficult and discouraging (i.e., the apple trees and scaring the travellers with fire).
In contrast, the fearsome Wizard presents the force of Non-Consideration (put it out of your mind), and also represents Temptation. The Wizard as Tempation? This is most clearly illustrated when tells Dorothy the only way to get her back to Kansas is if he takes her there himself in his balloon. Clearly, if Dorothy returned by balloon, she would never learn the lesson that "There's no place like home" and that she had the power all along.
As we shall see, Archetypal characters are made up of more that just two elements, internal and external. The point of the moment is that Archetypal characters and Complex Characters share the same elements, just in different combinations.
For now, let's consider a complete breakdown of the internal and external elements of the eight archetypes:
Archetype Internal External
Protagonist Consider Pursue
Antagonist Non_Consideration Prevent
Reason Logic Controlled
Emotion Feeling Uncontrolled
Guardian Conscience Help
Contagonist Temptation Hinder
Sidekick Faith Support
Skeptic Disbelief Oppose
From this table it is easy to see why these characters are Archetypal. The internal and external elements of each archetype are equivalent, and between opposing archetypes are most nearly opposite. So, Archetypal Characters are consistent inside and out, and are equally in opposition to their chief opponant in both realms.
Returning to Star Wars, we can see the elements at work in each of the eight Archetypes:
Name Archetype Internal External
Luke Skywalker Protagonist Consider Pursue
Empire Antagonist Non-Consideration Prevent
Princess Leia Reason Logic Controlled
Chewbacca Emotion Feeling Uncontrolled
Obi Wan Guardian Conscience Help
Darth Vader Contagonist Temptation Hinder
Droids Sidekick Faith Support
Han Solo Skeptic Disbelief Oppose
Beginning with Luke, he has taken it upon himself to Consider
Let's get practical for a moment and build some characters using archetypes. Although the names and description of most of these archetypes are no doubt familiar to you, an exact definition of their functions in story structure may not be. In fact, if you ask any group of authors to define each of these characters by their role in a story, you are likely to get such a range of different descriptions that some are actually contradictory. In other words, most everyone has a "feel" for these archetypes, but few have an exact understanding of them.
Moreover, even if two authors agree on a definition, they often use a different name for that archetype. For example, the terms "Protagonist," "Main Character," "Central Character," and "Hero," are often used interchangeably, sometimes even by the same author, when in fact, each is a completely different dramatic attribute.
The Main Character represents the audience position in the story, from where they experience the pathos first hand. In our own minds, the Main Character represents our sense of self - essentially, where we are coming from. Every Story Mind must also have a sense of self, otherwise, the audience only comes to the story from the outside looking in, as if it were something outside themselves, and therefore they never empathize with any of the characters in the story.
The Main Character provides the audience a place to stand on the inside. And, just as with our own minds, where we are coming from may change with the situation and/or with with issue in question. So, we may spend varying amounts of time looking through the eyes of any number of characters in our story.
Still, there is always one character that feels like the "Main" character. What is it that makes this character feel speical? As we shall soon see with our archetypes, each of the elements of character represents a different kind of concern - a different area of consideration in a complete map of the mind. One of these issues is the "message issue" of the story, the human quality around which the story's moral revolves. The character who contains that element represents that issue. So when we look through that character's eyes, we are standing at ground zero of the story's argument. It is this outlook which is being questioned in the story, the one that the author is trying to prove is better (or worse) than all the other approaches to the problem. Simply, that is why the Main Character feels so important, even if we actually spend more time looking through the eyes of other characters.
The character through whose perspective is give the most time or attention in the story is the Central Character. Notice I wrote "time or attentian" rather than just "time." The impact of a character is not due solely to screen time in a movie or number of pages in a novel. It is also dependent upon how strongly that character is drawn. It is the combination of the amount of exposure to a character and the intensity with which the author describes the character that deteremine its overall impact on the audience.
This concept is well-known in psychology, and they even have a name for it: Temporal and Spatial Summation. Simply put, it means that your response to the world is partly built on a life-time of experience and partly on those fleeting but intense moments that will live forever in your memory. (In fact, even the neurons of the brain respond to the collective energy of repeated exposure to the same information over and over again and to the sudden exposure to very intense momentary information.)
Just as the functioning of the brain's neurology is represented fractally in the mind's psychology, so too is it represented in the characters (and in fact in all the dramatics) of the Story Mind.
So, the terms "Main Character" and "Central Character" do not mean the same thing at all. Still, the player in a story that stands on the crucial issue is often given the most "play" by an author, and is therefore the Central Character as well as being Main. I just doesn't necessarily have to be that way. One character could be the "message character" and another the one who is most intense.
It should also be noted that you might present all of your characters in an equally intense manner. Who then is Central? As it happens, the term "Central" is not really about a single character, but is the measurement of how impactful on the audience each character is compared to the others. It is not a wasted question to ask of each character in a first draft you have written, "How Central is he (or she)?" The answer can give you a good idea how your audience's attention and empathy will be distributed.
Just being Central does not mean you are Main, and vice versa. In the human mind, and therefore in the Story Mind as well, we sometimes adopt a point of view looking at things from that perspective. We also look internally at our own attributes without necessarily adopting that outlook . The most important character whose point of view we share (the one possessing the trait at the heart of the message) is Main. The most important character whome we observe (the one most strongly drawn by the author) is Central.
When you have a Main Character who is also the Central Character, you have the beginnings of the traditional "Hero," who we will continue to explore in a moment. But first, what of the Protagonist? The Protagonist is the character who drives the plot forward. Note that while the Main Character is dealing with the judgmental aspects of the story's message regarding a particular issue or quality of human nature, the Protagonist is dealing with the practical issues of trying to achieve the story's Goal.
As with Main and Central, the Protagonist represents an aspect of the mind: our initiative. Within each of us is a drive to shake up the status quo, to make things different (for good/benefit or for bad/detriment). It doesn't matter if that drive is benevolently or malevolently applied. It is just the drive itself that the Protagonist represents.
You'll note that in the list of eight archetypes above, they are arranged in pairs, each associated with its most antithetical match. Reason is most directly offset to Emotion, and so on. And, as expected, Protagonist is set against Antagonist.
The Antagonist represents that force within ourselves that seeks hold things back or prevent them from happening WHETHER GOOD OR BAD. Note that in a structural sense, neither Protagonist nor Antagonist (nor the other six archetypes) are absolutely associated with any moral imperative, with right or wrong, kind or mean, positive or negative intent. Protagonist and Antagonist represent only our drive to make something happen and our drive to keep things as they are.
This concept is likely quite different than what you have encountered before, but it is absolutely essential to separating the function of a character in a story's structure from the moral judgement of the author.
When a character is made to appear to be moralistically correct or righteous, it is the author's opinion of the character's action, and is not directly dependent on whether the character is trying to instigate something or to block something.
Where then do the notions of right and wrong bear on the nature of characters? This occurs when we try to fashion a Hero. The stereotypical Hero is the Main Character who is also the Central Character, the Protagonist, AND is on the side of Good. His counterpart, the Villian, is the Influence Character (more about this concept later), who is also a Central Character (the second most impactful), the Antagonist, and is on the side of Evil.
Those other characters who are on the side of "right" are the "Good Guys" and those on the side of "wrong" are the "Bad Guys." And, of course, Good Guys can fall from grace and Bad Guys can be redeemed.
By separately defining Main Character, Central Character, and Protagonist, we have now opened up a whole world of possiblities for creating far less stereotypical characters that the standard Hero and Villian.
For example, suppose we have a character who is Main, Central, and Protagonist, but Bad to the bone. This character will stand at ground zero of the story's moral issue, because he is Main. He will also be the most strongly drawn and memorable character because he is Central. He will be the character who drives the plot forward as Protagonist. But, because he is Bad (moralistically) he will be an "Anti-Hero."
Or, a character might be Main, Central, and Good, but be an Antagonist. A well-known example of this is James Bond. It is the "Villian" of the story that has the agenda, instigates things, and tries to achieve a goal. Bond's function is to stop the Bad Guy, so, by definition, Bond is an Antagonist.
It is hard to disassociate the labels of Good and Bad from Protagonist and Antagonist, but doing so allows one to break out of formula ruts and to investigate a wealth of sound, new character types.
Returning to our list of eight archetypes,
In summary, if you have only been creating Heros and Villians, youve been severly limiting your storytelling opportunities.
Describing archetypes conceptually has its place, but it is much easier to get a feel for them in an actual story. One of the best examples of archetypal characters can be found in the original Star Wars movie, "Episode IV - a New Hope." It should be noted that these arechetypes are NOT maintained in any of the sequals or sequals.
In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is the Protagonist, for he is the one driven by initiative. Although it might appear at first that Darth Vader is the Antagonist, it is actually the Empire itself, in the form of the Gran Mof Tarkin (and all the Storm Troopers) that seeks to maintain the status quo (its own totalitarian hold on the galaxy).
The reason Darth seems to be the Antagonist is that he is the first of the "bad guys" we see. He enters with his flowing, black robes, and is clearly the leader of the evil minions. But, this is just the opening teaser of the story. Once the main plot gets going, Darth is relegated (in this first movie) to the role of glorified henchman.
Darh, in fact, is the Contagonist - the Temptation of the Dark Side of the Force - and the opposite of Obi Wan Kenobi's representation of Conscience.
Princess Leia is the cold force of Reason, the counterpart of the Emotional Chewbacca.
And finally, where the Droids are the faithful supporters or Sidekicks, the Skeptic is Han Solo (who doesn't believe in the Force, and verbally opposes every plan with which he is presented.
Again, the differences between the Droids' personalities and the bickering between them is part of a minor sub-plot. But, in the main plot, they function together as joint sidekicks.
In practice, very few stories use archetypal characters exclusively. A frequent method is to employ a mix of both archetypal and Complex characters. A good example of this technique can be seen in "The Wizard of Oz."
In the cast of Archetypal characters, Dorothy (like Luke) is the initiating Protagonist. Glinda, the good witch, fills Obi Wan's role as the helpful force of Conscience. Toto is the standard Sidekick, balanced by the Skeptical, doubting, Cowardly Lion.
The remaining principal characters (Scarecrow, Tin Man, Wicked Witch, and the Wizard himself) are close to being archetypes, but actually "swap" some elements among them that make them mmore complex. The remaining archetypes from which they will draw are Reason, Emotion, Antagonist, and Contagonist.
Although the Scarecrow (who always has a plan) might appear at first glance to be the equivalent of Leia's Reason archetype, he differs in that Leia is exceendingly controlled in her physical activities, whereas the Scarecrow is frenetic and uncontrolled (more like Chewbacca).
Similarly, though the Tin Man (who crys and rusts himself) seems to be the Emotion archetype like Chewbacca, externally, he is controlled like Leia.
It is almost as if the Scarecrow is internally like Leia, and externally like Chewbacca, whereas the Tin Man is just the reverse! In fact, we are on the verge of seeing how Archetypes are made up smaller elements of character which can be combined in different ways.
The Reason Archetype (as illustrated by Princess Leia) uses Logic internally, and is Contolled externally. The two elements work hand in hand as members of the same family, each a different spin on the same basic approach to problem solving. The Emotion Archteype (as illustrated by Chewbacca) is driven by Feelings internally, and is Uncontrolled externally.
The Scarecrow takes the internal quality of Logic from the Reason archetype, but matches it with the exterenal trait of Uncontrolled from the Emotion archetype. In the same manner, the Tin Man posseses Emotion's internal quality of Feeling and pairs it with Reason's external Control.
This "swap" makes Scarecrow and Tin Man each half of one archetype and half of another. We note that each character still has one internal and one external characteristic, just like the archetypes, but "flipped." As it turns out, this is not the only way to split an archetype.
The Wicked Witch and the Wizard also swap elements from the Antagonist and Contagonist, but not in the same way. The Antagonist, externally, tries to Prevent the Protagonist from upsetting the status quo. It's internal equivalent is Non-Consideration (simply, don't even think about it!) The Contagonist, internally, represents Temptation and externally is the fly in the ointment or the Hinderer.
In The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch gets both external elements and the Wizard takes both internal ones. So, the Witch tries to Prevent Dorothy (the Protagonist) from fulfilling her quest with the Ruby slippers, and also gums up the works whenever she can, just to make things more difficult and discouraging (i.e., the apple trees and scaring the travellers with fire).
In contrast, the fearsome Wizard presents the force of Non-Consideration (put it out of your mind), and also represents Temptation. The Wizard as Tempation? This is most clearly illustrated when tells Dorothy the only way to get her back to Kansas is if he takes her there himself in his balloon. Clearly, if Dorothy returned by balloon, she would never learn the lesson that "There's no place like home" and that she had the power all along.
As we shall see, Archetypal characters are made up of more that just two elements, internal and external. The point of the moment is that Archetypal characters and Complex Characters share the same elements, just in different combinations.
For now, let's consider a complete breakdown of the internal and external elements of the eight archetypes:
Archetype Internal External
Protagonist Consider Pursue
Antagonist Non_Consideration Prevent
Reason Logic Controlled
Emotion Feeling Uncontrolled
Guardian Conscience Help
Contagonist Temptation Hinder
Sidekick Faith Support
Skeptic Disbelief Oppose
From this table it is easy to see why these characters are Archetypal. The internal and external elements of each archetype are equivalent, and between opposing archetypes are most nearly opposite. So, Archetypal Characters are consistent inside and out, and are equally in opposition to their chief opponant in both realms.
Returning to Star Wars, we can see the elements at work in each of the eight Archetypes:
Name Archetype Internal External
Luke Skywalker Protagonist Consider Pursue
Empire Antagonist Non-Consideration Prevent
Princess Leia Reason Logic Controlled
Chewbacca Emotion Feeling Uncontrolled
Obi Wan Guardian Conscience Help
Darth Vader Contagonist Temptation Hinder
Droids Sidekick Faith Support
Han Solo Skeptic Disbelief Oppose
Beginning with Luke, he has taken it upon himself to Consider
Let's get practical for a moment and build some characters using archetypes. Although the names and description of most of these archetypes are no doubt familiar to you, an exact definition of their functions in story structure may not be. In fact, if you ask any group of authors to define each of these characters by their role in a story, you are likely to get such a range of different descriptions that some are actually contradictory. In other words, most everyone has a "feel" for these archetypes, but few have an exact understanding of them.
Moreover, even if two authors agree on a definition, they often use a different name for that archetype. For example, the terms "Protagonist," "Main Character," "Central Character," and "Hero," are often used interchangeably, sometimes even by the same author, when in fact, each is a completely different dramatic attribute.
The Main Character represents the audience position in the story, from where they experience the pathos first hand. In our own minds, the Main Character represents our sense of self - essentially, where we are coming from. Every Story Mind must also have a sense of self, otherwise, the audience only comes to the story from the outside looking in, as if it were something outside themselves, and therefore they never empathize with any of the characters in the story.
The Main Character provides the audience a place to stand on the inside. And, just as with our own minds, where we are coming from may change with the situation and/or with with issue in question. So, we may spend varying amounts of time looking through the eyes of any number of characters in our story.
