How does one create clarity in family relationships in the diagram below? It isn't clear who is the mother and who is the daughter, as there is no direction arrows. I suppose I could add "spouse" to make it clear, but that's a slippery slope these days.
A screenshot? In the forum? There shouldn't be a limit, except image size.
Any reason I cant upload a screenshot today?
I think we all agree about the broad idea of seeing the relationships visualized in some way, but the details are more elusive. It's like how Star Trek had a vague idea that touch pads would be awesome, but they hadn't really articulated the UI, so they just avoided zooming in.
What we have right now is a movie prop, and what needs to happen is building a real one. We have lots of thoughts on it, and are not starting from zero. It's just that there are many things that seem to obviously be part of the same concept of following relationships (e.g. conflicts, emotion curves, relationship folders etc), and unifying them is a brain-teaser.
If this chart were a representation of the log line, it would look pretty interesting without anything else supporting it. Just looking at it raises questions that lead to beats in the story. So I guess this may be a useful diagrammatic technique, even thou it's a thin concept in Causality. But I may be using this in an unintended way.
My only objection is against making thin concepts like just a space to put folders and draw lines, and then inventing two other relationship concepts elsewhere that are in no way connected.
I do fully support some kind of graphical representation of relationships, but it's still a bit up in the air for me what it should look like and what it is we're really tracking, and what it means to the rest of the app.
And I do feel that those other things should have been worked out before we went ahead and made a graphical canvas. We all have the same intuition that *something* like that could work. But in this area, we didn't take all the steps yet to make it real. For some of these things, it takes a while to make all the pieces fit together, and this also includes many things that you don't know about yet.
OK I get that. However, seeing relationships at a glance is still important as a companion "map" toa character bible, which SHOULD be able to be derived from Causality in some future update.
IMO relationships are a property of conflict, or the way you put it, conflict is a "subset" of a relationship. Order of dependency matters. You can't have a conflict without a relationship (even one's relationship to oneself, as in "i'm conflicted!"). But you CAN have a relationship without a conflict (rare).
This whole thing reminds me of the old "Detective Relationship Chart". It's part org chart, part cause and effect. I suppose the "beats" of an investigation are based on "motives" which that kind of chart is supposed to draw to the surface if you look at it long enough. So taking that concept over to the writing world, aren't authors discovering future conflict opportunities via relationships, character traits and conflicts? Don't those eventually become the basis of important beats?
But I get that the "concept" of a relationship map needs to have some way of representing itself as a beat in Causality.
Hi,
It's important without getting too deep to know that we're not happy with the relationship canvas. We tend to be extremely conservative about adding features before they're mature, because the moment you release a half-baked feature, people start using it, and now we have a responsibility to keep the feature even if it's wrong. Such is the relationship canvas in my view.
There's no question that relationships are a thing, and maybe a relationship canvas is still useful, but it's a very thin concept, basically just a drawing program bolted into the app allowing you to arrange folders on a desktop and make lines between them.
What's missing is relationships as an actual concept. For example, you're right now forced to choose a character who will hold all the relationship events in their folder, and it doesn't feel right whichever character you choose. There should be relationship folders. And what actually happens in a relationship? Emotion tracking is coming soon, which also has a concept of conflict, basically that competing emotions cause tension when they're both true or both false. Is conflict really a subset of a relationship?
It's these kinds of questions that have to be answered in order to talk about relationships, and seen from that angle, the relationship canvas was released too soon, and is in danger of being the tail wagging the dog in terms of defining what relationships really is. So this is likely to be an area with a deep change.
Until then, I'm not sure there is a good way to do what you're after. The relationship constellation you're after is really a circle around them, not lines between them. I think you should just do the best approximation with the tools that are available right now. But I'm not 100.00% sure the relationship canvas will survive in its current form.