Concern and goal

If a story has a goal of understanding can it have concern of misunderstanding or vice versa? Forgive the question if the answer should be obvious to me.

Yes definitely. Think of those boxes in the table of Story Elements more like targets rather than a 4x4 box. As long as you get close enough to the target that the Audience knows what you were aiming for, the integrity of the storyform will persist.

Every spot on that chart can be seen as both a positive and negative even within the same story point. In other words with an OS Concern of Understanding you could have some characters experiencing conflict through misunderstandings and other characters encountering conflict because of their attempts to understand something.

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Thank you!! I like thinking of it as a target vs. a box. That really sheds a lot of light.

Something that’s been really invaluable to me, as a Windows user, is this little tool somebody developed. (Is it okay to link to this?) (Ed: Nope! :slight_smile:) It’s really helped me find the range in the terms without having to buy a whole new computer.

One of my favourite concerns to do this for is Memory because it has (in my mind) a whole lot of inherent flexibility. For example, problems of Memory can mean: refusing to let go of a positive memory (implying loss, nostalgia, ‘golden age thinking’); compulsively remembering something negative (regret, guilt, trauma); misremembering or forgetting something crucial (various memory biases, amnesia, dementia); recreating something from memory (like a painting, or an ancient politician); wanting to be forgotten; memorializing somebody controversial; attempting to erase someone from public memory (damnatio memoriae)…on and on and on.

You can see, hopefully, how this method can be applied to Understanding. Invert, twist, add qualifiers, moral judgements, and specificity. Is the (Not/Mis)Understanding intentional? Desirable? Are the ends beneficial or destructive? What are they attempting to understand?

After you’ve got that down, you just have to remember that each story point is independent of the others, to be encoded however many different ways you’d like.

We totally understand not being able to upgrade to latest and greatest, but if you can, please refrain from linking to sites that copy and paste huge sections of our application. It makes it more difficult to develop further versions of Dramatica.

If someone misunderstands something, then to understand it properly sounds like a fine goal to have. Or, looking at it the other way, if the problem stems from a proper understanding of something, then to confuse that understanding sounds like a great goal as well.

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Apologies for the misunderstanding, Jim. :slight_smile: