Dramatica for young writers

theory
#1

After working with dramatica the last 4 years I recently recommended it to a friends daughter who started writing some years ago and loves it. She is sixteen and she asked me to give her an introduction.

Has anybody experience introducing Dramatica to kids or teens? I was thinking to use a popular story and use it to make up a short story using 1 issue or 1 concern.

Btw, as we both have different backgrounds when it comes to stories - she was raised in UK/Netherlands myself in Germany - does anybody know what are popular kids stories in UK/Netherlands? For Germans it are fairy tales from “Brüder Grimm”.

#2

Don’t know about foreign countries but John Green “The Fault in Our Stars” is a very popular YA author here in America.

#3

You might want to consider asking her what her favorite books were, the ones she enjoyed reading the most. If I knew that I could brainstorm.

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#4

Yes. You will find that teenagers and children take to Dramatica more readily than many adults. Instinctively they get it AND they don’t have years of faulty programming to overcome.

You don’t need to dumb it down or make a simpler version. They’ll get it right away if you explain it clearly.

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#5

Though I have found that the posters in my kids’ classrooms tend to push the myth that characters all change.

Is there a change/failure YA novel anyone knows about?

#6

What age range? Wuthering Heights? Old Yeller? The Yearling?

#7

I think Wuthering Heights might be too much. (I’ve never read it.)

The others are the right age. What I don’t know is if they are GASs. So many books of hers that I have read are good, but obvious tales.

Does anyone have an instinct about these recent books she’s read?

Tuck Everlasting
Esperanza Rising
The Babysitter’s Club
Hugo Cabret
American Psycho

Thanks!

PS. Just kidding about that last one!

#8

Due to a sad childhood, I never got into downers. I read Jane Eyre 16 times in high school because the writer depicted someone making a successful life in spite of childhood trauma. (so, a little deus ex machine being thrown in, what the heck ) However, I had always heard good things about Old Yeller and The Yearling. They might be more than a tale, with those endings. (as an aside: I read somewhere that Wuthering Heights was considered the greatest novel ever written of all time, in some circles…wasn’t my taste) The plot summaries in Wikipedia might give some hints.

#9

I know I’ve read Tuck Everlasting and The Invention of Hugo Cabret (and American Psycho :stuck_out_tongue: ), but my memories of them are fairly vague. Hugo Cabret had a pretty solid story, I recall, about a young orphan boy who is trying to determine the purpose and origin of a strange contraption his family owned. There’s also a girl he befriends, along with the various storeowners at the train station where he lives. She… might have been the IC? I don’t remember. The only other thing I remember was that Jacques Moliere makes a cameo.

As to Tuck Everlasting, my memory of it is much less vivid, though that is because I read it like 15 years ago. :sweat_smile: But what I do recall didn’t seem very positive. This girl meets this… family? And they’re all immortal because they accidentally drank from the Fountain of Youth? And she wants to go with them, but she ultimately decides… not to? I don’t remember why. Maybe he rejected her with a “You cannot understand our ways” kind of deal. Anyway, I don’t recall much of a plot, so it was probably a Tale.

Hmm… I’m trying to think of stories I’ve read that are age-appropriate and end with Failure. It’s really not that common, unfortunately. Maybe The Glass Sentence? Newbery award winners are usually pretty good for this, so you could try the list–though the intended age of the audience might skew a bit lower. The one that caught my attention was When You Reach Me, which, if it wasn’t a Failure story, certainly ended on a downer. :stuck_out_tongue: Also, I don’t remember if it was a Failure Outcome or not, but The Tale of Desperaux was good and somewhat melancholy. The Graveyard Book certainly ended bittersweet, too. Oh! And A Wrinkle in Time, though that’s definitely a success.

Now I’m just recommending novels that I like that are aimed at young girls. :blush: I know Esperanza Rising is about a young Mexican girl who moves with her family to America for better opportunity, but I don’t recall if I’ve read it or not. And The Babysitter’s Club is a whole series… and the kids solve mysteries? Or was that The Boxcar Children? In any case, I haven’t read them.

(And American Psycho definitely isn’t a GAS. It has this very modern/post-modern feel of a story that loops and doubles back on itself, never really grabbing a temporal foothold. That’s kind of the point of the story: every businessperson is identical, they all go to the same tacky restaurants, they all get the same tacky business cards, nothing ever changes. Even Patrick Bateman’s grisly murders seem to undo themselves, as though they were all part of his lurid imagination.)

#10

The Yearling is, probably, solid. It was the best selling book in America in 1938, and on the best selling list for 23 weeks. (info from wikipedia)

#11

You are thinking of The Boxcar Children which are not GAS in any way.

I’ve tried other Newberry Winners, and while they tend to be nicely written, they have all been tales so far.

#12

It can’t hurt to check it out…

#13

I just finished reading The Ruby Key, by Holly Lisle, to my daughter (10 year old).

It was a great story and I’m almost positive it’s a GAS, though I think the beginning is a bit lacking in IC throughline – there’s a bunch of IC handoffs but the IC throughline doesn’t get strong until the last handoff to the “real” (strongest) IC. Once that handoff occurs, the RS really kicks into gear too.

But what’s really incredible is how clear the OS Throughline is in terms of its Issue (Obligation) and the elements within it, especially Help (which I think is Problem but I wouldn’t rule out it being Symptom). You see so much conflict coming from very different types of Obligation and different Help-related problems that it feels like the writer used Dramatica – except I’m pretty sure she didn’t as she’s a writing teacher herself. A very good one, but her structure advice is very basic and doesn’t touch on anything like Dramatica.

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#14

I love Holly Lisle. She’s a great teacher. Her insights on the craft are awesome. Especially love her worldbuilding lectures. She’s suffered chronic worldbuilder’s disease before lol. She literally built one of her story worlds in mine craft just so she could really get into the setting.

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