Dramatica in Schools

My 16-year old daughter loves teaching her teachers about why characters are always saying “You and I are both alike” all the time :laughing:

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Ahahahaha! I love that!

No fear chaps! I have no intention of destroying your great Book of theory
or it’s reputaion. I am unqualified to teach Dramatica. So if your
intention to send me that email was to get me to reconsider, no need, my
friends, I had no intention anyhow. Emm.

Hey, Emm, I can only assume that you are talking about my reply to your post (unless someone else sent you a direct e-mail).

I have zero intention of getting anyone to reconsider. I’m asking a serious question.

Let’s take Jiim’s daughter’s uppity nature (ha). She tells the teachers about the you-and-I scene, and now the students can all talk about how the same problem (some theme of the book) looks to two people who are the same in one regard, but different in another – that deepens the conversation!

Maybe someone is able to use the concept of “Evaluation” to talk about how a certain problem is magnified for one character because of how he measures it – that’s cool!

What else would Dramatica do in the classroom to make a discussion better or more interesting?

I’m all for Dramatica in schools. Wish we had it in school!

@lakis I don’t think you can teach dramatica wrong if one follows the plot progression generated by the story engine.

For someone to teach dramatica wrong they’d have to hack the story engine.

I teach dramatica to people but we always stick with the plot progression generated by the story engine.

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When I first started learning Dramatica, I was helped by people (who are no longer around) who did not fully understand the theory. They were doing their best, but did not actually teach me the right things.

I mean, they thought a sunset was a timelock, LOL, amiright?

But seriously, they explained the theory wrong, so even though I had the engine, I was using it incorrectly.

Not only that, but some of the ideas are subtle enough that even people with the best intentions explain thing incorrectly.

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Watching some movies that are in the analysis section could be fun. You two could watch one she likes, without checking out the storyform ahead of time. You can find out that way what part of the theory she likes, and would use in her writing. Everyone’s brain is unique. Some aspects might bore her.

I’d say that even though you had everything explained correctly, it’s nearly and it may even be dispassionate to consciously consider the 75 story points as you write the first draft.

Our minds are different, the story points that inspire an individual as they work on a story form differ.

For example, once I’ve created a story form, I get the PS report and then I work through it then I may check the throughline appreciations after going through the first draft.

In my experience, even if all you use is the psr, the throughline appreciations specific to your story points will appear.

Jim hull’s process also doesn’t consider all the information from the psr, Jim will usually weave in only the plot sequence for the os, and maybe the mc or rs, he tends to leave the ic sequences to his intuition.

Even if we all knew how a quad ought to be expressed, the nature of what we’d say with a quad and the order of saying it would differ.

Different minds will express the 75 story points differently and consider them subjectively as they work through actually writing and completing a narrative.

For one, I use the psr to write all kinds of material outside the realm of story and it works for me.

Just to point out an extreme example, someone in the forum tried to sell the idea of five acts – the first signpost would get repeated in the last act.

I’m not talking about using all the points. I’m talking about just getting things totally wrong.

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That’s pretty extreme!

But even less extreme things can cause confusion, e.g. when is something a Situation (Universe) and when is it Activities (Physics)?

I would bet that 90+ percent of people when first learning Dramatica use story points as brainstorming for storytelling rather than encoding the source of conflict. You end up with an outline with a bunch of stuff in it but still no actual story (I speak from experience).

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I would put that number much higher than 90%.

Oddly, getting this wrong in a class, but still walking out understanding that the same problem looks different from the four relevant perspectives is still a valuable thing to know.

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yes dramatica has four signposts. The idea of five acts from the dramatica point of view is wrong

I’ve found the progressive story points and PSR helpful for delivering narrative power and storytelling even without encoding static plot points at the beginning.

The static plots show you what the story is about, the progressive story points show you how those issues play out and how they get resolved.

The progressive story points is where you tell the story points, the story points tend to serve as boundaries for the plot progression.

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If you don’t know how to use the terms or the ideas properly, how can you even generate a plot progression? Or how can you do so with any confidence that the story will be sharing the message you want to send?

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I’ve come to the opinion that, for many writers at least, the best way to develop an initial idea is to put Dramatica aside (except for the four throughlines concept which is sort of impossible to forget) and let it develop naturally. I think a lot of people struggle to find a storyform for an idea when it’s only half-baked, wasting time and possibly messing up their own concept of the story.

I’m not sure when the right time is to figure out the storyform and use it to aid your writing – once you’ve started the first draft? Once you’ve finished it? It might depend on the kind of writer you are and how long the story is.

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the dramatica theory book on page 17 gives details on how a writer can approach dramatica

There is a certain intuitive “click” that I think has to happen, and there is very little any active theorizing can do to make that happen.

On the whole, I agree with you. But I liken it to sports a bit: you train during the week so you don’t have to think during the game. Is that putting Dramatica aside, or is that getting in into your bones? At any rate, ultimately, a story must be passionately felt.

PS. The thing of mine that you quoted (paraphrase: the same problem looks different depending on where you stand) is a good thing to know generally—I wasn’t even thinking about that as a storytelling skill. Just a life skill.

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i found myself learning more about dramatica when i taught it to someone else

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8 posts were split to a new topic: Working with the Plot Sequence Report