Can any story idea use any story form?

questions
#1

This has always bugged me since I discovered Dramatica. My basic “pantser” nature rejects the whole idea behind planning but I am convinced of the power of the Dramatica theory. So here’s the question. I have a dozen half-finished novels; I’d really like to finish at least one of them. I don’t mind switching any of the components around in any way that would make them viable and would direct me towards finishing them and then revising them.

Does it matter what story form I use, given that drastic changes may be required? Or are some ideas just not configable to some story forms? Can I just use the brainstorming tool, click Spin and just start working with the results? Has anyone done that for more than just an exercise?

Thanks. And I apologize if this is a crazy question.

#2

A story form describes the source of conflict from different perspectives (OS, MC, IC, RS) and with different magnification (Domain, Concern, Issue, Problem). So any idea describing conflicts would naturally discriminate between story forms, right?
That isn’t necessarily the case with setting ideas, fantastical ideas, creature ideas, technology ideas, etc.
Some genres make certain story forms outright impossible. You cannot write a Romance as a Tragedy.

#3

It often seems you can take any story form and any story and match up about 50-70% of it, but I wouldn’t suggest throwing your already partially formed story onto any random storyform. There will be things that just don’t work when you do that. You may be able twist what you have to technically fit the story form, but you’ll also be twisting the perspective from which it was originally viewed and thus changing what is being argued.

#4

What I’ve done before is take a partially formed idea and found a story form that felt close. Then I took the story appreciations and tried to write a description for how each of them applied to my story. Unfortunately, I wrote multiple paragraphs for many of them, but a sentence or two should probably work. When I got to something that I couldn’t figure out, I tried to decide if it worked for my story and I was just having trouble figuring it out, or if it just didn’t belong in my story. If I decided it didn’t fit, I would try to change the engine setting to fix it. Then I would start going through the new story appreciations writing about how they fit into my story.

This took me through probably a dozen story forms or more, and sometimes the changes wouldn’t be small. I might switch whole throughlines around. There were a couple times I thought I had the right story form only to get close to the end and decide something still was just a bit off. So it was a long process, but I was eventually able to smooth out all the wrinkles and find what I think now is the correct story form for my story.

While it’s not always fun to start over with a new story form, its a much better feeling to know you’re writing about what you want to say and using a story form that will help you do that rather than to be writing about some argument that’s not really what you want to say just because you have a skeleton already outlining it. And a large part of the beauty of how Dramatica works is that if you start out with a completely wrong story form, your still encoding the appreciations to fit your story. So if you get halfway through encoding a story form and decide to change it, all that work you did is not lost. Even a drastically different story form can still use most-if not all-of the encoding you’ve already done. You will just needs to twist it a bit to fit the proper perspective of the new form.

Now I realize that in my first reply I said you wouldn’t want to twist the story you already started to fit any random story form, but now I’m telling you that you can gradually twist your story through multiple story forms until you find the right one. This isn’t a contradiction. The difference is that if you start out with the story you want to tell and twist it to fit the wrong story form, then you’re abandoning what you want to say in order to fit what you have a guideline for. You’re twisting a story with the right perspective on the problem (“the right perspective” being the one you want to tell your story from) to have the wrong perspective. You’re twisting a square peg to fit into a round hole.

But if you start out with the wrong form and fill it out for your story, then change forms and twist your story to fit a more correct form, then you are going from a story with the wrong perspective to a story with a more accurate perspective, until you finally get to a story with the right perspective. You are essentially untwisting your round hole into a square one to fit your square peg, if that makes sense.

#5

I think it depends on what you mean by story idea. A storyform is a list of thematic topics to cover in a story depending on what it is you want to say in that particular story. It’s not about subject matter. The storyform is completely divorced from the subject matter of your story. So therefore, if you mean concept when you say story idea then yes you can probably find a way to fit any storyform into a concept. But if you mean theme or message, for lack of a better word, then there’s only gonna be one storyform for that idea.

EDIT: The idea that the storyform does not relate to subject matter has been iterated by Chris Huntley many times during his video analysis with Dramatica Users Group. e.g. the analysis of Network.

