Justified and Ancient

Let's sidetrack a moment

The Dramatica document now goes into something it calls Deep Theory.  Having thought about character elements and story throughlines, for the first time it speaks about actions and behaviours, things which don't just exist as backstory and setting for your character, but the way in which your characters are going to behave and build up their repositories of attitudes and methods.


You got attitude!

Deep Theory is, as the name suggests, deep.  It concerns questions of the inner workings of characters, not just describing what they are as we have just done, but how they got there.  It also looks as how the main character gets to face the problem they are faced with in the story, and how does that story affect the overall story.  It addresses the issue of why the main character doesn't just solve this problem immediately, and why it requires an impact character to take him to the point of change.


Justification and Validation

When characters have a conflict between what they want to do and what they think they ought to do, then they will come up with excuses, justifications for their behaviour.  "There was nothing I could do." or "It's for your own good" or "I had to teach him a lesson".  These justifications imply that they have looked at alternatives and chosen the one most likely to achieve the desired outcome, rather than the one which was easiest or comfortable.

From the perspective of the characters, they do not know if the actions they choose are going to work in the end, only "truth" will out, but in the case of a Story Mind, "truth" is whatever the author makes it.  So it's up to the author to decide which of these justifications turn out to be - justified.  In some cases, it's obvious to the characters which is the correct thing to do - there may be a consensus - but even then, the author might choose to prove them all wrong and show them they chose badly.

Justification is the character giving a reason - or believable story -  for choosing a specific action which may later turn out to be falsified, or based on an incorrect model of the universe.  Only the author can validate a justification by showing which one "came true" in the story universe.


Problem Solving

When a character is faced with a problem, they may propose a set of actions which they hope will get them closer to a solution.  The invention and choosing of the most appropriate action is called Problem Solving.  Like Justification, each character has no idea (but hopes) that the solutions offered will turn out to be correct, and again only the author will have the power to demonstrate that to them by showing the real outcomes.

In a story, one of the main or impact characters should be choosing the best path, and one the worst path.  Other characters will choose paths which don't get there directly.


How do problems arise?

How do people get to have problems in the first place?  Some problems are imposed from the outside - a man loses his job, a spouse dies, someone is stranded on a desert isle - these are problems which cannot be controlled or mitigated.  In Dramatica, these are called Inequities, or unfairness.  Sometimes the inequity is caused by the behaviour of someone else, or a physical situation.

People then try to either change the environment or change their attitudes, in order to reduce the inequity and restore happiness.  If they choose to change the environment, then they will embark on courses of action to rearrange their external world. If they choose to change their attitude, then they will work on their inner world.  This is what they are driven to do in the first instance.  How they choose to do this is coloured by their experiences and justifications.


Chain of events

Unfortunately, changing may involve several steps, and people are not very good at keeping track.  The example Dramatica gives is about a waitress wanting to scratch her nose. It goes as follows:

A waitress comes through a one-way door from a kitchen when her nose begins to itch.  She is carrying plates so can't scratch it.  So she decides to put the plates down, but there are no clear surfaces for her to do so.  She tries to call the waiter to clear some space for her, but it's too noisy for him to hear.  So she calls out to a table-cleaner to go get the waiter, so he can clear some space, so she can put the plates down and she can scratch her nose.

She seems to have solved her problem, but it was a very inefficient way of going about it.  She could have just used her shoulder to scratch her nose, but because the immediate problem didn't have an immediate solution to hand, she got involved solving the problem of no free hands.  When the problem of no free hands was insoluble, she looked for a way to solve that problem, and so on.

Instead of concentrating her efforts on solving the original problem, she proposed a solution which itself had a problem, and then she set about solving this problem instead of the original one.  But because that was thwarted, she went on and on solving problems which were nothing to do with the original one.

She might have felt justified in her course of action, since it actually resulted in a positive outcome - her nose being scratched - but the cost and annoyance of such a circuitous route means it is not satisfying.  She was unable to see that the individual costs of all the steps she took to get there far outweighed the benefit of the actual solution. 

When characters are trying to solve problems, they sometimes keep throwing good money after bad, and have become invested in a chain of events where they have lost track of the cumulative costs of the previous steps.  They can become obsessed with solving problems which have nothing to do with an actual Inequity, but only with the solutions they proposed.


Learning from Experience

So how do characters choose which course of action to go for?  And why do they sometimes choose long side-tracks instead of a more direct route? Well, this is due to the way they evaluate the problem.  If everybody had to come afresh to each problem, then we would never learn from experience. We apply rules-of-thumb that have served us well in the past such as "there's no smoke without fire".

These idiomatic expressions are known as truisms, generally believed truths which are mostly true.  Unfortunately, they are true only up until the point when they are not.  If the context of a problem changes, then the person may be unaware of this, and try to use a truism as if it was knowledge.  if we have seen the sun come up every day of our lives we will assume it will happen tomorrow - until it doesn't.

When a character is faced with a situation where their previous knowledge stops working, there is usually a delay in the person realising this, because they are likely to see the new event as an exception which proves the rule.  After a suitable number or disproves, only then do they start to disbelieve.  Another reason is that the rule may have been built on by other rules, and to suddenly disbelieve it would mean dismantling an entire edifice of belief, and people do not do that lightly.


That's all for now

That's quite a splurge of Dramatica, and not a lot of practical stuff in there.  I just included it because I find this sort of stuff very instructive when it comes to imagining how characters evaluate problems and come up with solutions - sometimes badly.  Tomorrow we start on the Elements of Structure.