True of people; true of characters:

When hit with great personal grief, how many of us stop to think about how all those around us are coping – especially those whose approach to life is to keep it all inside?

By nature, we all stand at the apex of our perception, with all roads leading to ourselves. We look out from the center of our circle and think ourselves compassionate because we consider and feel for all that falls within it. We put ourselves in their shoes, but only to see how our circle looks from their point of view. But how often do we consider that others within our realm have circles of their own that extend beyond the borders of our own domain with other issues we simply do not see?

And just as true, those who care about us do not see the totality of what weighs upon us, but only that part of our lives that falls within their horizons as well. And so, when we hurt, when we feel wronged by life or by others, it is easily possible that those we care most about are not given the attention and compassion they need and deserve.

We try to be objective and determine that, in this case, the loss is closest to us, most painful to us, and though our friends and family may feel the loss as well, we are at ground zero. And this may be true. But what of the additional losses they face that fall outside our personal spotlight?

We may have the greatest sense of loss for this particular person or event, but they may have three times the number of losses occurring at the same time. And while this particular one is not as great for them, collectively they suffer even more and, perhaps, another loss that we cannot (or at least naturally do not) see is even greater than ours, in addition to many others as well that they are suffering that never enter our minds.

What is most unpleasant and difficult is when we ourselves are the cause or source of a loss for others that we did not originally perceive. The hardest thing to do is see oneself as the villain. The hardest position to reevaluate is the one on which you stand.

What if we, driven by grief, pull back from those we love so that they suffer not only the source of loss that pains us, but the loss of our love as well, albeit for a short but crucial time? And more – what if we, though a change in attitude, outlook, lifestyle or presentation have, in the name of growth and being true to one’s inner self, become a different person from their point of view, leaving them to morn the friend or mate or parent that was?

This we simply cannot see at the time. We make our choices to soothe the inner beast, to calm the seething cauldron of our angst. Yet in so doing, we may enrage the beast within other, fuel their own internal conflagration and, in the end, do far more harm to one or many of those for whom we care the most than the good we have struggled so hard to do for ourselves.

Age brings perspective and, with it, a greater sense of context. The young cannot be expected to rise to an an elevated grasp of life’s interconnections before they have travelled them one by one. And so, for those of use blessed with enough time on the planet to have the opportunity to stand beside ourselves and see behind the invisible walls that previously bound us, perhaps we can rise a little further, to appreciate not only how our losses may affect others, but how we may both contribute to or even be the cause of loss we have not previously seen.

What we do next, now graced with that extended panorama, determines who we are to ultimately be in this one life.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

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Unlike my usual articles, this piece is not intended to document an existing part of the Dramatica theory nor to reveal a part newly developed.  Rather, I will be sharing my speculations on a life-long thought problem of mine and, toward the end, provide a new way of looking at some old issues.

The subject of this line of inquiry is that “magic moment” when one binary state changes into another.  To illustrate, consider a light switch.  We can tell when it is on and when it is off.  We can recognize when it has changed state from one to the other.  But what happens at that moment between the two when it is neither on nor off, or perhaps both?

This is really a restating of the uncertainty principal or even of Zeno’s Paradox or Schrodinger’s Cat, for that matter.  It touches on the potential for faster than light travel, black holes, and synchronicity.  But for me, personally, it is at the heart of the issue that has driven me since childhood with a specific curiosity that led to the development of Dramatica and still propels me today into my ongoing work on narrative dynamics.

For me, the quest began at age four or five – sometime before kindergarten – while I was on my swing set in the backyard of our home in Burbank.  This would be, perhaps, 1957 or early 1958.

I remember the moment as if it were yesterday, for it has motivated (plagued) me since it occurred.  It was a seamlessly gray overcast, that day, and as I was swinging I wondered if I could get high enough so that my entire field of vision was filled by nothing but that flat gray sky – no trees, no birds, not the neighbor’s houses nor the edges of my swing or its suspending chains.

So, I set about rocking myself higher and higher to the point I became fearful the whole contraption would collapse upon me, assuming I didn’t just fly off into space from the force.

Nonetheless, I persevered, and finally (fortunately) I rose high enough at the apex of the arc and for just one glorious instant I achieved my seamless gray experience.  As the swing set was by that time wobbling menacingly, I quickly brought myself back to rest.

And I sat there for a bit when a question arose in my young mind: If nothing existed at all, would it look black because there was no light or gray because there also no dark?  This is, of course, just another version of “if a tree falls in the forest,” but I had never heard that one, so this was news to me.

