What a shocker. Someone who discounts Dramatica as a theoretical model because they don’t get it. 
I’ve had great success going the other way (Dramatica first, then write), It all depends on what kind of writer you are, organic or structuralist.
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I have to say, I think his critique is spot on correct.
I think it’s as easy as asking someone if they need to understand physics to use their cell phone. Nobody goes around saying, “I can’t intuitively grasp quantum mechanics and the use of complex numbers in electronics, therefore my cell phone must not work.”
Nobody goes around saying, “I can’t intuitively grasp quantum mechanics and the use of complex numbers in electronics, therefore my cell phone must not work.”
You do if you want to understand how the cell phone works. Particularly considering Dramatica Theory is not a piece of engineering, as you and Jim have stated in previous threads. The published theory book doesn’t describe many aspects of what the software does. Thereby making those algorithms implemented in software an undocumented black box.
Further, his point on recursive regression breaking down after two levels dues to structural asymmetries of the Dramatica chart is (IMO) spot on. And I can attest that anyone who took symbolic programming (LISP, Scheme) understands his regression method.
Sure. But this is a writing forum, not a “how does Dramatica work forum.” And just like understanding how a cellphone works is unlikely to help you make phone calls, understanding the black box of Dramatica is unlikely to help you write better stories.
I’m not sure why being understandable makes it relevant.
I noticed the recursive nature of how the Dramatica chart is used independently. But that poster actually ran a truth table for each recursive path. That’s interesting. His work shows a structural asymmetry at the bottom levels of its traversal path.
He argues that Dramatica - as a system - isn’t what its developers believe (or at least assert), that of being a general theory of story. While also agreeing that aspects of it are of practical use. I think he’s right on both counts.
I should note that people have been trying for a general purpose theory of story and narrative for quite some time. Dramatica in general fits in with a Structuralist perspective on the one hand and a psychoanalytic perspective on the other. I would argue a reading of De Saussure’s Nature of the Linguistic Sign and Binary Oppositions are of particular relevance here. As is Derrida’s Freud and the Scene of Writing and Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Lacan - though his work is dense. Zizek has a fantastic book Looking Awry, an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture that helps untangle his lectures. One should also look at Chomsky’s Theory of Generative Grammar, which is heavily reliant on recursive algorithms in the study of grammar. And this is relevant because Dramatica developers argue their system is not merely a theory of story, but is also a ‘Theory of Mind’. But the pseudomath presented - in particular by Melanie on her Youtube channel - shows clearly that it is not rigorous, certainly not in the way Chomsky’s Transactional Grammar is.
So, I don’t think Dramatica can separate itself from prior work in literary theory. Even if developers were not influenced by prior academics. And a study of those academics would show parallelism in some ideas and holes of its rigor in others. Hell, Melanie argued in one of her videos that Dramatica shows how to lead the way to viable machine Artificial Intelligence. Which shows just how little she understands about the field of AI.
And yet none of these criticisms should be taken to delegitimize Dramatica’s utility in developing enjoyable stories. Where the rubber meets the road here is how well audiences react to stories developed using Dramatica techniques. I honestly don’t know the answer to that just yet. But I’m curious enough to spent time trying.
What is the purpose of listing out all those books and what does it have to do with Dramatica? Specifically. Trust me, I get that and you and the other poster don’t get Dramatica, but I don’t see the point of throwing out all these references without actually saying something about them and their relation to the theory.
Then make the argument in a substantial way, and not by listing a bunch of big names.
By the way, Ptolemy’s epicycles – which supported geocentrism – are part of a rigorous system, but that didn’t make them correct. Here is a demonstration that epicycles are not all that helpful, since…
There is no bilaterally-symmetrical, nor excentrically-periodic curve used in any branch of astrophysics or observational astronomy which could not be smoothly plotted as the resultant motion of a point turning within a constellation of epicycles, finite in number, revolving around a fixed deferent.-- Norwood Russell Hanson
In other words, lets use Ptolemy to draw Homer Simpson:
To be fair MWallaeger, I didn’t just drop names. I also dropped titles. And even wrote little blurbs as to why I thought those essays were relevant to my point. Would you prefer I dig in to my Crit Theory book and cite quotes to make the argument a little more clear?
