Cool. I think we’re both saying the same thing from different angles!
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For Motivations, we have Faith, Conscience, Temptation, Disbelief. I’m being a little lazier than I thought I might be with the gists, but i’ll start with these.
Faith - Having faith
Conscience - Having a conscience
Temptation - being baited
Disbelief - distrusting someone
This is typically thought of as the Problem level, or as the characters drive. And for the longest time I thought of it more as a character being driven to solve the Problem, though maybe not quite in those worse. But that’s not quite right. The character is driven to either be the source of this element or to seek it out. They’re not motivated to end this element. They’re motivated to keep it going. Objectively, this element is the one creating conflict for the characters. But from the perspective of the characters, they would probably say that
The Problem IS the solution.
Notice the capital P and the lower case s. The reason the characters are motivated by this element is because they usually think this element is in some way an answer to their problems. If the storyform is about showing us four already justified perspectives on a problem that we may compare them to see which path is best, then those four perspectives at the beginning of the story will already think that they are addressing the problem. The reason the MC needs an influence is to help decide whether to address the problem in a different way or not. The reason one character will change and one will not is because that represents the mind either continuing to attempt to solve the problem with the original justified perspective or building up new justifications for a different solution. That’s why the Problem, prior to the actual story Solution, is the character solution.
So where I used to would have said that maybe a character would say “there’s an example of faith, I’m driven to deal with it”, I now see that it now makes more sense think the character would say “I need to do something right here. I’m going to engage in faith. Huh, I just engaged in faith, and yet there’s conflict. Do i need to keep engaging in faith, or do i disbelieve?”
So what do you think, @flight? In this story, when an OS character needs to engage to deal with an issue, are they motivated by or toward having faith, having a conscience, being baited, or distrusting someone?
I feel like I’ve written a ton in this thread. I should put this much effort into actually writing a story sometime! haha. Thanks for indulging me while I drivel on and on!
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So I have this clear, you’re talking about the mind working through an argument at a purely abstract level without trying to communicate it as a story, correct? In which case I’d say sure, if the mind sees the mountain wearing down over time as representing an inequity of Truth or Security or Reappraisal or anything at all really, that works fine as poetry takes for granted, or a Terrence Malick movie does as visual poetry, if I’m following you. In fact the mind wouldn’t even need to encode the imagery at all, the Storyform or a Subtext-style premise holds all the necessary information for working through the argument without encoding it.
As story though, I’d say encoded illustrations require more:
Yes, in a story a meteor heading toward Earth can represent a threat, if you either make a bunch of assumptions, or the story communicates the context in which it considers the meteor to be a threat. But to aliens watching it all from another planet it may be no threat at all. Or to earthlings in the 18th century if the meteor is coming in the 21st century. Or to a rock or a flower - unless the mind or author either personifies the rock or flower and so treats it as having a human mind, or a character in the story projects thoughts and feelings onto the inanimate object as Tom Hanks does with the Wilson volleyball in Cast Away.
So I think it’s totally cool with Dramatica to have this:
…so long as the story communicates to us that this is how the storymind is seeing and understanding the mountain. But if the mind is just weighing through the argument all on its own with no need to communicate it through story, then any symbols are a private matter between the mind and itself.
But, yeah to this:
Yes, this is where I’m enjoying this whole conversation. Looking at the story elements as parts of the argument instead of tracking the individual characters arcs and feelings and motivations opens up a nice distance for seeing alternative ways of exploring that argument.
How about distrust - the characters all live in a world where taking someone at their word is a good way to get a knife in your back. So just because the villagers take in the cabin boy doesn’t mean they aren’t going to count the silverware every night he’s in their home.
This would be key, yes.
It’s not about how aliens or past humans or rocks or flowers view the meteor. From within the story, those people or things, not knowing a meteor was headed their way or not caring, wouldn’t view it as a threat. It’s about how the Storymind sees it and in how it’s presented. Imagine a scene playing out in a novel playing out and then being followed by something along the lines of “And far above their blissfully unaware heads, as yet undetected, was a meteor just as big and angry as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, and it was headed straight for the small town.” With that, we know the story considers the meteor a threat and that the villagers are blissful in their ignorance of the threat.