I pondered the question for a long time (for a child with a short attention span), thinking about it from both sides.  And then I had the thought that has haunted me and pretty much cast the cut of my jib for the remainder of my days (so far).  This unbidden query rose into my conscious mind: “Why can’t I figure out which it would be?”

Now that’s an awful thing for the universe to do to such an innocent kid –  a carefree (until then) child who might have just breezed through live with a 9 to 5 and weekends to play.  But once that thought was there, it would not leave.

I kept thinking about it, for days on end.  My first assessments were along the lines of, “Well it must be either black or gray.  Okay.  But why can’t I figure it out?”  You see it wasn’t the paradox itself that bothered me but the very concept of paradox – that my mind was not capable of discerning the answer, for I was sure there must be one.

In later years, I began to speculate whether God knew the answer to whether it would be black or gray.  Surely he must; He’s God, after all!  But if he does, then why did He make me in a limited sort of way, unable to see the truth of it.  And if that is the state of affairs, then how can I be sure of anything, for I’m not graced with the whole picture!  What good is it, then, to try and know anything, to try and find any meaning at all, for it is all based on a partial access to the capacity to understand the universe and therefore any conclusions are inherently suspect and likely to be overturned if we are given full access to reality when we die and go to heaven.  (Which was where my young mind took me at the time.)

Seeing the truth after death was my only hope, because if that was not the case, then I was by nature locked in a limited mind incapable of truly understanding the universe in which it existed.  Obviously, I paraphrase, but those exact lines of reasoning were coursing through my brain to me continual dissatisfaction.

So, being rather enamored of my own cognitive abilities at the time (a trait I’ve seen no reason to alter over the years), rather than imagining myself as a hero with super powers, I imagined myself as a hero with mental powers – the one individual in the history of the planet with the capacity to answer that blasted question: “Why is it that our minds are not capable of resolving paradoxical questions?”  Which later evolved into “What is the difference between observation and perception,” “How do logic and emotion affect one another,” “What is that magic moment between one binary state and another,” and, currently, “What are the physics of the interface between structure and dynamics?”

And so, you see, the same insidious line of inquiry vexes me yet today in my attempts to develop the dynamic side of the Dramatica theory and to describe how the two sides impact one another and work together – an analog of our reason and emotion, and the holy grail (as I see it) of both universe and mind and, quite naturally by extension, of the relationship between universe and mind.

Sorry.  I hadn’t intended to go into such a detailed back story, but my decades long frustration with this pesky query oft gets the better of me.

Having set the stage, let’s get down to the heart of the matter.  What can we know about this limit line or interface between structure and dynamics beyond which neither can venture yet which also connects them both so that they influence one other across that great divide?

Let’s visualize the interface.  Imagine one of those 3D computer images that shows a flat plane with peaks and troughs on it, like mountains and gravity wells – essentially round-topped cones like stalagmites and stalactites, above and below the plane.

Structure takes a horizontal cross section of the cones, as if a pane of glass were placed above or below the plane.

This cross section results in a flat image with a number of circles on it.  Each circle is seen as a separate object and its edges define its extent.  Taken together, the circles form a pattern, and it is that arrangement by which structure seeks understanding.

Dynamics takes a vertical cross section of the cones as if a pane of glass were placed perpendicular to the plane.

This cross section results in a flat image with linear wave forms on it.  Each curve is seen as a separate force with its line defining its frequency.  Taken together, the wave forms create harmonics, and it is that arrangement by which dynamics seeks understanding.

So on the structural side we have patterns made of particles and on the dynamic side we have patterns made of waves. Particle or wave, digital or analog, on or off, gray or black.  Between the two sides of any paradox is an interface that generates both and created by both.  Yet neither side can see the whole of it.

Just as if you look at a scene with one eye and then the other, you now have all the information you need to create 3D, but neither eye can see it alone.  In fact, only if both eyes are looking at the same moment at the same thing (space and time in synchronicity) can the  whole of the thing be appreciated.  But even then, it is only an approximation of the true three dimensional nature of what is being viewed, made up of a left and right slice merged together.

And herein lies the essence of the paradox of mind that has hung over my head for all of these years: structure gives us one partial view of a larger Truth and dynamics give us another.  Neither view is wrong; each is incomplete.

So what are we to do?  Or, more personally, how am I ever going to resolve this durn conundrum?  The answer is to create a model of the interface itself, incorporating both structure and dynamics not as a synthesis between alternative views but as full-bodied model of the true critter, inclusive but not limited to structure and dynamics.

Fine.  So how do we do that?

Well, you’ll just have to wait for “Narrative Dynamics – the Interface Solution,” coming soon….

