Gists and Problems

[samuelogeda]

@Greg

So Gists are storytelling for the source of the inequity, but do not address the actual inequity itself, right? For instance “Gagging at the thought of eating oysters” describes the source of the problem, but not what the problem is. The problem could be “gagging at the thought of eating oysters causes a misunderstanding with the chef” or “gagging at the thought of eating oysters ruins a blind date”.

I’m late to this but this week I got a big personal revelation on expressing story points in a quad. My new rule is express the story points in terms of their dynamic pairs. I’ve struggled to contextualize or express a problem when I try to define one term in a quad in isolation from the other dynamic term in a dynamic pair.

@jassnip [quote=“jassnip, post:7, topic:1170”]
So how exactly do you know when you’ve made something a problem?
[/quote]

Example, I can have a quad of help, hinder, support, oppose.

Help: An NGO wants to help a war ravaged community rebuild shelters destroyed in a just ended armed conflict.

Hinder: A government official refuses to give the NGO clearance until he gets a bribe.

Support: The official knows the current shelters are a breeding ground for diseases, theft etc and that if there’s a disease outbreak, his role in the local government will be audited or scrutinized.

Oppose: The official is like, the western funded NGOs have a lot of money so giving a bribe to him shouldn’t be an issue. The money from the bribe can help him set up an income generating business that will enable him break free of his low paying job in the government.

will the official stand in the way of his people getting the much needed help or will the NGO break their code of ethics so they can provide much needed assistance to the community

It’s probably been expressed above already but. My rule now is express gists or story points in terms of the relationships between pairs not in isolation from the pair relations, the inequity is unearthed in the relationships between story points not in isolation

the problem is defined in the relationships between quad items not just by looking at one story point.

So define the inequity in one dynamic pair and then once that’s define, express the other dynamic pair in terms of the first dynamic pair to grasp or get hold of the problem in your mind.

This can also be expanded to dependent, companion and associative relationships.

My learnings of the week.

@Greg

Something else i notice while looking at problems in the Story Mind and not in the story itself from the characters point of view is that it gets around thinks like “But what if the character didn’t care about this problem?” or “it’s a problem for the character, but they don’t know it, only the author does,” because, whether the character cares or not or whether the characters know there’s a problem or not, the Story Mind does care and does know there’s an inequity. So it’s not a problem because the author knows it is or the characters care about it, but it’s a problem because the Story Mind knows it is and cares about it.

[samuelogeda]

@Greg

But would having a list of problems to randomly match up with gists be of any interest or use to anyone else? Are there any problems with this type of thing that I’m not seeing?

@greg I would pick one gist from one story point in a quad and then pick another gist from the dynamic pair.

I would pick one gist from the opposite dynamic pair and then match those four gists from the quad to unearth the problem.

@Greg

So to make something a problem within a story, you have to show how too much or little pressure is placed on one element such that more or less pressure on it’s dynamic opposite is needed to restore balance. Once you have shown that, you have created a narrative problem.

@Greg

the inequity is between elements within the mind, not between characters

[samuelogeda]

insightful. I’d attach your process here to a quad. There’s a fourth aspect of your process to be defined later on. I’m just kidding.

[samuelogeda]

My personal dramatica rule.

The smallest useful indivisible aspects of #dramatica are the pairs not the story points in isolation. Look at the Story points in pairs then as a quad at the simplest level then look at them as a pair

[samuelogeda]

Secrets of the Quad

This is probably more mental relativity territory than story theory.

There’s this video by Melanie Anne Philips which goes into the secrets of the quad.

It can help you create interesting flavors of story.

It’s quite heavy so you may have to re-watch it over and over and over.

[Lakis]

@samuelogeda

My rule now is express gists or story points in terms of the relationships between pairs not in isolation from the pair relations, the inequity is unearthed in the relationships between story points not in isolation

the problem is defined in the relationships between quad items not just by looking at one story point.

I think this is a brilliant insight that I need to process.

One problem that frequently comes up for me is figuring out the element level. Problem, Solution, Focus, Direction are all parts of a quad, but which one should go where? Is the Problem of my story Inequity, or is that the Focus? Or is problem Equity? Etc. Maybe trying to encode them together in terms of relationships would help.

[samuelogeda]

@lakis

@Lakis

Is the Problem of my story Inequity, or is that the Focus? Or is problem Equity? Etc.

Expressing the relationship between the quad elements is what will reveal the problem.

The problem is an interplay between the relationships of the problem quad.

• there’s always a pair that makes the most sense to you in an elemental quad.

for example the story engine may give you the following problem quad of: faith, disbelief, conscience, temptation

Start by defining the diagonal relationship that makes the most sense to you.

For example the problem could be disbelief: a teenage girl is in disbelief of the fact her dad has started making sexual advances towards her a week after the death of her mom and his wife

Solution - faith - she has faith that if she speaks to the police or higher authority they will deal with her dads advances

Focus: temptation - her father is a porn addict and a lot of times when he’s at home with her, he envisions her as one of the girls in a porn scene. One time they are having dinner and his heart starts racing as he pictures her in his mind seated opposite him on the dinner table shirtless.

