What are your shortcuts/secrets to keeping a Protagonist/ MC from meddling with the wrong Throughline? If a MC has an issue and it distracts him from the OS Protagonist job, is that scene both OS+MC?
For me, The Great Gatsby makes the most sense to see a MC (Nick, narrator) vs Protagonist (Gatsby). But when they are the same person, there is a merging. The hero is ultimately the broken man.
I know Protagonist is the Pursuit, Proactive, Consider. That has to touch the MC throughline.
But my question is: What do you do in your head to keep these roles/categories separate? What is your mantra to understand this separation? (Please try to explain very concisely).
Think of it as keeping your car payment separate from dealing with that one coworker. Sure they seem connected sometimes. You canât quit your job to get away from the coworker because you need to pay for your car. But for the most part, itâs pretty easy to keep those two problems separated.
not sure what you mean by this. it doesnât actually. the objective role of protagonist has nothing to do with an mcâs throughline even if they are the same person. objectively they may be proactive, but is that part of their personal conflict? not necessarily.
I used to worry about this but I donât anymore. It makes sense to try to identify and keep separate the different throughlines up front. But once youâre weaving, there is bound to be crossover, MAMs, etc. For me, worrying too much about keeping the throughlines separate as Iâm actually writing is distraction.
The MC perspective is in relation to his or her personal issues. The Protagonist role is in relation to the Story Goal. (If youâre at the point in story development where youâre not quite sure what the Goal is, just imagine there is a Goal the Protagonist is pursuing, which is crucial to the objective story involving most/all of the characters.)
Itâs good to be able to separate the two in your head when needed. But I agree with @Lakis that once you know your throughlines and especially once you begin writing, generally you want to weave them together. Itâs great when they keep impacting each other, and your gut may know things that are hard to see analytically (e.g. maybe the Protagonist role gets handed off for a while the character recovers from grief or a wound or something).
I think the easiest way to look at the protagonist role is to think of the character by their role in the story. For example, in âStar Warsâ we have the âinexperienced farm boyâ join forces with the rebellion. In âA Christmas Carolâ, the âhard-nosed money lenderâ is shown the path of those that âkeep Christmas in their own wayâ by four ghosts. In âA Star is Bornâ, the young singer finds the triumphs and pitfalls of success, and so on.
The minute you start thinking of your main character by their first name it is virtually impossible to remain objective.
So the main thing thatâs helped me (and the thing I try to illustrate in Conflict Corner workshop on Subtext) is really separating out the notion of Players and POVâs.
I donât think about Nick in Gatsby, so much as I think of the universal source of conflict driving the perspective thatâs the audienceâs eyes. Itâs almost to the point where Nick, the player, becomes a metaphor for moving through the processes in that Domain.
It opens up so many possibilities for me, using this technique, because youâre not bound to the notion that the MC is or isnât the Protagonist. It really doesnât matter. The Protagonist is a force in another Domain. Work out the sources of conflict from that different lens, get to the subtext of what youâre saying first⌠and then use that to inform your writing and creative decisions as to which Players will illustrate that POV.
We touched on this in todayâs Conflict Corner⌠the weaving part. Personally, I find it an important step to pull the story apart before you put it back togetherâjust to make sure you are successfully illustrating your Grand Argument.
The MC perspective is in relation to his or her personal issues. The Protagonist role is in relation to the Story Goal. (If youâre at the point in story development where youâre not quite sure what the Goal is, just imagine there is a Goal the Protagonist is pursuing, which is crucial to the objective story involving most/all of the characters.)
And yeah, while I totally agree with all of that⌠it reminds me of what attracted me to Dramatica in the first place⌠which is to say, the thing that drove me AWAY from things like the Heroâs Journey or Save the Cat. I came to realize those story theories and tools are really approaching story from more of a critic or audienceâs point of view. I went through two film schools, studied all these great books⌠Vogler, McKee, etc. only to find myself staring at a blank page with no more insight into how to PRODUCE a story than when I applied to school years before. If anything, I was more confused, more intimidated by the process.
Dramatica seems to be one of the few (if not only) theory that forces the Author to stop and think about what theyâre writing, why theyâre writing it, and how it will AFFECT the audience. No one ever seems to talk about the last, and I think most important step with Dramaticaâwhich is the Audience Appreciation.
Iâve said it before, that storytelling is Telepathy. An author has a vision in their mind of a story and its meaning, and itâs only through the process of storytelling that it can be transferred to an audience.
This is all to say that appreciating your Main Character player or Protagonist player and whether theyâre the same person is, to me, not the most fruitful approach to storytelling.
Like Chris pointed out, the author should remain objective.
I had a lecture at CalArts (not @jhull) once from a story artist at Pixar who got a bit into what it is weâre really doing as storytellers. And basically, it was manipulation. Weâre manipulating an audience to see, hear and feel certain things. Even on a scientific level⌠whether youâre using words or images of light⌠weâre screwing with the brains of the audience to force them to feel certain things, force their minds to consider certain things in a certain order, so theyâre brought in alignment to what @jhull calls the Premise (or Grand Argument).
So here, do you mean that kid (however he is) is joining forces, fighting, obtaining, struggling. OS Protagonist.
But within the attributives, inexperienced + farm + boy, there is yet another rotation happening turning those into experienced + space + man, which is the MC?
So when heâs doing the second half of the diagram, the verbals, heâs the protagonist in OS, but when heâs rotating his adjectives heâs the MC? But ultimately this whole process of OS+MC=Luke?
I cannot get my brain around this yet. Is there an analogy in real life (besides the brain?). In economics, government, society, family âŚis there something else that you can make analogous with this?