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica

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The minds of characters work very much like our own.

People think both in terms of time and of space.  Our time sense gives us the ability to predict what is likely to happen next.  Our space sense gives us the ability to determine what else (unseen) may be connected to what we do see.

For example, “one bad apple spoils the bunch” describes a time-based (temporal) causal relationship: given that there are a bunch of apples with one bad one in the bunch, it will inevitably lead to the spoiling of them all.  Of course, this is meant as an analogy to the effect on a group of people if one person of questionable character remains in their midst.

The space-based (spatial) equivalent is “where there’s smoke there’s fire.”  This phrase does not predict what will be, but describes a here and now connection.  In other words, if you see all the symptoms or indicators that something exists, then it exists, even if you don’t see it.  The concept of circumstantial evidence is based on this concept as well.

In fact, we base many of our social conventions on macroscopic projections of inherent human qualities amplified to the large-scale.  Not surprising since when we gather in groups, we self-organize into external dynamic replicas of the very same thought processes that go on in our own minds so that the group itself takes on a personality and develops a psychology, and members of the group come to specialize in (or represent) all the different principal kinds of thought processes we use within our own minds.  So, in a group there will be an individual who represents the voice of reason while another expresses passion and a third speaks a the conscience of the group.  In my continuing development of the Dramatica theory I named this phenomenon “Fractal Psychology.”

Now because we, as individuals think in both time and space, and because we organize our experience both temporally and spatially (i.e. “if this, then than” for time and “when this, also that” for space), we are constantly evaluating, both consciously and subconsciously, all that we encounter so that we might identify any instances of either of these two forms of causality in our experience base.  In this manner we are able to protect ourselves in the here and now from that we cannot see and in the future from that which has not yet happened.  Simple survival programming.

Normally, this works pretty well.  And though we sometimes make mistakes by misinterpreting or by not being aware of the larger context, overall odds are that temporal and spatial anticipation is more beneficial than it is harmful.  But, when we interact with others, this seemingly positive survival system can really mess up our relationships.

Here’s a typical scenario:

A conversation between two friends or family members is going along quite normally, perhaps even quite pleasantly.  One says something quite innocuous and the other responds with thinly veiled sarcasm or even a blatant barb.  The first person, feeling unduly attacked, responds with a flash of anger and before either party sees it coming, they are a heated argument or perhaps even a full-blown fight.  We’ve all see this and probably experienced it.  But where does it come from? Why does it happen?

This kind of conflict often stems from a disconnect between time and space.  in a nutshell, one party to the conversation is thinking about the interchange in a temporal way and the other is noting it spatially.  What does that mean?  Simply that while the flow of the conversation by one party may be harmless, a particular item of subject matter may be very close to a land mind buried in the other party’s psyche.  In other words, the flow of one person’s time has intruded upon the other person’s space.

As an example, suppose a pleasant conversation is about getting ready for some guest who are about to arrive.  Dinner is discussed, and bringing out the board games and a selection of movies.  Then, the conversation naturally, temporally, progresses to the kitchen counters which need to be cleaned.  The first person is simply going through all the things that need to be done.  But, the second person has a spatial connection to the dirty dishes because a week ago, the first person had, with some irritation,  requested that the second person stop putting the dishes into the sink without rinsing them.

There was no argument at that time.  The second person grumbled and made some retort that it was no worse than the first person leaving their towels on the floor in the shower all the time.  First person just shrugged it off an moved on but the second person stewed awhile about the dishes comment, feeling put upon and unfairly held to task.

Now, a week later, the second person still has a spatial sensitivity – a topical sensitivity not only to the subject of dirty dishes, but by extension to any chores that pertain to the kitchen area, thereby including the cleaning of counters.  While a mention of dirty dishes again would have elicited a harsh response, this tangential topical reference brought only a verbal barb in reply.  But, since that snappy response seemed unwarranted to the temporally thinking first person, they now felt unduly attacked by the second person and respond in kind.

To the first person who was thinking temporally, they now switch to spatial thinking so that their comment seems to them to be a fair and balanced response to unjustified irritation and levels the score.  But, to the second person who was thinking spatially about the topic, they now switch to temporal thinking and see a trend defining itself in which the first person will not let them balance the remaining emotional distress they had been carried.  Projecting that sequence, the second person now responds with even greater anger.

And so, both parties, switching between time sense and space sense, find themselves becoming angrier as the other person (while really just trying to even the score according to their own needs and assessments) keeps undermining their own attempts to establish an equitable balance within their own hearts.  Each roadblock to satisfaction layers more irritation upon the last, increasing the amount of compensation required to balance the books.

