Outlining Your Chapters Using The Dramatica Quad

An inspirational workshop intuitively turns to Dramatica to explain how to structure a written piece of work.

In Long Beach today for an Abraham Hicks Vortex of Attraction workshop I heard something that sounded quite familiar.

For those who don't know,[^1] Esther Hicks is an inspirational writer along the lines of a Wayne Dyer and a proponent of the Law of Attraction. Tapping into "infinite intelligence" she offers advice and recommendations for people seeking to attract more of what they want in their life and repelling that which they don't.

Regardless of whether or not you buy into where her intelligence comes from, listening to her lecture is an inspiring experience--particularly for writers and artists. I was invited as a plus one, but was pleasantly surprised at the amount of useful information she gave for those looking to build momentum in their lives...

...especially the advice she gave to an amateur writer asking for suggestions on how to write her book on raising children. The writer knew she wanted to communicate all that she had learned through her experiences with her children but wasn't sure where to start.

Esther recommended she structure each chapter of her book in four stages:

1. Write about your situation
2. Write about your response
3. Write about the action you took
4. Meditation

Sound familiar?

Now it wasn't clear whether or not the fourth step was a personal meditation on the words written or a fourth and final section elaborating on a suggested meditation for the reader, but the pattern is clear:

Esther described the four base elements of every Dramatica quad.

1. Universe
2. Mind
3. Activity
4. Psychology

The fourth--as with every fourth element in a Dramatica quad--doesn't quite fit in, yet seemingly is the perfect missing piece. In Dramatica, Psychology differs from Mind in that it looks at HOW we think rather than WHAT we think. In other words, precisely what meditation seeks to modify.

For those requiring a visual representation, here is the top (and theoretically, extreme bottom) level of the Dramatica Table of Story Elements:

Traces of dramatic or narrative structure in real life interest me. Finding evidence here compels me to think more into the event. Esther is someone deeply in tune with her own intuition--and her own intuition listed out the four elements of a narrative quad.

You could feel the level of understanding rise when she mentioned that fourth and final piece--as if completing the quad completed the understanding within each and every one of the storyminds gathered there.

[^1]: I just learned about her in the past couple of months.