I’m not totally sure, but I believe Pulp Fiction’s PSR would appear out-of-order from what Tarantino showed. It would read as it does in chronological order.
That being said, you really don’t have to worry about it too much. If you want a scene to be a flashback, have it be a flashback. What’s important is the progression of the conflict in your story.
@jhull would likely have much to say about Memento’s dealing with time.
Exactly. The storyform doesn’t care about the storytelling. That doesn’t mean the storytelling couldn’t confuse the form, I guess. But I suggest approaching storytelling with wild abandon. Just, you know, adhere to the storyform while doing it! Haha.
So, using some VERY quick inequities, let’s just go with a random quad… and forgive me if this isn’t totally coherent:
Evidence. The PRCO of a story beat might be straight down–Ability, Aware, Self-Aware, Desire.
P - Ability - One should stick to what they’re good at so they feel happy, unless discovering a hidden talent brings real joy.
R - Aware - One must focus on their surroundings to feel safe, unless being on autopilot enables your instinct to guide you safely.
C - Self-Aware - One must focus on their every move in order to conquer fear, unless lacking self-awareness eradicates apprehension.
O - Desire - One must remain fearless about their task in order to remain vigilance, unless one must allow fear to pass through them in order to remain fully mindful.
You might construct the following scenes:
Are these memories? Flashbacks? Flash forwards?
It doesn’t matter… the story beats describing a conflict of Evidence are felt by the reader. The reader’s mind fills everything in and you “get” the message.
The reason the order is important is that the mind attributes meaning to order. For example:
123 and 132 are very different stories.
So whether you use a flashback to show beat #2 or you show it in order, the true chronological order matters to the Storymind, as it determines what story you are telling.
Right, obviously the order matters – that’s why it’s not possible to have a Signpost 1 Obtaining story that ends in Success.
I guess in the case of flashbacks, however, I’m wondering if the order that you reveal things could actually be the structural order (I thought maybe this was what @JohnDusenberry was getting at). Especially if what’s happening in the past is (for example) the IC throughline, and we see it primarily as a flashback through the eyes of the MC player … each memory could maybe influence in the order in which it was revealed.
Similarly, this example only make sense to me if we see how one beat influences the other. So I could see #3 is great as a flashback that informs the current moment.
Hey, to help add to the discussion, I found this related thread:
Ahh, memories. Haha. Whoever asked that clearly didn’t quite have a grasp on things 
So whether you use a flashback to show beat #2 or you show it in order, the true chronological order matters to the Storymind, as it determines what story you are telling.
@mlucas Right… and admittedly I could be really off in my example. This is a tricky topic… BUT isn’t it the true chronological order of the Storyform that matters, devoid of encoding?
@jhull, please tell me I’m wrong, haha.
Haha, yeah, no fair bringing up threads from a year ago! Understanding is a process that changes so much in that amount of time!
You want the signposts to appear in the proper order from the perspective of the Storymind. You could have IC signposts that happen in any chronological order, 1904, 1902, 1901, 1903, say.
You’re skipping through time storywise, but still keeping things in the proper order for the Storymind to unwrap them and get the message. That’s because if I look at You to see how you deal with conflict, it doesn’t matter what time you existed in. It only matters in what order you influence me. So You could influence me first by something you did in 1904, and then influence me with something you did in 1901. Your chronological order would seem messed up, but the order in which I was influenced would not be.
Cool, yes. Thank you. It’s about the meaning of the grand argument being made, not necessarily the order of events that happen in the storytelling.
In my example, I tried to make it so that to the reader, the PRCO conflicts add up to demonstrate of conflict of Evidence in the mind of the reader.
I linked it because, ultimately, it seems like this thread is reaching a similar (or same, depending on your perspective) conclusion.
There’s another thread that covers another similar topic that I started awhile back. I was asking about whether the influence could come from a player who was absent for a Signpost. The TL;DR is “yep!”
So, to summarize my understanding thus far: Perspectives, or that which Dramatica calls Character or Throughline, by the very nature of a Grand Argument Story, interact, and the order of that interaction matters. But, the traditional characters, or what Dramatica calls players, need not even be aware one another for this interaction to happen. (It just makes a lot of sense for a lot of people when these line up.)
I wonder if our different initial thoughts on this is linked to linear and holistic ways of seeing the world.
The linear sees the objective linear way cause and effect unfolds across time, e.g. the infected spoon.
