Diagram Madness

After the last two incredibly long posts, including an aside that wasn't really about Activated Story, I decided that this blog needs a little visual interest.

So here it is, the diagram of Activated Story. Fairly simple and self explanatory. Notice there's no "conflict" or obstacles. That's because opposition happens in three areas, depending on the story: 1) opposition to the actions to change the interim condition, 2) opposition to the ending condition, or 3) opposition to the activated character herself. I'll have more to say about conflict later. Right now, I'll rest and bask in my beautiful artwork.

I'm not the only crackpot to try and diagram drama and story. Take a look at Wagner's ideal.

Don't speak German? Here are the translations:
Wortsprache - written language
Geschichte - narrative history
Verstand - mind/intellect/understanding
Phantasie - imagination
Epos - epic
Griechische Tragodie - Greek tragedy
Schauspiel und Oper - Pageant/Spectacle and Opera
Gefuhl - feeling/emotion
Vernunft - good sense/reason
Tonsprache - musical language
Lyrik - poetry
Mythos - myth
Vernunft - good sense/reason
Worttonsprache - [not really translatable. wort is word, sprache is language. I take this to mean "wordplay" or "verbose speech".]
Vollendetes Drama - perfect drama [analogous to "perfect rhyme", in other words, drama of a particular and limited form]
Dramatisher Mythos - dramatic myth
Mensh - man

Does Wagner's diagram make sense? No. Do his operas make sense? No. Is the diagram cool? Yes. Are his opera's cool? Often. Such is art.

Us diagramers are a strange and crackpot lot. It is our attempt to take a Google Earth look at our creations, to obscure the trees for the forest, to catch a glimpse of the irreducible, to stand above the "work" like the physicians of old who were theorticians and prescribers who never touched their patients, unlike the common laborers of medicine, the surgeons and barbers.

But we're laborers, too, and these theoretical models are often distractions from grabbing the shovel or the axe.

Take this strange diagram I ran accross. It's called an enneagram (9 sided star polygon), after the personality system devised by G. I. Gurdjieff and is incomprehensible to me. I suppose you start at 1 and go clockwise around the circle, with the option of following either the dotted arrows or the solid ones. I could not use this to develop a story or plot. Can you?

Numerology, I Ching, and Astrology all use a system, not dissimilar to this one, to try and explain personalities and motivations. For that matter, so does the software program, "Dramatica". Give me a break. I need something I can use, a template to follow, a guide for problem solving.

I'm a big fan of Joseph Campbell. Nobody will believe this, but I was a fan before the Bill Moyers series that made him a pop self-help icon. The man took all these world stories and distilled them! He extracted their common ideas! He gave us the keys to uber storytelling! Yeah, yeah, I know the accusations of anti-semitism and anti-feminism. I turn my blind eye to them and rationalize that it wasn't the Jews he didn't like, it was their mythology; and it wasn't that he was a chauvinsit, it was that he was of an earlier time. What he did do was provide a template for a particular, and powerful, kind of story.

Here's another easier-to-read diagram of the Hero's Journey.

Uh, you go counter-clockwise.

I don't know why.

It's a good dramatic theory, but you have to know the definitions of the various points along the circle. It's not very self-explanatory.

I came up with this (how do you spell cacamame?) idea of Activated Story because I was unhappy with the unspecific definitions of the other descriptions of dramatic theory. Take Freytag's pyramid.

The NaNoWriMo folks (National Novel Writing Month) who sponser writing a 150 page novel in a month, also have a script writing event in April (which I plan to participate in). Their advice to new playwrights is to follow the Freytag paradigm.

Exposition = my Initial Condition; Inciting Incident = Activating event. Rising Action? A vague term that refers to conflicts that increase in stakes. Climax = action that brings about the Ending Condition. Falling Action? I never got this notion. Turning point? Why is it so late? Doesn't it happen with the climax? Why is Falling Action the same length as the Rising Action? Resolution = Ending Condition.

This diagram simply confuses me. The pyramid as a symbol is rife within other systems.

Here is a plot diagram, which uses some of the same terms, namely Rising and Falling Action. At least the sides of the pyramid are more indicative of what really happens in drama: the slope of conflict is shallower than the slope of Denouement.

But it's a metaphoric map. How useful is it? If you're lost in New York, do you want a metaphoric map of the subway, or a representational one?

Syd Field, the screenwriter mentor extraordinare, expounds upon this diagram for the screenplay. His pyramid is less steep, he calls exposition setup, rising and falling action ascending and descending action, the middle of the show Confrontation, and introduces the idea of "plot points", events that happen which change the direction of the story. Huh?

I like my diagram best. It's prettier. It's self-explanatory. Not all stories follow my paradigm. That's ok, because it's a subset of the notion of story: the descripton of a journey from one state to another. In my version, the change from one state to another is temporary, and the new state is intolerable to someone who takes action to change it to a state that he can live with. This is what Activated Story and Activated Character are all about.

JIM