Reading Dramatica Books

theory
#1

Just finished Dramatica Unplugged, not too bad, 37 pages. And started Dramatica: Inside the Clockwork. Yikes 181 pages!! The first 16 pages explaining the relations of the quads - fantastic. Fascinating.Splay! Display! Family relationship! So much more! I have a feeling this is the kind of book where you really don’t want to do more than 20-40 pages a day. And for Mercury’s sake make notes.

I tried to read these some time ago and was just all d’oi. And for some reason, now, I pretty much get it. I’m also getting a lot clearer on the theory vs the app. I was also interested in seeing more stuff in the book that’s referenced in Pinker, the Mental Relativity stuff, although I haven’t really hit it yet.

I’ve made a lot of notes on this, I’ll try cobbling them together and posting. Tremendous relief that I actually understand it now. Word of encouragement to other newbies: just try them, put them down, go back to the standard theory book, let some time pass, go back. Eventually you just get it. It’s not that it’s difficult, but it is NOT simple. It is composed of many moving parts and relationships and you just have to kind of hang in there until it comes together in your brain. Read, visit, revisit, reread, do it again, repeat.

and get ready to flip those quads four ways and then into a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th dimension.

One not of sight, or of sound. But of mind.

Storymind.

Take the case of Mr Stanley Beemus, a man who just wanted to alone with his books…

#2

Yes! When it comes to reading anything Dramatica—particularly from Melanie—this is the best approach to take.

Read. Reread. And read again.

It’s always fascinating how you come back to it and suddenly understand it more and more.

#3

I go through this in tech all the time. My brownies are at work building a mental model in my head while I sleep. I’ve always said, in person, I’m not that smart, but the guy who does the work at night is a friggin genius.

#4

spatial and fractal in the vertical plane

temporal and frictal (dynamic fractal)
in the horizontal plane

Looking at the matrix this morning, it started to dawn on me that it’s the underlying fluid dynamic nature of the story mind that’s the “reality” of the model, and the elements are best thought of as the emergent properties at at specific point in the 4d reality of mass energy space time.You go a little to the left or right or up or down, even by a fraction and a difference occurs in the emergent property, perhaps one too subtle to be named, but there, When you’re looking at the matrix, you’re looking at the 1) an underlying fluid dynamic of mass energy space and time and 2) the natural interactions of the human mind with that underlying stuff, modeled as the story mind.

It’s really a ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey…stuff. As long as you’re looking at it it won’t change but turn away from it, even for a fraction of a second, and oh yes it will.

In fact, there it is in inside the clockwork. “The mind is a machine made of Time.” Oohhh Melanie, That is fanTAStic. Absolutely fantastic.

dramatica clockwork.pdf (83.1 KB)

I’ve made this worksheet as I have grappled with the ideas of Inside the Clockwork. It is a work in progress. Very. Based on what I’ve read so far, Inside the Clockwork looks like it’s going to be one of those life changing books. Since I’m in the field of ML and AI, I’m already wondering about other applications for this, and I see Melanie has written about that.

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#5

You just made my Sunday! :heart_eyes:

Love the visualizations here…plus, it’s really interesting to see what others gleam from Melanie and Dramatica.

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#6

It gets weirder when you remember that Mass Space Time Energy is an infinite conceptual space. As Melanie points out, the structure’s just half of it, then there are the dynamic algorithms that move and change.

Feel free to use the visualizations as you like. Might make a good article on NF. The books are great but, also true of the theory book, you really have to be prepared to do some ‘unpacking.’

Working with Dramatica theory has made me more aware, even more aware than when learning another language, of the nature of a word as an arbitrary sign, and tool of convention packed with cultural assumptions. We have to call these emergent points something but don’t get carried away with the marriage between the word and that point in the matrix. It’s at best a marriage of convenience, not of romance.

#7

I added a look at weights of the levels in the matrix, and visualized the bidirectionality of the construction of the matrix, from the top or the bottom

also cleaned up the iterations, some of it was wrong, I had mixed up cooperative and dependent pairs.

dramatica clockwork.pdf (102.6 KB)

most important take aways for me here was that the arrangement of the elements is actually an arrangement of bonded pairs in a 4 quad space. Fascinatin’.

“These bonded pairs do nt rearrange at the Element level within a quad but within a group of four quads.” - M.A.P.

That is one hell of a chapter she wrote there.

And I have to say, putting that chapter as chapter 1, while probably essential, hides the fact that every. single. other. chapter is MUCH easier to read.

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#8

someday this will be a giant poster in my office :heart_eyes:

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#9

Hahahhahha yeah i know what you mean and more to come. I’m just doing a relaxed reading of the rest of the book for now, but already see much more that could be visualized to help my (and other’s) understanding. The concepts are quite clear and she’s a great explainer but you have to shift into diagram drawing mode in your head.

#10

I’m seeing charts, and mentions of AI and ML.
This, I have to watch.

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#11

I stand on the shoulders of your giant example.