A year ago I used the 30-day trial version of Dramatica Story Expert. It took me more than half of those 30 days to wrap my head around the theory behind Dramatica. So I didn’t have much time left to try a story form. I tried the StoryGuide but I was not sure about the story form that remained. I want to make better use of the software, so I recently bought it. It is still not very easy to me, to be fair. But I think it can become more helpful to me once I get the hang of it.
I came up with this story idea several years ago and I did a lot of thinking about it. If the above synopsis seems a bit vague, it is probably because I was trying to be brief. The story in my head is pretty clear. I just have a hard time applying Dramatica to it.
The wealth inequity is much more extreme than most people want it to be. In this video Michael from Vsauce explains how much of our money system is based upon trust. From 12:44 on, he talks about the Tinkerbell effect and how our belief that our money is worth something, makes it worth something. And whether or not people have the right to live is mainly based upon this belief.
The novel I try to write plays with this idea. My protagonist falls in love with a dirt poor African woman. She dies. He wants to fix this system by creating a more dependable, more justifiable monetary system (MC Approach: Do-er). Of course he fails (Outcome: Failure); his approach is not better — just a different set of rules.
So like I wrote, confidence and trust are very important. I just don’t know where to put them. In my story, the people go from trusting the current broken system, to testing an alternative system, to realizing that it is all a matter of trust. I am ‘confident’ that the OS Issue is Confidence (sorry for the bad pun). So that leaves me with 2 possible story forms: either the OS Symptom or the OS Response needs to be Trust.
What do you think?