And, since both sides are alternating their consideration of the conversation both temporally (how it is progressing as each seeks the last word to achieve temporal equity) and spatially (what old wounds are being re-opened in the attempt to find spatial equity), like a brush fire the flames move more and more quickly and cover more and more ground, thereby increasing both the pace of the mutual attacks and the extent of the topics begin brought into play.

Usually such interchanges continue either until they burn themselves out or spark a fire storm so great it creates its own weather and destroys the relationship landscape beyond any hope of regrowth.

This is contextual retribution.  It is the attempt to seek equity that is justifiable in one of either space or time, but seems inappropriately out of context in the other.  Such conflicts lead to broken relationships, alienated family members, feuds, wars, and even ethnic cleansing.  It is human nature.  But it is also human nature to have a choice.  Each individual may choose to accept that there is more than one valid perspective, more than one valid context in which the world and all that happens in it can be interpreted.  Space and time, logic and emotion, male and female, your experience and the other guy’s – each is valid in his or her own context – as valid as your is invalid from their experience base.  If we can train ourselves to recognize the occurrence of contextual retribution when it happen, either in the other party or, even more important, in ourselves, we can interrupt the temporal and spatial escalation of hostilities, allow the dust to settle, and then find a common solution that will bring equity to all parties at once, thereby avoiding the downward spiral of one-up-man-ship.

Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica

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By Melanie Anne Phillips
Co-creator, Dramatica Theory of Narrative Structure

Human behavior cannot be predicted by observation alone.  No matter how deep the statistical database, no matter how sophisticated the algorithms, accuracy derived from observation falls short because it is unable to see the inner mechanism of the mind itself.  All that can be catalogued is simply the external impact of internal mental processes, and therefore observation can only chart the progress of ripples in the pond and speculate as to the nature of the pebble that produced them.

Human behavior cannot be predicted solely by internal self-examination.  No matter how deep we focus our inner eye, no matter how extensive our thoughts, accuracy derived from self-examination falls short because it is unable to see the mechanism of its own sentience.  All that can be grasped is simply the results of inner mental processes, and therefore self-examination can only map our attitudes and speculate as to the nature of the feelings that produced them.

To predict human behavior, a true model of the mind is required – one not derived from external observation nor internal self-examination.  The question arises as to how such a model can be created.  The answer is that such a model already exists.  It is called Dramatica and it was discovered in the structure of narrative.

The creation of narratives – both as stories and in the real world – is a uniquely human endeavor with two primary purposes:  one, to move an audience to adopt an attitude or point of view and, two, to describe human truth as best we can, so that we might better know ourselves and understand our relationships with others.  The first purpose is directed toward subject matter – the real world issues about which an author might wish to move an audience.  But the second purpose is accomplished below the level of subject matter for it documents human nature itself.

When you strip away the subject matter, the structure is laid bare and reveals itself as a model of the mind.  Why should this be?  Because when humans gather in groups to address a common issue, they tend to self-organize into specialties that represent different attributes of the human mind.   For example, one will emerge as the voice of reason while another will express skepticism and yet another might express the considerations of conscience.  In this way, each specialist is able to bring greater depth to the collective discussion than if each individual was a general practitioner, all trying to do the same job – a shallow exploration of every perspective.  It is a simple societal survival technique.

Simple stories, the first stories, addressed this and established the archetypal characters and how the fundamental human attributes they represented interrelated.  In fact, the interaction of one character with another is analogous to the way these attributes interact in the mind of an individual, as if our own mental processes had been projected outward and made tangible in a macroscopic manner.

When groups grow even larger, the fundamental attributes attract additional followers so that they become sub-groups within the larger group.  In this manner, each perspective on the problem is represented by many individuals.  And, when a sub-group grows to a critical mass, it will itself self-organize, just as did the original master group.  One member of the specialty group will emerge as the leader with the others falling into the roles of the other human attributes.   And, similarly, if a number of master groups come together to address and even larger issue of common interest, each master group will shift off center as they all self-organize into specialty roles as well.

As thousands of generations of storytellers documented what they saw in the way people and groups of people organized themselves, though trial and error they gradually refined the conventions of story structure until it accurately represented the functioning of the mind itself.  Recognizing the correlation of structure to the mind, Dramatica further refined the structural elements and the dynamics that drive them.  Conceptually, this model of the mind is the substance of the Dramatica theory and, practically, it is re-created in the Dramatica software.

Dramatica’s model of the mind is comprised of two principal components.  The first is a periodic table of narrative elements in which the nested nature of human attribute self-organization is presented as families within families, much as the periodic table in physics gathers elements into families such as the rare earth elements or the noble gasses.  The second is a set of algorithms that describe the manner in which these mental attributes interact and interrelate.

