Melanie Anne Phillips

The Elements of Character In the Story Mind, characters represent different facets of the human psyche. Archetypal characters illustrate broad personality traits whereas more Complex characters illustrate combinations of specific human qualities. When a story seeks to explore overall aspects of human nature, it is best populated with Archetypal characters. A story that delves into specific attributes requires the use of Complex characters. Just as with the personality of a real individual, a single story is usually comprised of a mixture of both broad, Arthetypal traits and and complex attributes as well. In fact, Archetypal and Complex characters are all made up from the same essential elements, just as real people all possess the same palette of emotions and componants of reason. It is the way we put the pieces together that determines our personalities as individuals, and the same is true for characters. The Archetypal arrangement simply groups a whole family of similar traits in...

Your Story's Mind To an audience, every story has a distinct personality, almost as if it were a person rather than a work of fiction. As with the people we meet, some stories are memorable and others we forget as soon as they are gone. Some are the life of the party, but get stale rather quickly. Some initially strike us as dull, but become familiar to the point we look forward to seeing them again. When we first encounter a person or a story, we tend to classify it in broad categories. We might label someone as a bully, a nerd, or a money-grubbing shark. Similarly, we might label a story as a Romance, an Adventure, or a situation comedy. As with the people we meet, the more time we spend with stories the less we see them as generalized types and the more we see the traits that define them as individuals. Some stories might like to scare us, some to make us laugh. One story might be interested in the Civil War while another is heavily into science fiction. One story might ...

What if your story had a mind of it's own, as if it were a character unto itself with its own personality, its own psychology? Suppose your characters were seen as the conflicting drives of this "Story Mind," theme as its troubled value standards, plot as its efforts to resolve its problems, and genre as the Story Mind's overall personality? More importantly, what if you could psychoanalyze your story's mind to learn who your characters should be, what thematic issues you should explore, how your plot should unfold, and what unique twists define your story's genre? In this book you'll learn about all facets of the Story Mind. You'll find out how to create a personality profile for your story and to use it as a map to exactly what your story is about and what happens in it. STRUCTURE vs. PASSION The Story Mind approach to story is a structural approach. But no one reads a book or goes to a movie to enjoy a good structure. No author writes because he ...

POINTS OF VIEW To examine the Story Mind, we need to know how to look at it. If audiences only looked AT stories, then there would only be one point of view from which to see the Story Mind. But the audience not only looks AT stories, but also becomes involved IN them. It follows that there must be more than one way to look at the structure of a story. In fact, there are four principal points of view that are necessary to fully satisfy the mind of the audience, and each of these is represented in the Story Mind as well. We'll begin with the most obvious and then explore some points of view that many authors fail to include in their structure, leaving serious holes in their stories. The first point of view is the easiest: the OBJECTIVE view. We've already encountered the Objective View when we described how we might look at a story as if we were a general on hill, watching a battle in the valley below. From that perspective, we can't identify the characters by name as w...

Here's a couple paragraphs I penned to open a story I put aside and haven't gotten back to yet. Just like the imagery: The morning dissolved the night like acid on a blind man's eyes. Cruel colors lanced the sky, gouging out the stars with jagged streaks. The warm, acrid after-taste of the milk I had guzzled last night curdled under my tongue. I play a little game with my teeth when I neglect the brush. I've found that if I jut my jaw out in a slight overbite, I can press the tip of the upper incisor down against the side of the lower incisor and make it stick. Then, if I open my jaw with almost excruciating delicacy, the two teeth will hold together for a moment, finally realeasing with a satisfying tug.

Back in '97 I came up with a way to apply Mental Relativity psychology theory to interactive search engine algorithms which would not only learn the interests of a user and predict what else they would want, but also predict things they were going to want that they did not YET want. This idea would cause search engines to lead the user, rather than simply parse data and follow. Further, it could guide users to new areas of interst they had never before considered and of which they were completely unaware. Here 'tis: A Mental Relativity Approach to Search Engines Proposed by Melanie Anne Phillips The caliber of a search engine is judged by the quality of its results. When it returns the expected information it is deemed accurate. When it brings information of greater detail or ferrets out information that is more obscure, it is deemed powerful. But if a search engine could anticipate a user's wants and return information not yet specifically requested - that would seem t...

Here's an 18 minute mp3 recording of some basic Dramatica character concepts for a program I never got around to completing. Thought I might as well share it with y'all. Hope you find it useful. Characters, Dramatica Style (Click to listen, right click to download)