A Small Rebellion

What The... ?

Having broken the back of the analysis of character and theme, and followed through on the various relationships, I have to admit I'm not altogether happy with the way things have turned out.  In my mind I already had a few great Themes worked out, and these have not been replicated after working through Dramatica.

Perhaps I have misunderstood or misapplied the process, but some things seem to have worked, and some things definitely haven't worked.  I love the idea of the four Story Throughlines, that makes a lot of sense to me, but I don't feel any resonance between any of the throughlines even though I went out of my way to do what the system says.

I also have a problem with some of the minutiae.  I am an intelligent person, I have university degrees. I have been writing fiction for as long as I could write, and reading it just as long.  I even having a passing interest in the worlds of Philosophy and Psychology.  I understand what the words mean, but I think some of them are being misused.


For Example....

Do you really understand the difference between Deduction, Reduction, Induction and Production?  I mean, you can look up the definitions, and they all relate to the way a person comes up with theories to explain the facts and project into the future.

Deduction - Eliminates possibilities until the one remaining must be true
Reduction - Ranks competing possibilities by merit or likelihood
Induction - Works out causal chains of effect by linking unrelated facts
Production -  Arrives at a future truth by ruling out what cannot happen

But, doesn't everybody do all of those things?  Can you really categorise a person by assigning them to one of these, to make it their overriding method?  What would an Inductive person do any differently in our story than a Deductive person?  How would they ever get to be so one-sided, and what does being that way actually give you which helps you as a writer work out how they will react in a situation? 

Internal methods of arriving at models of the world may be interesting in some psychological thriller or something, or if you're trying to show how someone came to a conclusion, but they mean not a lot in your usual dramatic fiction.  Who cares if the hero decides to go after the girl because he eliminated all the other possibilities, or that he ranked them by likelihood?  Who really cares about that level of detail? 

To put these four up as an equal alongside a quartet such as Faith, Conscience, Temptation, Disbelief is a travesty.  These things are fundamental concepts, massive thematic foundations which resonate throughout the story.  Sorry, it just doesn't hang together for me.  Some of these sixty-four elements seem phony, and out of place.

Faith, Conscience, Temptation and Disbelief are themes, massive weighty concepts which touch every aspect of the story from plot through to character, but they are not characteristics of people. You cannot categorise a person in the story by any one of them.

I'm sorry, Dramatica, you're plain wrong.


Hierarchies upon hierarchies

Themes repeat, they do not fracture into littler and littler themes.  To get resonance between your throughlines, you have to allow them to cover the same thematic elements, but from the different viewpoint that the throughline offers.  In Star Wars, Luke goes from ignorant farm boy to hero, the rebellion goes from beaten to winning, Han Solo goes from lazy and criminal to good, The Droids go from lost to found.  Themes repeat, and in doing so resonate.

By forcing me to box in my major themes into mutually exclusive categories, none of my eventual themes resonated.  It's hardly surprising, this positional thing caused more problems than it solved (i.e. it solved none).  The promise of a deeply resonating set of Throughline themes simply came out - unsurprisingly - with four separate themes which were unrelated.

It's not even as if the hierarchy of themes were related, some of the sub categories bore no relation to the category above.


Another example

Take any of the Thematic Classes, say Psychology.  When you look at the definition Dramatica gives, it fudges it.  It says that Psychology is not what you thought it was (how the mind works) but is about the change of the mind over the course of the story, whether it is changing and if this is good or not.

Fair enough, you might think, so it should contain variations such as doubt, suspicion, persuasion, challenge, argument, cogitation, decision, searching, consideration, debate.... you would be wrong.

Psychology breaks down into : Conceptualizing, Being, Becoming, Conceiving.

So according to Dramatica, the section which is supposed to be about the change of mind over the course of the story can only have types of Conceptualizing (thinking up ways to do something), Being (playing a role), Becoming (truly changing your nature) and Conceiving (making a plan an actuality).  Three of those have nothing to do with change.  They don't even relate well to one another.

This is nonsense.  There are many examples of this, too many to print.


Four on Four

Another place I found it very disappointing was the layering of Themes on top of Throughlines.  I already mentioned it smelled fishy while I was doing it, and my suspicions turned out to be correct.

You've drilled down to the Type of Theme you want for each of your throughlines, and then you are expected to lay that on top of the character grid you created before?  This seems like a very lame attempt to claim some sort of connection between Theme and Character.  The idea being that your themes somehow blend seamlessly into the character traits you've designed.

Only it doesn't work.  Just look at the previous posts.

Where it does work, it only works because the original Character grid is chock full of themes.  It was supposed to be full of character traits.  Most of the time, it doesn't work at all.


So is there anything to salvage from this?

It's a tough one.  I did wonder why Dramatica wasn't more popular, it seemed to offer a foolproof way of getting complexity and depth into your characters and themes, but after going through it, it all seems very arbitrary to me, so I can understand why people stay away from it.

It seems the writers got carried away with this idea of grids, squares and multi-dimensional relationships.  Unfortunately I don't think the entirety of human thought actually breaks down that way.  I think they found that out too, and they had to fill a lot of empty space with spurious concepts which looked good on paper.

But there have been things I thought were amazing, I think they just approached it from the wrong direction.  Perhaps the remainder of this blog will be about me trying to synthesize something from the debris which actually works.


Any ideas?

I think you need to get your themes sorted out first, and from the themes, the characters will fall out.  There's no point designing a complex grid of interrelated characters with conflicts and confederacies, and then try to shoehorn deep thematic quality on top of that. The hope that you can set up characters and that coincidentally deep amazing themes on multiple levels will just emerge from that is ludicrous.

Worse than that, the way Dramatica seems to be set up, is you design all your character conflicts from a palette which contains some concepts which are borderline shady to say the least. Then you independently try to design a thematic structure with multiple levels. Then hope that when you crunch both of them together, all the pieces fit.  This is nonsense.  It doesn't work.

What I think I need to do is take a hatchet to some of these spurious concepts, and whittle the thing down to manageable proportions.  I would guess that as many as half the elements can go.

I'll perhaps try starting on this in the next post.