By the way, Ptolemy’s epicycles – which supported geocentrism – are part of a rigorous system, but that didn’t make them correct.
I think you’re making my point now…
I’m still waiting for you to make a clear argument. I’m not even sure what you’re arguing. You have to understand that the Skeptic shows up once a year around here. He goes by different names each time, but his methodology is the same–he throws out vague references, declares Dramatica “pseudo math”, and generally does whatever he can to justify his lack of understanding of the material.
He then disappears, only to resurface another year or two later under a different name.
Dramatica is not an attempt at a “general purpose of story” or a unified theory of narrative. The creators of the theory are very specific in relating its purpose as to helping create a Grand Argument Story. This does not include every and all forms of narrative, only one in which the Author seeks to make a solid and coherent argument.
No, you don’t have to dig in. I have too much to do to dig in with you.
But, come on, you can’t discard Dramatica for being pseudomath and then claim that a rigorous system also supports your ideas. That’s just weak, man.
Let’s just stick to the practical storytelling stuff here. At least until there is something concrete to discuss. That would be interesting. A breakdown of some kind of recursion (at the elemental level) that we don’t understand is just arguing over nothing.
Hello Jim,
This is my real name. I can’t speak for authors of prior discussions, skeptical or not.
Regarding my point, in a previous comment I linked to someone else’s recursive regression of the Dramatica chart posted over at storymindmedia.com. There, the author presented examples from a truth table for all possible traversal points. In doing so, he showed that there exists a semantic symmetry (or structural consistency) at one level of the chart, say from the Type level down to the Variation level, its symmetry breaks down at the Element level. And from my perspective, that’s an interesting point.
Further, he made it clear that he considered the system to be worthwhile. Just not internally consistent. And I think he’s right.
Next, I pointed out that Dramatica developers aren’t the first to attempt a theoretical approach to storytelling. From a Literary Criticism standpoint, Structuralists and PostStructuralists have done so as well. And I pointed to specific academic authors and various papers they’ve written.
And linguists have attempted a generalized theory of language and grammar using recursive algorithms as a core to their analytic method. There, I pointed to Chomsky. I might have also pointed to Professor Marvin Minsky, the founder of the AI lab at MIT, in his model of hierarchical nested processes to represent internalized states. Or, later, Douglas Lenat’s work with his Cyc project. I pointed to these because of Melanie’s videos on her Storymind Youtube channel. There, she also presented some of the pseudomath used (which is why I brought up pseudomath). I can point to specific video URLs if you like.
And Jim, none of this discounts that Dramatica may be very useful in developing stories. Like that prior poster, I think it may well be. Which is why I’ve spent effort to read through the texts, buy the software, analyze its output, and attempt to use it for a draft of a story.
So I’m genuinely trying to make use of this here. And I’d argue that a kneejerk skeptic wouldn’t bother to put any real effort in. I’m not out to harm Dramatica as a useful system. Nor your business.
I agree with this completely.
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If you think this has anything to do with business then you have no idea who I am. The fact that you would even say something like that just makes me dislike you even more and tells me what I already suspected of your character. Clearly I didn’t mean to say that you were the same person that shows up every year, but you exhibit the same skeptical methodology that purports to say much but in the end says little to nothing productive.
I have been involved with Dramatica for over twenty years. Much of what you see here and elsewhere represents a passion of mine: great storytelling. That’s why I write my articles, that’s why I built these websites that you now for some reason feel a need to pollute, and it’s why I work endless hours to help authors who actually care about writing great stories write great stories. I care about great stories and I get annoyed by people who try to break down what they don’t understand.
You bug me because you don’t engage. And you have an air of superiority that conflicts with your rudiment understanding of Dramatica. The only saving grace is that eventually I know you will leave. They always do. Once they find out that no one cares about their “recursive” discoveries or “pseudo math” claims, they eventually slink away never to be heard from again.
