If I want to say something about how finding self-worth leads to a happier life, that sounds all fine and good (and obvious), but I think it’s more useful for a story to explain HOW to find that self-worth. Would I have to make the premise something like “X leads to self-worth” or do the Signposts of “self-worth leads to a happier life” point the way of how to find that self-worth?
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The storyform as a whole will show how that premise is correct. But, yes, the signposts will show how you get from A to B.
As a premise though, it seems a bit vague. I think one way to improve the “how” of your premise is to add resolve in there.
Are you saying I should keep doing something or give up something?
“Keep focusing on seeing your self worth and you can live a happy life.”
“Give up beating yourself up and you can live a happy life.”
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I have a change character, so something like “Start focusing on what you can do and you can Y.”
I don’t know if Y would be “live a happy life” or “gain self-worth” I’d say gaining self-worth leads to living a happy life so I don’t know which is the correct Goal. I suppose self-worth would be some kind of Requirement?
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Cool. Sounds like you’re well on your way!
Are you doing the Armando storyforming from a premise, thing?
I’d recommend using Jim’s premise system, just because I’ve found it more clear. I could never quite follow Armando’s choices in that section.
In either case, do you have an idea of Genre for your story? I ask because living a happy life sounds like Psychology and your sci-fi story from the prior thread seemed like it would be in an external domain.
Living a happy life could be a positive consequence in a Failure / Good story.
For example:
“Virtuous are those who live a happy life by finding their self-worth”
That could be a Doing / Failure / Good / Start story.
ETA: That would actually be a Stop premise. Start would be “Virtue lies in finding your self worth, even if it means living a happy life.” Seems like the “living a happy life” part would need a little massaging. 
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Depends on where you want to put the focus. For the question (how finding self-worth leads to a happier life) here a few examples from my approach and my little exercise:
OS explores the nature of Doing something without Experience (Doing, Experience)
MC has issues with Worth (Preconscious, Worth)
IC illustrates impact by believing the impossible (Progress, Fantasy)
RS explores the meaning of having uncontrollable Desires (Being, Desire)
Argument: (Change, Success, Good) You can live a happy life when you give up lacking determination
OS explores the nature of Lacking a Sense of Self (Conceptualising, Sense of Self)
MC has issues with Escaping the Predestined (Past, Interdiction)
IC illustrates impact by Questioning Something or Someone (Memory, Suspicious)
RS explores the meaning of responding to Stress in a particular way (Understanding, Conditioning)
Argument: (Change, Success, Good) You can imagine a new life when you give up wanting to undo history
OS explores the nature of Being deluded by a particular group (Progress, Fantasy)
MC has issues with Being a Talented Artist (Doing, Skill)
IC illustrates impact by Being Able to Walk in Someones Shoes (Being, Ability)
RS explores the meaning of Being worthless for Something or Someone (Preconscious, Worth)
Argument: (Change, Success, Good) Give up getting drug tests for someone and you can change the world
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“Do Signposts explain how to get there?”
I’m not sure exactly what you mean, here, but here’s how I treat Signposts.
Let’s say you have a Physics domain. If you look at the four appreciations under Physics, you will, of course, see Understanding, Doing, Obtaining, and Learning. If you look at them spatially-that is, as all four existing at the same time-then you will point to one of them as the problem. This one is your story’s Concern.
For example, if the conflict of exploring the mystical island is that your characters are being chased by a monster, then you will see “being chased by a monster” as coming from one of these corners. Does being chased by a monster come from a misunderstanding of something? is it happening because of something the characters were or were not Doing? From an attempt to learn or gather experience? From trying to obtain something, or maybe from the monsters attempts to obtain the characters? All four of these areas-misunderstanding, doing something, gathering experience, and obtaining-are all present in the story at the same time. And it’s the imbalance between these four that creates conflict. But spatially, you will feel this conflict tied most strongly to one corner.