Still, there is always one character that feels like the "Main" character. What is it that makes this character feel speical? As we shall soon see with our archetypes, each of the elements of character represents a different kind of concern - a different area of consideration in a complete map of the mind. One of these issues is the "message issue" of the story, the human quality around which the story's moral revolves. The character who contains that element represents that issue. So when we look through that character's eyes, we are standing at ground zero of the story's argument. It is this outlook which is being questioned in the story, the one that the author is trying to prove is better (or worse) than all the other approaches to the problem. Simply, that is why the Main Character feels so important, even if we actually spend more time looking through the eyes of other characters.
The character through whose perspective is give the most time or attention in the story is the Central Character. Notice I wrote "time or attentian" rather than just "time." The impact of a character is not due solely to screen time in a movie or number of pages in a novel. It is also dependent upon how strongly that character is drawn. It is the combination of the amount of exposure to a character and the intensity with which the author describes the character that deteremine its overall impact on the audience.
This concept is well-known in psychology, and they even have a name for it: Temporal and Spatial Summation. Simply put, it means that your response to the world is partly built on a life-time of experience and partly on those fleeting but intense moments that will live forever in your memory. (In fact, even the neurons of the brain respond to the collective energy of repeated exposure to the same information over and over again and to the sudden exposure to very intense momentary information.)
Just as the functioning of the brain's neurology is represented fractally in the mind's psychology, so too is it represented in the characters (and in fact in all the dramatics) of the Story Mind.
So, the terms "Main Character" and "Central Character" do not mean the same thing at all. Still, the player in a story that stands on the crucial issue is often given the most "play" by an author, and is therefore the Central Character as well as being Main. I just doesn't necessarily have to be that way. One character could be the "message character" and another the one who is most intense.
It should also be noted that you might present all of your characters in an equally intense manner. Who then is Central? As it happens, the term "Central" is not really about a single character, but is the measurement of how impactful on the audience each character is compared to the others. It is not a wasted question to ask of each character in a first draft you have written, "How Central is he (or she)?" The answer can give you a good idea how your audience's attention and empathy will be distributed.
Just being Central does not mean you are Main, and vice versa. In the human mind, and therefore in the Story Mind as well, we sometimes adopt a point of view looking at things from that perspective. We also look internally at our own attributes without necessarily adopting that outlook . The most important character whose point of view we share (the one possessing the trait at the heart of the message) is Main. The most important character whome we observe (the one most strongly drawn by the author) is Central.
When you have a Main Character who is also the Central Character, you have the beginnings of the traditional "Hero," who we will continue to explore in a moment. But first, what of the Protagonist? The Protagonist is the character who drives the plot forward. Note that while the Main Character is dealing with the judgmental aspects of the story's message regarding a particular issue or quality of human nature, the Protagonist is dealing with the practical issues of trying to achieve the story's Goal.
As with Main and Central, the Protagonist represents an aspect of the mind: our initiative. Within each of us is a drive to shake up the status quo, to make things different (for good/benefit or for bad/detriment). It doesn't matter if that drive is benevolently or malevolently applied. It is just the drive itself that the Protagonist represents.
You'll note that in the list of eight archetypes above, they are arranged in pairs, each associated with its most antithetical match. Reason is most directly offset to Emotion, and so on. And, as expected, Protagonist is set against Antagonist.
The Antagonist represents that force within ourselves that seeks hold things back or prevent them from happening WHETHER GOOD OR BAD. Note that in a structural sense, neither Protagonist nor Antagonist (nor the other six archetypes) are absolutely associated with any moral imperative, with right or wrong, kind or mean, positive or negative intent. Protagonist and Antagonist represent only our drive to make something happen and our drive to keep things as they are.
This concept is likely quite different than what you have encountered before, but it is absolutely essential to separating the function of a character in a story's structure from the moral judgement of the author.
When a character is made to appear to be moralistically correct or righteous, it is the author's opinion of the character's action, and is not directly dependent on whether the character is trying to instigate something or to block something.
Where then do the notions of right and wrong bear on the nature of characters? This occurs when we try to fashion a Hero. The stereotypical Hero is the Main Character who is also the Central Character, the Protagonist, AND is on the side of Good. His counterpart, the Villian, is the Influence Character (more about this concept later), who is also a Central Character (the second most impactful), the Antagonist, and is on the side of Evil.
Those other characters who are on the side of "right" are the "Good Guys" and those on the side of "wrong" are the "Bad Guys." And, of course, Good Guys can fall from grace and Bad Guys can be redeemed.
By separately defining Main Character, Central Character, and Protagonist, we have now opened up a whole world of possiblities for creating far less stereotypical characters that the standard Hero and Villian.
For example, suppose we have a character who is Main, Central, and Protagonist, but Bad to the bone. This character will stand at ground zero of the story's moral issue, because he is Main. He will also be the most strongly drawn and memorable character because he is Central. He will be the character who drives the plot forward as Protagonist. But, because he is Bad (moralistically) he will be an "Anti-Hero."
Or, a character might be Main, Central, and Good, but be an Antagonist. A well-known example of this is James Bond. It is the "Villian" of the story that has the agenda, instigates things, and tries to achieve a goal. Bond's function is to stop the Bad Guy, so, by definition, Bond is an Antagonist.
It is hard to disassociate the labels of Good and Bad from Protagonist and Antagonist, but doing so allows one to break out of formula ruts and to investigate a wealth of sound, new character types.
Returning to our list of eight archetypes,
In summary, if you have only been creating Heros and Villians, youve been severly limiting your storytelling opportunities.
Storymind Basics 3
The Elements of Character
In the Story Mind, characters represent different facets of the human psyche. Archetypal characters illustrate broad personality traits whereas more Complex characters illustrate combinations of specific human qualities.
When a story seeks to explore overall aspects of human nature, it is best populated with Archetypal characters. A story that delves into specific attributes requires the use of Complex characters.
Just as with the personality of a real individual, a single story is usually comprised of a mixture of both broad, Arthetypal traits and and complex attributes as well.
In fact, Archetypal and Complex characters are all made up from the same essential elements, just as real people all possess the same palette of emotions and componants of reason. It is the way we put the pieces together that determines our personalities as individuals, and the same is true for characters.
The Archetypal arrangement simply groups a whole family of similar traits into a single character, while Complex characters are composed of conglomerations of both similar and dissimilar elements.
Grouping elements together creates the particular chemistry for each character, much as the elements in physics combine to create chemical compounds. And, just as in chemistry, mixing certain elements will produce stable or unstable characters, and some elements may not mix at all, or at least not without a suitable dramatic catalyst.
So what are these elements of character? Since Complex arrangements of elements are almost infinite in their variety, it is easiest to begin with the Archetypes and then break them down into their componants to discover the "Periodic Table of Character Elements."
The Eight Archetypal Characters
For the moment, we shall propose that there are eight Archetypal characters. Later, when we have a better understanding of arhcetypes, we shall expand our list of archetypes to sixty-four! (Note, the number of archetypes is not arbitrary, but reflects very specific qualities of the human mind, as represented by the Story Mind.)
The eight Archetyapl characters are:
Protagonist - Antagonist
Reason - Emotion
Guardian - Contagonist
Sidekick - Skeptic
Protagonist drives the plot forward.
Antagonist tries to stop him.
Reason looks at the practical side
Emotion reacts from the heart.
Guardian tries to keep things on the True Path.
Contagonist tries to lead things astray.
Sidekick is the faithful supporter
Skeptic is the doubting opposer
The archetypes provide a kind of short hand for an author. Rather than having to illustrate each and every element independently, one by one, the author can simply illustrate a whole family of similar elements at a time, thereby saving pages and/or screentime.
When an author identifies a character as an archetype, the audience assumes that however the character fairs reflects on all of the contained elements as a group. So, since each element represents a different path (attitude or approach) that might be taken to resolve the problem, valuable "media real estate" is saved for other issues the author wishes to explore.
For example, in an action movie, an author might use archetypes to save time for chases and pyrotechnics. In a deep thematic novel, and author might employ archetypes to simplify the characters so fine nuances of the moral issues can be explored without distraction.
Any story that does not at least explore these eight essential facets of the Story Mind is leaving out some of the ways human beings evaluate and grapple with problems. Such a story's argument would be incomplete, and to an audience this would feel as if there were holes in the story's structure.
Of course, some stories have fewer characters that eight. In such stories, all of the same underlying elements must be present, but they will not be combined in an archetypal manner. In other words, at least some of the characters will have more than eight elements, meaning that they will contain qualities from at least two different broad personality traits. As long as all the essential elements are accounted for, stories can have as few as one single character.
In contrast, a character might only have a single element and still be functional dramatically. A character with fewer elements than an archetype, even if they are all in the same family, is also called complex, because they must be described for the audience, element by element. So a character with onlyone element would, in fact, be considered Complex.
Archetypes work with an audience because they represent the eight basic human drives we all use when trying to resolve a problem or better our situation. As individuals, we all have a sense of initiative (Protagonist) and a tendency to maintain the status quo (Antagonist). We use our Intellect (Reason) and our feelings (Emotion). We are influenced by our Conscience (Guardian) and by Temptation (Contagonist). We believe in ourselves (Sidekick) but may also be unsure of ourselves (Skeptic).
These eight qualities (Initiative, Reticency, Intellect, Feelings, Conscience, Temptation, Confidence, and Doubt) are the cornerstones of human thought, and the archetypes that represent them are the cornerstones of the Story Mind.
The first four of these archetypes (Protagonist, Antagonist, Reason, and Emotion) are called "Driver Characters" because they set the course and speed for the journey. The second four (Guardian, Contagonist, Sidekick, and Skeptic) are called "Passenger Characters" because they influence the Drivers, much like "back seat drivers."
Although the names and description of most of these archetypes are no doubt familiar to you, an exact definition of their functions in story structure may not be. In fact, if you ask any group of authors to define each of these characters by their role in a story, you are likely to get such a range of different descriptions that some are actually contradictory. In other words, most everyone has a "feel" for these archetypes, but few have an exact understanding of them.
Moreover, even if two authors agree on a definition, they often use a different name for that archetype. For example, the terms "Protagonist," "Main Character," "Central Character," and "Hero," are often used interchangeably, sometimes even by the same author, when in fact, each is a completely different dramatic attribute.
The Main Character represents the audience position in the story, from where they experience the pathos first hand. In our own minds, the Main Character represents our sense of self - essentially, where we are coming from. Every Story Mind must also have a sense of self, otherwise, the audience only comes to the story from the outside looking in, as if it were something outside themselves, and therefore they never empathize with any of the characters in the story.
The Main Character provides the audience a place to stand on the inside. And, just as with our own minds, where we are coming from may change with the situation and/or with with issue in question. So, we may spend varying amounts of time looking through the eyes of any number of characters in our story.
Still, there is always one character that feels like the "Main" character. What is it that makes this character feel speical? As we shall soon see with our archetypes, each of the elements of character represents a different kind of concern - a different area of consideration in a complete map of the mind. One of these issues is the "message issue" of the story, the human quality around which the story's moral revolves. The character who contains that element represents that issue. So when we look through that character's eyes, we are standing at ground zero of the story's argument. It is this outlook which is being questioned in the story, the one that the author is trying to prove is better (or worse) than all the other approaches to the problem. Simply, that is why the Main Character feels so important, even if we actually spend more time looking through the eyes of other characters.
The character through whose perspective is give the most time or attention in the story is the Central Character. Notice I wrote "time or attentian" rather than just "time." The impact of a character is not due solely to screen time in a movie or number of pages in a novel. It is also dependent upon how strongly that character is drawn. It is the combination of the amount of exposure to a character and the intensity with which the author describes the character that deteremine its overall impact on the audience.
This concept is well-known in psychology, and they even have a name for it: Temporal and Spatial Summation. Simply put, it means that your response to the world is partly built on a life-time of experience and partly on those fleeting but intense moments that will live forever in your memory. (In fact, even the neurons of the brain respond to the collective energy of repeated exposure to the same information over and over again and to the sudden exposure to very intense momentary information.)
Just as the functioning of the brain's neurology is represented fractally in the mind's psychology, so too is it represented in the characters (and in fact in all the dramatics) of the Story Mind.
So, the terms "Main Character" and "Central Character" do not mean the same thing at all. Still, the player in a story that stands on the crucial issue is often given the most "play" by an author, and is therefore the Central Character as well as being Main. I just doesn't necessarily have to be that way. One character could be the "message character" and another the one who is most intense.
It should also be noted that you might present all of your characters in an equally intense manner. Who then is Central? As it happens, the term "Central" is not really about a single character, but is the measurement of how impactful on the audience each character is compared to the others. It is not a wasted question to ask of each character in a first draft you have written, "How Central is he (or she)?" The answer can give you a good idea how your audience's attention and empathy will be distributed.
Just being Central does not mean you are Main, and vice versa. In the human mind, and therefore in the Story Mind as well, we sometimes adopt a point of view looking at things from that perspective. We also look internally at our own attributes without necessarily adopting that outlook . The most important character whose point of view we share (the one possessing the trait at the heart of the message) is Main. The most important character whome we observe (the one most strongly drawn by the author) is Central.
When you have a Main Character who is also the Central Character, you have the beginnings of the traditional "Hero," who we will continue to explore in a moment. But first, what of the Protagonist? The Protagonist is the character who drives the plot forward. Note that while the Main Character is dealing with the judgmental aspects of the story's message regarding a particular issue or quality of human nature, the Protagonist is dealing with the practical issues of trying to achieve the story's Goal.
As with Main and Central, the Protagonist represents an aspect of the mind: our initiative. Within each of us is a drive to shake up the status quo, to make things different (for good/benefit or for bad/detriment). It doesn't matter if that drive is benevolently or malevolently applied. It is just the drive itself that the Protagonist represents.
You'll note that in the list of eight archetypes above, they are arranged in pairs, each associated with its most antithetical match. Reason is most directly offset to Emotion, and so on. And, as expected, Protagonist is set against Antagonist.
The Antagonist represents that force within ourselves that seeks hold things back or prevent them from happening WHETHER GOOD OR BAD. Note that in a structural sense, neither Protagonist nor Antagonist (nor the other six archetypes) are absolutely associated with any moral imperative, with right or wrong, kind or mean, positive or negative intent. Protagonist and Antagonist represent only our drive to make something happen and our drive to keep things as they are.
This concept is likely quite different than what you have encountered before, but it is absolutely essential to separating the function of a character in a story's structure from the moral judgement of the author.
When a character is made to appear to be moralistically correct or righteous, it is the author's opinion of the character's action, and is not directly dependent on whether the character is trying to instigate something or to block something.
Where then do the notions of right and wrong bear on the nature of characters? This occurs when we try to fashion a Hero. The stereotypical Hero is the Main Character who is also the Central Character, the Protagonist, AND is on the side of Good. His counterpart, the Villian, is the Influence Character (more about this concept later), who is also a Central Character (the second most impactful), the Antagonist, and is on the side of Evil.
Those other characters who are on the side of "right" are the "Good Guys" and those on the side of "wrong" are the "Bad Guys." And, of course, Good Guys can fall from grace and Bad Guys can be redeemed.
