Hi there! I am Lady Eruwaedhiel's mom, but I hope you won't hold that
against me. We have been working on the Meta Essence/Essence
Mapping idea this morning and I had some ideas/questions about it. I think
this is a totally great concept! I was in love with the idea from the
moment Elizabeth told me about it. I taught myself html and dabbled in
CSS and I'm a terrible word nerd so the possibilities of the system were
immediately apparent and appreciated! We had a bit of trouble getting
our heads around the concept at first, but I think I have it figured out now.

I think a couple of things make it difficult to explain to "outsiders" *grin*

1. What you are using is a nesting or hierarchical language, but it's written
(at least in the forum) in a non-nesting non-hierarchical way. After I finally
got the concept down I realized it's much like a basic outline. (dots are placeholders)

TOPIC
I. First Point
....A. Important subpoint
........1.Blah Blah
............a. subpoint
............b. subpoint
........2.Blah Blah 2
............a. etc.
This format would work really well in a spreadsheet! One of the main
things that was confusing us was the lack of physically represented
structure to help define the terms. Which brings me to number 2.

2. I think the system would be much easier to understand if the terms you
used for names ("metaphor" "class" "element") were either less common
(even made up) or less conflicted with our everyday definitions for those
words. In the process of figuring this out I typed up Emeth's sister's
example from the "What is Essence" topic in the structured way that I
was referring to. I'll include it at the end of this post.Using the first couple
of lines from her post I'll illustrate what I mean about the terms (the dots
are used as placeholders to keep the structure intact):


....BODY {Motion [Speed (quivering flags)
..............................(the flirt of butterfly wings)

The Meta-Essence titles applied to these parts would be as follows:
METAPHOR NAME {Metaphor [Class (element)
...........................................(element)

However... BODY is not a metaphor! Nor is Motion. The true metaphors
in the system are quivering flags and butterfly wings! This confused me!
Therefore I would suggest a change in terms. After looking at the
example she gave and the definitions you all posted for each part of the
system I came up with these, though I'm sure there are many terms that
would work equally well. I also added an overarching topical title which in
the above example would be HORSE or the name of the particular horse.

SUBJECT
ASPECT {Qualifier [Characteristic (metaphor)]}
----------------------------------------------------------------

SUBJECT: name of the object, character, person, event, concept, etc
that you are describing.

ASPECT: general quantifier or broad aspect you will be describing; body,
soul, spirit, mind, that which is immediately apparent (1st Level),that
which is just under the surface (2nd Level), that which is deepest in a
thing (3rd Level), span of time, etc.

Qualifier: specific, allegorical qualifiers of the aspect that encloses
them;light, depth,density, motion, image/sight, scent, sound, texture,
taste, balance, complexity, beauty, size, etc.

Characteristic: (this part deviates a little from your set up) what binds
together the individual metaphors you will be using? In her example
quivering flags, butterfly wings, and archer drawing his bow all
characterize the Speed of the Motion of the BODY of the HORSE we are
describing. I would consider the colors, descriptions, poems etc to be
part of the next classification, which I would call the metaphor.

metaphor: different ways of articulating the nature of the attribute that it is in. They can either be abstract and nebulous, concrete and precise, or indirect and allegorical. There are only a few that we use, but they can be as powerful and as flexible as you have the skill to use them. There are six main kinds: color, color pair, color triad, description (a sentence, paragraph, or even a poem), percentage, or a reference.


Elpis's example in my suggested structure:
HORSE
....BODY {Motion [Speed (quivering flags)
...............................(the flirt of butterfly wings)
...............................(an archer slowly drawing back his bow)]
..................[Variability (moaning wind)
................................(roiling clouds)]}
.........{Beauty [Strength (gothic arch)
................................(momentarily arrested power)]
...................[Color...(bark of a redwood tree)
................................(mahogany - dull red)]}

....SPIRIT {Strengths [Depth (a dog's brown eyes)]
........................[Loyalty (Mt. St. Helens)]
........................[Pride (Reepicheep)]
........................[Gentility (the soft, black eyes of kywedim child)]
........................[Density (a translucent black agate - 60%)]}

Wow. Very well thought out.

This helped me understand essence a bit more, but I think I still need to go back and reread it a few times before I totally understand it.

Understandable, Alaethea. I hardly understand it myself, and I worked with her on it for hours.

Wow. I was really impressed by that! I have yet to try Essence.. but this helped me understand some of the things I was a little mixed up on!

I am officially glad you are on board White Raven.

I normally use indentation in the same manner that I code perl, php, css, and html, but the forum's bbcode would not allow me to do that. So I went with what I did because I was in a hurry. I like the use of dots as placeholders. Thank you.