Please use this forum as a means of actually learning the theory. If you continue to rant about recursive systems I will simply eject you: one, because it reeks of setting up your own version of Dramatica which is prohibited here (the skeptic often thinks they can do better) and two, because it’s just plain fun for me to lock people like you out.
I’m sorry you dislike me Jim. Apparently, I can’t help that.
This is your site. If you’d like me to go, just say so. I’m not here to troll.
Hi Maynard,
I’m not a Dramatica expert by any means nor do I dismiss other practically-focused story development models, so I can’t speak with authority on either your concerns about the fundamental workings of Dramatica or on how much it parallels other theoretical approaches to understanding story. What I can offer you are two thoughts that occur to me on a frequent basis both with using Dramatica in my own work and when reading the folks on this discussion board:
The first is that there’s no discussion whether socratic, didactic, or otherwise that’s going to convince someone that Dramatica is or isn’t a complete (even within its own claims of the Grand Argument Story) model of storytelling. Why? Partly because the experts here (and it’s fair to call them experts given the years they’ve put into understanding and working with the model) have already had this discussion dozens if not hundreds of times and, I think, are less than enthused about debating it yet one more time.
The other part, though–the part I care about and would draw your attention to–is that Dramatica’s usefulness (or lack thereof) is not contingent on how convincing the explanation around it is. It’s usefulness is dictated by whether or not it enables, inspires, or otherwise facilitates you to write a better story.
This brings me to my second point:
I make my living writing novels and one consequence of that is that I’m forever meeting other writers who are struggling to break out–to get a publisher for their books or just get more readers. Any writer with a basic grasp of the craft can put together a story without Dramatica or any other tool or model. Any kid who’s watched a movie or read a comic book can come up with a model of storytelling and, with some work, write a story. There’s a basic level of Western storytelling that we all inherit and with a few tools, I honestly believe any literate person willing to put in the work can write a novel or a screenplay.
The thing is, once you get past the basics or writing, you hit the wall, and the wall is not about having a tool or model tell you what to write next. The wall is how do you make your story just 5% better.
That 5% may not sound like much but it’s often the difference between an ‘okay’ book or screenplay and a ‘great’ book or screenplay. Once you’ve gotten the basics down, the struggle–every single day–is to get just 5% better, because in that 5% is the difference between the people whose work gets published, bought, and loved, versus those whose work sits in a drawer.
If tomorrow someone came out with absolute conclusive evidence that Dramatica was absolutely correct or absolutely false it would make no real difference to me because my stake is not in the theoretical. The only question I ask myself when I’m bashing around in Dramatica–struggling with the god-damned difference between obligation, responsibility, commitment, and whatever the hell other element that sounds distinctly like a synonym to me–is whether this is helping me make my story 5% better.
In my case, it does. When I sit there trying to figure out how and why “The Present” means something different to my book than “How Things Are Changing”, I’m forced to think deeper about what’s going on in the story and this sets the mechanics of my brain working. It’s from that tension–between what Dramatica is saying (whether I fully understand it or not) and what I know about my story–that I focus my creativity to come up with a better scene, character, or arc. It’s from that process that I get my next improvement, my next 5%, and that is worth more to me than if Calliope herself, Greek Muse of Epic Poetry, were to descend from Olympus to tell me which is the one true model of storytelling.
Let critics and literary theorists become lost in the often semantic debates about the essential structure of stories. As writers, our only concern is finding tools that make our own writing better.
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The only question I ask myself when I’m bashing around in Dramatica–struggling with the god-damned difference between obligation, responsibility, commitment, and whatever the hell other element that sounds distinctly like a synonym to me–is whether this is helping me make my story 5% better.
decastell:
I completely agree with this perspective. I’m selling some stuff under a pen name, but I don’t think it’s very good. That is, it doesn’t meet my standards for what I want to achieve. It’s not tasteful. And what I mean by that is best understood by what Ira Glass had to say about storytelling.
Glass has an hour long radio show called This American Life that presents interwoven segments on various topics. His work is good. Genuinely. Here’s a two minute snippet of what he had to say with some fancy motion graphics:
So let’s say that what brought me to investigating Dramatica is my desire to fulfill a sense of taste in my work that I currently don’t meet. It’s not what I want and I know it. Yet I do have a sense for what it should be. Just as Glass says.