By separately defining Main Character, Central Character, and Protagonist, we have now opened up a whole world of possiblities for creating far less stereotypical characters that the standard Hero and Villian.
For example, suppose we have a character who is Main, Central, and Protagonist, but Bad to the bone. This character will stand at ground zero of the story's moral issue, because he is Main. He will also be the most strongly drawn and memorable character because he is Central. He will be the character who drives the plot forward as Protagonist. But, because he is Bad (moralistically) he will be an "Anti-Hero."
Or, a character might be Main, Central, and Good, but be an Antagonist. A well-known example of this is James Bond. It is the "Villian" of the story that has the agenda, instigates things, and tries to achieve a goal. Bond's function is to stop the Bad Guy, so, by definition, Bond is an Antagonist.
It is hard to disassociate the labels of Good and Bad from Protagonist and Antagonist, but doing so allows one to break out of formula ruts and to investigate a wealth of sound, new character types.
Returning to our list of eight archetypes,
In summary, if you have only been creating Heros and Villians, you
ve been severly limiting your storytelling opportunities.
In the Story Mind, characters represent different facets of the human psyche. Archetypal characters illustrate broad personality traits whereas more Complex characters illustrate combinations of specific human qualities.
When a story seeks to explore overall aspects of human nature, it is best populated with Archetypal characters. A story that delves into specific attributes requires the use of Complex characters.
Just as with the personality of a real individual, a single story is usually comprised of a mixture of both broad, Arthetypal traits and and complex attributes as well.
In fact, Archetypal and Complex characters are all made up from the same essential elements, just as real people all possess the same palette of emotions and componants of reason. It is the way we put the pieces together that determines our personalities as individuals, and the same is true for characters.
The Archetypal arrangement simply groups a whole family of similar traits into a single character, while Complex characters are composed of conglomerations of both similar and dissimilar elements.
Grouping elements together creates the particular chemistry for each character, much as the elements in physics combine to create chemical compounds. And, just as in chemistry, mixing certain elements will produce stable or unstable characters, and some elements may not mix at all, or at least not without a suitable dramatic catalyst.
So what are these elements of character? Since Complex arrangements of elements are almost infinite in their variety, it is easiest to begin with the Archetypes and then break them down into their componants to discover the "Periodic Table of Character Elements."
The Eight Archetypal Characters
For the moment, we shall propose that there are eight Archetypal characters. Later, when we have a better understanding of arhcetypes, we shall expand our list of archetypes to sixty-four! (Note, the number of archetypes is not arbitrary, but reflects very specific qualities of the human mind, as represented by the Story Mind.)
The eight Archetyapl characters are:
Protagonist - Antagonist
Reason - Emotion
Guardian - Contagonist
Sidekick - Skeptic
Protagonist drives the plot forward.
Antagonist tries to stop him.
Reason looks at the practical side
Emotion reacts from the heart.
Guardian tries to keep things on the True Path.
Contagonist tries to lead things astray.
Sidekick is the faithful supporter
Skeptic is the doubting opposer
The archetypes provide a kind of short hand for an author. Rather than having to illustrate each and every element independently, one by one, the author can simply illustrate a whole family of similar elements at a time, thereby saving pages and/or screentime.
When an author identifies a character as an archetype, the audience assumes that however the character fairs reflects on all of the contained elements as a group. So, since each element represents a different path (attitude or approach) that might be taken to resolve the problem, valuable "media real estate" is saved for other issues the author wishes to explore.
For example, in an action movie, an author might use archetypes to save time for chases and pyrotechnics. In a deep thematic novel, and author might employ archetypes to simplify the characters so fine nuances of the moral issues can be explored without distraction.
Any story that does not at least explore these eight essential facets of the Story Mind is leaving out some of the ways human beings evaluate and grapple with problems. Such a story's argument would be incomplete, and to an audience this would feel as if there were holes in the story's structure.
Of course, some stories have fewer characters that eight. In such stories, all of the same underlying elements must be present, but they will not be combined in an archetypal manner. In other words, at least some of the characters will have more than eight elements, meaning that they will contain qualities from at least two different broad personality traits. As long as all the essential elements are accounted for, stories can have as few as one single character.
In contrast, a character might only have a single element and still be functional dramatically. A character with fewer elements than an archetype, even if they are all in the same family, is also called complex, because they must be described for the audience, element by element. So a character with onlyone element would, in fact, be considered Complex.
Archetypes work with an audience because they represent the eight basic human drives we all use when trying to resolve a problem or better our situation. As individuals, we all have a sense of initiative (Protagonist) and a tendency to maintain the status quo (Antagonist). We use our Intellect (Reason) and our feelings (Emotion). We are influenced by our Conscience (Guardian) and by Temptation (Contagonist). We believe in ourselves (Sidekick) but may also be unsure of ourselves (Skeptic).
These eight qualities (Initiative, Reticency, Intellect, Feelings, Conscience, Temptation, Confidence, and Doubt) are the cornerstones of human thought, and the archetypes that represent them are the cornerstones of the Story Mind.
The first four of these archetypes (Protagonist, Antagonist, Reason, and Emotion) are called "Driver Characters" because they set the course and speed for the journey. The second four (Guardian, Contagonist, Sidekick, and Skeptic) are called "Passenger Characters" because they influence the Drivers, much like "back seat drivers."
Although the names and description of most of these archetypes are no doubt familiar to you, an exact definition of their functions in story structure may not be. In fact, if you ask any group of authors to define each of these characters by their role in a story, you are likely to get such a range of different descriptions that some are actually contradictory. In other words, most everyone has a "feel" for these archetypes, but few have an exact understanding of them.
Moreover, even if two authors agree on a definition, they often use a different name for that archetype. For example, the terms "Protagonist," "Main Character," "Central Character," and "Hero," are often used interchangeably, sometimes even by the same author, when in fact, each is a completely different dramatic attribute.
The Main Character represents the audience position in the story, from where they experience the pathos first hand. In our own minds, the Main Character represents our sense of self - essentially, where we are coming from. Every Story Mind must also have a sense of self, otherwise, the audience only comes to the story from the outside looking in, as if it were something outside themselves, and therefore they never empathize with any of the characters in the story.
The Main Character provides the audience a place to stand on the inside. And, just as with our own minds, where we are coming from may change with the situation and/or with with issue in question. So, we may spend varying amounts of time looking through the eyes of any number of characters in our story.
Still, there is always one character that feels like the "Main" character. What is it that makes this character feel speical? As we shall soon see with our archetypes, each of the elements of character represents a different kind of concern - a different area of consideration in a complete map of the mind. One of these issues is the "message issue" of the story, the human quality around which the story's moral revolves. The character who contains that element represents that issue. So when we look through that character's eyes, we are standing at ground zero of the story's argument. It is this outlook which is being questioned in the story, the one that the author is trying to prove is better (or worse) than all the other approaches to the problem. Simply, that is why the Main Character feels so important, even if we actually spend more time looking through the eyes of other characters.
The character through whose perspective is give the most time or attention in the story is the Central Character. Notice I wrote "time or attentian" rather than just "time." The impact of a character is not due solely to screen time in a movie or number of pages in a novel. It is also dependent upon how strongly that character is drawn. It is the combination of the amount of exposure to a character and the intensity with which the author describes the character that deteremine its overall impact on the audience.
This concept is well-known in psychology, and they even have a name for it: Temporal and Spatial Summation. Simply put, it means that your response to the world is partly built on a life-time of experience and partly on those fleeting but intense moments that will live forever in your memory. (In fact, even the neurons of the brain respond to the collective energy of repeated exposure to the same information over and over again and to the sudden exposure to very intense momentary information.)
Just as the functioning of the brain's neurology is represented fractally in the mind's psychology, so too is it represented in the characters (and in fact in all the dramatics) of the Story Mind.
So, the terms "Main Character" and "Central Character" do not mean the same thing at all. Still, the player in a story that stands on the crucial issue is often given the most "play" by an author, and is therefore the Central Character as well as being Main. I just doesn't necessarily have to be that way. One character could be the "message character" and another the one who is most intense.
It should also be noted that you might present all of your characters in an equally intense manner. Who then is Central? As it happens, the term "Central" is not really about a single character, but is the measurement of how impactful on the audience each character is compared to the others. It is not a wasted question to ask of each character in a first draft you have written, "How Central is he (or she)?" The answer can give you a good idea how your audience's attention and empathy will be distributed.
Just being Central does not mean you are Main, and vice versa. In the human mind, and therefore in the Story Mind as well, we sometimes adopt a point of view looking at things from that perspective. We also look internally at our own attributes without necessarily adopting that outlook . The most important character whose point of view we share (the one possessing the trait at the heart of the message) is Main. The most important character whome we observe (the one most strongly drawn by the author) is Central.
When you have a Main Character who is also the Central Character, you have the beginnings of the traditional "Hero," who we will continue to explore in a moment. But first, what of the Protagonist? The Protagonist is the character who drives the plot forward. Note that while the Main Character is dealing with the judgmental aspects of the story's message regarding a particular issue or quality of human nature, the Protagonist is dealing with the practical issues of trying to achieve the story's Goal.
As with Main and Central, the Protagonist represents an aspect of the mind: our initiative. Within each of us is a drive to shake up the status quo, to make things different (for good/benefit or for bad/detriment). It doesn't matter if that drive is benevolently or malevolently applied. It is just the drive itself that the Protagonist represents.
You'll note that in the list of eight archetypes above, they are arranged in pairs, each associated with its most antithetical match. Reason is most directly offset to Emotion, and so on. And, as expected, Protagonist is set against Antagonist.
The Antagonist represents that force within ourselves that seeks hold things back or prevent them from happening WHETHER GOOD OR BAD. Note that in a structural sense, neither Protagonist nor Antagonist (nor the other six archetypes) are absolutely associated with any moral imperative, with right or wrong, kind or mean, positive or negative intent. Protagonist and Antagonist represent only our drive to make something happen and our drive to keep things as they are.
This concept is likely quite different than what you have encountered before, but it is absolutely essential to separating the function of a character in a story's structure from the moral judgement of the author.
When a character is made to appear to be moralistically correct or righteous, it is the author's opinion of the character's action, and is not directly dependent on whether the character is trying to instigate something or to block something.
Where then do the notions of right and wrong bear on the nature of characters? This occurs when we try to fashion a Hero. The stereotypical Hero is the Main Character who is also the Central Character, the Protagonist, AND is on the side of Good. His counterpart, the Villian, is the Influence Character (more about this concept later), who is also a Central Character (the second most impactful), the Antagonist, and is on the side of Evil.
Those other characters who are on the side of "right" are the "Good Guys" and those on the side of "wrong" are the "Bad Guys." And, of course, Good Guys can fall from grace and Bad Guys can be redeemed.
By separately defining Main Character, Central Character, and Protagonist, we have now opened up a whole world of possiblities for creating far less stereotypical characters that the standard Hero and Villian.
For example, suppose we have a character who is Main, Central, and Protagonist, but Bad to the bone. This character will stand at ground zero of the story's moral issue, because he is Main. He will also be the most strongly drawn and memorable character because he is Central. He will be the character who drives the plot forward as Protagonist. But, because he is Bad (moralistically) he will be an "Anti-Hero."
Or, a character might be Main, Central, and Good, but be an Antagonist. A well-known example of this is James Bond. It is the "Villian" of the story that has the agenda, instigates things, and tries to achieve a goal. Bond's function is to stop the Bad Guy, so, by definition, Bond is an Antagonist.
It is hard to disassociate the labels of Good and Bad from Protagonist and Antagonist, but doing so allows one to break out of formula ruts and to investigate a wealth of sound, new character types.
Returning to our list of eight archetypes,
In summary, if you have only been creating Heros and Villians, you
ve been severly limiting your storytelling opportunities.
Storymind Basics 2
Your Story's Mind
To an audience, every story has a distinct personality, almost as if it were a person rather than a work of fiction. As with the people we meet, some stories are memorable and others we forget as soon as they are gone. Some are the life of the party, but get stale rather quickly. Some initially strike us as dull, but become familiar to the point we look forward to seeing them again.
When we first encounter a person or a story, we tend to classify it in broad categories. We might label someone as a bully, a nerd, or a money-grubbing shark. Similarly, we might label a story as a Romance, an Adventure, or a situation comedy. As with the people we meet, the more time we spend with stories the less we see them as generalized types and the more we see the traits that define them as individuals.
Some stories might like to scare us, some to make us laugh. One story might be interested in the Civil War while another is heavily into science fiction. One story might be slow going and one charged with nervous energy.
The personality of a story is created by the combination the subject matter and the manner in which it is expressed. It is the personality of a story that defines its genre.
Like real people, stories suffer from conflicting drives, represented by the characters. They struggle with conflicting vlaue standards, as illustrated in the theme. And, they try various methods to resolve their troubles, documented in the plot.
In short, characters are the motivations of the Story Mind, theme its reasessment of values, plot its problem solving techniques, and genre its overall personality.
When an audience sits down with a book, in a theater, or in front of a television, it is sitting down with a person to make conversation. In fact, it is a one-sided conversation. Your story must have a personality intriguing enough to hold the audience's interest until the show is over.
Is your story a good enough conversationalist, or does it need to go back to finishing school with another draft before it is ready for prime time? You have days, months, perhaps even years to prepare your story to exude enough charisma to sustain just one conversation. How disappointing is it to an audience when a story's personality is plain and simply dull?
As an author, thinking of your story as a person can actually help you write the story. All too often, authors get mired in the details of a story, trying to cram everything in and make all the pieces fit.
Characters are seen only as individuals, so they often unintentionally overlap each other's dramatic functions. The genre is depersonalized so that the author trying to write within a genre ends up fashioning a formula story and breaking no new ground. The plot becomes an exercise in logistics, and the theme emerges as a black and white pontification that hits the audience like a brick.
Now imagine that you are sitting down to dinner with your story. For convenience, we'll call your story "Joe." You know that Joe is something of an authority on a subject in which your are interested. You offer him an appetizer, and between bites of pate, he tells you of his adventures and experiences.
Over soup, he describes what was driving him at various points of his endeavors. These are your characters, and they must all be aspects of Joe's personality. There can be no characters that would not naturally co-exist in a single individual. You listen carefully to make sure Joe is not a split-personality, for such a story would seem fragmented as if it were of two or more minds.
While munching on a spinach salad, Joe describes his efforts to resolve the problems that grew out of his journey. This is your plot, and all reasonable efforts need to be covered. You note what he is saying, just an an audience will, to be sure there are no flaws in his logic. There can also be no missing approaches that obviously should have been tried, or Joe will sound like an idiot.
Over the main course of poached quail eggs and Cohoe salmon (on a bed of grilled seasonal greens), Joe illucidates the moral dilemmas he faced, how he considered what was good and bad, better or worse. This is your theme, and all sides of the issues must be explored. If Joe is one-sided in this regard, he will come off as bigoted or closed-minded. Rather than being swayed by his conclusions, you (and an audience) will find him boorish and will disregard his passionate prognositications.
Dessert is served and you make time, between spoonfuls of chocolate soufle (put in the oven before the first course to ready by the end of dinner) to consider your dinner guest. Was he entertaining? Did he make sense? Did he touch on topical issues with light-handed thoughtfulness? Did he seem centers, together, and focused? And most important, would you invite him to dinner again? If you can't answer yes to each of these questions, you need to send your story back to finishing school, for he is not ready to entertain an audience.
