Body Switching with Dramatica

writing
#1

So I recently watched a review of “Freaky Friday” and I wondered how to do this kind of genre in Dramatica. Not only was body switching somewhat popular some time ago (which means it’ll be popular again in some time) but the plot device is used fairly frequently in cartoons with even remote hints of magic, supernatural or science fiction.

So the first thing I thought about was the throughlines and their domains. Assuming that the two switchers are Main Character and Impact Character, I’m fairly certain that the objective story and relationship story are on the static diagonal (situation + fixed attitude), simply because the whole thing is about being ‘stuck’ in the other’s body and it is usually started and stopped with a belief like “you have it so much easier/better than me!” On the other hand, the two usually try to keep their switch a secret from everyone else, so ‘becoming unstuck’ might be to limited for an overall story goal? Still, undoing the switch is usually what ends the story; everything after that is epilogue. So with that said, would the relationship throughline be Situation or Fixed Attitude? With stories like these, where the relationship between Main Character and Impact Character more or less IS the story, I have trouble deciding this thing. Is it more defining of the relationship that they’re stuck in each other’s bodies or that their attitudes about each other’s lives is fixed? Does the overall story revolve around being stuck (in bodies, in status, in ethnicity/gender/sex/whatever the story is about) or around prejudices about whatever the story is about? I’m not entirely sure, but for now I’d say that OS Domain of Fixed Attitude would be better…

Then again, with these kind of stories, I sort of expect both switchers to change. Which would mean telling a tale, them both being main character of the same GrandArgumentStory, or both being main characters of their own GAS. Would that make sense? Having to walk in each other’s shoes… and they wouldn’t have to meet or do hand-offs that often… The Impact Character would then be someone (or some people) in the other person’s life.

This is just an excercise, really. I’m not currently writing a body switch story. What do you think?

I apologize if this isn’t the kind of topic for this forum.

#2

One thing that makes Dramatica so great is that it doesn’t care about the flavor of your story. Once you’ve picked a storyform, it doesn’t matter whether your story is sci-fi, western, action, or romance. The storyform stays the same.

I say all that to say that the actual body-swapping plot point can be either a central part of the storyform or just a bit of flavor. If the former, it would probably be in Situation. Which Throughline it would be depends (again) on the way it’s framed in the story. Is undoing it the central conceit of the story? Then it’d be the Overall Throughline. Is the fact that the Main Character is body-swapped what makes them who they are? Then it might be the Main Character Throughline instead. That would probably mean that the Overall Throughline is something else instead, like Obtaining or Becoming. This would be the case if the body-swapping is merely one of the obstacles towards some higher goal.

Now, as to your point about both of the characters changing. Just because a character “changes” doesn’t mean their viewpoint on the universe, their Resolve, fundamentally changes. Lots of characters grow and develop without capital-C Changing. Let’s scribble up a quick story. Let’s make it Freaky Friday style, a mom and her daughter switch bodies. If switching back is the only concern in the story, let’s put the Overall Throughline in Situation (Future/Preconception/Hinder). Our Main Character will be our daughter, who just wants to be a teenager (Psychology/Becoming/Responsibility/Temptation), but can’t do what she wants to thanks to her mother’s constant meddling (Activity/Obtaining/Attitude/Hinder). With this dynamic, there’s an imbalance: either our teenager stops trying to be so rebellious, or our mother starts helping her daughter blossom instead of holding her back. If you know Dramatica theory, you can probably tell which way I’ve set it up to go. :stuck_out_tongue:

But just because the mom is going to change, doesn’t mean the daughter can’t change too. The Relationship is about their Attitudes about each other (Desires/Dream/Uncontrolled) [I swear, I didn’t choose Uncontrolled intentionally, but it’s perfect.], which can certainly improve as they experience each other’s lives. The mother can describe why she’s afraid of losing the daughter to Uncontrol (perhaps some strictly Logical reasons), and the daughter can respond with why she’s so inimical to the idea of Control (perhaps deeply rooted in her Feelings). Perhaps as the story goes on, the daughter can recognize the Feelings the mother has, or submit some portion of her life to her mother’s Control for the sake of their Relationship. But in the end, the teenager never gives up her desire to pursue Temptation, and the mother accedes her Hindering ways to become Helpful instead. It might look like they’re meeting halfway, but the mother has changed utterly, while the daughter hasn’t.

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#3

I’m aware that Dramatica doesn’t really care about this one way or the other, but I do think that some Forms simply suggest themselves better to certain types of Stories and Plot Devices.

I would argue that Body-Switching is usually a big enough Plot device that you can’t just use it as flavor… and I don’t recall seeing anything where it was. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but I’m mostly talking about stories where it is a central part of the story.

