Candle Craft 5: The Story Mind
by Royal McGraw
Royal McGraw has written professionally for film, television, comics, and games for over 20 years. He led development on the mobile smash hit Choices: Stories You Play and currently serves as CEO of Candlelight Games.
Welcome! This is the fifth installment of a multi-part series intended to provide you with 10 Quick And Actionable Adjustments that you can make to your own writing process to improve your storytelling. Some of these process adjustments will be strategic, offering suggestions to improve how you think about storytelling from a big-picture standpoint. Some of these process adjustments will be tactical, offering suggestions to improve how you think about tackling scenes or even individual lines of dialogue. In all cases, these lessons have been hard-won, gleaned from over 20 years of experience writing across a variety of different mediums.
In the previous installment of Candle Craft, we discussed the strategy of undermine and underline to help build out your central theme across the arc of the story. In this installment, we’re going to explore the same subject but with a more nuanced approach.
What is the Story Mind?
In 1993, Melanie Anne Philips and Chris Huntley wrote a book and simultaneously developed a software suite called Dramatica. This book and software suite advertised itself as “the most profoundly original and complete paradigm of story since Aristotle wrote Poetics.” These are bold claims! Probably not true!
But that doesn’t mean the book doesn’t contain a lot of value. I happened to pick up a reprint of the book while pursuing my MFA in Screenwriting. In the book, Philips and Huntley propose a number of novel approaches toward the intersection of theme and character, but the best and most wholly applicable is The Story Mind. To use their words:
One of the unique concepts that set Dramatica apart from all either theories is the assertion that every complete story is a model of the mind’s problem solving process. This Story Mind… like our own minds, bring[s] many conflicting considerations to bear on the issue.
Or to put it more in my own words, more plainly:
The characters, plot, theme, and genre play out an argument that the audience gets to read in the case of a book, or see in the case of a television show or movie.
This is an extraordinarily powerful concept, and it recontextualizes a lot of conventional writing advice.
Needs Versus Wants
Most writing classes cover Needs Versus Wants; this is the tension between what a character thinks they want and what they actually need in order to grow. As typically stated:
Wants are external surface-level goals
Needs are internal emotional growth
In writing Candle Craft, I skipped right over Needs Versus Wants. Why? Because I consider it to be a misdirection. In this paradigm, writing instructors are putting a label on what they’ve encountered, not how the thing itself was constructed from parts.
So like good mechanics, let’s get under the hood.
Your character doesn’t need or want anything; it’s just a character in a story that you, the author, are writing.
Meanwhile, you the author absolutely do want something: you want to communicate to your reader. You have a theme.
Your character’s need is your theme manifested via narrative.
Using the concept of Undermine & Underline, we might rephrase the Needs Versus Wants dynamic as so:
What your character needs is a manifestation of your theme
What your character wants is a good argument against your theme
Pretty good! But using the concept of Story Mind, we might expand the Needs Versus Wants dynamic as follows:
What your character needs is a manifestation of your theme
What your character wants is a good argument either against your theme or for a different theme
What Story Mind suggests–and I very much buy into this–is that the main character is not unique. Every single character and plot point exists in the exact same conversation: your story.
Moving Forward
To carry these ideas into our own work, you first need to answer the following questions:
What is the central theme I’d like to pursue?
What are some great arguments for that central theme?
What are some great arguments against that central theme?
What are some great arguments for different themes that are in some way contradictory to your central theme?
Once you have those answers written down, you can begin crafting characters and scenes that argue their positions well.
You’ll immediately discover that your characters have powerful and deep things to say about the world, and you’ll immediately discover rich conflicts to mine for drama or laughs.
Harnessing the power of Story Mind allows you to look past all of the unnecessary clutter and mysticism that people sometimes peddle about storytelling. At its core the whole thing is simple: a good story is an entertaining argument for what you want to say.
TIP #4: The theme of your story is an assertion, and your characters dramatize an argument over the truth of that assertion
One potential shortcoming of the Story Mind approach to writing is that it can be taken too far. Just because there is one argument does not mean that characters should think, speak, or act in similar ways.
Next time, we’ll discuss techniques to make sure character voices are always distinct in: Matrarch, Patriarch, Scholar, Fool.