Hawkins Scale of Consiousness can be a great storytelling tool.

Allow me to explain...

This is David Hawkins Scale of Consciousness.

It shows the emotional expression of people as they increase their vibration and get closer to enlightenment.

Whether it is true or valid is irrelevant to out discussion here.

We’re looking at it as a tool for creating stories

With great stories

EMOTION DICTATES PLOT

The emotion comes first which then tells you what events to write about.

Beginners get this backwards.

They come up with a bunch of mere events without the emotional journey.

Using the Scale of Consciousness fixes this.

A HEROIC TALE

A happy story involves the story of a character moving Up the scale.

So the protagonist might start off as a timid person (Fear)
Suffer a tragedy (grief)
Tackle their demons (anger)
And stumble bc of ego (pride)
Before overcoming & being ready for life (hope)

See how it works?

And this was linear for the sake of simplicity.

You can move a character up &down the scale, snakes and ladders-like to build tension.

If you reflect this is how real life journeys transpire. Two steps forward one step back.

Boring stories are too smooth

The emphasis on emotional movement naturally gives your story propulsion.

In fact, if you just think up a sequence of different movements up and down the scale, your mind will easily form a plausible plot within these to manifest.

This system is great for idea generation.

TRAGEDY

A tragic tale involves a character ultimately ending up at a lower place on the scale

For contrast they will usually start at a place of neutrality or higher and then descend

Romeo starts at neutrality &moves as high as Love & joy before descending all the way down

Hamlet sinks from neutrality all the way down to the very depth of despair and apathy

Othello too

Any character who murders or kills themselves is at the very bottom of the scale

And this is the value of tragedy, to make us reflect on the bottom without having to go there

STORIES ARE SURVIVAL INFORMATION FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS ENCODED EMOTIONALLY

They don’t resonate and stick without this element

So we need to learn to shape stories in terms of waves of emotion

Hawkins Scale is an invaluable reference for this

Emotion dictates plot. Always

Thanks for reading. I hope this was useful to you.

This may seem esoteric and niche but there is a lot of hard won storytelling info in here that I haven’t encountered elsewhere.

Also thanks to everyone who helped get me to 5k.

Soaring Twenties begins https://twitter.com/thomasjbevan1/status/1318192979006423041?s=20
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