Do-er, Be-er and Change

[didomachiatto]

In July, during my revision process, I posted this…

@didomachiatto

My Be-er is a Do-er,

@Lakis wrote:

@Lakis

she’ll actually change from Do-er to Be-er by the end of the story…So it’s very easy to imagine a character who is actively doing everything she can to avoid, prevent, or escape from a problem rather than confronting it. These actions would cause further problems until she learns to take some kind of internal action to change the situation (prompted by the actions of the IC, though not necessarily directly).

In July, I had to shrug and keep moving forward. Now, as I’m considering the revisions the publisher will want (hopefully, they’ll take it on!), I’m rethinking the storyform.

In my current considerations, I see that she is TRULY a Do-er who becomes a Be-er because of the IC. Here’s what I read today that helped.

Some Main Characters prefer to solve problems externally first, while others prefer to change themselves internally first. Main Characters can and do both, but they will always defer to one over the other as they work through a narrative. The Main Character Approach sees the primary character within a narrative falling into one of two places: either a Do-er or a Be-er . (Narrative First)

In light of this, and the chiropractic adjustment I gave to my storyform, I can finally see that she goes from Doing her solution-attempts to Being a solution, changing internally. It’s very subtle. Even hidden to the Author’s conscious.

I just hope the subtlety will come across as profound to the publishers; I suppose publishers are often “Heroes-Journey” bound and need to see a bigger/louder switcheroo.

This isn’t a question, just a help source for people later on.

I think it would be good if discuss.dramatica had a topic/category of “Read this, it is meaty,” which we could nominate certain posts to for. @jhull ?

[jhull]

@didomachiatto

I think it would be good if discuss.dramatica had a topic/category of “Read this, it is meaty,” which we could nominate certain posts to for. @jhull ?

Interesting - you mean a way to boost posts or responses here on Discuss that are “meaty”?

[didomachiatto]

I believe there used to be a place called “start here” in the previous dramatica forum. But a lot of things have been morphed on this new site.

We need a place that has filtered out all the really great things. I suppose you could even just have a place where the most-shared post-answers are kept. That is a sign of the “best of.”

But thinking of the newbies, they’re always writing the same questions. So maybe have a menu by term. The regular search feature sometimes gives you two hundred replies to weed through to find that “answer” you are looking for.

Narrative First is a source for all those answers, don’t get me wrong. But I wonder if there were a way to tag posts with relevant theory topics (hashtags?), and then have one that is a tag for (KING answer) or something.

Or the original poster can tag one or two as “Answered” at that post. I think Microsoft has something like that on their forum. On discuss.dramatica, usually one to three posts hold an answer that a poster is looking for.

I guess alternately, what if each member had a place to save individual quotes that were helpful, which we can tag. Kindle has a group highlighting feature. I’m not sure this forum could do that, but we could use a more fine-tuned searching method.

Just brainstorming. This also works the way it is.