Once all the corpus material, the list of people and their relative autobiographical texts have been obtained, the narrative can be composed.
For them we work on three axes; the main dilemma, the personal dilemmas of the characters, the structure and the themes.
Dilemma
According to Dramática, every Great Story Story contains a dilemma that is defined as ...
a problem for which there is no acceptable solution.
You can expand your information on the Dramatica blog.
What worries now is how to discover these dilemmas. There are two ways to find them.
The autobiographical dilemma
Or, in a text the dilemma is so obvious or is named directly by the autobiographical authors. This often occurs in texts about open conflicts such as war conflicts.
What these texts often hide is the personal dilemma. Although problems such as violence, hunger or lack of resources may seem great, they are not necessarily insoluble. Often there are open conflicts, because contemporaries believe that they will solve those problems through war or some other grand event.
Dilemmas may seem very small and insignificant, but they are always related to people's personal ethics.
To give an example, a goal that is not reached is not a dilemma. The person with that objective can manage to abandon, respectively change, her objective in view of the great difficulty that her reach has, or can try to fight harder.
According to Dramatic theory this would count as a dilemma and personal growth. But it is not what the ASUWADA project is looking for.
We look for dilemmas where there is no objective solution. We take the idea of the dilemma as
... a problem for which there is no acceptable solution ...
very literal. For example, a doctor who has sworn not to do harm and at the same time has to take care of a terminally ill person, whose treatment only adds to suffering, is faced with an existential dilemma.
Euthanasia is not a solution to the dilemma. And it is not the intention here to make a value judgment on euthanasia itself, as a practice. What is of interest here is the fact that the act of what is often referred to as "ending suffering" is nothing more than a disguised way of saying that one is "ending life." It is far from providing a life free of suffering.
But letting the person live, even doing everything possible to make his life last as long as possible, does not solve the dilemma either, since the doctor does not comply with the premise of "do no harm."
The doctor could redefine his role and abandon the Hippocratic oath, or even stop being a doctor. But nothing he can do will (apparently) solve this dilemma that is part of the Hippocratic oath and therefore of the figure of the doctor that defines him (at least at that time and in large part) as a person.
It should not be thought now that such a problem can suddenly be solved through a narrative. They are ancient dilemmas that do not have a universal answer. But people in their biographies sometimes find very creative and original solutions to deal with such a situation and even grow as a person.
This is what we are looking for in texts.
The researcher's dilemma
We are not always lucky enough to find this kind of answer in the autobiographies we analyze. At other times, it is simply not our primary concern.
An alternative approach is to start with a personal dilemma of the researcher, in our case the community that participates in participatory historiography.
What are the dilemmas posed by today's society?
Is there a shared existential dilemma?
These are some of the questions that can be asked.
Sometimes this approach is too personal and intimate to begin with.
Then, it is proposed to use as an alternative great challenges or dilemmas proposed for today's society.
Examples are:
Structure
The structural and central concepts of the plot are:
The four visions
The mind of the story
The main argument, the hypothesis (Grand Argument Story, GAS)
Once the characters, the protagonist and antagonist and the main dilemma have been defined, a hypothesis or a Great Argument is created in the form of a message that you want to transmit to the audience.
The mind of the story is molded and the four visions (Throughlines) are organized.
You can find more theoretical information on the Dramatics Blog.
La forma más fácil de crear la parte estructural de forma coherente es usar el Software de Dramatica.
Themes
Finally, it remains to associate each structural point of the story with a theme.
To learn more about the topics in Dramatica see the Dramatica Blog.
Tabea Hirzel
Saturday, January 23, 2021