I’m trying to write a love story, and it seems to me the relationship IS the overall story. How do you distinguish between the two in that case?
Pretty much new to this, any advice would be helpful.
Using the theory, not so much the software.
How is everyone concerned with the love story? Do you have two characters that have a relationship not covered by The Love Story?
The RS is the major part of the read/viewing time, but the OS is separate and does still exist.
I’m thinking one of three things. 1. Your Relationship Story is overshadowing the Overall Story in the telling-which should be fine-or 2. your Overall Story has everyone concerned with A love story while somewhere in all of your characters is a relationship that is not covered within the love story that everyone is looking at-that would be your Relationship Story, or 3. you don’t have a complete Grand Argument Story just yet.
Examples for 1 and 2:
- Your Relationship Story is overshadowing the Overall Story
A group of soldiers is helping to rebuild a war torn land. One of the soldiers finds himself falling in love with a member of a local village. Meanwhile, soldiers and villagers alike are concerned with the difficulties of building a bridge in order to make travel and trade easier for the village.
Your story would focus more on the couple falling in love than everyone’s concern of building a bridge. - Your Overall Story is a love story while your Relationship Story takes place outside of that.
There is a couple who is extremely poor. They have a beautiful young daughter who once fleetingly caught the attention of the rich Lord’s son. If the family can marry the daughter off to the rich Lord’s son they will never again have to worry about money. Meanwhile, the rich Lord has not been viewed favorably in the eyes of the public lately. Everyone thinks that he thinks he and his family are too good for the common man. Marrying his son off to a common girl will change the way the public sees his family. Everyone is concerned with getting the Lords son and the beautiful young (poor) girl together.
There are lots of ways that the RS for this story could go down. Maybe the young girl is the MC and the IC is a…I don’t know, maybe a magical dragon or something. And their Relationship is about building a friendship. You’d have an OS about a love story, and an RS about a friendship.
Or maybe neither the young girl nor the Lord’s son are MC or IC. Maybe the MC is the young girls sister and the IC is a traveling salesman and the two have a relationship outside of the OS love story. Maybe it’s a friendship, maybe a student/teacher relationship, or maybe another love story.
Don’t know if any of that helps. Feel free to explain your story a bit and maybe you’ll get some help parsing the Throughlines out.
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That’s a really clear answer, thank you. I’ll post a little about my story in a bit, I’m still lining up what I think of as ‘the raw elements.’ But much clearer now, thanks to folks on this thread.
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@Gregolas That’s a really great explanation – shows the incredible range of possibilities!
For what it’s worth @GetSchwifty , in Dramatica for Screenwriters, Armando uses a Romantic Comedy premise to illustrate his “New Instant Dramamatica” approach. So for the overall story throughline, he has:
The characters are mostly upper-class neurotics (Overall Story Domain of Manipulation) who meticulously prepare for any insignificant event (Overall Story Concern of Developing a Plan).
For the relationship story (he uses “subjective story” terminology) throughline:
Alex looks for the Girl on the Bus while she unconsciously searches for him (Subjective Story Domain Activities), but they misunderstand all the signs (Subjective Story Concern of Understanding), and mutually look for each other in all the wrong places.
So you can sort of see how the focus might be on the RS, but there’s also an overall story happening “in the background” (my words). It’s pretty clear if you have a chance to read the whole chapter.
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Thank you, that’s very interesting.
I just kindled the book and read the part you mentioned. It occurs to me that the overall story he described isn’t really a story, as opposed to the story @Gregolas brought up. It’s more like a personality description, how the characters will behave in a story when they’re dropped into one.
OTOH I guess with the theory, building the bridge is the class Activity, right? And the one Armando described is a way of thinking about things or, in this case, a way of reacting to things. So I guess you could show the characters reacting to things and show the individual successes or failures of all that meticulous planning, how it relates to the events and relationships in the story, and then show a character change at the end – maybe a few of them to learn to stop all the planning and Get On With Living, or something.
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Well, remember that the OS is something which everyone in the story is concerned about. All of the objective characters will have different approaches towards the OS goal, and will be working for or against its realization.
So if two people getting married is the central concern of ALL the characters, then that might very well be the OS. But still, the actual subjective heart of the story will probably be between the two love interests in a love story, or it won’t really feel like a love story.
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Hm, that’s an interesting point.
