If anyone is willing to have an exhaustive discussion about Dramatica Theory -

let’s go for it. I’ve been studying every day for - well, a very long time. I believe that having an active discussion with someone who’s familiar with the terms and clockwork every so often helps in understanding it. It’s like a foreign language.

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I don’t think you’ll find anyone like that here. LOL.

I assure you I will jump into the discussion, wherever it goes. What do you want to talk about?

I think that’s what this entire Discussion board is about, isn’t it? :grinning:

Did you have anything specific? (and maybe we could break those questions down into separate posts - to make it easier for other writers to find in the future)

Since using Dramatica, has anyone’s problem-solving developed outside of storytelling?

So I came to Dramatica in hopes of becoming a better story teller. That was my only goal for learning Dramatica at the time. Since then, however, story telling has become a secondary goal to learning how to apply Dramatica to real life problems. It’s taken a while, but I feel like I’m much better (though still far from good) at seeing where the source of the problem lies and how to handle it.

When I’m faced with an inequity I try to use Dramatica in real time to find a solution, but I haven’t had much success like that. Where I find it’s been the most helpful is looking at inequity after the fact and seeing what happened and what I should have done and trying to remember that the next time a similar issue comes up. I feel like I’ve had great success in avoiding potential conflict from that.

I think there’s two reasons for that. First, I’m just not that good at using Dramatica to analyze things. I’m much better at starting from scratch an using it to build story problems. So that makes real time use of the theory extremely difficult. I’m sensing that the second thing that makes it difficult is that Dramatica is a holistic theory, meaning you can’t take one part of an inequity and determine an entire storyform. So I think a lot of times it’s not even feasible to use Dramatica until a certain amount of the inequity has played out, and by then it’s often too late to make any significant changes. The path is already committed to a Success/Bad or Failure/Good, or Failure/Bad ending. But I still think that, with more study and more more understanding I can use it to greater and greater success.

How about you? What has your experience been like?

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I discovered the depth in history of Storytelling with dramatica. I discovered the character Contagonist exists in stories, films, etc. going way, way back. It is probably the most important storytelling discovery since Aristotle and Shakespeare, imho. In fact, working with Dramatica and going to some workshops got me back to college for a double major of psych and drama. I took one acting class to see what the actors would experience in my screenplay writing, and I got hooked. A double major was the next step. The dramatica theory is a fun way to produce in the arts and bring people together.

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