So, as you put it, I will continue with Dramatica as long as I believe it “…enables, inspires, or otherwise facilitates [me] to write a better story.” That’s the brass tacks. So I’m with you there.
As discussed in another thread, I’m now about done with ‘encoding’ all the signpost scenes using a Plot Sequence Report from Dramatica on a particular project. Each signpost for each throughline has gone up on an index card, with the four scenes per signpost written out.
Next comes weaving the plot in detail. I’ll do it both with journey cards per throughline, per ac, on the cork board. And as a timeline underneath following the story spine using the McKee method, as seen in his chapter on Act Design in Story. I want to run a comparison between the two, mostly because I’m much more familiar with McKee’s methods.
I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with this work. And I don’t want to decide that until I it’s done and finalized on the corkboard where I can see it in its entirety. The corkboard approach has been tremendously useful for seeing patterns I’d otherwise miss.
Thanks for your input. It’s been a help.
Hey Maynard,
I started a mentorship with Jim Hull in the spring of 2016. Jim has graciously helped me work through how Dyspraxia impacts my ability to tell and read stories. I hold degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy. However, I am currently in my final year as a Screenwriting graduate student at LMU. I think I can make very quick work of this issue you are having coming from a post-structuralist education in lit theory but also needing structure in order to write.
The mathematical work that will help the most is to look at the work of Kurt Godel who discusses consistent systems and their incompleteness. In the world of Dramatica, the fractal nature is recursive. But, this is a strength of the model because storytelling is inherently inductive. Those of us that wish it were deductive are wishing that story could do more than it is designed for. And, Dramatica focuses on how induction fractalizes recursively. Now, you can’t see all of that recursion occuring because the chart is only part of the model. There are sixteen equations that manipulate things that are discussed by Melanie in the Quad theory class. Part of what you are noticing is that the multiplication and division is non-commutative in this Ring. However, a lack of commutivity in a Ring does not imply logical inconsistency. This is because Dramatica is logically consistent with in it’s own walled garden. The same is true of the monomyth that you sited.
You will find however, that these systems have contradictory axioms at their foundation. Because of that, we have to switch gears when applying models. There are times in writing when one model is less useful than another. But, the cool thing about dramatica is that it is such a great model that it works for every story with a Grand Story Argument. For example, the monomyth is priceless for backstory where Dramatica doesn’t focus on backstory because it doesn’t change the Story Form of the Grand Story Argument.
I can tell you that Dramatica is incomplete and there are true statements in this model that do not flow from the axioms. But, the same is true for all consistent models. Dramatica is internally consistent and is built on the way we resolve gestalt dissonance. Because of that, there are some axioms that we abandon in other systems. But, the same could be said about geometry or algebra. While geometry and algebra are formalized now, the older proofs were not so formal, but are still inlcuded in the canon of theory. The same is true for the pioneers of Dramatica.
As someone who can have a very hard time putting gestalts together, I have developed strengths and weaknesses around storytelling and problem solving. Dramatica is a key tool in my toolbox because it is like the seeing eye dog to my internal blindness. So, if your point is that there is no structure that replaces the territory, that is just the nature of maps. A map can never be a territory. But, Dramatica is a great map and it will get you from here to the moon. If you want to go from the moon to the stars, you might need another map. But, when you get to that far reaching Planet among the stars, you’ll need Dramtica again to land you vessel. And, it will serve you for all the drama that occurs inside the space ship.
Post structuralism and Post modernity should mean that we appreciate many structures and don’t misapply them. But, it errors when it throws the maps out all together. The best thing we can do is discuss if this map is the right one for the job and be willing to switch to the right one for the next job. In ergonomics, the old adage is that the next position is the best position. And, the same is true here. We are very lucky that Chris and Melanie have given us what they have so that we aren’t misapplying Robert McKee’s or Blake Snyder’s rules of thumb everywhere we go. At the same time, their work is even less formalized than Dramatica.
Hope this helps,
Brian