Your story is your child. You give birth to it, you nurture it, you have hopes for it. You try to instill your values, to give it the tools it needs to succeed and to point it in the right direction. But, like all children, there comes a time where you have to let go of who you wanted it to be and to love and accept who it has become.
When your story entertains an audience, you will not be there to explain its faults or compensate for its shortcomings. You must be sure your child is prepared to stand alone, to do well for itself and to not embarassed you. If you are not sure, you must send it back to school.
Personifying a story allows an author to step back from the role of creator and to experience the story as an audience will. This is not to say that each and every detail in oot importat, but rather that the details are no more or less important than the overall impact of the story as a whole. This overview is one of the benefits of looking at a story as a Story Mind.
But what of the details? After all, the overview only gets one in touch with the big picture, yet every big picture is made through hundreds of brush strokes.
In the sections that follow, we'll begin to psychoanalyze the Story Mind to learn the specific details about its drives (characters), value standards (theme), problem solving techniques (plot), and overall personality (genre). As we identify the Elements of Story Structure, we will explore how to use them to construct complete blueprints for our own stories that are complete, sound, and provide form without formula.
To an audience, every story has a distinct personality, almost as if it were a person rather than a work of fiction. As with the people we meet, some stories are memorable and others we forget as soon as they are gone. Some are the life of the party, but get stale rather quickly. Some initially strike us as dull, but become familiar to the point we look forward to seeing them again.
When we first encounter a person or a story, we tend to classify it in broad categories. We might label someone as a bully, a nerd, or a money-grubbing shark. Similarly, we might label a story as a Romance, an Adventure, or a situation comedy. As with the people we meet, the more time we spend with stories the less we see them as generalized types and the more we see the traits that define them as individuals.
Some stories might like to scare us, some to make us laugh. One story might be interested in the Civil War while another is heavily into science fiction. One story might be slow going and one charged with nervous energy.
The personality of a story is created by the combination the subject matter and the manner in which it is expressed. It is the personality of a story that defines its genre.
Like real people, stories suffer from conflicting drives, represented by the characters. They struggle with conflicting vlaue standards, as illustrated in the theme. And, they try various methods to resolve their troubles, documented in the plot.
In short, characters are the motivations of the Story Mind, theme its reasessment of values, plot its problem solving techniques, and genre its overall personality.
When an audience sits down with a book, in a theater, or in front of a television, it is sitting down with a person to make conversation. In fact, it is a one-sided conversation. Your story must have a personality intriguing enough to hold the audience's interest until the show is over.
Is your story a good enough conversationalist, or does it need to go back to finishing school with another draft before it is ready for prime time? You have days, months, perhaps even years to prepare your story to exude enough charisma to sustain just one conversation. How disappointing is it to an audience when a story's personality is plain and simply dull?
As an author, thinking of your story as a person can actually help you write the story. All too often, authors get mired in the details of a story, trying to cram everything in and make all the pieces fit.
Characters are seen only as individuals, so they often unintentionally overlap each other's dramatic functions. The genre is depersonalized so that the author trying to write within a genre ends up fashioning a formula story and breaking no new ground. The plot becomes an exercise in logistics, and the theme emerges as a black and white pontification that hits the audience like a brick.
Now imagine that you are sitting down to dinner with your story. For convenience, we'll call your story "Joe." You know that Joe is something of an authority on a subject in which your are interested. You offer him an appetizer, and between bites of pate, he tells you of his adventures and experiences.
Over soup, he describes what was driving him at various points of his endeavors. These are your characters, and they must all be aspects of Joe's personality. There can be no characters that would not naturally co-exist in a single individual. You listen carefully to make sure Joe is not a split-personality, for such a story would seem fragmented as if it were of two or more minds.
While munching on a spinach salad, Joe describes his efforts to resolve the problems that grew out of his journey. This is your plot, and all reasonable efforts need to be covered. You note what he is saying, just an an audience will, to be sure there are no flaws in his logic. There can also be no missing approaches that obviously should have been tried, or Joe will sound like an idiot.
Over the main course of poached quail eggs and Cohoe salmon (on a bed of grilled seasonal greens), Joe illucidates the moral dilemmas he faced, how he considered what was good and bad, better or worse. This is your theme, and all sides of the issues must be explored. If Joe is one-sided in this regard, he will come off as bigoted or closed-minded. Rather than being swayed by his conclusions, you (and an audience) will find him boorish and will disregard his passionate prognositications.
Dessert is served and you make time, between spoonfuls of chocolate soufle (put in the oven before the first course to ready by the end of dinner) to consider your dinner guest. Was he entertaining? Did he make sense? Did he touch on topical issues with light-handed thoughtfulness? Did he seem centers, together, and focused? And most important, would you invite him to dinner again? If you can't answer yes to each of these questions, you need to send your story back to finishing school, for he is not ready to entertain an audience.
Your story is your child. You give birth to it, you nurture it, you have hopes for it. You try to instill your values, to give it the tools it needs to succeed and to point it in the right direction. But, like all children, there comes a time where you have to let go of who you wanted it to be and to love and accept who it has become.
When your story entertains an audience, you will not be there to explain its faults or compensate for its shortcomings. You must be sure your child is prepared to stand alone, to do well for itself and to not embarassed you. If you are not sure, you must send it back to school.
Personifying a story allows an author to step back from the role of creator and to experience the story as an audience will. This is not to say that each and every detail in oot importat, but rather that the details are no more or less important than the overall impact of the story as a whole. This overview is one of the benefits of looking at a story as a Story Mind.
But what of the details? After all, the overview only gets one in touch with the big picture, yet every big picture is made through hundreds of brush strokes.
In the sections that follow, we'll begin to psychoanalyze the Story Mind to learn the specific details about its drives (characters), value standards (theme), problem solving techniques (plot), and overall personality (genre). As we identify the Elements of Story Structure, we will explore how to use them to construct complete blueprints for our own stories that are complete, sound, and provide form without formula.
Story Mind Basics 1
What if your story had a mind of it's own, as if it were a character unto itself with its own personality, its own psychology?
Suppose your characters were seen as the conflicting drives of this "Story Mind," theme as its troubled value standards, plot as its efforts to resolve its problems, and genre as the Story Mind's overall personality?
More importantly, what if you could psychoanalyze your story's mind to learn who your characters should be, what thematic issues you should explore, how your plot should unfold, and what unique twists define your story's genre?
In this book you'll learn about all facets of the Story Mind. You'll find out how to create a personality profile for your story and to use it as a map to exactly what your story is about and what happens in it.
STRUCTURE vs. PASSION
The Story Mind approach to story is a structural approach. But no one reads a book or goes to a movie to enjoy a good structure. No author writes because he is driven to create a sound structure. Rather, audiences and authors come to opposite sides of a story because of their passions - the author driven to express his, and the audience hoping to ignite its own.
As an audience, what draws us to a story in the first place is our attraction to the subject matter and the style. We might love a taut mystery, a fulfilling romance, or a chilling horror story. We might be intrigued by the potential applications of a new discovery of science, the exploration of newly rediscovered ancient city, or the life of a celebrity.
As an author what brings us to write a story may also be a clever concept for an action story, a bit of dialog, a notion for a character, a setting, time period, or a clever twist of plot. Or, we might have a deep-seated need to express a childhood experience, work out an irrational fear, or make a public statement about a social injustice.
No matter what our attraction as audience or author, it is our passions that trigger our imaginations. So why should an author worry about structure? Because passion rides on structure, and if the structure is flawed or even broken, then the passionate expression from author to audience will fall.
When structure is done properly, it is invisible, serving only as the carrier wave that delivers the passion to the audience. But when structure is flawed, it adds static to the flow of emotion, breaking up and possibly scrambling the passion so badly that the audience gets nothing of what the author was sending.
Yet, the attempt to ensure a sound structure is an intellectual pursuit. Questions such as "Who is my Protagonist?" "Where should my story begin?" "What happens in Act Two?" or "What is my message?" force an author to turn away from his passion and embrace logistics instead.
As a result, an author often becomes mired in the nuts and bolts of storytelling, staring at a blank page not because of a lack of inspiration, but because he can't figure out how to make his passion make sense.
Worse, the re-writing process is often grueling and frustrating, forcing the author to accept unwanted changes in the flow of emotion for the sake of logic. So what is an author to do? Is there any way out of this dilemma?
In the pages that follow, you'll discover a new way of writing stories - a method that allows an author to retain his passion even while serving the demands of structure. This system can be used either before you write to know exactly where things will be going or after you write to find and refine the structure already hidden in your passion.
You won't be asked to discard any techniques or approaches you are currently using. Rather, you'll simply be adding to what you already know, to what you are already doing; extending your understanding of how stories really work and how to write them.
So join me on an expedition into the uncharted frontiers of story structure. The risks are low, the potential rewards are great, and all you need to carry with you is your own passion.
Introducing the "Story Mind"
This book is entitled, "The Story Mind." and as described above, the Story Mind is a way of looking at a story as if all the characters were facets of a larger personality, the mind of the Story itself.
To illustrate, imagine that you stepped back from your story far enough that you could no longer identify your characters as individuals. Instead, like a general on a hill watching a battle, you could only see each character by his function:
There's the guy leading the charge - that's the Protagonist. His opponent is the Antagonist. There's the strategist, working out the battle plan - he's the Reason archetype. One soldier is shouting at the pathos and carnage - he's the Emotion archetype.
The structure of stories deals with what makes sense in the big picture. But characters aren't aware of that overview. Just like us, they can only see what is around them and try to make the best decisions based on that limited view. And so characters must also be real people as well, with real drives and real concerns.
Characters, therefore, really have two completely different jobs: They must act according to their own drives and desires and also play a part in the larger mosaic of the story as a whole. The trick is to create a story in which these two purposes work together, not against each other.
As individuals, each character must be fully developed as complete human beings. As cogs in the Great Machine, they must each fulfill a function. So, when we develop our characters we need to stand in their shoes, make them real people, and express ourselves passionately through each of their points of view. But when we develop our story's structure, we must ensure that each character fulfills his, her, or its dramatic purpose in the story at large.
It is that larger purpose that we call the Story Mind. As previously described, the Story Mind is like a Super Character that generates the personality of the overall story itself, as if it were a single, thinking, feeling, person. So, in addition to being complete people, each of our characters also represents a different aspect or facet of a greater character, the Story Mind.
For example, the Reason archetype represents the use of our intellect. The Emotion archetype illustrates the impact of our feelings. Individually as complete characters, they each employ both Reason and Emotion in regard to their own personal issues. But when it comes to the central issue of the story - the message issue that is the essence of what the overall story is about - then one of these two Characters will attempt to deal with that issue solely from a position of Reason and the other solely from the position of Emotion.
This is why we, the audience, see characters simultaneously as real people and also by their dramatic functions, such as Protagonist and Antagonist. Regarding their own concerns, characters are well rounded. Regarding the overall concern of the story as a whole, they are single-minded. Collectively, they describe the conflicting motivations or drives of the Story Mind.
But characters are only part of the story. As we shall see, Plot, Theme, and Genre are represented in the Story Mind as well. For now, suffice it to say that the Story Mind is the character of the story itself.
In a moment, we'll explore each of the archetypal characters and see what aspect of the human mind each represents. Then we'll break them apart into their essential mental componants - the Elements of Character - and learn how to combine these elements in different ways to create the chemistry of characters.
But first, there is an essential question which begs to be answered....
Why a Story Mind?
Before asking any writer to invest his or her time in a concept as different as the Story Mind, it is only fair to provide an explanation of why such a thing should exist. To do this, let us look briefly into the nature of communication between an author and an audience.
When an author tells a tale, he simply describes a series of events that both makes sense and feels right. As long as there are no breaks in the logic and no mis-steps in the emotional progression, the structure of the tale is sound.
Now, from a structural standpoint, it really doesn't matter what the tale is about, who the characters are, or how it turns out. The tale is just a truthful or fictional journey that starts in one situation, travels a straight or twisting path, and ends in another situation.
The meaning of a tale amounts to a statement that if you start from "here," and take "this" path, you'll end up "here." The message of a tale is that a particular path is a good or bad one, depending on whether the ending point is better or worse than the point of departure.
This structure is easily seen in the vast majority of familiar fairy "tales." Tales have been used since the first storytellers practiced their craft. in fact, many of the best selling novels and most popular motion pictures of our own time are simple tales, expertly told.
In a structural sense, tales have power in that they can encourage or discourage audience members from taking particular actions in real life. The drawback of a tale is that it speaks only in regard to that specific path.
But in fact, there are many paths that might be taken from a given point of departure. Suppose an author wants to address those as well, to cover all the alternatives. What if the author wants to say that rather than being just a good or bad path, a particular course of action the best or worst path of all that might have been taken?
Now the author is no longer making a simple statement, but a "blanket" statement. Such a blanket statement provides no "proof" that the path in question is the best or worst, it simply says so. Of course, an audience is not likely to be moved to accept such a bold claim, regardless of how well the tale is told.
In the early days of storytelling, an author related the tale to his audience in person. Should he aspire to wield more power over his audience and elevate his tale to become a blanket statement, the audience would no doubt cry, "Foul!" and demand that he prove it. Someone in the audience might bring up an alternative path that hadn't been included in the tale.
The author might then counter that rebuttal to his blanket statement by describing how the path proposed by the audience was either not as good or better (depending on his desired message) than the path he did include.
One by one, he could disperse any challenges to his tale until he either exhausted the opposition or was overcome by an alternative he couldn't dismiss.
But as soon as stories began to be recorded in media such as song ballads, epic poems, novels, stage plays, screenplays, teleplays, and so on, the author was no longer present to defend his blanket statements.
As a result, some authors opted to stick with simple tales of good and bad, but others pushed the blanket statement tale forward until the art form evolved into the "story."
A story is a much more sophisticated form of communication than a tale, and is in fact a revolutionary leap forward in the ability of an author to make a point. Simply put, when creating a story, and author starts with a tale of good or bad, expands it to a blanket statement of best or worst, and then includes all the reasonable alternatives to the path he is promoting to preclude any counters to his message.
In other words, while a tale is a statement, a story becomes an argument.
Now this puts a huge burden of proof on an author. Not only does he have to make his own point, but he has to prove (within reason) that all opposing points are less valid. Of course, this requires than an author anticipate any objections an audience might raise to his blanket statement. To do this, he must look at the situation described in his story and examine it from every angle anyone might happen to take in regard to that issue.
By incorporating all reasonable (and valid emotional) points of view regarding the story's message in the structure of the story itself, the author has not only defended his argument, but has also included all the points of view the human mind would normally take in examining that central issue. In effect, the structure of the story now represents the whole range of considerations a person would make if fully exploring that issue.
In essence, the structure of the story as a whole now represents a map of the mind's problem solving processes, and (without any intent on the part of the author) has become a Story Mind.
And so, the Story Mind concept is not really all that radical. It is simply a short hand way of describing that all sides of a story must be explored to statisfy an audience. And, and if this is done, the struture of the story takes on the nature of a single character.
