Avoiding the Dark Night of the Soul

questions
#1

I was reading a story the other day, and right at the end of the second act (by which I mean the third Dramatica act), the Main Character went too far and insulted the Impact Character, who left her alone to face the final climax. It was supposed to be a powerful scene, but all I could think was, “Yup, that’s the Dark Night of the Soul all right.” It’s so frustrating to watch a show or read a story where the Dark Night of the Soul is so heavy-handed. I’ve seen it in adventure stories, romance stories, coming-of-age stories, you name it. And just about every time, it feels totally artificial. Like, I get why the Dark Night of the Soul exists. We as viewers want our heroes to be underdogs, rising up from nothing to defeat the more powerful villains. And having them fall all the way back to square one right before the final confrontation is very exciting and tense.

But in so many stories, the collapse doesn’t feel like it naturally follows from what came before it. I know Dramatica can write so many different stories, ones that aren’t bound to the common stereotypes of modern fiction. So what are some great alternatives to the Dark Night of the Soul Dramatica has to offer? Or, if you’re a fan of it, what are some great examples of the Dark Night of the Soul that you like? How does that story make the fall and return flow naturally from the events before it?

#2

My hunch is that Dramatica doesn’t have much to do with story beats like this. In my opinion the different story models all fit inside Dramatica but Dramatica doesn’t fit inside them. Things like the Hero’s Journey can’t (if I remember right) be made into a Dramatica Storyform in and of itself . Or it is predisposed to the typical American OS Action Throughline.
I mean a good movie has an inciting incident, midpoint ordeal, crisis, and climax but how do those points fit into Dramatica? They may be connected to the Dramatica Decision/Action Driver.
Or… How could you take the quest of the hero in the Hero’s Journey and make it work for a Main Character who is not the protagonist who has a concern of Contemplation. Again, in my opinion, it can be done creatively.
What are some good stories that don’t have a crisis or climax? They probably aren’t American.
I guess the old line that Dramatica is a single mind having an argument with itself trying to solve an inequity is the answer. If that argument can be made without all of the beats of the Hero’s Journey or Blake Snyder’s 15 beats then maybe but it may not be very exciting or emotionally satisfying.
Here’s an image I found

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#3

Cool picture!

Mmm. All of that is absolutely true. I had a big long post in response, but in writing it, I came up with my answer. (It being, “use a storyform that focuses on hairpins instead of Zs or Us.”) So… yeah. Disregard my stupid posts! XD

#4

It probably took an hour for me to write that. I usually just free associate. I found my own answers also as I wrote. I actually started out asking you about the Dark Night of the Soul but figured it out as I went. I think it’s an interesting thread, breaking down traditional story structure through the lens of Dramatica.

#5

I think this is a great question, despite your plea to ignore it.

The first thing is that Dramatica is more than the storyform, It’s natural to conflate those two things, since the storyform is unique and concrete.

The second is that I want to point out that you are looking into the wrong place for the answer. Something like Dark Night of the Soul comes more from the storyweaving than the storyform. Storyforms are all about the conflict, but the drama is really more at home with how you present the conflict.

This means you can have a Dark Night even if you have an X pattern, which would have the smoothest transition at the end.

Third, the nature of an inequity in a story is that it is constantly creating problems. If those problems flattened off, we’d probably get used to them, so stories tend to have worsening problems. That means things are always going to be darkest before the resolution. This gives the appearance of a Dark Night or Lowest Point or whatever, even if the writer could have taken them further.

Lastly, a question. If you were going to write a story with different a Protagonist and MC, who would get the Dark Night of the Soul moment?

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#6

Ooh, those are all really good points. It’s true that I don’t tend to think about much past the storyform. Once you get past the argument, it’s up to you whether or not there’s a given beat or not. Dramatica doesn’t seem to have a lot to say past that point; the closest it does have is the Story Driver (which is what brings the characters from act to act), the Limit (which is what makes the story feel tense), and the sequence of Acts (which could make it seem incongruous to stop the flow for a break). It’s almost like… like the Dark Night of the Soul is when the Limit feels like it has run out, the Driver to start the fourth act is AWOL, and the storyweaving mood has dropped significantly.

