Reader Question: What about the screenwriting program Dramatica?

An open forum question from Eve Montana:

What are your thoughts on Dramatica?

Most writers will have bumped up against “Dramatica” in the form of a story development software program. As far as I can tell, it is based upon the work of Melanie Ann Phillips and Chris Huntley who wrote a book called “Dramatica: A New Theory of Story”. That book is available to read online free here.

To give you a taste of the ideas at work in the book, here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

The Dramatica Theory of Story Structure is built around an idea called “The Story Mind.” According to this notion, every story has a mind of its own — its psychology is built by the story’s structure and its personality is determined by the storytelling.

The theory suggests that this model of the mind was developed unintentionally over centuries of storytelling as a by-product of the attempt to communicate information and emotions across a medium from an author to an audience.

In this light a story is seen as an argument in which the author, hoping to convince the audience of a point of view, suggests that a particular approach to problem solving is (or is not) better than all others that might reasonably be tried in a given situation.

To successfully make this argument, all other pertinent problem solving approaches much be examined in the story as well and shown to fall short of the one promoted by the author.

In the process of including all the reasonable ways one might go about solving a particular problem, all universal human points of view, attitudes, and approaches must appear for any story’s argument to be complete.

Over centuries of trial and error storytelling, these human qualities became fixed as the conventions of story structure from characters, to theme, to plot.

Therefore, the Dramatic theory sees characters as representing our various drives and motivations, theme is seen as our conflicting value standards, plot represents our problem solving methods, and genre describes the overall attitude (personality type) of the Story Mind itself.

Products based on these ideas are available here at the Storymind.com website.

I tried a version of the Dramatica software in 1998. What I recall is this:

* You are provided a lengthy series of questions which you answer

* Many of the questions are multiple choice, requiring the writer to choose between this or that option

* The options relate primarily to plot, character, and theme

* If none of the options seems to fit your story, you must still make a choice between the given options

* At the end, you print out a lengthy document — in the case of one of my stories, a total of 57 pages (single-spaced) — that is supposed to serve as a “story engine”

My reactions? From what I remember at the time, as an exercise to force me to think about my story and characters, it was a reasonable success. But the language system and ideas were pretty dense, at times even obtuse. Plus it was frustrating to be forced to choose between options that didn’t feel like they were relevant to my story.

This does raise a larger question. On the whole, while I do believe there are some fundamental principles related to story structure and characters, I would suggest caution regarding any book, software, class, or screenwriting guru who claims to know a unique, comprehensive approach to screenplay narrative. Every story is different. Every writer is different. Besides if there was one comprehensive approach to screenplay narrative, don’t you think Hollywood movie studios would adopt it, hire lackeys, and churn out one hit movie after another on the cheap?

I suggest taking a more, shall we say, organic approach. It’s fine, even advisable to do prep-writing work on structure and characters, but once a writer types FADE IN, they should leave room for the magic to happen, for characters to come alive and say, “To hell with your outline, I want to go over here!” 

For example, here is a set of questions I think are important for a writer to grapple with and eventually answer during the prep-writing phase:

CHARACTERS

Who is the Protagonist?
What do they want (conscious goal / external world)?
What do they need (unconscious goal / internal world)?
Who is keeping them from that goal (Nemesis)?
Who is connected to their emotional development (Attractor)?
Who is connected to their intellectual development (Mentor)?
Who tests the Protagonist by switching allegiance back and forth between ally and enemy (Trickster)?

PLOT

What is the story’s beginning (Opening)?
What is the end of Act One (Lock)?
What is the end of Act Two (All Is Lost)?
What is the story’s ending (Final Struggle)?

CHARACTER-PLOT

What is the nature of your Protagonist’s metamorphosis from Disunity to Unity?

I believe those 12 questions are relevant to most movie stories. If you spend time brainstorming these ideas in relation to character and plot, and dig deep into your characters to uncover their core essence and respective narrative functions, and you can answer these 12 questions, you’re probably equipped well enough to type FADE IN and write your script, hopefully having found a balance between knowing enough to carry you through the writing process, yet leaving room for the story to grow into what it wants to become.

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