Armed with this information we are now prepared to examine the nature of the Story Mind, and to see how we might apply what we discover to meet the demands of a logical structure without sacrificing our passion.
POINTS OF VIEW
To examine the Story Mind, we need to know how to look at it. If audiences only looked AT stories, then there would only be one point of view from which to see the Story Mind. But the audience not only looks AT stories, but also becomes involved IN them. It follows that there must be more than one way to look at the structure of a story.
In fact, there are four principal points of view that are necessary to fully satisfy the mind of the audience, and each of these is represented in the Story Mind as well. We'll begin with the most obvious and then explore some points of view that many authors fail to include in their structure, leaving serious holes in their stories.
The first point of view is the easiest: the OBJECTIVE view. We've already encountered the Objective View when we described how we might look at a story as if we were a general on hill, watching a battle in the valley below.
From that perspective, we can't identify the characters by name as we are too far removed from the conflict. Instead, we see them by function - the fellow leading the charge or the strategist, to refer to the examples used earlier.
If we could stand outside ourselves and look at our thought processes objectively, we could take that dispassionate perspective and observe the various logistic and emotional forces at work within our minds. Of course, we cannot do this with ourselves. The closest we come is when we pass judgment on others, observing them outside of their own passionate experiences.
We often say things such as, "If I were you, I'd...." More often than not, such comments get an angry reaction because in taking the Objective view, we have completely ignored the personal experiences that we can't see from the outside looking in. That is why our Objective view is dispassionate. It is not that we don't care about the individual, just as a general cares about his troops. But no matter how intently we seek to understand another from the outside, we can never really know what they are experiencing - what they are truly going through.
When it comes to our own minds, it is the Objective view we can never truly see, for we can never truly stand aside from ourselves dispassionately. That, in fact, is one of the principal reasons audiences are attracted to stories (beyond the simple entertainment value). Stories, through their Story Mind structure, provide a projection of our own minds, in a book, on stage, or on the screen, where we can look into our own thought processes from the outside in, made tangible as characters, theme, plot, and genre.
The author is essentially saying, "I have some life experience or some special insight that I can share about the big picture, the larger meaning of life in which we struggle." It is the author's argument that when this Objective view is taken into account, we can learn when we should go against what feels right personally, or when we should ignore the admonitions of others and go with our gut instincts.
So it is from this Objective view of the overall story that we see characters by their functions, such as Protagonist, Antagonist, Reason and Emotion. And each of these archetypal characters represents a broad quality of every human mind. We'll explore each of those characters of the mind soon. But first, what about that passionate internal view?
Returning to the general on the hill, suppose we zoomed down and stood in the shoes of one of the soldiers on the field. Naturally we lose our overview of the grand strategies and movements of the battle as a whole. But we are now intimately involved in the battle itself.
WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND?
You have an idea for a story. In fact, you have lots of little bits and pieces of ideas. But how do you put them together into something that makes sense? Your enthusiasm can carry you so far, but at some point you're going to wonder how to fit everything in and how to figure out what happens next.
Here's how the Story Mind can help. First, ask yourself what your story is about. Don't describe the order of events at this point, just describe the set-up. For example, "My story is about people trapped in a space ship with a monster," or "My story is about a man who lacks compassion."
Like our minds, the Story Mind examines issues in it's environment and issues within itself. So, if your story is about something something like people trapped in a space ship, that's an external issue within the outside universe. But if your story is about a man who lacks compassion, that's an internal issue within a person's mind.
So ask yourself, "Is my story about something external (Universe) or something internal (Mind)?" Of course, every external situation will create and also be affected by people's attitudes. And, every internal attitude will be affected by and lead to various situations. So, every story will have both situations and attitudes which affect each other.
But how do YOU think about your story? Which is more important to you, the external situation or the internal attitudes? Answering this question is the first step in giving your Story Mind a personality. Is your story more concerned with a situation or with an attitude?
Stories that are more concerned with external situations include "The Posiedon Adventure," "The Matrix," and "The Edge."
Stories that are more concerned with internal attitudes include, "A Christmas Carol," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," and "Analyze This."
To examine the Story Mind, we need to know how to look at it. If audiences only looked AT stories, then there would only be one point of view from which to see the Story Mind. But the audience not only looks AT stories, but also becomes involved IN them. It follows that there must be more than one way to look at the structure of a story.
In fact, there are four principal points of view that are necessary to fully satisfy the mind of the audience, and each of these is represented in the Story Mind as well. We'll begin with the most obvious and then explore some points of view that many authors fail to include in their structure, leaving serious holes in their stories.
The first point of view is the easiest: the OBJECTIVE view. We've already encountered the Objective View when we described how we might look at a story as if we were a general on hill, watching a battle in the valley below.
From that perspective, we can't identify the characters by name as we are too far removed from the conflict. Instead, we see them by function - the fellow leading the charge or the strategist, to refer to the examples used earlier.
If we could stand outside ourselves and look at our thought processes objectively, we could take that dispassionate perspective and observe the various logistic and emotional forces at work within our minds. Of course, we cannot do this with ourselves. The closest we come is when we pass judgment on others, observing them outside of their own passionate experiences.
We often say things such as, "If I were you, I'd...." More often than not, such comments get an angry reaction because in taking the Objective view, we have completely ignored the personal experiences that we can't see from the outside looking in. That is why our Objective view is dispassionate. It is not that we don't care about the individual, just as a general cares about his troops. But no matter how intently we seek to understand another from the outside, we can never really know what they are experiencing - what they are truly going through.
When it comes to our own minds, it is the Objective view we can never truly see, for we can never truly stand aside from ourselves dispassionately. That, in fact, is one of the principal reasons audiences are attracted to stories (beyond the simple entertainment value). Stories, through their Story Mind structure, provide a projection of our own minds, in a book, on stage, or on the screen, where we can look into our own thought processes from the outside in, made tangible as characters, theme, plot, and genre.
The author is essentially saying, "I have some life experience or some special insight that I can share about the big picture, the larger meaning of life in which we struggle." It is the author's argument that when this Objective view is taken into account, we can learn when we should go against what feels right personally, or when we should ignore the admonitions of others and go with our gut instincts.
So it is from this Objective view of the overall story that we see characters by their functions, such as Protagonist, Antagonist, Reason and Emotion. And each of these archetypal characters represents a broad quality of every human mind. We'll explore each of those characters of the mind soon. But first, what about that passionate internal view?
Returning to the general on the hill, suppose we zoomed down and stood in the shoes of one of the soldiers on the field. Naturally we lose our overview of the grand strategies and movements of the battle as a whole. But we are now intimately involved in the battle itself.
WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND?
You have an idea for a story. In fact, you have lots of little bits and pieces of ideas. But how do you put them together into something that makes sense? Your enthusiasm can carry you so far, but at some point you're going to wonder how to fit everything in and how to figure out what happens next.
Here's how the Story Mind can help. First, ask yourself what your story is about. Don't describe the order of events at this point, just describe the set-up. For example, "My story is about people trapped in a space ship with a monster," or "My story is about a man who lacks compassion."
Like our minds, the Story Mind examines issues in it's environment and issues within itself. So, if your story is about something something like people trapped in a space ship, that's an external issue within the outside universe. But if your story is about a man who lacks compassion, that's an internal issue within a person's mind.
So ask yourself, "Is my story about something external (Universe) or something internal (Mind)?" Of course, every external situation will create and also be affected by people's attitudes. And, every internal attitude will be affected by and lead to various situations. So, every story will have both situations and attitudes which affect each other.
But how do YOU think about your story? Which is more important to you, the external situation or the internal attitudes? Answering this question is the first step in giving your Story Mind a personality. Is your story more concerned with a situation or with an attitude?
Stories that are more concerned with external situations include "The Posiedon Adventure," "The Matrix," and "The Edge."
Stories that are more concerned with internal attitudes include, "A Christmas Carol," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," and "Analyze This."
Characters, Dramatica Style
Here's an 18 minute mp3 recording of some basic Dramatica character concepts for a program I never got around to completing. Thought I might as well share it with y'all. Hope you find it useful.
Characters, Dramatica Style
(Click to listen, right click to download)
(Click to listen, right click to download)
Friday, May 1, 2009
Introducing the Story Mind
Syllabus from one of my seminars:
Introduction To The Story Mind
Excerpted from “Writing with The Story Mind”
by Melanie Anne Phillips
What if your story had a mind of it's own, as if it were a character unto itself with its own personality, its own psychology?
Suppose your characters were seen as the conflicting drives of this "Story Mind," theme as its troubled value standards, plot as its efforts to resolve its problems, and genre as the Story Mind's overall personality?
More importantly, what if you could psychoanalyze your story's mind to learn who your characters should be, what thematic issues you should explore, how your plot should unfold, and what unique twists define your story's genre?
In this book you'll learn about all facets of the Story Mind. You'll find out how to create a personality profile for your story and to use it as a map to exactly what your story is about and what happens in it.
Structure Vs Passion
The Story Mind approach to story is a structural one. But no one reads a book or goes to a movie to enjoy a good structure. No author writes because he is driven to create a sound structure. Rather, audiences and authors come to opposite sides of a story because of their passions - the author driven to express his, and the audience hoping to ignite its own.
What draws us to a story in the first place is our attraction to the subject matter and the style. As an audience, we might be intrigued by the potential applications of a new discovery of science, the exploration of newly rediscovered ancient city, or the life of a celebrity. We might love a taut mystery, a fulfilling romance, or a chilling horror story.
As an author what inspires us to write a story may be a bit of dialog we heard in a restaurant, a notion for a character, a setting, time period, or a clever twist of plot we’d like to explore. Or, we might have a deep-seated need to express a childhood experience, work out an irrational fear, or make a public statement about a social injustice.
No matter what our attraction as audience or author, it is our passions that trigger our imaginations. So why should an author worry about structure? Because passion rides on structure, and if the structure is flawed or even broken, then the passionate expression from author to audience will fail.
When structure is done properly, it is invisible, serving only as the carrier wave that delivers the passion to the audience. But when structure is flawed, it adds static to the flow of emotion, breaking up and possibly scrambling the passion so badly that the audience gets nothing of what the author was sending.
Yet, the attempt to ensure a sound structure is an intellectual pursuit. Questions such as "Who is my Protagonist?" "Where should my story begin?" "What happens in Act Two?" or "What is my message?" force an author to turn away from his passion and embrace logistics instead.
As a result, an author often becomes mired in the nuts and bolts of storytelling, staring at a blank page not because of a lack of inspiration, but because he can't figure out how to make his passion make sense.
Worse, the re-writing process is often grueling and frustrating, forcing the author to accept unwanted changes in the flow of emotion for the sake of logic. So what is an author to do? Is there any way out of this dilemma?
In the pages that follow, you'll discover a new way of writing stories - a method that allows an author to retain his passion even while serving the demands of structure. This system can be used either before you write to know exactly where things will be going or after you write to find and refine the structure already hidden in your passion.
You won't be asked to discard any techniques or approaches you are currently using. Rather, you'll simply be adding to what you already know, to what you are already doing; extending your understanding of how stories really work and how to write them.
So join me on an expedition into the new world of the Story Mind. The risks are low, the potential rewards are great, and all you need to carry with you is your own passion.
Introducing the "Story Mind"
This book is entitled, "The Story Mind." and as described above, the Story Mind is a way of looking at a story as if all the characters were facets of a larger personality, the mind of the Story itself.
To illustrate, imagine that you stepped back from your story far enough that you could no longer identify your characters as individuals. Instead, like a general on a hill watching a battle, you could only see each character by his function:
There's the guy leading the charge - that's the Protagonist. His opponent is the Antagonist. There's the strategist, working out the battle plan - he's the Reason archetype. One soldier is shouting at the pathos and carnage - he's the Emotion archetype.
The structure of stories deals with what makes sense in the big picture. But characters aren't aware of that overview. Just like us, they can only see what is around them and try to make the best decisions based on that limited view. And so characters must also be real people as well, with real drives and real concerns.
Characters, therefore, have two completely different jobs: They must act according to their own drives and desires and also play a part in the larger mosaic of the story as a whole. The trick is to create a story in which these two purposes work together, not against each other.
As individuals, each character must be fully developed as a complete human being. As cogs in the Great Machine, they must each fulfill a function. So, when we develop our characters we need to stand in their shoes, make them real people, and express ourselves passionately through each of their points of view. But when we develop our story's structure, we must ensure that each character fulfills his, her, or its dramatic purpose in the story at large.
It is that larger purpose that we call the Story Mind. As previously described, the Story Mind is like a Super Character that generates the personality of the overall story itself, as if it were a single, thinking, feeling, person. So, in addition to being complete people, each of our characters also represents a different aspect or facet of a greater character, the Story Mind.
For example, the Reason archetype represents the use of our intellect. The Emotion archetype illustrates the impact of our feelings. Individually as supposedly real people, they each employ both Reason and Emotion in regard to their own personal issues. But when it comes to the central issue of the story - the message issue that is the essence of what the overall story is about - then one of these two Characters will attempt to deal with that issue solely from a position of Reason and the other solely from the position of Emotion.
This is why we, the audience, see characters simultaneously as real people and also by their dramatic functions, such as Protagonist and Antagonist. Regarding their own concerns, characters are well rounded. Regarding the overall concern of the story as a whole, they are single-minded. Collectively, they describe the conflicting motivations or drives of the Story Mind.
But characters are only part of the story. As we shall see, Plot, Theme, and Genre are represented in the Story Mind as well. For now, suffice it to say that the Story Mind is the character of the story itself.
Why a Story Mind?
Before asking any writer to invest his or her time in a concept as different as the Story Mind, it is only fair to provide an explanation of why such a thing should exist. To do this, let us look briefly into the nature of communication between an author and an audience.
Tales vs. Stories
When an author tells a tale, he simply describes a series of events that both makes sense and feels right. As long as there are no breaks in the logic and no mis-steps in the emotional progression, the structure of the tale is sound.
Now, from a structural standpoint, it really doesn't matter what the tale is about, who the characters are, or how it turns out. The tale is just a truthful or fictional journey that starts in one situation, travels a straight or twisting path, and ends in another situation.
The meaning of a tale amounts to a statement that if you start from "here," and take "this" path, you'll end up "there." The message of a tale is that a particular path is a good or bad one, depending on whether the ending point is better or worse than the point of departure and perhaps whether or not the result was worth the journey.
This structure is easily seen in a vast majority of familiar fairy "tales." Tales have been used since the first storytellers practiced their craft. In fact, many of the best selling novels and most popular motion pictures of our own time are simply tales, expertly told.
In a structural sense, tales have power in that they can encourage or discourage audience members from taking particular actions in real life. The drawback of a tale is that it speaks only in regard to that specific path.
But in fact, there are many paths that might be taken from a given point of departure. Suppose an author wants to address those as well, to cover all the alternatives. What if the author wants to say that rather than being just a good or bad path, a particular course of action is the best or worst path of all that might have been taken?