I guess when I’m talking about a Dark Night of the Soul, I specifically mean when things seem to be going well, but then everything suddenly, inexplicably crashes and burns for not much of a good reason other than it’s the point where that’s supposed to happen. Like the old “boy loses girl” section of the cheesy romance plot right before “boy gets girl back.” In Silence of the Lambs (not saying it’s a bad movie, just that it demonstrates what I’m trying to say), there’s the moment where Lecter escapes, all the leads on Buffalo Bill go cold, and Clarice feels utterly lost. That’s what I mean by Dark Night of the Soul. Contrast that with, say, The Empire Strikes Back. The part that really brings the story into the final act would be… what, when Luke foresees his friends in Cloud City? There’s no moment when Luke loses everything and asks himself, “How can I possibly go on?” There’s instead this constant buildup of tension to the moment when Darth Vader reveals his secret.

Do you see how I see those two stories differently? One of the things that makes the biggest difference to me is this. According to the theories, at the end of the Dark Night of the Soul, the character realizes something that they didn’t understand before, and that revelation is what makes them successful when they finally storm the castle and confront the antagonist. But I’ve read and watched tons of stories where the character never has that revelation until the very end! There’s no moment of doubt that leads to the clarity. There’s only constantly building tensions up until that final Climactic decision/action.

Who would get the Dark Night of the Soul? Well, my gut reaction says the Main Character, since they’re the one whose emotional state we actually care about. On the other hand, I could also see it as the Protagonist has the moment of doubt, and it’s the Main Character that has to inspire them to fight once more. I think the best way to explain it would say the Dark Night of the Soul is an event in the Overall Throughline, but it doesn’t necessarily happen to the Protagonist. It just has to be firmly felt among the characters that all of the previous plans have fallen apart and everything seems to be lost.

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#7

I too am not a fan of the DNotS that feels false, however, this beat has came through in my writing organically in the stories I’ve written so far. So either I’m brainwashed into imitating the so many action/adventure stories that came before having been so ingrained into my psyche from overwatching/rewatching so many great ones. Which is entirely possible.

Or, as Joseph Campbell suggested, the human race has a collective unconscious that has some intangible expectations (for lack of a better word) for a story to be told or written a certain way. I just saw an interview with George Lucas a couple days ago where he said he used the mono-myth as a basis for Star Wars just to see if we still think the way they did, (story tellers of history) when crafting the stories of the Greek myths etc… he ended that statement declaring that he believes he proved we still do.

Like MWollaeger said, if the story continues to raise stakes or has rising tension, the tension proves to be too much and snaps the momentum. What we do after the pieces are all over the floor is every bit as interesting so long that you made it feel organic, surprising or interesting. And if you can surprise yourself then my guess is that you’ve got something special.

Can the DNotS be avoided? I don’t think so.

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#8

The monomyth is a story; it isn’t the story. Like, here are some examples of story ideas I had recently that I’m pretty confident don’t fit into the monomyth: “A group of revolutionaries lay siege to a flower garden believing it to be home to a valuable treasure.” “A fire spirit is sent from heaven to restore faith to a disbelieving population.” “A traditional young prince must come to terms with the fact that the princess he intends to marry is secretly a powerful mage.” So much of the necessary pieces of the monomyth aren’t in any of those stories: the call to leave home, trials to prove the hero’s worth, the death of a guardian, the return home as a god, and, most importantly to this discussion, a Dark Night of the Soul. The monomyth is, at its most basic, a story of rags to riches, and in all of my stories, my main characters all start at the maximum and minimum power level they will ever fill. The Dark Night of the Soul is just a brief return to rags before gloriously rising back up to riches once more. None of my stories need to do that, as they’re about entirely different things.

Now, that’s not to say the monomyth is a bad thing. After all, it wouldn’t be a popular story concept if it didn’t have merit. (In fact, I was working on a story once that used the monomyth involving a little girl with demon powers.) But, as I said, it’s not the only story type in existence. I don’t think that was Joseph Campbell’s idea, either. After all, it’s not called the “monostory;” it’s called the “monomyth.”

EDIT: Sorry, I should say that those stories don’t fit into the monomyth as I currently envision them. True, you could definitely write them into the monomyth, but I don’t want to do that. You could give the fire spirit a crisis of faith right before the final climax, or you could have the princess put the prince through a series of trials before revealing her secret, but that would be totally optional.

#9

My interpretation of the monomyth are guidelines if nothing else. Mr. Campbell did his best to encompass all of the stories he had heard and discovered during his lifelong experience as a student of cultures. And imo it was the best he could do to describe a tradition that is storytelling, as it crossed space and time but by no means the end all be all just a telescope view of it if you will. I only brought it up because you used Star Wars as an example of not having a DNotS when I think the entire film of Empire ends on a DNotS leading into the final act that is Return.