Direction: conscience - her dad knows it’s wrong to think about his daughter that way, he considers beginning to sleep with prostitutes to relieve his sexual pressure and attending rehab. Starts attending rehab.

Basically - define one dynamic pair. Then use the expressions used to define the first dynamic pair to help you define the second pair.

*Melanie Anne Philips says:

We always blend two items into a baseline from which to measure and observe the other two. So, you stepped outside the universe you could clearly see time and space as separate and not locked to each other on that seesaw at all, thereby severing the space-time continuum and making all kinds of things possible (like that two dimensional man on a piece of paper who can’t cross a straight line drawn across the page).

Similarly, we think in threes, but one of the threes is really two things combined. Looking at others we are observing their universe from the outside and so we see their thought processes in fours, leading us to easily see the solutions to their problems but not to our own. And lastly, the equation K/T = AD is not the only one in Dramatica.

Sequentially, we go through all permutations such as A/K = TD. Now that isn’t mathematically equivalent to the first equation, but it describes a particular mind set.

To get the best parallax on the universe, our minds adopt one equation (mind set) after another in order to see things in all possible contexts.*

[mlucas]

@Lakis

Problem, Solution, Focus, Direction are all parts of a quad, but which one should go where? Is the Problem of my story Inequity, or is that the Focus? Or is problem Equity?

This is definitely tricky sometimes. Look for the one element that causes problems because of it being a drive, something the characters are driven by or driven to do. This is the Problem element. Often they won’t question it – the idea that it could be the source of their problems is not considered, or if considered would seem ludicrous to change their approach. “Of course we need to X!”

When it comes to Focus and Direction, I really like @samuelogeda 's idea of working with them together. This is similar to what @jhull has done in his playground exercises too. When you look at the individual “bits of story” in isolation it’s often impossible to tell which is which. Focus and Direction often exist in a kind of feedback loop. Take these examples:

• A character accuses another: “You’ve allowed your emotions to cloud your judgement!”
• In the narration, the author describes the POV character’s reaction to something: He felt troubled for no reason he could explain.

Both cases could work equally well as Focus->Direction of Logic->Feeling or Feeling->Logic. It’s only when you pull back to see the entire story that the right pattern emerges.

And the key is that these interactions occur under the influence of the real Problem. This is how I like to picture it:

The characters are sort of stuck in the Focus <-> Direction area (feedback loop), most of them refusing to look up to see what the real source of difficulty is. (I say most of them because you sometimes get the rare character who does see the problem and/or solution quite clearly: Obi-Wan in Star Wars, Morpheus in The Matrix, Rose in The Last Jedi to name a few.)

[samuelogeda]

Awesome, in addition I’d say, you can explore the relationships of the elements dynamically:

In the dynamic expression I express how the diagonal terms conflict with each other. One pair positively, one pair negatively.

Eg: trust vs test and unending versus unending

Companion relationships - how to the horizontal relationships/pairs amplify or fail to apply each other.

How does trust amplify ending
How does unending fail to amplify trust

Dependent relationships - how do the vertical pairs/relationships contrast each other or how are they different from each other.

How is trust different from unending and how does that create an interdependency

How is ending different from trust and how does that cause a codependency.

The last is the associative relationships which I won’t go into here.

The trust - test, ending - unending quad is found under the progress type

[LunarDynasty]

@mlucas

Focus and Direction often exist in a kind of feedback loop.

I love this interpretation of Symptom-Response / Focus-Direction because it plays well into the justification process. The loop requires a lot of energy from the participant(s), expending the effort that could be put toward the real problem.

[Lakis]

Awesome. Bookmarked!

[Greg]

@samuelogeda

My new rule is express the story points in terms of their dynamic pairs

This defines the inequity (the imbalance between two elements, or the relationship/space between the elements), such as Desire for a car but the inAbility to pay for one.

But that does not necessarily define the problem (here meaning a process and the conflict that comes out of that process). There’s nothing necessarily problematic with wanting a car one can’t afford. There is something problematic with being stuck in jail because your inability to pay for that car drove you to rob a liquor store. [quote=“samuelogeda, post:22, topic:1170”]
@greg I would pick one gist from one story point in a quad and then pick another gist from the dynamic pair
[/quote]
That’s great for coming up with a unique inequity. Maybe instead of desire for a car you can’t afford, you’d get Desire for a car you don’t have the ability to win in a Kung fu tournament! As far as making a Problem a problem, I think you can pick from any Gist. For instance, a Physics Gist of exploring a haunted house could create Physics conflict of fighting against ghosts, Mind conflict of being confronted by a worst fear, Psychology conflict of struggling with maintaining a naturalistic worldview, etc.

I read an article somewhere (sorry, can’t find it at the moment, so no link) that said Holistic Problem Solvers see inequities and Linear Problem Solvers see problems. The way I took it was that HPS will attribute their conflict to the imbalance between elements while LPs will attribute conflict to one element or the other. So an HPS attributes being stuck in jail to wanting a car they can’t afford while an LPS attributes being stuck in jail to either wanting a car or not being able to afford it.