Now the author is no longer making a simple statement, but a "blanket" statement. Such a blanket statement provides no "proof" that the path in question is the best or worst, it simply says so. If the blanket statement reflects popular assumptions, it might be accepted at face value. But, if the blanket statement diverges from conventional wisdom or expectation, an audience is not likely to accept such a bold claim, regardless of how well the tale is told. It will demand to be convinced; it will demand proof.
In the early days of storytelling, an author related his tale to his audience in person. Should he aspire to manipulate his audience by making a blanket statement that conflicted with the norm, the audience would likely cry, "Foul!" and demand that he prove it on the spot.
Someone in the audience might bring up an alternative path that hadn't been included in the tale. The author could then counter that rebuttal to his blanket statement by describing how the path proposed by the audience was not as strong as the path he did include. One by one, he would disperse any challenges to his tale until he either exhausted the opposition or was overcome by an alternative he couldn't dismiss.
But as soon as stories began to be recorded in media such as song ballads, epic poems, novels, stage plays, screenplays, teleplays, and so on, the author was no longer present to defend his blanket statements. If he were to convince his audience of his point of view he must anticipate all reasonable challenges that might arise to his blanket statement and incorporate them in his presentation in advance. In fulfilling this new requirement, authors pushed the tale format forward beyond the blanket statement until it became a new art form we call the story.
A story is a much more sophisticated form of communication than a tale, and is in fact a revolutionary leap forward in the ability of an author to make a point. Simply put, a tale is a statement, a story is an argument.
Now this puts a huge burden of proof on an author. Not only does he have to make his own point, but he has to prove (within reason) that all opposing points are less valid. Of course, this requires than an author anticipate any objections an audience might raise to his blanket statement. To do this, he must look at the situation described in his story and examine it from every angle an audience might consider in regard to that issue.
By incorporating all reasonable (and valid emotional) points of view regarding the story's message in the structure of the story itself, the author has not only defended his argument, but has also included all the points of view the a person would normally take in examining that central issue. In effect, the structure of the story now represents the whole range of considerations a human mind would make if fully exploring that issue.
As each of the points of view is explored and the argument is made, the structure of the story begins to resemble a map of the mind's problem solving processes, and (without any intent on the part of the author) has become a Story Mind. The more accurately the story's structure represents the Story Mind, the more powerful the story's argument.
And so, the Story Mind concept is not really all that radical. It is simply a short hand way of describing that all sides of a story must be explored to satisfy an audience. And, and if this is done, the structure of the story takes on the nature of a single character.
Armed with this information we are now prepared to examine the nature of the Story Mind, and to see how we might apply what we discover to meet the demands of a logical structure without sacrificing our passion.
What's In Your Story's Mind?
As with people, your story's mind has different aspects. These are represented in your Genre, Theme, Plot, and Characters. Genre is the overall personality of the Story Mind. Theme represents its troubled value standards. Plot describes the methods the Story Mind uses as it tries to work out it's problems. Characters are the conflicting drives of the Story Mind.
Genre
To an audience, every story has a distinct personality, as if it were a person rather than a work of fiction. When we first encounter a person or a story, we tend to classify it in broad categories. For stories, we call the category into which we place its overall personality its Genre.
These categories reflect whatever attributes strike us as the most notable. With people this might be their profession, interests, attitudes, style, or manner of expression, for example. With stories this might be their setting, subject matter, point of view, atmosphere, or storytelling.
We might initially classify someone as a star-crossed lover, a cowboy, or a practical joker who likes to scare people. Similarly, we might categorize a story as a Romance, a Western, or a Horror story.
As with the people we meet, some stories are memorable and others we forget as soon as they are gone. Some are the life of the party, but get stale rather quickly. Some initially strike us as dull, but become familiar to the point we look forward to seeing them again. This is all due to what someone has to say and how he goes about saying it.
The more time we spend with specific stories (or people) the less we see them as generalized types and the more we see the traits that define them as individuals. So, although we might initially label a story as a particular Genre, we ultimately come to find that every story has its own unique personality that sets it apart from all others in that Genre, in at least a few notable respects.
In the Genre section of this book, we'll describe how to get a feel for the personality of the story you wish to tell, how to create a Genre map describing your story's primary attributes, and how to develop your story so that its unique qualities surface and reveal themselves.
Theme
Everyone has value standards, and the Story Mind has them as well. Some people are pig-headed and see issues as cut and dried. Others are wishy-washy and flip-flop on the issues. The most sophisticated people (and stories) see the pros and cons of both sides of a moral argument and present their conclusions in shades of gray, rather than in simple black & white. All these outlooks can be reflected in the Story Mind.
No matter what specific thematic topic is explored, the key structural point about value standards is that they are all comprised of two parts: the issues and one's attitude toward them. It is not enough to only have a subject ( abortion, gay rights, or greed) for that says nothing about whether they are good, bad, or somewhere in between. Similarly, attitudes (I hate, I believe in, or I don't approve of) are meaningless until they are applied to something.
An attitude is essentially a point of view. The issue is the object under observation. When an author determines what he wants us to look at it and from where he wants it to be seen, he creates perspective. It is this perspective that comprises a large part of the story's message.
Still, simply stating one's attitudes toward the issues does little to convince someone else to see things the same way we do. Unless the author is preaching to the audience as choir, he's going to need to convince it to share his attitude. To do this, he will need to make a thematic argument over the course of the story which will slowly dislodge the audience from its previously held beliefs and reposition the audience so that it adopts the author's beliefs by the time the story is over.
In the Theme section of this book we'll outline how to discover your story's message and how to create a thematic argument that presents all sides of the issues. You'll find out how to make your point without hitting the audience over the head with binary statements of right and wrong, and how to lead the audience to your point of view.
Plot
Novice authors often assume the plot of a story is the order in which events unfold. In fact, the order in which events are revealed to an audience is seldom the same order in which they happened to the characters. Through exposition, an author unveils the story, dropping bits and pieces that the audience rearranges until the meaning of the story becomes clear. This technique involves the audience as an active participant in the story rather than simply being a passive observer. It also reflects the way people go about solving their own problems.
When people try to work out ways of dealing with their problems they tend to identify and organize the pieces before they assemble them into a plan of action. So, they often jump around the timeline, filling in the different steps in their plan out of sequence as they gather additional information and draw new conclusions.
In the Story Mind, both of these attributes are represented as well. We refer to the internal logic of the story - the order in which the events in the problem solving approach actually occurred - as the Plot. The order in which the Story Mind considers these elements as it develops a plan of action is called the Storyweaving.
If an author blends these two aspects together, it is very easy to miss holes in the internal logic because they are glossed over by smooth exposition. By separating them, an author gains complete control of the progression of the story as well as the audience's progressive experience. In the plot section of this book you will learn how to create a complete sequential treatment for your story and to develop an exposition plan that involves and captivates your audience.
Characters
If characters represent our conflicting drives yet they each have a personal point of view, where is our sense of self represented in the Story Mind? After all, every real person has a unique point of view that defines his or her own self-awareness.
In fact, there is one special character in a story that represents the Story Mind's identity. This character, the Main Character, functions as the audience position in the story. He, she or it is the first person experience of the story - the story's ego.
Earlier I described how we might look at characters by their dramatic function, as seen from the perspective of a General on a hill. But what if we zoomed down and stood in the shoes of just one of those characters, we would have a much more personal view of the story from the inside looking out.
But which character should be our Main Character? Most often authors select the Protagonist to represent the audience position in the story. This creates the stereotypical Hero who both drives the plot forward and also provides the personal view of the audience. There is nothing wrong with this arrangement but it limits the audience to always experiencing what the quarterback feels, never the linemen or the waterboy.
In real life we are more often one of the supporting characters in an endeavor than we are the leader of the effort. If you have always made your Protagonist the Main Character, you have been limiting your possibilities.
In the Character section of this book we will fully describe each of the Story Mind's drives, how to choose the right one as your Main Character, and how the Main Character needs to come into conflict not with the Antagonist but with an Obstacle Character who represents the opposite point of view.
Getting Our Mind Together
We've now established four key aspects of the Story Mind. Characters are the conflicting drives of the Story Mind, theme its reassessment of values, plot its problem solving techniques, and genre its overall personality. But how do these fit together in an integrated story?
When an audience sits down with a book, in a theater, or in front of a television, it is sitting down with a person to make conversation. In fact, it is a one-sided conversation. Your story must have a personality intriguing enough to hold the audience's interest until the show is over.
Is your story a good enough conversationalist, or does it need to go back to finishing school with another draft before it is ready for prime time? You have days, months, perhaps even years to prepare your story to exude enough charisma to sustain just one conversation. How disappointing is it to an audience when a story's personality is plain and simply dull?
As an author, thinking of your story as a person can actually help you write the story. All too often, authors get mired in the details of a story, trying to cram everything in and make all the pieces fit.
Characters are seen only as individuals, so they often unintentionally overlap each other's dramatic functions. The genre is depersonalized so that the author trying to write within a genre ends up fashioning a formula story and breaking no new ground. The plot becomes an exercise in logistics, and the theme emerges as a black and white pontification that hits the audience like a brick.
Now imagine that you are sitting down to dinner with your story. For convenience, we'll call your story "Joe." You know that Joe is something of an authority on a subject in which your are interested. You offer him an appetizer, and between bites of pate, he tells you of his adventures and experiences.
Over soup, he describes what was driving him at various points of his endeavors. These are your characters, and they must all be aspects of Joe's personality. There can be no characters that would not naturally co-exist in a single individual. You listen carefully to make sure Joe is not a split-personality, for such a story would seem fragmented as if it were of two or more minds.
While munching on a spinach salad, Joe describes his efforts to resolve the problems that grew out of his journey. This is your plot, and all reasonable efforts need to be covered. You note what he is saying, just an an audience will, to be sure there are no flaws in his logic. There can also be no missing approaches that obviously should have been tried, or Joe will sound like an idiot.
Over the main course of poached quail eggs and Coho salmon (on a bed of grilled seasonal greens), Joe elucidates the moral dilemmas he faced, how he considered what was good and bad, better or worse. This is your theme, and all sides of the issues must be explored. If Joe is one-sided in this regard, he will come off as bigoted or closed-minded. Rather than being swayed by his conclusions, you (and an audience) will find him boorish and will disregard his passionate prognostications.
Dessert is served and you make time, between spoonfuls of chocolate soufflé (put in the oven before the first course to ready by the end of dinner) to consider your dinner guest. Was he entertaining? Did he make sense? Did he touch on topical issues with light-handed thoughtfulness? Did he seem centers, together, and focused? And most important, would you invite him to dinner again? If you can't answer yes to each of these questions, you need to send your story back to finishing school, for he is not ready to entertain an audience.
Your story is your child. You give birth to it, you nurture it, you have hopes for it. You try to instill your values, to give it the tools it needs to succeed and to point it in the right direction. But, like all children, there comes a time where you have to let go of who you wanted it to be and to love and accept who it has become.
When your story entertains an audience, you will not be there to explain its faults or compensate for its shortcomings. You must be sure your child is prepared to stand alone, to do well for itself and to not embarrass you. If you are not sure, you must send it back to school.
Personifying a story allows an author to step back from the role of creator and to experience the story as an audience will. This is not to say that each and every detail in not important, but rather that the details are no more or less important than the overall impact of the story as a whole. This overview is one of the benefits of looking at a story as a Story Mind.
The following is excerpted from
Dramatica: A New Theory of Story
by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
The Four Throughlines
It is not enough, however, to develop a complete Story Mind. That only creates the argument the audience will be considering. Equally important is how the audience is positioned relative to that argument.
Does an author want the audience to examine a problem dispassionately or to experience what it is like to have that problem? Is it more important to explore a possible solution or to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of alternative solutions? In fact, all of these points of view must be developed for a story to be complete.
An author's argument must go beyond telling audience members what to look at. I must also show them how to see it. It is the relationship between object and observer that creates perspective, and in stories, perspective creates meaning.
There are four different perspectives which must be explored as a story unfolds in order to present all sides of the issue at the heart of a story. They are the Objective Story Throughline, theMain Character Throughline, theObstacle Character Throughline, and theSubjective Story Throughline.
The Objective Story Throughline
The first perspective is from the Objective Story Throughline, so called because it is the most dispassionate look at the Story Mind.
Imagine the argument of a story as a battle between two armies. The Objective Story view is like that of a general on a hill overlooking the battle. The general focuses on unfolding strategies and, from this perspective, sees soldiers not by name but by their function on the field: foot soldier, grenadier, cavalryman, scout. Though the general may care very much for the soldiers, he must concentrate on the events as they unfold. Because it emphasizes events, the Objective Story Throughline is often thought of as plot, but as we shall see later, plot is so much more.
The Main Character Throughline
For a story to be complete, the audience will need another view of the battle as well: that of the soldier in the trenches. Instead of looking at the Story Mind from the outside, the Main Character Throughline is a view from the inside. What if that Story Mind were our own? That is what the audience experiences when it becomes a soldier on the field: audience members identify with the Main Character of the story.
Through the Main Character we experience the battle as if we were directly participating in it. From this perspective we are much more concerned with what is happening immediately around us than we are with the larger strategies that are really too big to see. This most personally involved argument of the story is the Main Character Throughline.
As we shall explore shortly, the Main Character does not have to be the soldier leading the charge in the battle as a whole. Our Main Character might be any of the soldiers on the field: the cook, the medic, the bugler, or even the recruit cowering in the bushes.
The Obstacle Character Throughline
To see the third perspective, keep yourself in the shoes of the Main Character for a moment. You are right in the middle of the story's battle. Smoke from dramatic explosions obscures the field. You are not absolutely sure which way leads to safety. Still, before there was so much turmoil, the way was clear and you are confident in your sense of direction.
Then, from out of the smoke a shadowy figure appears, solidly blocking your way. The shadowy figure is your Obstacle Character. You can't see well enough to tell if he is friend or foe. He might be a compatriot trying to keep you from stepping into a mine field. Or, he might be the enemy luring you into a trap. What to do! Do you keep on your path and run over this person or try the other path instead? This is the dilemma that faces a Main Character.
To completely explore the issue at the heart of a story, an Obstacle Character must present an alternative approach to the Main Character. The Obstacle Character Throughline describes the advocate of this alternative path and the manner in which he impacts Main Character.
The Subjective Story Throughline
As soon as the Main Character encounters his Obstacle, a skirmish ensues at a personal level in the midst of the battle as a whole. The two characters close in on one another in a theatrical game of "chicken," each hoping the other will give in.
The Main Character shouts at his Obstacle to get out of the way. The Obstacle Character stands fast, insisting that the Main Character change course and even pointing toward the fork in the road. As they approach one another, the interchange becomes more heated until the two are engaged in heart-to-heart combat.
While the Objective Story battle rages all around, the Main and Obstacle Characters fight their private engagement. The Subjective Story Throughline describes the course this passionate battle takes.
The Four Throughlines Of A Story You Know
Here are some examples of how to see the four throughlines of some well known stories. Completed stories tend to blend these throughlines together in the interest of smooth narrative style. From a structural point of view, however, it is important to see how they can be separated.
Star Wars
Objective Story Throughline: The Objective view of Star Wars sees a civil war in the galaxy between the Rebels and the evil Empire. The Empire has built a Death Star which will destroy the Rebels if it isn't destroyed first. To even hope for a successful attack, the Rebels need the plans to the Death Star which are in the possession of a farm boy and an old Jedi master. These two encounter many other characters while delivering the plans, ultimately leading to a climactic space-battle on the surface of the Death Star.
Main Character Throughline: The Main Character of Star Wars is Luke Skywalker. This throughline follows his personal growth over the course of this story. Luke is a farm boy who dreams of being a star pilot, but he can't allow himself to leave his foster parents to pursue his dreams. He learns that he is the son of a great Jedi Knight. When his foster parents are killed, he begins studying the religion of the Jedi: the Force. Surviving many dangerous situations, Luke learns to trust himself more and more. Ultimately he makes a leap of faith to trust his feelings over his computer technology while flying into battle as the Rebel's last hope of destroying the Death Star. It turns out well, and Luke is changed by the experience.
Obstacle Character Throughline: The Obstacle Character of Star Wars is Obi Wan Kenobi and this throughline describes his impact (especially on Luke Skywalker) over the course of the story. Obi Wan is a wizened old Jedi who sees everything as being under the mystic control of the Force. He amazes people with his resiliency and ability, all of which he credits to the Force.
Subjective Story Throughline: The Subjective Story throughline of Star Wars describes the relationship between Luke and Obi Wan. Obi Wan needs Luke to help him and he knows Luke has incredible potential as a Jedi. Luke, however, needs to be guided carefully because his desires are so strong and his abilities so new. Obi Wan sets about the manipulations which will help Luke see the true nature of the Force and learn to trust himself.
To Kill A Mockingbird
Objective Story Throughline: The Objective view of To Kill A Mockingbird sees the town of Maycomb with its horns locked in various attitudes over the rape trial of Tom Robinson. Due-process has taken over, however many people think this case should never see trial. As the trial comes to fruition, the people of the town argue back and forth about how the defense lawyer ought to behave and what role people should take in response to this alleged atrocity.
Main Character Throughline: The Main Character of To Kill A Mockingbird is Scout and her throughline describes her personal experiences in this story. Scout is a young tom-boy who wants things in her life to remain as simple as they've always been. Going to school, however, and seeing the town's reaction to her father's work introduces her to a new world of emotional complexity. She learns that there is much more to people than what you can see.
Obstacle Character Throughline: The Obstacle Character point of view in To Kill A Mockingbird is presented through Boo Radley, the reclusive and much talked about boy living next door to Scout. The mystique surrounding this boy, fueled by the town's ignorance and fear, make everyone wonder what he is really like and if he's really as crazy as they say.
Subjective Story Throughline: The Subjective Story view of To Kill A Mockingbird sees the relationship between Scout and Boo Radley. This throughline explores what it's like for these two characters to live next door to each other and never get to know one another. It seems any friendship they might have is doomed from the start because Boo will always be locked away in his father's house. The real problem, however, turns out to be one of Scout's prejudice against Boo's mysterious life. Boo has been constantly active in Scout's life, protecting her from the background. When Scout finally realizes this she becomes a changed person who no longer judges people without first trying to stand in their shoes.
Summary - The Grand Argument Story
We have described a story as a battle. The overview that takes in the full scope of the battle is the Objective Story Throughline.
Within the fray is one special soldier through whom we experience the battle first-hand. How he fares is the Main Character Throughline.
The Main Character is confronted by another soldier, blocking the path. Is he friend or foe? Either way, he is an obstacle, and the exploration of his impact on the Main Character is the Obstacle Character Throughline.
The Main and Obstacle Characters engage in a skirmish. Main says, "Get out of my way!", and Obstacle says, "Change course!" In the end, the steadfast resolution of one will force the other to change. The growth of this interchange constitutes the Subjective Story Throughline.
Taken together, the four throughlines comprise the author's argument to the audience. They answer the questions: What does it feel like to have this kind of problem? What's the other side of the issue? Which perspective is the most appropriate for dealing with that problem? What do things look like in the "big picture?"
Only through the development of these four simultaneous throughlines can the Story Mind truly reflect our own minds, pitting reason against emotion and immediate advantage against experience in the hope of resolving a problem in the most beneficial manner.
Copyright 2001 Melanie Anne Phillips
http://storymind.com
Introduction To The Story Mind
Excerpted from “Writing with The Story Mind”
by Melanie Anne Phillips
What if your story had a mind of it's own, as if it were a character unto itself with its own personality, its own psychology?
Suppose your characters were seen as the conflicting drives of this "Story Mind," theme as its troubled value standards, plot as its efforts to resolve its problems, and genre as the Story Mind's overall personality?
More importantly, what if you could psychoanalyze your story's mind to learn who your characters should be, what thematic issues you should explore, how your plot should unfold, and what unique twists define your story's genre?
In this book you'll learn about all facets of the Story Mind. You'll find out how to create a personality profile for your story and to use it as a map to exactly what your story is about and what happens in it.
Structure Vs Passion
The Story Mind approach to story is a structural one. But no one reads a book or goes to a movie to enjoy a good structure. No author writes because he is driven to create a sound structure. Rather, audiences and authors come to opposite sides of a story because of their passions - the author driven to express his, and the audience hoping to ignite its own.
What draws us to a story in the first place is our attraction to the subject matter and the style. As an audience, we might be intrigued by the potential applications of a new discovery of science, the exploration of newly rediscovered ancient city, or the life of a celebrity. We might love a taut mystery, a fulfilling romance, or a chilling horror story.
As an author what inspires us to write a story may be a bit of dialog we heard in a restaurant, a notion for a character, a setting, time period, or a clever twist of plot we’d like to explore. Or, we might have a deep-seated need to express a childhood experience, work out an irrational fear, or make a public statement about a social injustice.
No matter what our attraction as audience or author, it is our passions that trigger our imaginations. So why should an author worry about structure? Because passion rides on structure, and if the structure is flawed or even broken, then the passionate expression from author to audience will fail.
When structure is done properly, it is invisible, serving only as the carrier wave that delivers the passion to the audience. But when structure is flawed, it adds static to the flow of emotion, breaking up and possibly scrambling the passion so badly that the audience gets nothing of what the author was sending.
Yet, the attempt to ensure a sound structure is an intellectual pursuit. Questions such as "Who is my Protagonist?" "Where should my story begin?" "What happens in Act Two?" or "What is my message?" force an author to turn away from his passion and embrace logistics instead.
As a result, an author often becomes mired in the nuts and bolts of storytelling, staring at a blank page not because of a lack of inspiration, but because he can't figure out how to make his passion make sense.
Worse, the re-writing process is often grueling and frustrating, forcing the author to accept unwanted changes in the flow of emotion for the sake of logic. So what is an author to do? Is there any way out of this dilemma?
In the pages that follow, you'll discover a new way of writing stories - a method that allows an author to retain his passion even while serving the demands of structure. This system can be used either before you write to know exactly where things will be going or after you write to find and refine the structure already hidden in your passion.
You won't be asked to discard any techniques or approaches you are currently using. Rather, you'll simply be adding to what you already know, to what you are already doing; extending your understanding of how stories really work and how to write them.
So join me on an expedition into the new world of the Story Mind. The risks are low, the potential rewards are great, and all you need to carry with you is your own passion.
Introducing the "Story Mind"
This book is entitled, "The Story Mind." and as described above, the Story Mind is a way of looking at a story as if all the characters were facets of a larger personality, the mind of the Story itself.
To illustrate, imagine that you stepped back from your story far enough that you could no longer identify your characters as individuals. Instead, like a general on a hill watching a battle, you could only see each character by his function:
There's the guy leading the charge - that's the Protagonist. His opponent is the Antagonist. There's the strategist, working out the battle plan - he's the Reason archetype. One soldier is shouting at the pathos and carnage - he's the Emotion archetype.
The structure of stories deals with what makes sense in the big picture. But characters aren't aware of that overview. Just like us, they can only see what is around them and try to make the best decisions based on that limited view. And so characters must also be real people as well, with real drives and real concerns.
Characters, therefore, have two completely different jobs: They must act according to their own drives and desires and also play a part in the larger mosaic of the story as a whole. The trick is to create a story in which these two purposes work together, not against each other.
As individuals, each character must be fully developed as a complete human being. As cogs in the Great Machine, they must each fulfill a function. So, when we develop our characters we need to stand in their shoes, make them real people, and express ourselves passionately through each of their points of view. But when we develop our story's structure, we must ensure that each character fulfills his, her, or its dramatic purpose in the story at large.
It is that larger purpose that we call the Story Mind. As previously described, the Story Mind is like a Super Character that generates the personality of the overall story itself, as if it were a single, thinking, feeling, person. So, in addition to being complete people, each of our characters also represents a different aspect or facet of a greater character, the Story Mind.
For example, the Reason archetype represents the use of our intellect. The Emotion archetype illustrates the impact of our feelings. Individually as supposedly real people, they each employ both Reason and Emotion in regard to their own personal issues. But when it comes to the central issue of the story - the message issue that is the essence of what the overall story is about - then one of these two Characters will attempt to deal with that issue solely from a position of Reason and the other solely from the position of Emotion.
This is why we, the audience, see characters simultaneously as real people and also by their dramatic functions, such as Protagonist and Antagonist. Regarding their own concerns, characters are well rounded. Regarding the overall concern of the story as a whole, they are single-minded. Collectively, they describe the conflicting motivations or drives of the Story Mind.
But characters are only part of the story. As we shall see, Plot, Theme, and Genre are represented in the Story Mind as well. For now, suffice it to say that the Story Mind is the character of the story itself.
Why a Story Mind?
Before asking any writer to invest his or her time in a concept as different as the Story Mind, it is only fair to provide an explanation of why such a thing should exist. To do this, let us look briefly into the nature of communication between an author and an audience.
Tales vs. Stories
When an author tells a tale, he simply describes a series of events that both makes sense and feels right. As long as there are no breaks in the logic and no mis-steps in the emotional progression, the structure of the tale is sound.
Now, from a structural standpoint, it really doesn't matter what the tale is about, who the characters are, or how it turns out. The tale is just a truthful or fictional journey that starts in one situation, travels a straight or twisting path, and ends in another situation.
The meaning of a tale amounts to a statement that if you start from "here," and take "this" path, you'll end up "there." The message of a tale is that a particular path is a good or bad one, depending on whether the ending point is better or worse than the point of departure and perhaps whether or not the result was worth the journey.
This structure is easily seen in a vast majority of familiar fairy "tales." Tales have been used since the first storytellers practiced their craft. In fact, many of the best selling novels and most popular motion pictures of our own time are simply tales, expertly told.
In a structural sense, tales have power in that they can encourage or discourage audience members from taking particular actions in real life. The drawback of a tale is that it speaks only in regard to that specific path.
But in fact, there are many paths that might be taken from a given point of departure. Suppose an author wants to address those as well, to cover all the alternatives. What if the author wants to say that rather than being just a good or bad path, a particular course of action is the best or worst path of all that might have been taken?
Now the author is no longer making a simple statement, but a "blanket" statement. Such a blanket statement provides no "proof" that the path in question is the best or worst, it simply says so. If the blanket statement reflects popular assumptions, it might be accepted at face value. But, if the blanket statement diverges from conventional wisdom or expectation, an audience is not likely to accept such a bold claim, regardless of how well the tale is told. It will demand to be convinced; it will demand proof.
In the early days of storytelling, an author related his tale to his audience in person. Should he aspire to manipulate his audience by making a blanket statement that conflicted with the norm, the audience would likely cry, "Foul!" and demand that he prove it on the spot.
Someone in the audience might bring up an alternative path that hadn't been included in the tale. The author could then counter that rebuttal to his blanket statement by describing how the path proposed by the audience was not as strong as the path he did include. One by one, he would disperse any challenges to his tale until he either exhausted the opposition or was overcome by an alternative he couldn't dismiss.
But as soon as stories began to be recorded in media such as song ballads, epic poems, novels, stage plays, screenplays, teleplays, and so on, the author was no longer present to defend his blanket statements. If he were to convince his audience of his point of view he must anticipate all reasonable challenges that might arise to his blanket statement and incorporate them in his presentation in advance. In fulfilling this new requirement, authors pushed the tale format forward beyond the blanket statement until it became a new art form we call the story.
A story is a much more sophisticated form of communication than a tale, and is in fact a revolutionary leap forward in the ability of an author to make a point. Simply put, a tale is a statement, a story is an argument.
Now this puts a huge burden of proof on an author. Not only does he have to make his own point, but he has to prove (within reason) that all opposing points are less valid. Of course, this requires than an author anticipate any objections an audience might raise to his blanket statement. To do this, he must look at the situation described in his story and examine it from every angle an audience might consider in regard to that issue.
By incorporating all reasonable (and valid emotional) points of view regarding the story's message in the structure of the story itself, the author has not only defended his argument, but has also included all the points of view the a person would normally take in examining that central issue. In effect, the structure of the story now represents the whole range of considerations a human mind would make if fully exploring that issue.
As each of the points of view is explored and the argument is made, the structure of the story begins to resemble a map of the mind's problem solving processes, and (without any intent on the part of the author) has become a Story Mind. The more accurately the story's structure represents the Story Mind, the more powerful the story's argument.
And so, the Story Mind concept is not really all that radical. It is simply a short hand way of describing that all sides of a story must be explored to satisfy an audience. And, and if this is done, the structure of the story takes on the nature of a single character.
Armed with this information we are now prepared to examine the nature of the Story Mind, and to see how we might apply what we discover to meet the demands of a logical structure without sacrificing our passion.
What's In Your Story's Mind?
As with people, your story's mind has different aspects. These are represented in your Genre, Theme, Plot, and Characters. Genre is the overall personality of the Story Mind. Theme represents its troubled value standards. Plot describes the methods the Story Mind uses as it tries to work out it's problems. Characters are the conflicting drives of the Story Mind.
Genre
To an audience, every story has a distinct personality, as if it were a person rather than a work of fiction. When we first encounter a person or a story, we tend to classify it in broad categories. For stories, we call the category into which we place its overall personality its Genre.
These categories reflect whatever attributes strike us as the most notable. With people this might be their profession, interests, attitudes, style, or manner of expression, for example. With stories this might be their setting, subject matter, point of view, atmosphere, or storytelling.
We might initially classify someone as a star-crossed lover, a cowboy, or a practical joker who likes to scare people. Similarly, we might categorize a story as a Romance, a Western, or a Horror story.
As with the people we meet, some stories are memorable and others we forget as soon as they are gone. Some are the life of the party, but get stale rather quickly. Some initially strike us as dull, but become familiar to the point we look forward to seeing them again. This is all due to what someone has to say and how he goes about saying it.
The more time we spend with specific stories (or people) the less we see them as generalized types and the more we see the traits that define them as individuals. So, although we might initially label a story as a particular Genre, we ultimately come to find that every story has its own unique personality that sets it apart from all others in that Genre, in at least a few notable respects.
In the Genre section of this book, we'll describe how to get a feel for the personality of the story you wish to tell, how to create a Genre map describing your story's primary attributes, and how to develop your story so that its unique qualities surface and reveal themselves.