Also I think you have a narrow perspective on what the DNotS can be or what’s possible when illustrating this beat. I think the reason we are both tired of the cliche is that because it’s always shown almost identically to the last thing we saw. What if, for example, instead of a momentary lapse to rags that instead there were just too much riches or what if we compound the DNotS… at some point the story progresses on a downward slope where nothing is working out culminating in something bad, something good looks like its possible but then things get twice as worse.

The trick is in making yourself, or the audience wonder “How the hell are they going to get back from this?”

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#10

Yeah, Star Wars was probably a bad example. I was having trouble choosing a movie that really solidly didn’t have that kind of scene. (I do have some examples, in my head, but they’re… obscure, shall we say. If you’re curious, it’s an episode from a TV show that has both oatmeal and golden tickets in it.) The reason why I thought Empire Strikes Back would work is if you take it on its own without The Return of the Jedi, like you did.

Right, that’s totally fair. But that’s exactly the problem. The main character snaps at his boyfriend, and he and all his friends abandon him for being so insensitive. The witch gets all her powers drained from her and spends a night locked in a dungeon. The main character finally gets the money and success he always wanted, but he realizes for the first time that he’s lost touch with his daughter because of it. It’s all so freaking trite! I suppose part of it would be writers having the courage to write failure stories (like your example of “compounding”), but what galls me the most is just the silly “lose everything, realize your errors, fix everything” plot contrivance. Even doing a different type of DNotS like “The tension’s rising too fast for me to keep up” or “I’m trying to face my demons too quickly and it’s all just too much” would be more interesting to me. Or even when it’s not explicitly the Main Character’s fault that everything’s fallen apart, even that would be preferable. It’s just the stupid “I made a stupid mistake and now everyone hates me” thing that grinds my gears most of all.

See, that’s one possibility. But another would be something like, “We’ve finally figured out where the bad guy is, but we also have just figured out we might not have enough time to stop him.” Instead of “how are they going to get back from this,” it’s “can they make it in time?” The personal arc, then, would be in pulling out that last shred of drive and eking out a victory at the last second. No moment of loss or angst necessary.

#11

Just from the sound of “dark night of the soul,” it has a very subjective feel to it so I would guess MC?

#12

The point is, now you are brainstorming alternatives… and that’s deal we have with our stories. You gotta weed through the first few (5, 6, 7?) before you get anything worth a damn.

Well don’t do that lol… lose some things or the key thing, fail to realize anything and instead work your way back from square one, don’t fix everything but just enough to get back on track, lose one thing you held dear but have to leave behind. All the while the opposition gets all the more powerful, physically or psychologically etc…

My point is the DNotS can be a hindrance, a handicap or a limitation that forces creativity.

#13

Right. I have no problem with the Dark Night of the Soul as a concept. In fact, I recommended it to a writer whose story I was helping. It’s just that I can tell pretty easily when it’s being used as a crutch rather than something to be toyed with like you recommend.

#14

Yes, it was his idea. Using it to build stories wasn’t, but it’s a descriptor.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t right either. I don’t believe Campbell thought this was the only story shape. He was describing only stories that involved heroes, and I think hero origin stories.

My take on the journey is that we are all naïve and have crutches we rely on. Since growth is painful (you have to give up comfort), there is resistance. But in order to grow up, you have to lose your crutches. Since you give up your crutches, you don’t know how to act and the whole growth process seems like a bad idea (DNotS).

Put in those terms, it never seems like such a silly idea to me. But when you’ve got Kal Bashir touting his 2100+ steps of the hero’s journey, it seems so ridiculous…

#15

Not the only story shape but the only myth shape… I should have said myths instead of stories my bad. His intention with the monomyth was to ascribe it all myths, having contained within them the same basic patterns of steps. It was summarized in the Heroes Journey but that was only one book he wrote. And he wasn’t without his critics as well.

The only reason I mentioned it was because this thread was about the DNotS and trying to avoid the monomyth structure but take bits and pieces from it may result in something that reads or feels disconjointed or fractured.

#16

I thought it was sort-of taken for granted by people who use Dramatica that the monomyth is false – that people use it and at times it certainly fits, but by no means is it necessary. Once it’s false, “taking bits and pieces” ceases to have any meaning.

#17

I think it’s only artificial if it comes out of nowhere and was not properly set up. As if they read Save the Cat! and said, “We need a Dark Night of the Soul moment here!” (which I’ve heard in story meetings btw). As long as it is part of the Main Character’s Throughline, exposes some of the Main Character’s thematic issues, then I think it’s natural to have that 3rd Signpost be a bit of a downer.