Now if you view the quad temporally, you will not see all four as existing at once, but as existing one at a time and in sequence. Where a spatial view sees how things are laid out, a temporal view will see how things are played out. And instead of saying out of four corners, the conflict comes from this one, you are saying the conflict comes from this corner first, then that corner, then that one, then the last one. This temporal view gives you Signposts. So signposts explain in what order you look through the appreciations of the quad.
But the appreciations aren’t just sources of conflict. Each “vertical” level of the table gives you a different type of appreciation. The domain level is the genre, or purpose. In short, the Domain gives you the Purpose of the story. But the Concern level is Methodology, or the type of elements one will engage to achieve a purpose. In other words, Plot.
So to answer your what I think you’re asking, Signposts describe the path taken through the quad as the perspective views each in sequence, and also shows how the mind engages in each area as an effort to solve the problem. Any path through the quad is valid, so the Signposts don’t exactly describe “how to get there”. They just describe how these characters in this perspective “got there”.
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These are two different stories.
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This is a different story idea but I guess is sci-fi (an extraordinary sci-fi element in otherwise normal world).
I find the phrasing of that premise confusing for a Failure story. It sounds like a success w/ a different goal to me.
That’s what I was wondering.
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Right on. I didn’t realize that.
[quote=“SharkCat, post:8, topic:2753”]
I find the phrasing of that premise confusing for a Failure story. It sounds like a success w/ a different goal to me.[/quote]
Have you by chance read Jim’s post about Failure / Good premises?
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I wanted to know whether the Signposts tell you how to get from the problem to the solution, but if a story about getting self-worth leading to happiness is one story, and how starting/stopping X leads to getting self-worth is another story, then the Signposts must not walk you through getting self-worth or else they’d be part of one story (which might look like A happy life Requires self-worth, and this is how the characters get that self-worth…).
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This is an interesting question. Upon reflection, I think @Greg is right here:
Say you have an Optionlock story. As the characters progress through the story, they try a, b, c, until they eventually run out of options. The last option is the one that either gets you to success or failure. But every step before presumably didn’t work–to one degree or another–otherwise the story would end at that point.
I think the reason you have to go through each of the Signposts is that for the story to feel complete, you have must explore all four quads (which is what I think @greg was saying?) in search of your answer. If you don’t, it’s more like a statement than an “argument”.
However, the order in which you explore things does matter to the outcome. If your OS first Signpost is Obtaining, for example, the story will end in Failure.
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Going back to your original question:
No, the signposts on their own don’t make the “how” argument for you. This is basically what @MWollaeger was saying regarding two separate stories – if you want to make an argument about how to find self-worth, then that’s your story/premise.
I think the reason you find the “self worth leads to a happier life” too obvious is because your story intuition is telling you that leads to a happier life is already covered by Judgment (Good). I’m stretching the definition of Judgment a little, but I think it fits for this story and the idea you’re describing.
Not to mention, “X leads to self-worth” just sounds cool, like a much more focused story!
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No and yes. The Signposts describe the minds journey through the methodology quad as it looks at what each corner looks like as a source of conflict. This journey alone does not move the story from having a Problem to embracing a Solution in that a story may end in, say, Steadfast/Failure where the MC never gives up the Problem.
And yet, everything in the story will contribute to where the story ends up because everything contributes to building up or tearing down the story’s justifications. As Lakis says, even the order of Signpost exploration contributes to this. So they don’t get you to a Solution, per se, but they do get you to a final view, or perspective, of the problem.
Because signposts also represent the story’s methodology, I think that, within the storytelling, they probably often do look like multiple attempts at a solution to the characters themselves. But this is not the same thing as a Dramatica Solution, which is more about Motivation than Methodology.
I agree with MLucas. You can write a story that says someone who has self worth will be happier than someone without. And you can write another story that says this path leads to having self worth and that one doesn’t. And it would be easy to say in the second version that this path is Good because it leads to self worth. And if you try to describe that Second version by saying that self worth leads to a Happy life, then you are basically saying that taking this path to self worth is good because it’s good.