And when I wrote “changing” I did mean their viewpoint, their Resolve. I can definitely see body-switch stories where only one of them Changes and the other remains Steadfast, but considering that in quite a few of these stories, both characters enter a very different world from their own and usually pretty different from their expectations (contemporary high school vs. actual job, city vs. country, ), it might just seem really weird if they didn’t both change.
Using your example, if switched mother and teenager rarely meet (because of work and school or something) then the teenager (in the mother’s body) giving in to temptation could go pretty bad (leading her to change) while the mother’s hindering of ways could be troublesome in the teenager’s social circle (leading HER to change).
I’m aware of hand-offs and such, but in a story where these two character rarely meet it might just seem reasonable to make them both main characters of their own story, with the Impact Character(s) being their new surroundings. If the mother is the impact character, who would take the role of the main character (making the mother change) when the teenager is off doing mother’s work? Main Character Hand-Offs are possible, but kind of strange; much stranger than Impact Character Hand-Offs - at least to me.

So, I suppose what I’m trying to say is… If both switchers are together for a majority of the story (trying to change back or solving another problem), then ok, one GAS. But if they spend most of their time apart, in worlds they never had to dive into before, then I would probably go with two GAS - it just seems more intuitive to me.

#4

Fair enough. I should have mentioned that I was just trying to be as clear as possible.

Also fair enough. I was just trying to demonstrate that you always have a lot of options when writing.

I suppose the dispute between us is whether this would be one story or two. Personally, and I don’t mean any offense by this, but I think splitting a story up into two GASes is… lazy, I guess? Like, part of the idea of Dramatica is the steadfastness of one character against the change of another, and splitting up the story into two seems like trying to have your cake and eat it, too. Dramatica doesn’t intend for “synthesis” or “compromise” stories, where the two characters agree to meet in the middle. We see a lot of that in movies (especially kids’ movies), but doing that weakens the argument by making it unclear which way is “correct.”

I don’t mean to imply that you believe any of that, though. It just bugs me, is all. Anyways, if you set up in two separate stories, then you can’t have the Overall Throughline be “undo the body-swap.” That Problem only has one Solution, and if both characters Change, you have two Solutions.

#5

I don’t know if I would call splitting it into two GAS ‘lazy’ since welding those two forms together seems like more effort to me than ‘just’ writing one. In the Dramatica Theory Book there is a short passage about Relationship of Subplots to Plot. “[…] In contrast, the subplot may arrive at the opposite conclusion, suggesting the solution for one storytelling situation is not universally appropriate.” (Theory Book). So it seems Dramatica’s developers wouldn’t mind this kind of thing (or didn’t when they wrote that part).

The question is, if you have two storyforms with all 12 essential questions answered the same, except for the os problem one, which gives each form opposing elements (so hinder/help or something), and you then put these forms into one story… does one half undermine the other? Or even if you use these forms in two separate stories, are you contradicting yourself? Does it make you sound wishy-washy? Or do you feel weird after watching two movies with apparently opposing GAS? *

Aside from that, in the case of two GAS, I would probably make both switchers Situation-Main-Characters. It is their personal goal to get “unstuck”. They wouldn’t have an argument with each other (from a Dramatica Point of View). Maybe them, individually, wishing to be on the greener sider would be the inciting incident that caused all this and they have their adventures on their own. Again, in this scenario, the two switchers don’t meet that often. So, to me, it makes sense to split it into two GAS…

Generally though, if they stick together, I would definitely use just one GAS. And maybe make the steadfast character the one who made the switch happen in the first place… although that might turn into one of those Impact Character = Antagonist stories.

And whether Dramatica is intended for a particular kind of stories… I think it’s fun to explore the edges of models like these. Body Switching stories (and I’m sure many other ‘genres’) help me determine where using this tool would be detrimental to the stories I’m trying to write. Thing is, Dramatica doesn’t seem to be intended for longform stories like television series either. And we still try to mix and match storyforms, so that maybe each season (and maybe a few individual episodes) is a separate argument.

  • For example, according to the Analysis Pages “Harry Potter” and “Aliens” share Change, Stop, Do-er, Male, Action, Optionlock, Success, Good, Physics, Understanding and Instinct, but their OS Problems are Ability and Desire respectively.

#6

Bob, where you are talking about changing, it might help you to start using the word “growth”. The central idea is that a character (who switches bodies) “enters a very different world from their own” and what this does is present them will all sorts of new experiences (so they grow) and it tests the way they live their lives – it’s worked so far, will it work here? If they abandon a central tenet of how they live and adopt something else, then they’ve capital-C changed. That’s what the storyform cares about when it talks about Resolve.

Two characters don’t need to meet a ton to be IC/MC. Look at Hamlet. But, on a broader scale, I think it’s a bit crazy to think that two characters sharing the other’s body aren’t together for the majority of the story: they are in each other’s body probably environment. To me that screams “being together”, because it’s all about experiencing the other person’s way and limitations and being. You wouldn’t need two stories.

