Welcome to my Dramatica blog.
If you are a writer and don't know what Dramatica is, then you are about to discover something which is amazing and horrifying in equal measure. I think part of the horror is realising how much you don't know about storytelling, and part of the amazement is realising how much you instinctively do know about storytelling - but apparently by accident.
If you have encountered it before and recoiled in horror, then please stick around. I am not completely sold on it yet, but can see enough in there to give it a whirl. By the end of this, I will be a convert or a sceptic, but at least I will know why I am a convert or a sceptic.
What is Dramatica?
Dramatica is a story modelling system, developed by Chris Huntley and Melanie Anne Phillips in the 1990s. For a while it was taught as a course at the University of California. It is also a piece of software (actually two pieces of software) marketed and sold to help writers utilise the Dramatica story model. People use the word Dramatica to refer to both the theory and the software, but I am not going to use the software - for reasons I will go into later. For this blog, Dramatica will refer to the story modelling system.
What do I find attractive about Dramatica?
Having read through the Dramatica theory document - all 350 pages of it - I can see real merits in some of the systems presented.
I have been writing on-and-off since I was about 10 years old, and although I can spin a decent yarn as well as the next scribbler, I am always left with a sense that my story lacks a certain measure of depth. The main narrative is fine, but when I attempt to insert counterpoints, sub-plots and characters to hold certain roles in the story, my attempts sometimes seem clumsy and contrived. When I do occasionally get it right - and the story resonates on a character or plot level - it feels more by accident than design. In those cases I can't give myself any credit for it, and feel unable to repeat it deliberately in the next story.
What Dramatica promises is a way to make sure your story contains all of those intangible elements which make a rich tapestry - in character, theme and content. The story model claims that certain elements must be present in a story to make it feel complete, and gives you a method to make sure you have included them at the correct places in the correct intensity, contrast and flavour.
The downsides, there are always downsides.
Dramatica, as presented in the document, suffers from a few problems. One of the major problems is the immense size and complexity of the theory. Anyone reading who has looked at it already will be nodding at this point. To give the authors credit, they have thought of everything. Unfortunately this makes for a large complicated model which is difficult to grasp in a single sitting. It's going to take time to learn and implement properly, and it's tempting to just abandon it.
The other problem is the intent. The authors, deliberately or otherwise, adopt a fairly academic tone when writing out the theory. They use a lot of jargon and have a habit of defining, and re-defining words which are already well-known to writers in other contexts. This means you are constantly referring back to previous chapters to see what they actually mean, and this makes understanding slow. Perhaps they were trying to impress academia and adopted that tone deliberately, but it makes it less useful as a working tool for the writer.
Another theory of mine is that the authors have software to sell. They are treading a careful line between explaining the theory fully and yet making it seem a little impenetrable, so that you may just buy their program instead to do all the heavy lifting. They compound this by not providing much in the way of examples to show you how you would implement this in a real story. Writing is difficult enough on its own, without having to use up time and energy learning something else as well. The software is a tool which might be able to give you the benefits without the wasted time.
Why not just use the software?
The Dramatica Pro software gives you a free demo trial, so feel free to try it out. It doesn't allow you to save or print out your work, so it really is just a try-out - don't get drawn into putting a lot of work into it because as soon as you exit, your work will be gone.
So what is it like? Well, it's presented like a tree-and-branch menu system. On one side you go through a step-by-step dialogue, where the program asks you about your characters, their personalities, the sorts of things you want them to do. Unfortunately, it also asks you many questions where you would need to already understand the Dramatica story model to answer, such as when choosing character quads or archetypal roles.
When I was trying it out, I put in the characters and story arc of a novel I had previously outlined a few years ago. This meant I didn't have to think much about my answers, since I'd already worked out a lot of this detail before, when writing the original outline. If I'd been using the software as part of creating a story from scratch, this process might have taken many days or weeks.
At the end, it produced a 'report' which basically just told me back what I'd entered in the boxes. It had actually made very few suggestions or changes to my original premise. I found it difficult to see what it had added to the process. To be fair, some of the questions made me look more closely at some of the relationships and roles I had already created, and I could see some changes I would like to make as a result - but it was the questions themselves, not the analysis the software provided, which had prompted this further thought.
So after I'd finished I was less interested in the software, but still intrigued by the ideas behind the theory. Others may find the software helpful, but you will still have to learn the Dramatica model in order to understand the software.
What is this blog going to be about?
As well as a dabbling writer, my day job has been working as a software engineer for most of my working life. I write computer programs for a living. This can be a highly technical area, and one of the skills I have developed over the years is the translation of feelings and desires into hard lines of code, functions and programs. A marketing manager may come to me as say they want a way to engage the customers on their website, perhaps a blog or a chat forum, or a new way of ordering products, providing help and support, or getting hits on social media. I have to go from this wooly desire to designing screens, functions and ultimately databases and lines of code written on a computer.
This means I've gotten good at approaching large complex unknown systems, and working them out to produce tangible real-world things that are useful. Technical words and the sing-song of technical explanations don't phase me. I've found that if you take them one small chunk at a time, play around with it, exploring the options, you can eventually break the whole thing down into something useful.
So what I thought I might do is take a story idea for a novel - one of the many that I have rattling about but never progressed - and try to apply the Dramatica story model method to it. Working from the start to the end of the system, I am going to try to work through each layer in as much detail as I think it needs - and apply it to my very particular story. If it all works out, not only will I have a fantastically structured and richly layered novel at the end of the process, I will have produced a long 'working example' of the Dramatica method, detailing the pitfalls and successes along the way. Perhaps it will help someone else. Perhaps it will scare them away. We shall see!
What next?
Every good episodic needs a cliffhanger. Tune in next time where I look at some of the stories in my backlog, and choose a suitable one for my first Dramatica story.
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