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Right. So there are two ways to look at any quad. Spatially, or temporally.
The spatial view explores the entire quad by looking at all four corners at the same time and assigning all conflict from the space between those four corners to one corner. Since there is no time, it never changes throughout the story. This correlates to the Concern.
The temporal view of this quad, then, takes a different view. I’m not sure of the best way to explain it. Is it looking at each corner as though it were the only corner, and then proceeding until it’s looked at all four? Is it looking at all four corners at once and, rather than assigning all conflict to one corner, it assigns conflict to a path through all four corners? Both views seem both right and wrong in their own way. But this correlates to Signposts.
Both spatial and temporal views explore the quad in its entirety and, as you said, contribute to making a complete argument. What’s interesting is that the Signpost level is the only one that offers this temporal exploration of the quad in the Dramatica software. The temporal view of other levels has been held back from what the software provides.
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Except for the Plot Sequence Report (which drills down one level from/into Signposts). Unless I misunderstood what you meant Greg?
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You didn’t misunderstand. I suppose I was thinking more of the Story Engine Settings report that gives the seventy or so different appreciations. But yes, the PSR gives you a bit of a temporal journey through a quad as well.
Side note-The PSR mentions that it’s a view of how dramatic tensions manifest between plot and theme meaning that, as you said, it’s also tied to the Signposts. So the software gives two different views of plot. I imagine part of what it holds back is a report that shows how dramatic tension manifests between character and theme and between plot and genre. And I wonder if this suspected possible report between plot and genre might correlate to the sub genres.
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I’m thinking it’s something like “Address your resistance to having higher self-esteem (Worth) by balancing your coming to a conclusion based on circumstantial evidence (Determination) with your positive expectations (Expectation)” but I’m not sure how to make that encompass something like how you should compare your progress to yours rather than to other people’s or if that’s something different like Process/Result or Aware/Self-Aware (either pair is going to take away Worth as the goal).
Or maybe it should be about realizing everyone has different strengths that add value? Address your resistance to doing something outside one’s comfort zone by allowing your reassessing someone to balance out your making poor evaluations of something.
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It definitely sounds like you are on the right track!
I hope someone else can help you now because you’ve wandered into utterly foreign territory for me. (I can’t make myself care a whit about a premise when I START a story. At that point “Keep focusing on Logic and you can Become something” means nothing to me… Whereas “gorgeous starfighter pilot desperate to help save her mom from cancer” [IC throughline] and “lovelorn college athlete grieving sister’s death” [MC throughline] etc., those mean everything to me. The premise eventually becomes meaningful to me, but only later; trying to force it early would make me hate it. So that’s why I have to storyform from the story ideas, but anyway that’s just my process.)
One thing I will say is that I believe that often what writers find most compelling about their work is not the Dramatica elements in play, but their own unique interpretation of those elements and how they connect it to their storytelling. So maybe your idea of judging your progress on its own rather than comparing it other people’s, and how that relates to self-worth (Worth) and Determination and Expectation, might really be what gives your story meaning to you and others. (I think I may be repeating what @decastell has said elsewhere, but I’ve definitely found this to be true in my own work.)
BTW I do think that fits Determination and Expectation fantastically well. Do you determine your worth by comparing against other people, or looking only at how far you’ve come? Should we expect more of ourselves because of what others accomplish? etc.
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I thought Determination was about finding causes though.
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Though objectively accurate, the formal definitions can be difficult to work with because we understand and recognize the elements more on an intuitive level (since they are part of our mind’s built-in problem-solving). So while I think Determination always comes down to determining causes, it’s better understood in terms of just determining something, or being determined, or having determination, or making judgments, etc. The gists, basically. Once you layer on a bunch of gists to the formal definition, and see how the definition applies to all of them, it really helps you get a feeling for the range of the element in question.
So yes, your story might be about how you determine the forces that drive your self-worth, but it’s clearer to just take the shortcut all humans have learned to take and say, how you determine worth.
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