In combination, the algorithms describe mental dependencies in which the action of every human dynamic has impact or influence upon other closely related dynamics.  The dynamics form a web that can be interpreted to reveal the tensions and forces at work in the mind and how they warp the shape of the mind and focus motivation in predictable directions.

In conjunction with the table of narrative elements, these algorithms of dynamics can pinpoint the sources of motivation and, conversely the location of blind spots into which one’s own consciousness, or that of a group, cannot see.

The model as whole is able to determine the relationship between a state of mind and the sequential progression of considerations, both conscious and subliminal, which must follow from such an arrangement.  This process is commutative, for if one knows the order in which a sequence of considerations occurred one can regressively ascertain in great detail the mental arrangement that must have existed to drive such a progression.

In theory, if one identifies in the real world an individual or group mind of any number of nested levels of sub-groups, one can accurately determine the drives, areas of focus, purposes and methods of that mind.  By applying the sequential algorithms, one can also predict the progressive behavior of the mind under study.

In practice, both individual and group minds are constantly coming into conjunction, in conflict or collusion.  Since they are not joining in a common purpose for a sufficient period of time, they do not reach the flash point at which they would self-organize into a single predictable system.  Rather, their interactions are only partial facets of a mental model and operate more according to the procession of chaos than an orderly progression.  Nonetheless, the impact of such encounters leaves an identifiable impact upon both parties that enables a revised accurate assessment of each altered mind and its future behavior.

The domain of chaos can be somewhat reduced by the application of those same standard statistical and algorithmic approaches that have been unable to predict human behavior, for they take into account environmental considerations, essentially the subject matter of medium in which the minds encounter one another.

In conclusion, human behavior can be predicted with significant accuracy through narrative modeling.  But when narratives are only partially present in volatile scenarios, statistical modeling can be used in conjunction with narrative to achieve the best possible predictive algorithm.

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In this second article in the Dynamic Model series, I’m going to explore really intriguing problem – how particles can be transmuted into waves and vice versa.

Why this important to writers and even more important to psychologists and social scientists may not be immediately apparent, so first I’ll outline its potential usefulness and also how it is essential to the expansion of the Dramatica theory into a whole new realm.

Stories might end in success or failure of the effort to achieve the goal.  But how big a success, or how great a failure.  Now you are talking a matter of degree.  What’s more, is it a permanent success/failure or a temporary one?  And if temporary, does it always remain at the same level or does it vary, getting bigger, smaller, or oscillating in a symmetrical cyclic or complex manner?

Now, apply this to a character’s motivation.  It may be motivated by one particular kind of thing, but is that motivation increasing or decreasing?  It is accelerating or decelerating?  Is it cyclic or complex, is it transmuting from one nature of motivation to another?  And for that matter, how does a character actually change from one nature to another in a leap of faith?  Up the magnification and ask, “can I see the exact moment a character’s mind changes from one way of looking at the world to another?”

When is that magic moment at which Scrooge changes?  How long does it last?  Can we find the spot at which he is one way now and another way a moment later?  Is the change a process or an immediate timeless shift from one state to another?  What exactly is the mechanism – not the mechanism that leads him to the point of change, but the exact time at which that change occurs?

When can we say that a light switch is off versus being on?  Is it how many electrons are crossing the gap, is it the position of the switch at a visual resolution?  Is it the light getting brighter?  How bright?  How fast?  How about a mercury light that fades on and off at 60 Hz?  When it is on the nadir of the down cycle is it off?  And therefore, does the exact moment of a character’s change depend upon momentum?  Inertia?  Zeno’s paradox?

If writers could follow the rise and fall, the ebb and flow of dramatic potentials, resistances, currents, and powers discreetly for every element, every particle in a story’s structure, one could predict the cognitive and affective impact on the readers or audience as a constantly changing bundle of waveforms, each one thread or throughline in the undulating unbroken progression of experience.

Now project this into psychology, societal concerns, stock market analysis, weather prediction – such a dynamic model would enable incredibly accurate projections as well as far more detailed and complete snap analyses.

BUT

In order for these applications to be realized, we need not only a dynamic model, but also the means of connecting it to the structural model.  In other words, we need to develop a particle/wave continuum in which particles can become waves can become particles in an endless flow of cascading shifts and transmutations.

So how does this interface work?  What stands between particle and wave that alters one to another?

In the next installment of the Dynamic Model series, I’ll offer some conjectures.

—Melanie Anne Phillips

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