Hi Mike:
I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo too and am also using Dramatica for my story structure. A few days before Nov. 1, I sketched out a Dramatica storyform. What I’m writing is a bit different than what I expect most people are doing, i.e. it’s not a straight novel per say.
I’d just finished the book “Call Me By Your Name” and was so moved by it, having identified with Elio (being a young gay man), with Oliver and the book’s setting (I was an American student who lived in Rome, Italy for a year), and with the book’s time period (the novel takes place during the very same year I was living in Italy). The story and the emotions it evoked resonated with me so much I decided (Decision, coincidentally, is my Story Driver) to undertake a semi-autobiographical story and perhaps spin it into some inspired fiction.
I selected a storyform based on myself as a main character, with certain circumstances of my life in mind, and a sense of a story arc – albeit a faint and incomplete one. After my minimum required decisions were input, I ended up with a complete storyform, one in which Dramatica had filled in a great deal more information than I had input. While I had no detail to support it yet, the storyform felt right–right in a personal sense, knowing myself, my own issues, my hopes and dreams, etc. (Note, I did however selfishly make sure I had a happy ending in there.)
I figured I’d riff on the initial events I’d selected, then create additional fictional ones from them – taking the story off into some uncharted territories. But as I started off the month, I continued to cull more and more from memories and real stories of my own life. Each one would elicit another, then another. As the days and weeks progressed, I found I wasn’t veering off, as I’d expected I would, into Fictionland. Instead, I was finding the storyform still intact while I continued to fill in many more parts of my life, in a rather non-linear process. Using the Plot Sequence Report, I carved out thematics for the selected scenes of my life to plug into. It’s rather fun to think of a memory – they’re springing up like popcorn now – then look for a thematic it might fit under in one of the signposts, find that its story placement fits not only into the story structure but also (somehow magically) the real chronology of my life, and have it all make sense within one of the four throughline viewpoints. It’s rather amazing how it’s all fitting together. And each storypoint completed suggests another related story or memory from my life for me to shape and fit into the narrative arcs.
About halfway through November, when I realized this was how it was going to go, I committed to this project more clearly as memoir and began undertaking it essentially as therapy – an exercise in self examination, awareness and discovery. I’m learning a great deal about myself as all this formulates. And the more I get into it, the more I’m letting my hair down. At this point, however, I have no intention of anyone, other than me, ever reading it.
But who knows?
. Ulysses tells me that if you count all that, I have over 20,000 words, so not so bad!