Love that. He was a pirate after all!
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Right - which is very easy to do in almost any story telling medium and also a kind of cool dramatic irony trick, the Hitchcock moment when the camera pans down from the family eating supper together and we see the bomb under the table. And with that I think I finally understand what you meant by this -
- that it’s good to be reminded there are other ways to get storypoints across and to point the audience’s attention towards inequities without requiring a character to be aware of every one of them. Cool.
Ha! I didn’t mean he does steal the silverware, just meant they don’t trust him. But hell yeah, let’s have him steal the silverware and earn their distrust! Pesky pirates, place is lousy with 'em.
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Cool. So what we’ve got with this throughline is a Storymind that’s pushing to get the pirates to find the treasure. But though the purpose of the story is for the pirates to find the treasure, the story itself will actually be largely following the residents of the coastal village. As the story pushes the pirates to find the treasure, there will likely be sword fights, a threat of mutiny, a ship firing cannonballs at the village, villagers fighting back against pirates, etc, for Physical conflict.
The Method the Storymind will use will have to do with Obtaining the cabin boy. I don’t remember if I said I wanted pirates or villagers to be Protagonists, but the pirates were attacking the village to get the boy back. So I guess the pirates are portages. But the as the pirates work to get the boy back in order to find the treasure, there will be villagers threatened, homes razed, traps set, etc.
Meanwhile, the family that takes in the family will be seen as putting others first and this will create advantages for that family. The cabin boy, to return their kindness, will show them where to find bigger fish, how to tie better sailor’s knots, etc. Maybe the family has an easier time of doing things in the village because everyone knows who they are now. Maybe people that support them offer to help fix the family’s roof after a cannonball tears through it.
And as all of that is going on, the Os characters will be driven by a disbelief that looks like distrust. Sure the family brought the cabin boy in in order to help him and aren’t kicking him out, but he was still a pirate. When the wife suspects her silverware may be missing and the cabin boy hears her accuse him to her husband there’s a big fight. Or when the husband suspects the boy is sneaking off at night to give info to the pirates (he’s not), he tails the cabin boy and ends up getting himself captured by a sneaky pirate. When none of the villagers believe that the cabin boy is innocent, he runs away. And when the villagers tell the pirates they don’t have the cabin boy anymore, the pirates distrust the villagers and start an attack.
The solution, then, is faith. When the family has faith that the cabin boy won’t betray them, they are able to let themselves be the bait in a trap that allows the cabin boy to do whatever he needs to send the pirates running.
The pirates fail to obtain the cabin boy meaning the story ends in Failure, but the villagers, and particularly the MC, feel good about their efforts and have no more angst about their problems.
Awesome. Depending whether the Cabin Boy really has the heart of a pirate, you may have inadvertently written something pretty close to The Return of Martine Guerre - is he or isn’t he?
So you began with the Purpose of the story is for the Pirates to find the treasure. Does that mean the Pirates should still find the treasure despite everything, or that the Purpose remains but ends in failure, or that your Purpose has changed as a result of discovering the story as you went along?
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I think what I laid out would have the pirates failing to achieve their purpose. But they don’t have to. Maybe putting faith in the cabin boy prevents the pirates from Obtaining him, but they still end up finding the treasure hidden under the floor of some building that’s been destroyed and part of the reason they leave without the cabin boy is because they don’t need him anyway. Whether the pirates achieve the purpose or not is separate from whether they accomplish their goal. They hope to accomplish the goal in order to achieve their purpose, but accomplishing the goal is no guarantee that the purpose will be achieved. Just depends on the story you want to tell and what it is you’re arguing to your audience.
Once you know what you want to say, the purpose shouldn’t change. The purpose, among other things, is what you’re arguing to the audience.