Understanding How to Select Genres Using the Dramatica Genre Table

questions
#1

From the following article: http://storymind.com/dramatica/genre/1.htm @jhull

The easiest way to assign positions on the Genre Table is simple to make sure that Main Character, Obstacle, Objective Story, and Subjective Story each fall in their own Class. Then, position them all in the same row so that they all fall into Comedy, or all fall into Drama. In this way, your story will have good breadth (because all four Classes are represented) but will have very little depth, because it is all Comedy, or all Drama.

The first way to mix it up, is to move the Structural aspects of Main Character, Obstacle, etc., each into a different row, so that your Main Character is Comedic, but your Objective Story is Dramatic (Like many Marx Brothers movies). In this way, you increase your depth, and can create a number of interesting combinations, such as having Both Main and Obstacle Comedic, but the Objective Story Entertaining, and the Subjective Story Dramatic.

So far, we have loosened things up a bit, but still not enough. The next step is to realize that the four Structural aspects don’t have to stay in the same Storytelling category (row) for the entire story. For example, a Main Character might begin in Entertainment, but end up in Drama by the end of the story. In fact, any of the four aspects might “move” through the table any number of times over the course of the story, touching on some or all of the rows.

Melanie Ann Phillips says in her post that you can move through different genres or modes of expression across different signposts for example if my MC is in physics: signpost one can be "How it works from the information mode then move to entertainment through thrills in signpost two then move to physical comedy in signpost three then move to action drama in signpost four"

Have any of you experimented with this technique before?

She also takes of splitting and combining modes of expression but I will leave it at the above text for now.

The genre chart is an interesting thing I’m exploring in my story telling as of now.

#2

Pretty sure that if the Marx Brothers movies were complete stories (their wonderfully anarchic stylings make me suspect they’re not) have all four throughlines, they’d all be comedic. Even in Duck Soup, where the topic is war, it never for a second drops into drama. The closest they get to drama is when they insert an unnecessary love story, and even then, it’s so tangential that I’m not even sure it would be part of the ‘main’ storyform. Otherwise, it’s cramming people into a room, cleverly manipulating people into doing your bidding, singing about going to war, etc.

#3

I think the modes of expression can change as melanie says in that post. The concerns must remain consistent despite the fact that the modes of expression change.

For example my OS concern could be Obtaining: for the OS Throughline: A lawyer has to acquire evidence to prove that his client is not guilty of a crime he has been framed for.

I have the liberty to cycle through comedy, information, drama and entertainment for each of the signpost while keeping throughline class as activity.

#4

Oh, I totally get it. My point was more that they’re not the greatest ones to use as a reference here because their movies are like 98% comedy, and the bits that aren’t comedy feel like they’re shoehorned in from an entirely different story (usually romantic). Groucho even went on the record as saying he hated them and would have taken them out. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s one of the movies where the characters in the romantic subplot never even interact or even meet the Marx Brothers. But that’s very much off-topic.

If you’re going for classic cinematic comedians, I think Chaplin is a better example of an artist that mastered the slide between genres. Or even Keaton with The General, or Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (that final setpiece is very much in the ‘Entertainment’ genre, but the rest of the film alternates between the other three).

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#5

I remember being at a Burbank weekend workshop Chris gave, years ago. There is something wrong with Hudson Hawk’s flow of genre somehow within the film itself, and maybe it was about this. They skipped one, jumping into his singing scene without doing a necessary previous one first. If you watch that part of the film, it is painfully obvious, making one realize the importance of structure for a complete product. It was very interesting.

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#6

In fact, the character could also arrive at Drama, by passing through Information instead, even though this would take them off the bottom of the Table and back up to the top (as published in the book). The reason is, that the Table is really more like a cylinder - the cardboard tube in a roll of paper towels. The Table really wraps around, connecting the top to the bottom; Information to Entertainment.

This represents the flow of human emotions. We can all get to any emotion, but just as with the Seven Stages of Grief, or Freud’s Psycho-Sexual Stages, you can’t skip the in-between. If you do this, the audience will not be able to follow the story emotionally, and you will lose them - pull them out of the experience. They will suddenly become aware they are an audience to a story, and will examine what happens dispassionately.

This was the mistake made by the Bruce Willis movie, “Hudson Hawk”. They wanted to mix it up (comedy, thriller, action movie, musical!) but rather than wrapping around the Table, they jumped over in-between and lost the audience. If you haven’t seen it, rent the video just to see what I mean.

Still, (and finally), there is one way to violate this rule to your advantage. If you skip a step, your audience will look to see if it is just a fork in the road. If it is, then you will effectively be telling your audience to “be of two minds” about what is happening. In other words, you are telling them to have mixed emotions about what they see.

The way to make this work, is to make one and ONLY one skip-over, then start TWO lines of emotional presentation for the same throughline. For example, you might have the Objective Story be Informational, then jump to Comedy, but also continue the Informational line. The audience is now split in their emotional assessment of the Objective Story, and will experience mixed emotions until you bring both lines back to the same row, perhaps Drama, or any one you choose. When the flow of each of the split lines converges back to the same Storytelling aspect, the audience will wait one more scene to see if they are just crossing paths or really combining.

To cross paths, each would next jump to different places, to combine, on the next move, they would move to the same place again.

When you consider the four aspects of Structure, the four aspects of Storytelling, the ability to place different Classes in different Storytelling aspects (Comedy, Drama, etc.), the ability to move around the Table with each Class independently, and the ability to split and recombine any or all of the Classes pathways, you end up with a highly complex, highly flexible, yet absolutely predictable method of creating the “Genre feel” of a story, all from one simple little 4x4 table.

Melanie Anne Phillips

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