Theme
Everyone has value standards, and the Story Mind has them as well. Some people are pig-headed and see issues as cut and dried. Others are wishy-washy and flip-flop on the issues. The most sophisticated people (and stories) see the pros and cons of both sides of a moral argument and present their conclusions in shades of gray, rather than in simple black & white. All these outlooks can be reflected in the Story Mind.
No matter what specific thematic topic is explored, the key structural point about value standards is that they are all comprised of two parts: the issues and one's attitude toward them. It is not enough to only have a subject ( abortion, gay rights, or greed) for that says nothing about whether they are good, bad, or somewhere in between. Similarly, attitudes (I hate, I believe in, or I don't approve of) are meaningless until they are applied to something.
An attitude is essentially a point of view. The issue is the object under observation. When an author determines what he wants us to look at it and from where he wants it to be seen, he creates perspective. It is this perspective that comprises a large part of the story's message.
Still, simply stating one's attitudes toward the issues does little to convince someone else to see things the same way we do. Unless the author is preaching to the audience as choir, he's going to need to convince it to share his attitude. To do this, he will need to make a thematic argument over the course of the story which will slowly dislodge the audience from its previously held beliefs and reposition the audience so that it adopts the author's beliefs by the time the story is over.
In the Theme section of this book we'll outline how to discover your story's message and how to create a thematic argument that presents all sides of the issues. You'll find out how to make your point without hitting the audience over the head with binary statements of right and wrong, and how to lead the audience to your point of view.
Plot
Novice authors often assume the plot of a story is the order in which events unfold. In fact, the order in which events are revealed to an audience is seldom the same order in which they happened to the characters. Through exposition, an author unveils the story, dropping bits and pieces that the audience rearranges until the meaning of the story becomes clear. This technique involves the audience as an active participant in the story rather than simply being a passive observer. It also reflects the way people go about solving their own problems.
When people try to work out ways of dealing with their problems they tend to identify and organize the pieces before they assemble them into a plan of action. So, they often jump around the timeline, filling in the different steps in their plan out of sequence as they gather additional information and draw new conclusions.
In the Story Mind, both of these attributes are represented as well. We refer to the internal logic of the story - the order in which the events in the problem solving approach actually occurred - as the Plot. The order in which the Story Mind considers these elements as it develops a plan of action is called the Storyweaving.
If an author blends these two aspects together, it is very easy to miss holes in the internal logic because they are glossed over by smooth exposition. By separating them, an author gains complete control of the progression of the story as well as the audience's progressive experience. In the plot section of this book you will learn how to create a complete sequential treatment for your story and to develop an exposition plan that involves and captivates your audience.
Characters
If characters represent our conflicting drives yet they each have a personal point of view, where is our sense of self represented in the Story Mind? After all, every real person has a unique point of view that defines his or her own self-awareness.
In fact, there is one special character in a story that represents the Story Mind's identity. This character, the Main Character, functions as the audience position in the story. He, she or it is the first person experience of the story - the story's ego.
Earlier I described how we might look at characters by their dramatic function, as seen from the perspective of a General on a hill. But what if we zoomed down and stood in the shoes of just one of those characters, we would have a much more personal view of the story from the inside looking out.
But which character should be our Main Character? Most often authors select the Protagonist to represent the audience position in the story. This creates the stereotypical Hero who both drives the plot forward and also provides the personal view of the audience. There is nothing wrong with this arrangement but it limits the audience to always experiencing what the quarterback feels, never the linemen or the waterboy.
In real life we are more often one of the supporting characters in an endeavor than we are the leader of the effort. If you have always made your Protagonist the Main Character, you have been limiting your possibilities.
In the Character section of this book we will fully describe each of the Story Mind's drives, how to choose the right one as your Main Character, and how the Main Character needs to come into conflict not with the Antagonist but with an Obstacle Character who represents the opposite point of view.
Getting Our Mind Together
We've now established four key aspects of the Story Mind. Characters are the conflicting drives of the Story Mind, theme its reassessment of values, plot its problem solving techniques, and genre its overall personality. But how do these fit together in an integrated story?
When an audience sits down with a book, in a theater, or in front of a television, it is sitting down with a person to make conversation. In fact, it is a one-sided conversation. Your story must have a personality intriguing enough to hold the audience's interest until the show is over.
Is your story a good enough conversationalist, or does it need to go back to finishing school with another draft before it is ready for prime time? You have days, months, perhaps even years to prepare your story to exude enough charisma to sustain just one conversation. How disappointing is it to an audience when a story's personality is plain and simply dull?
As an author, thinking of your story as a person can actually help you write the story. All too often, authors get mired in the details of a story, trying to cram everything in and make all the pieces fit.
Characters are seen only as individuals, so they often unintentionally overlap each other's dramatic functions. The genre is depersonalized so that the author trying to write within a genre ends up fashioning a formula story and breaking no new ground. The plot becomes an exercise in logistics, and the theme emerges as a black and white pontification that hits the audience like a brick.
Now imagine that you are sitting down to dinner with your story. For convenience, we'll call your story "Joe." You know that Joe is something of an authority on a subject in which your are interested. You offer him an appetizer, and between bites of pate, he tells you of his adventures and experiences.
Over soup, he describes what was driving him at various points of his endeavors. These are your characters, and they must all be aspects of Joe's personality. There can be no characters that would not naturally co-exist in a single individual. You listen carefully to make sure Joe is not a split-personality, for such a story would seem fragmented as if it were of two or more minds.
While munching on a spinach salad, Joe describes his efforts to resolve the problems that grew out of his journey. This is your plot, and all reasonable efforts need to be covered. You note what he is saying, just an an audience will, to be sure there are no flaws in his logic. There can also be no missing approaches that obviously should have been tried, or Joe will sound like an idiot.
Over the main course of poached quail eggs and Coho salmon (on a bed of grilled seasonal greens), Joe elucidates the moral dilemmas he faced, how he considered what was good and bad, better or worse. This is your theme, and all sides of the issues must be explored. If Joe is one-sided in this regard, he will come off as bigoted or closed-minded. Rather than being swayed by his conclusions, you (and an audience) will find him boorish and will disregard his passionate prognostications.
Dessert is served and you make time, between spoonfuls of chocolate soufflé (put in the oven before the first course to ready by the end of dinner) to consider your dinner guest. Was he entertaining? Did he make sense? Did he touch on topical issues with light-handed thoughtfulness? Did he seem centers, together, and focused? And most important, would you invite him to dinner again? If you can't answer yes to each of these questions, you need to send your story back to finishing school, for he is not ready to entertain an audience.
Your story is your child. You give birth to it, you nurture it, you have hopes for it. You try to instill your values, to give it the tools it needs to succeed and to point it in the right direction. But, like all children, there comes a time where you have to let go of who you wanted it to be and to love and accept who it has become.
When your story entertains an audience, you will not be there to explain its faults or compensate for its shortcomings. You must be sure your child is prepared to stand alone, to do well for itself and to not embarrass you. If you are not sure, you must send it back to school.
Personifying a story allows an author to step back from the role of creator and to experience the story as an audience will. This is not to say that each and every detail in not important, but rather that the details are no more or less important than the overall impact of the story as a whole. This overview is one of the benefits of looking at a story as a Story Mind.
The following is excerpted from
Dramatica: A New Theory of Story
by Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley
The Four Throughlines
It is not enough, however, to develop a complete Story Mind. That only creates the argument the audience will be considering. Equally important is how the audience is positioned relative to that argument.
Does an author want the audience to examine a problem dispassionately or to experience what it is like to have that problem? Is it more important to explore a possible solution or to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of alternative solutions? In fact, all of these points of view must be developed for a story to be complete.
An author's argument must go beyond telling audience members what to look at. I must also show them how to see it. It is the relationship between object and observer that creates perspective, and in stories, perspective creates meaning.
There are four different perspectives which must be explored as a story unfolds in order to present all sides of the issue at the heart of a story. They are the Objective Story Throughline, theMain Character Throughline, theObstacle Character Throughline, and theSubjective Story Throughline.
The Objective Story Throughline
The first perspective is from the Objective Story Throughline, so called because it is the most dispassionate look at the Story Mind.
Imagine the argument of a story as a battle between two armies. The Objective Story view is like that of a general on a hill overlooking the battle. The general focuses on unfolding strategies and, from this perspective, sees soldiers not by name but by their function on the field: foot soldier, grenadier, cavalryman, scout. Though the general may care very much for the soldiers, he must concentrate on the events as they unfold. Because it emphasizes events, the Objective Story Throughline is often thought of as plot, but as we shall see later, plot is so much more.
The Main Character Throughline
For a story to be complete, the audience will need another view of the battle as well: that of the soldier in the trenches. Instead of looking at the Story Mind from the outside, the Main Character Throughline is a view from the inside. What if that Story Mind were our own? That is what the audience experiences when it becomes a soldier on the field: audience members identify with the Main Character of the story.
Through the Main Character we experience the battle as if we were directly participating in it. From this perspective we are much more concerned with what is happening immediately around us than we are with the larger strategies that are really too big to see. This most personally involved argument of the story is the Main Character Throughline.
As we shall explore shortly, the Main Character does not have to be the soldier leading the charge in the battle as a whole. Our Main Character might be any of the soldiers on the field: the cook, the medic, the bugler, or even the recruit cowering in the bushes.
The Obstacle Character Throughline
To see the third perspective, keep yourself in the shoes of the Main Character for a moment. You are right in the middle of the story's battle. Smoke from dramatic explosions obscures the field. You are not absolutely sure which way leads to safety. Still, before there was so much turmoil, the way was clear and you are confident in your sense of direction.
Then, from out of the smoke a shadowy figure appears, solidly blocking your way. The shadowy figure is your Obstacle Character. You can't see well enough to tell if he is friend or foe. He might be a compatriot trying to keep you from stepping into a mine field. Or, he might be the enemy luring you into a trap. What to do! Do you keep on your path and run over this person or try the other path instead? This is the dilemma that faces a Main Character.
To completely explore the issue at the heart of a story, an Obstacle Character must present an alternative approach to the Main Character. The Obstacle Character Throughline describes the advocate of this alternative path and the manner in which he impacts Main Character.
The Subjective Story Throughline
As soon as the Main Character encounters his Obstacle, a skirmish ensues at a personal level in the midst of the battle as a whole. The two characters close in on one another in a theatrical game of "chicken," each hoping the other will give in.
The Main Character shouts at his Obstacle to get out of the way. The Obstacle Character stands fast, insisting that the Main Character change course and even pointing toward the fork in the road. As they approach one another, the interchange becomes more heated until the two are engaged in heart-to-heart combat.
While the Objective Story battle rages all around, the Main and Obstacle Characters fight their private engagement. The Subjective Story Throughline describes the course this passionate battle takes.
The Four Throughlines Of A Story You Know
Here are some examples of how to see the four throughlines of some well known stories. Completed stories tend to blend these throughlines together in the interest of smooth narrative style. From a structural point of view, however, it is important to see how they can be separated.
Star Wars
Objective Story Throughline: The Objective view of Star Wars sees a civil war in the galaxy between the Rebels and the evil Empire. The Empire has built a Death Star which will destroy the Rebels if it isn't destroyed first. To even hope for a successful attack, the Rebels need the plans to the Death Star which are in the possession of a farm boy and an old Jedi master. These two encounter many other characters while delivering the plans, ultimately leading to a climactic space-battle on the surface of the Death Star.
Main Character Throughline: The Main Character of Star Wars is Luke Skywalker. This throughline follows his personal growth over the course of this story. Luke is a farm boy who dreams of being a star pilot, but he can't allow himself to leave his foster parents to pursue his dreams. He learns that he is the son of a great Jedi Knight. When his foster parents are killed, he begins studying the religion of the Jedi: the Force. Surviving many dangerous situations, Luke learns to trust himself more and more. Ultimately he makes a leap of faith to trust his feelings over his computer technology while flying into battle as the Rebel's last hope of destroying the Death Star. It turns out well, and Luke is changed by the experience.
Obstacle Character Throughline: The Obstacle Character of Star Wars is Obi Wan Kenobi and this throughline describes his impact (especially on Luke Skywalker) over the course of the story. Obi Wan is a wizened old Jedi who sees everything as being under the mystic control of the Force. He amazes people with his resiliency and ability, all of which he credits to the Force.
Subjective Story Throughline: The Subjective Story throughline of Star Wars describes the relationship between Luke and Obi Wan. Obi Wan needs Luke to help him and he knows Luke has incredible potential as a Jedi. Luke, however, needs to be guided carefully because his desires are so strong and his abilities so new. Obi Wan sets about the manipulations which will help Luke see the true nature of the Force and learn to trust himself.
To Kill A Mockingbird
Objective Story Throughline: The Objective view of To Kill A Mockingbird sees the town of Maycomb with its horns locked in various attitudes over the rape trial of Tom Robinson. Due-process has taken over, however many people think this case should never see trial. As the trial comes to fruition, the people of the town argue back and forth about how the defense lawyer ought to behave and what role people should take in response to this alleged atrocity.
Main Character Throughline: The Main Character of To Kill A Mockingbird is Scout and her throughline describes her personal experiences in this story. Scout is a young tom-boy who wants things in her life to remain as simple as they've always been. Going to school, however, and seeing the town's reaction to her father's work introduces her to a new world of emotional complexity. She learns that there is much more to people than what you can see.
Obstacle Character Throughline: The Obstacle Character point of view in To Kill A Mockingbird is presented through Boo Radley, the reclusive and much talked about boy living next door to Scout. The mystique surrounding this boy, fueled by the town's ignorance and fear, make everyone wonder what he is really like and if he's really as crazy as they say.
Subjective Story Throughline: The Subjective Story view of To Kill A Mockingbird sees the relationship between Scout and Boo Radley. This throughline explores what it's like for these two characters to live next door to each other and never get to know one another. It seems any friendship they might have is doomed from the start because Boo will always be locked away in his father's house. The real problem, however, turns out to be one of Scout's prejudice against Boo's mysterious life. Boo has been constantly active in Scout's life, protecting her from the background. When Scout finally realizes this she becomes a changed person who no longer judges people without first trying to stand in their shoes.
Summary - The Grand Argument Story
We have described a story as a battle. The overview that takes in the full scope of the battle is the Objective Story Throughline.
Within the fray is one special soldier through whom we experience the battle first-hand. How he fares is the Main Character Throughline.
The Main Character is confronted by another soldier, blocking the path. Is he friend or foe? Either way, he is an obstacle, and the exploration of his impact on the Main Character is the Obstacle Character Throughline.
The Main and Obstacle Characters engage in a skirmish. Main says, "Get out of my way!", and Obstacle says, "Change course!" In the end, the steadfast resolution of one will force the other to change. The growth of this interchange constitutes the Subjective Story Throughline.
Taken together, the four throughlines comprise the author's argument to the audience. They answer the questions: What does it feel like to have this kind of problem? What's the other side of the issue? Which perspective is the most appropriate for dealing with that problem? What do things look like in the "big picture?"
Only through the development of these four simultaneous throughlines can the Story Mind truly reflect our own minds, pitting reason against emotion and immediate advantage against experience in the hope of resolving a problem in the most beneficial manner.
Copyright 2001 Melanie Anne Phillips
http://storymind.com
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