#6

You are in a great situation with your half-finished novels to be able to pick one and figure out the storyform behind it. Maybe pick one that seems to fit Dramatica’s concept of four throughlines best – which mostly means one where you can identify a main character with some personal baggage/issues, and an influence character who challenges their perspective or world-view (especially as it relates to their issues). Or, just pick the one you most want to finish!

Because a storyform represents the structure of a complete narrative, I would suggest that your muse was probably working toward a single storyform with your half-finished novel. However, you may have had some blind spots so that some parts of the narrative were missing, or don’t match up to the rest of the storyform/narrative properly. So the best thing to do would be to try and identify the storyform that’s hiding in there; you’ll probably need some help from the forum with that. You could also try Narrative First’s free “logline to treatment” email course, sort of pretending that your half-finished novel is just a “story idea” and working it into a treatment.

Once you have a good sense of the underlying storyform, you will be able to use Dramatica to figure out what’s missing or a bit messed up in your narrative. Once you do that, I honestly think you’ll get incredible flashes of insight about what should happen in terms of character development and plot in the last half of your novel. (But it might require some fairly big changes to the first half too.)

So yeah, definitely do NOT use the “spin” feature – that’s not what you need. Also I would not recommend trying to write a lot of encodings for each story point; first just try to identify the storyform. After that you can write a brief few words, like a “gist” for each story point, to make sure they all jive with you. We can help with that.

I have been in the same situation as you (though I would say more like 10% finished novels rather than half!), and I honestly think it was because I could feel something was wrong with my narrative, but had no idea how to fix it. I believe that Dramatica is the exact tool I needed to get past that, which is huge for me.

#7

Of course you can, otherwise you couldn’t have a “doomed romance” story. Romeo and Juliet are a bittersweet (Success/Bad) story, but it is considered a “traditional” tragedy.

Any storyform can be made into ANY genre, though it may break storytelling conventions to do so.

#8

The capital-R Romance (as in, what publishers buy and sell as Romance (wiki)) requires a Happily Ever After (HEA) or Happy For Now (HFN). This keeps coming up in writing forums, but the general consensus is, if it doesn’t have either HEA or HFN, then it might be romantic, but no Romance.

#9

Thus my comment that it may break storytelling conventions. That said, if you define a genre by the use of particular story point settings, e.g. Success/Good, then not every storyform will fit into that “genre” by definition. However, you can make a successful story out of it.

That is the problem with the way most people define “Genre.” Non-Dramatica genres use various different standards to define them. For example:

  • Genres defined by subject matter: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Western, War, Family drama, etc.

  • Genres defined by time period: Traditional Westerns, Period Piece, etc.

  • Genres defined by intended audience: Family, Children’s story, Adult, Christian (or other religious group), etc.

  • Genres defined by the storytelling style: Animation, Musical, Horror, etc.

  • Genres defined by the storyweaving style: Mystery, Whoddunit?, etc.

  • Genres defined by the throughline emphasis: Romance, Buddy Picture, etc.

And I’m sure there are many other ways to slice and dice the traditional definitions of genre.

So, it is my conviction that any subject matter and material can be explored though ANY storyform. Concessions to “genre” can be made by emphasizing or de-emphasizing various story points.

By way of example, I think a Happily Ever After story requires only a Judgment Good, not an outcome of Success, because it is the relationship that goes on happily ever after, which is good for the MC. One can mitigate a Failure story by de-emphasizing the story goal and emphasizing the story dividends…“So, you did not kill the dragon, but you got a whole new kingdom far away from that ol’ rascal.” :smile:

2 Likes
#10

Any self-respecting knight would prefer a medium rare dragon steak to a kingdom.

#11

Incredibly great answers to my question from all of you. Again, the flexibility of Dramatica always astounds me. But as I can see, it will take work and rework to get to where I need to be. As I move forward, I’ll definitely drop my questions into the discussion. Again, thanks, everyone, for your thorough and thoughtful responses.