A New Hope

What are we trying to do here?

Having failed to get Dramatica to work properly, wouldn't it just be a good idea to abandon it and go back to the traditional methods?  Well, I think there is something in the ideas of Dramatica, I think when they were doing it, they went too far with all the grids and layers and when it didn't work out, they padded it with concepts which don't work.  But as I went though I could sense it was adding value, but the nasty and nonsensical bits were detracting from that.


What worked

What works in Dramatica is the idea that there are Player Roles in your story, and for a good story, every perspective needs to be told.  It's like a debate, and you need to hear from every viewpoint, so you can take a perspective.  The idea of the archetypal roles was excellent, and to further break those eight archetypes into a number of Player Roles which you distribute across your actual characters was great.  I'll keep that.

I liked the opposing of Player Roles, as in the diagonal grid.  That can stay. Not so keen on the left-right and up-down dependencies, they didn't work so well for me, but they can stay in I suppose.

The throughlines were excellent, the telling of the story on four different levels.  As I was doing the analysis, I did find it difficult to disentangle the Main and Impact throughlines when discussing the Subjective Throughline.  The overall and main throughlines are excellent and obvious.  I'm less interested in the Impact throughline, usually I'm, only interested in the impact character in as much as he affects the main character, the personal journey of the impact character is of less importance, but it's still good enough to keep in there.  I'm not so sure that the Subjective storyline exists, it's where the Main and the Impact storylines clash, but it's not a perspective on its own. So maybe the number can be worked on.

I liked the idea of choosing your theme on the grid, but again it went way too deep, and many of the squares made no sense at all.  The four levels of drill-down were overkill.  The part where you choose one major thematic split and tell that story in one of the four throughlines just seemed like so much hogwash.  As I said before, themes resonate.  You pick a theme and then split that theme into variants, one for each throughline. The variants of the theme resonate across the story.

The part of Dramatica we didn't get to is the scene generation part, where you take all the Story Points (which are the basically the conflicts between Player Roles) and run them out to give 8x8, sixty four possible scenes and conflicts within your story. I like this, because it gives you a reason for every scene.


What I'd like to add

One of the things which irritated me about Dramatica from the start was characterising characters in terms of two or three characteristics.  So one of your characters might be Logic and Chaos and Result.  And then you were supposed to write a character who embodied these three, sometimes opposing, characteristics.

I think Dramatica missed a trick here.  A person may be involved with these multiple characteristics, but the exact relationship they have with them is left oddly unknown within the story system.  I'd like to add some verbs.  My character uses logic, fears chaos and obsesses about results.  There are differences between what a character would like to feel, and what they really do.  A character may want to be loyal, respect loyalty, but fails to live up to it.  The character may use logic, but in such a way to subvert personal feelings and justify them.  There is more detail here than Dramatica says.

The theming needs work.  I think an overall theme needs to be typed, and then throughlines need to parallel.  I'll go into that in a bit.


Off we go then...

This may be slow, because I'll be making it up as I go.