As for your renaming of the different attributes, I agree completely, except to comment that your Character attribute can be optional, as in a few of the cases of my dear sister's essence map. You redid it wonderfully, although we think that there were a few extraneous tags put in.

Hmmm... we need to work together and put together a report on the concept and implementation of essence and essence mapping for new users. Following all these threads can be confusing.

Yay!
I was hoping you wouldn't be bothered about me suggesting things.
(you never know how people will take things!)

Yes, I agree that there are some extra tags in there
that are more intuitively understood and therefore
not necessary (especially the "class/characteristic" level.)
I only put them in because I'm a nerd LOL.
It all has to match for me. *big grin*

When Eruwaedhiel and I were discussing it yesterday
I suddenly thought that it was somewhat like finding
the object's "true name!" except longer. lol
I'm curious what inspired your creation of the system?

Raven

PS I love homeschoolers!
They are so creative.
It's amazing to me how interesting they and their ideas are.

That actually helped a bit. I know I could never come up with something like this. It's hard enough to understand it! lol

I know how that is, I like my code very neat and orderly (positioning before size, size before padding and margins, font effects before backgrounds, etc.).

We made the concept up (or discovered it) many years ago. I had this theory about our imaginations: I called it my Mental Self theory (don't ask why). Basically things in our heads had more dimensions than the three spacial dimensions that we have in the physical world (of course there are at least five dimensions in the physical world, but I won't get into that). These additional dimensions were somewhat equivalent to the Classes (or Qualifiers) of the essence mapping system of today.

Then we were trying to figure out how to explain the slight shades of meta-essence (though we didn't call it that back then) between different contexts of the same object. I thought that it might be because in our imaginations they were different objects because they had different dimensions in the other, special imagination-dimensions. So we started using those dimensions to talk about things in our stories by listing lots of abstract metaphors for the different aspects/dimensions.

We then started expanding and building on that system, and continued to do so for a long time. We made essence maps that were pages long. We even made essence maps to help describe our themes for our birthdays! (That was fun.)

Eventually we met this nice person who calls herself White Raven who helped us polish it up and get it presentable. And we owe her many thanks.

Aw! Now that's just sweet! LOL
I'm glad to have been able to help in some small way.

I really feel like this system has enormous potential.
(especially for authors and other artists
but it has applications in many other fields as well.)
It feels like it has poetry and art at the heart of it,
and has the added benefit of being useful in a very unique way.

Raven

That is my hope. I just wish that I could figure out how to be able to use it for communicating with clients when doing web design.

*sigh* I'm still trying to figure it out (stupid me.), but it's getting...less complicated to me at least. Thanks so much for posting this!

I have one that's okay, I just haven't posted it yet!

EDIT: I just posted my attempt at Essence, if you want to see it!

White Raven, I must say that I did not know what to think when I read the first post on Essence here... I believe it was Sir Emeth's. I figured I just did not really know what fantasy was and that ya'll were just a bunch of super smart techs or something.

Either way.... you have made this SO much easier to understand (though I do not fully understand it, not even partially, really, I do believe that I will get it after MUCH studying on the Essence maps of others...).

Thank you very much!!! I hope I will learn this skill eventually.

Ok, I'm starting to get it. Lots of metaphor and simile. I think I might be able to do this (thanks to my school curriculum's annoying literature plan .)

What do you do with essence when you are finished with your code? Is it a map for your character, or is it just reference?

Cool! You can use it as a reference, but its power is, I think, more ably used when you turn it into a description. An essence map is a skeleton of a poem or at least a poetic description.

OK, I like this simplified syntax...kudos to those who did this, and kudos for the Lausers for starting the whole thing. I've only been on for a month, but I might just be starting to kind of sort of get this whole essence thing. Actually, I need to get it because I'm working on sending my characters through Jay's fractalling thing, and I WANT to get essence mapping, since I'm figuring out more and more that 'all the cool kids are doing it'. Well, just kidding, but this post has helped me out and I think I'll try an essence map for my character after dinner.

I'll try to post my results but they'll probably be sloppy!

eruheran

I'm getting it, slowly, it reminds me of slogging through some of my pre-algebra lessons last year. I'll have to absorb the information and have an epiphany tomorrow.

This helped a lot. But I must say that the best way to figure out how to do it for me, was trial and error. I came up with a pretty good one after a few days of torture. LOL

I have found the essence map very useful, however sometimes I find it hard coming up with good metaphors. Seer should start a thread on that. He's good in that aspect.

That is really helpful. I think I understand it a bit better now.