In his example the OS solution comes into play as characters “change their nature to improve their love lives”. But of course my immediate thought is that not all of the OS characters would do that - it would depend on their roles. But if it’s a success story, maybe most of them do? I guess that’s an interesting question – how to illustrate a solution that has to do with a group of characters “changing their nature” as opposed to achieving a more concrete story goal.
I think in the Instant Dramatica examples Armando is giving an idea of the source of the OS problem (not sure if the term “Gist” was in use at the time of its publication) and not focusing on what made it problematic. He’s looking to create characters and a “complete but rough structure” and is definitely more focused on the MC and IC Throughlines at that point. While he never gets around to giving us a concrete description of the OS story as he does with the MC, IC, and RS, he does give some Sign Post descriptions and an illustration of the OS Domain in a screenplay format.
I imagine that the completed story would have a more singular feel to the OS, one big problem everyone faces from being meticulous neurotics, but I think it should also work to just have everyone having a different problem from being meticulous and neurotic without it feeling like one single story problem. Who can say how the completed story would wind up, but as is, I definitely see that example leading to a narrative in which the RS greatly overshadows the OS.
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I’m not sure this particular post advances the discussion any, but I’m wondering if there could conceivably be a fourth option where the OS is about two characters coming together or being split up while the RS is about them falling in love. I keep thinking of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”. I have no idea what the storyform for that is-if there even is one-and will have to stretch and bend things a bit for this to work*, but say everyone is concerned with Ariel and Eric(?) getting together. Ariel wants it, Ursula and Triton are against it, Sebastion and the Seagull want him to “kiss de girl”. And then the RS is about how the two of them do or do not get together.
*id guess the actual OS is more about breaking the spell than getting Ariel and Eric together, this was more of a thought experiment
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That is a brilliant note and I intend to ste…ahem “borrow” the idea.
In Disney’s The Little Mermaid I’m pretty sure the IC is King Triton with a hand-off to Sebastien for part of it. I think the romantic part with Eric is entirely in the OS and MC throughlines.
Good examples of the type of Romantic Comedy fitting with Armando’s example are Notting Hill, Four Weddings And A Funeral, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. (Wait, are those all Hugh Grant movies??)
One example of @Gregolas’s “Relationship Story overshadowing the Overall Story” is the first Twilight movie, which I believe has a complete or mostly-complete storyform (possibly unlike the book, which I haven’t read, but which Jim Hull over on Narrative First said has almost no OS throughline). The relationship story between Bella and Edward is the main subject of the film, but the screenwriters were careful to throw in little bits and pieces of the Overall Story which is something like “life in a town with vampires, including some newly arrived evil ones”. The way they did this does seem a little heavy-handed at times (cut to unknown hick on his boat who gets eaten by bad vamps!), probably because they didn’t get much support from the novel. But they managed to get some OS in in each Act so it still works, at least for me.
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So is the idea of OS prescriptive or descriptive? Am I supposed to have one, or, if I have one, this is probably what it looks like?
@mlucas, yeah I probably shouldn’t’ve even mentioned that movie since it didn’t already fit. Beside the point, I guess.
@GetSchwifty, I was pondering if that might work, but it may very well not. I wouldn’t want to try it until I was sure I could keep the two throughlines apart, which I personally don’t feel capable of doing.
To answer your last question, if you want a complete Grand Argument Story, you need an OS. It’s not an absolute requirement, but only if you’re okay with having what Dramatica calls a tale. Definitely better to have one, particularly if you’re going to go to the trouble to learn Dramatica.
Without any knowledge of your story, I would blindly guess the most probable thing going on is either 1. Your RS is overshadowing the OS, or 3. You have an RS in mind, but haven’t built an OS into the story. If you want to tell us what you’ve got so far, we can give you a better idea of what we think you have and what you need. If you don’t want to discuss openly on the board, you can PM as well.
Will do. Am working at my day job today 
I should probably get back to that as well.
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Hmmm…right…other than each other, what do they both want?
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Another really good thought.
Good question. Not sure I can pull this off, but let’s give it a shot. You have a reality television show. Doesn’t matter what it’s about. Everyone in the story is trying to get their two favorite contestants, characters 1 and 2, to fall for each other and this is problematic because X.
At the same time, characters M and I are both building a relationship around competing with each other. Maybe this starts out as co-contestants on the show, but moves to life outside of the show.
If Characters 1 and 2 are the same as M and I, do you have a proper OS in Psychology and a proper RS in Physics?