The holistic sees the subjective way the mind comes to relate events that may not have a literal cause and effect relationship but rather relate to one another spatially, like prco does rather than like 1234 do…
I would be unsurprised for any correlation. Also, your reply, and this entire thread remind me of two quotes I’ve heard throughout my life, but never really thought about:
Maybe they relate, also? Whether they do or not, I have new insight, so thank you!
Only from a certain perspective. 
In response to the original question, of a Main Character returning to a hometown and being impacted by their memories of a place…
Assuming the Main Character’s story is about a source of conflict generated from what happened (the Past), the Influence Character perspective would be anyone who triggers recollections through conflict.
The Main Character is not a real person, she is a perspective, so it’s not her Memories that are being triggered or brought to light, but rather a process of Memory-ing (recollecting, reminiscing) that is the source of challenge to the personal perspective.
Flashbacks may be part of this Memory process, but Backstory is not. Backstory is where you find the genesis of the justification in the current story:
Backstory -> Initial Story Driver -> Forestory
Forestory is what most people understand to be THE story. Backstory explains WHY, or HOW, the individual Problems in each Throughline came to be.
As awesome as those PRCO inequities are in @JohnDusenberry 's post above, I’m not sure the sequence as presented would work, in that seeing him as a child feels more like Backstory (they feel really out of place with the others)
If there was a greater context of Memory - and all four were geared towards challenging through Memory (like the sequence in Inception where Cobb recounts the secret his wife Mal had hidden away), then it could work. It’s difficult without greater context.
With all that said, 9 times out of 10 when the writer is trying to write an Influence Character that is not present, or is a rock, or is someone who died a long time ago that they’re thinking about – it’s usually indicative of a writer avoiding creating an effective Main Character and Influence Character dynamic.
Agree, it needs an overall context, but just wanted to show an example of the inequity communicated from mind to mind. Of course, the example of Evidence I used is in Memory, so I think it genuinely could work as I laid out given the right circumstances, yeah?
In other words, if you took Evidence and Ability, Aware, Self-Aware, and Desire and applied it to the Inception “flashback” sequence you would see that they work together to challenge in regards to Memory:
Ability - I can mess with people’s minds and I did
Aware - I made her see that this is world is not what she thinks it is
Self-Aware - I made her self-conscious of whatever she was hiding, plus I remember what a jerk I was to do this in the first place
Desire - I made her want to kill herself (and I miss her)
So all four of those work in context of Memory, and so the “flashback” feels less like Backstory, and actually an essential part of what is being communicated to the Audience through the Influence Character’s challenging perspective.
Your example above feels more like an out-of-place flashback as the context for going back into that time is not part of a greater context of Memory of all four - not that it couldn’t, just that at the present moment it feels like a jump-cut in the narrative.
Replying to the original post, I think it is important to keep in mind that if the MC is concerned (capital “C” Concern) with Memory – recalling, forgetting, etc. – then the IC would embody a concern of the Past. Being confronted by the location (a.k.a. ‘situation’) where the original trauma occurred allow the past to appear in many guises, by old friends, enemies, family, events, etc.
Though it is easier to embody the influence of the past into a single character, novels tend to spread the ‘job’ of the Influence Character (though not necessarily a single character or a person at all) among multiple players. Yet each player represents the influence of the past on the main character as the MC struggles with their memories.
Also, do not lose sight of the rest of the narrative – the overall story throughline and the relationship throughline. Those throughlines play a large part in contextualizing the MC’s personal journey and the interplay with the IC.
Thanks for the clarification Chris. May I ask if you and Melanie could consider new title for the IC(and maybe a few others) in a future iteration of Dramatica? Something encompassing like, Subjective Influencing Perspective(SIP), since the understanding of the theory has progressed a fair bit.
Hi Khodu, the labels we selected are always going to be insufficient, which is why we recommend looking to the definitions for understanding what the labels represent.
The idea of a “Main Character” and an “Influence Character” presupposes that you’re creating a character-emphasized narrative – one that focuses the subjective throughline perspectives through one or two, or a limited number of players. That’s the problem with using “Character” for those throughline labels. The throughlines are equally plot, theme, and genre, but since Western / American works – particularly ‘films’ – focus on single, character-driven narratives we chose those labels to support and ease usage and understanding.
Like many aspects of Dramatica, we’ll probably make the tool more flexible in user-modified labelling of the story points to accommodate a wider variety of narratives tastes and usages, but we’ve got to get the software updated on both platforms before we have the luxury of doing that.
Many thanks for your response Chris. I look forward to that. Would be a fine time for the Theory.