Sort of. I think Lukeâs MC throughline is about having untrained Jedi powers but seen as a nobody because most are not aware that he is the son of a Jedi knight.
His role in the OS is to join the rebellion to help destroy the Death Star â though much of that is revealed over time, not at the beginning.
I am also not great with this, honestly, and always fight to have characters do things and not perspectives. It is a lot easier to see in other peopleâs stories.
Another way to learn how to see things this way is to look at things that donât feel like characterâcatalyst, say, or inhibitor.
But if you want something from economics or society, think aboutâŚ
Religion. Letâs say thereâs an area with teen pregnancy. Their belief prevents them from teaching proper sex ed, and you can see how this comes out in different charactersâeven the science teacher who believes that giving away condoms for free and teaching biology and the reality of raising children is the better way to go.
Society. The arrival of electricity altered everything: people finally had real light at night, not crappy light. You could stay out late! But it also drove candle makers to figure out something new to do with their oil and wax reserves⌠hello vegetable shortening. But you can trace it all back to electricity.
Government. Everyone needs to get votes! So the Southern Strategy was created by the GOP back in the day to appeal to voters by appealing to their racism. Yes, there was an undercurrent they could draw on, but the drive for votes was behind it all.
Does that help?
If you want to think about whatâs behind the characters, this is actually an okay place to start. Look at Princess Leia at the beginning and when they rescue her (and after). She is the proactive, pursuit character, not Luke. But when sheâs not on screen⌠itâs Luke.
When I look at MC vs OS this way, it severs them from being âLukeâ and makes it two characters/ two perspectives.
So far I donât quite get any of the analogies people have shared, but I see that the second half of my diagram also has a rotation, as we see here:
Iâm going to try an analogy. See if this works:
Marriage: You have you and your spouse on a personal level, highs and lows, joys and pains, closing in or separating, progressing like a ray with varying frequencies (RS) You have You as an individual with your issues, often private and reactionary, tied to your passions (MC). Your spouse has their issues, which always seem to center around trying to get you to change who you are or causing you to have to sacrifice your âwantsâ for their âneedsâ (IC) and you have your car payments, house payments, kidsâ needs, home repairs, movie choices, guests visiting (OS)
UPDATE:
I forgot the main point. My question is how to see a story like this. Iâm writing about a shy boy who fixes the worldâs problem.
A boy has a relationship (the ray that brightens and dims) with a dog; A shy boy turns into a brave boy, tied to his passions; An old man prefers the innocence of the boy; In the course of every day life, a meteor is coming and only one boy can program a meteor destructing ray to stop it.
But still, with either of these, I donât understand the analogy of the Mind. How itâs solving the problem.
In economics we have bankers, money, stores and consumers. All of these work together for economics to work. The problem: Survival. Bankers manipulate, money moves, stores manipulate, consumers debate.
At risk of totally having misunderstood what youâre asking for as analogies, hereâs a cool little bit I read this morning and the two sources it referenced which I thought sounds possibly close:
âScientists like Einstein couldnât do laboratory experiments. They relied on thought experiments, and a thought experiment is like a historical narrative. And a narrative is an investigative tool. It uses the mind to isolate variables in the effort to simulate how something happened, in science and in history, and to determine the causes.â
â Historians Can Be Scientists Too(Complement with Thought Experiments )
If a thought experiment is a narrative that a scientist or historian or economist uses to model something thatâs really difficult to prove directly, then the storymind model - and all narratives for that matter - also works nicely as a thought experiment.
You probably know way more about economics than I do, but am I close by saying economists used to model consumer behaviors using the ârational consumerâ, and the collective actions of thousands of rational consumers would therefore deliver predictable effects? That would be a single OS-like POV. I would guess an economic report might try to be more relate-able by throwing in a case study modeling an individual consumer, maybe with their more individualized choices, and maybe even their less rational choices as well, maybe even trying out a subjective first person POV to really get inside that consumerâs head. So weâre coming closer to two or more POVâs instead of just one, and a demonstration that how the individual consumer behaves might see the problem of survival very differently than the average collective action of thousands of rational consumers does.
If that economist - or an historian - tries to do what you did in your model of the âYou and your spouseâ marriage above, they could easily model three different POVâs on the survival problem - MC, IC, and RS. But instead of the OS being the objective view of the economics of the single marriage as you have it, the economist would juxtapose âYou and your spouseâ and the marriage within the OS context of the big economic picture the economist is working with.
So⌠a storymind is a thought experiment that requires juxtaposing the results of four different thought experiments at once?
For the majority of the time that I have worked with Dramatica, I also didnât understand the analogy. Itâs not that important. 100% donât worry about it.
four interacting threads in one thought experiment, maybe
Not sure if itâs helpful, but non-Dramatica writing teacher Matt Bird has a âhead - heart - gutâ theory of how polarized character ensembles often work (e.g. Spock = Head, Kirk = Gut, McCoy = Heart). It seems to me that this is a less precise but possibly more approachable version of Dramaticaâs OS characteristics. Anyway, according to Bird, the reason ensembles like this can work is that every argument/conflict in the show is actually âan externalized version of an internal debateâ. This sounds a lot like the Storymind to me.
So another way to way to state this (maybe?) is to ask, what is important about this character from a given throughline perspective?
So from a panned out, objective perspective â like if you were telling Star Wars as a history â Lukeâs importance is his role in taking over leadership of the rebellion and blowing up the Death Star. (Physics/Doing). But from a personal âIâ perspective, whatâs important is his Future (Where am I going? What will my life look like?), and the fact that he is secretly the son of a Jedi (Situation).
EDIT â Actually whatâs important is Lukeâs Progress, not his Future.