Beginners to Dramatica commonly see the need for multiple GAS’s. I think this is generally a sign that they are invested in the story, and want to see it all developed thoroughly. So, it’s a good thing in that it comes from good intentions. But it is also generally a misalignment of what they want and what Dramatica covers. One GAS is usually enough.

(Also, @actingpower, you are mixing issues when you talk about:

…because, there are many ways to handle this that negate your point.)

As for the rest of your thoughts, @bobRaskoph, about feeling wishy-washy or dramatica not being intended for certain kinds of stories (body switching, TV)… this is inaccurate. Dramatica isn’t “intended” for anything: it’s not a way to model any specific narrative form. It’s a way of dealing with conflict; stories deal with conflict – it’s a match! But it’s not about any specific kind of story.

Long-form TV works because it’s a blend of multiple GAS’s and tales that all work together. Dramatica deals with the components, the individual GAS’s. If they contradict, so be it: life itself is complicated, and humans are pretty good at dealing with contradictions. We recognize what we live. It’s when a single GAS is weak that we notice and rebel, because it is a failure to deal with conflict the way it should be dealt with.

(Body-switching as a flavor: how about Avatar?)

#7

I’m aware of the difference between Growth and captical-C changed. I was talking about both characters abandoning a central tenet of how they live and adopting something else.
The difference between Hamlet and this body-switching situation would be that we don’t really spend much time in the head of Ghost Hamlet, while we would spend that time in the heads of both switchers (in the scenario that I made up). And while I understand that I wouldn’t need two stories, it does seem more intuitive to me to do so. Whether that’s because I’m a beginner to Dramatica or because of some other reason that I’m not able to argue for, I don’t know. I’d say it’s both. Generally when writing stories I use only one form. This body switching plot is one of the very few instances where it makes sense to me to use two (apart from parallel stories and such).
Let me ask you then: Can you think of instances where using two (or more) forms makes more sense than using one? Let’s assume we’re talking about feature-length movies. (I’m aware of Finding Nemo and Jerry Macquire, though I haven’t seen the latter.)

Well, if Dramatica isn’t intended for anything, then it isn’t intended for certain kinds of stories, either :P. And no, Dramatica isn’t a way to model any specific narrative form, but it does seem to me that certain forms work better with the model (on its own) than others. The blending of multiple GAS’s is not part of the actual theory, is it? As you say, it deals with the individual GAS’s, the components, while the blend of it is completely in the authors’ hands.
Stories deal with conflicts… unless they don’t. I’ve seen some eastern story structures that don’t require conflict (like Kishotenketsu) and it did seem like using Dramatica with those would cause at least some friction.

I admit, I haven’t seen Avatar, but as far as I know, there isn’t so much body-switching as much as the main character ‘possessing’ a Navi’s body, right? Nobody takes his human body for a ride.

It seems as though I don’t understand the theory as well as I had thought. But knowing your own ignorance is the first step to progress, isn’t it?

#8

If that’s what you want to do, then yes, it would take two GAS’s. If you set them to be very similar, then you could “hide” the fact that there are two, but I’m not sure what this would get you – the more you overlap them, the more they will look like one GAS – then having two changes will be experienced like two changes in one GAS… it doesn’t seem worthwhile to me.

(My point with Hamlet is that an MC doesn’t need to spend all that much time with the IC for them to still qualify as an IC.)

I just watched Lagaan. It is long (4 hrs) so that might disqualify it, but it has one GAS and one tale. The tale was limp, and should have been handled differently – either as a GAS or a part of the main story. As it is, it took up very little time. (It was a love story running along side the main story of a drought.) No other movies jump to mind, but I think it’s because movies are short. A novel is probably better equipped for more. (I think The Art of Fielding has two. I’m guessing, though.)

Well… if Kishotenketsu don’t deal with conflict, they don’t need any input from a system that describes how the human mind deals with conflict. It’s why Chris and Melanie try to distinguish between stories and Grand Argument Stories. (Nobody says Kishotenketsu benefits from the theory of quantum electrodynamics, but that seems more self evident.) Trying to distinguish between them is easy, but hecklers can claim you are pulling a “No True Scotsman” fallacy.

Avatar: not really body-switching, no.

#9

@MWollaeger, you captured exactly what I was trying to say, only so much more clearly and so much better. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

#10

And something to consider is that the body switching part is ONLY part of the Overall Story or Relationship throughline, and its development and resolution are limited to those threads in the story. In stories like that, the MC throughline will be something personal and apart from the body-switching event, even though the MC will grow in that other role but not necessarily in direct response to it. That’s why it is important to identify the domains for the throughlines – they help clarify what is happening and within which context.