Hey Scott, my German translation is again a bit different from your text. The first part of tragedy is called “orchestration” or “staging” and instead of “plot” they are writing about “myth”. The notes explain what Aristotle means by character and “perception” (instead of “thought”): * CHARACTER: The customary behavior of human beings * PERCEPTION: The intellectual properties of a human being, their ways of perception, their resulting insights about life including the expression of it in dialogue You are really spot-on with your interpretation. It’s the subconscious and the conscious parts of characters that are defining actions in a story.

>>CHARACTER: The customary behavior of human beings Well, yes, and more than that: Poetics, Chapter 6: "Character is that which reveals moral purpose,showing what kind of things a man chooses ( "seeks" in some translations) or avoids." To wit, their goals and needs [positive and negative] in relation to the plot.

I think that whatever Aristotle meant by Thought in his "Poetics" can be understood in reference to his treatise on rhetoric. Indeed in Chapter 19 of the Poetics, Aristotle says: "Concerning Thought, we may assume what is said in the Rhetoric, to which inquiry the subject more strictly belongs. Under Thought is included every effect which has to be produced by speech...proof and refutation; the excitation of feelings..." And what is rhetoric? The art of persuasion, getting someone else to agree with your point of view, to do what you want them to do. Whatever Aristotle meant by "Thought", it is active, not merely passive; it is goal-oriented. And "Thought" is what we are supposed to put into dialogue in a script. Ideally, every word of dialogue is supposed to have a purpose, to advance the speaker's goal in that scene. Or as David Mamet put it: "People may or may not say what they mean… but they always say something designed to get what they want."

That's a very good point, pgronk! Dialogue seems to be a mystery even for writers. It may help people to know about the fact that every little word uttered by a character is bound to have a purpose.

Hi You Guys, Well, my first thought on reading this section was, this seems to land right at the crux of the writer's conundrum regarding plot/structure/character: action rises from character, so the character/s must drive the plot, via action. For some reason (most likely because I just saw Whedon's awesome new movie version of "Much Ado About Nothing"!), this made me think of the play within the play in "Hamlet," when Hamlet has the players put on his revised version of "The Mousetrap," whereby he hopes to trap his uncle/step-father into giving away his guilt by his response to the play. Hamlet's own paranoid, intellectual character drives his actions there, because another character - say, his foil Fortinbras - probably would devise a very different test to assess the guilt of Claudius, if indeed he even paused to make such an assessment before exacting the ghost's required revenge - so it made me wonder if maybe Aristotle is proposing that each character's individual acts must serve as a revelation of that character's internal compass/thoughts vs. outward behavior, as they continue their individual journey, as well as provide a means by which to help forward the story's overall plot?

[...] Studying Aristotle’s “Poetics” – Part 6(B): Character and Thought [...]

Right on, pgronk and Sven, regarding "Thought." If going for one word that bridges Aristotle to Mamet, it boils down to "Intent." As you've nailed, Mamet's origins in theater, where so much action is propelled by the dialogue itself, the force driving that rhetorical language of persuasion is the inner want of the character.