I have been writing novellas for a few years and recently started tackling some larger-scale writing projects that have been burning in my mind for a while. With this step, however, I also once again encountered an old friend: uncertainty and choice paralysis.
Most of my work so far was created in a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-my-pants kind of process. None of it is really well-structured, nor does it have a “point” per se. My stories are a mere matter of putting characters into situations and watching them react. I am not, in the words of Joe Gillis from Sunset Boulevard, “one of the message kids.”
Trying to write more complex stories, however, I feel like I need more guidance, more of a plan - not just in the interest of the story’s integrity, but also to stay motivated. To achieve this goal, I need a theory that I can fully embrace. Having read a lot about Dramatica theory lately, I’m just about to go all-in on it. There are many great elements here, and the methodical approach speaks to my somewhat analytical way of doing things. But there are still a few caveats:
I don’t think that a purely analytical framework can serve as a good creative guideline. That’s why I am not a fan of Hollywood’s plethora of cookie-cutter “Hero’s Journey”/Three-Act structure guides. These models may work in a medium where the writer’s role is more confined, but I never saw them applying to the writing process in longform fiction all too well. However, I’m aware that Dramatica addresses this explicitly, I’m just not entirely convinced yet. Maybe I just need someone to restate this in a plain fashion for it to really ‘click’.
Most examples are movie-focused. While I acknowledge that screenwriters are probably the largest audience and movies the most popular and widely-known medium these days, the fact also triggers my natural insecurity. Is Dramatica even well-suited for novels? What degree of “translation” does it need from my end to work in this context?
As you can see, I am more concerned about the practical use of Dramatica as a tool for creating stories, but feel that being convinced of this use case is a condition to get fully on-board with the theory. I’d appreciate any input on these points from the more experienced users in the community!
I’ve never gotten much into Heroes Journey, but I’m pretty sure it’s roughly the same ideas behind Save the Cat, which I am more familiar with. Here’s the thing. Refusing the call and climbing the mountain and storming the castle are all storytelling advice. I don’t know where HJ gets its story beats from, but I’d be surprised if it was any different than where STC gets its story beats from. Basically “other stories have them, so every story should have them.” It’d be a bit like watching an 80s action film marathon and then deciding that Finding Nemo doesn’t work because Marlin doesn’t machine gun and grenade those sharks to death.
My understanding is that Dramatica also began with the creators looking at films to find patterns (looking for archetypes in Star Wars and such), but they went deeper. They determined that a story was really a form of argument equivelent to a single human mind working through a problem. So when Dramatica says to do something, it’s reason isn’t “because Rambo did it, Marlin should also do it”. Its reason is that it’s part of the human problem solving process. Much more meaningful and much easier for me to accept as a reason for including a step. HJ and STC are telling you what to do with your characters while Dramatica is telling you how to solve problems. Thus it works whatever the medium. Novels, screenplays, life.
One way I think of the difference between Dramatica and others is this. If STC or HJ were telling you how to build a house, they’d say all the other houses on the block have four outside walls, six windows, and a steep roof, so this new construction should have those same things. But Dramatica would say you need to place studs in these spots to bear the weight of the roof and beams there to support the weight of the house, also, you need a large concrete foundation to build it all on, regardless of how many walls or windows you have.
With HJ and STC, someone had to do it before they could say “this is how it’s done”. If we relied on that for architecture, we’d all be living and working in the same mud huts. With Dramatica, though it technically looked at what had been done, the idea is built on its own foundation (the human problem solving process) and should work for mud huts all the way up to skyscrapers whether it’s been done before or not.
This is just because movies are faster to watch and therefore faster to analyze. Novels are more likely to have multiple storyforms (because of length) and other complexities that make them harder to parse out. I think this is the same reason you don’t see as many long-form television shows analyzed (which is shame because some of these have the best stories around these days).
If I were go back a year and give myself advice, I might suggest not going all-in on Dramatica, but rather to find an approach with it that gets me quickly to a workable outline and a finished draft. To put it another way, Dramatica is awesome but I think there’s a danger of losing the forest for the trees.
Dramatica is in no way cookie-cutter. However, it can be a trick to figure out how to use it creatively, as it can potentially cause you to question your own assumptions and stall out on drafting.
Again, if I were doing it all over, I would try a “looser” approach to using Dramatica for the synopses/outline stage, trusting my intuition more as I write, then coming back to it to fill in holes with the second draft.
You should also consider @jhull 's Atomizer site – he has some tools that can get you to an outline pretty quickly with minimal Dramatica jargon.
Finally, Melanie Anne Phillips (co-founder of Dramatica) has a somewhat different approach embedded in her Storyweaver program (she explains it in her books as well) that is in some ways more useful for the creative development phase and might be worth checking out.
no, you don’t.
you need tools you understand. Some tools are really great for some projects.
Other tools are better for other projects. A specialist in the claw hammer is not a carpenter.
I’m pretty much exclusively a novelist (though I was hired to write a video game script recently and have – on occasion and mostly under duress – written short screenplays.) I’ll do my best to answer your questions regarding Dramatica for novelists:
There’s actually a lot to unpack here. First, those “cookie-cutter” models can and often do apply to novels. Take a look at the vast majority of books on outlining novels and you’ll find some variant of the hero’s journey and/or three-act structure (not sure why people call it three acts – it’s almost always actually four if you look at the fine print.) To be honest, I think Save The Cat does a better job than most of these simply because it’s unabashedly geared towards giving the audience the emotional beats that are often satisfying. What they give you is a high-level structure. What they don’t give you is any semblance of theme, motifs, or the other ways of looking at a narrative that inspire you to put depth into your work.
What Dramatica does for me is force me to find both separation and unity of throughlines. Separation in that it demands four separate and distinct throughlines. So what the main character is going through has to be different from what the overall story (“everyone”) is dealing with which has to be different from what the influence character is going through which is again different from the relationship between the influence character and the main character. Finding that separation is sometimes very difficult, but it’s always proven worth it to me. Then Dramatica pushes for a unity between those throughlines – that each one isn’t simply another storyline but a perspective on something deeper – something hard to even put into words but which you can fully experience by reading the entire book.
Dramatica will let you keep going down deeper and deeper until you reach the limit of your own understanding of the model (which I tend to reach pretty quickly and then scurry back up the levels before calling @jhull and simultaneously denouncing the model while begging for help with it.
I haven’t found that Dramatica requires any translation to work with novels. In some ways I think it applies more naturally to novels because screenplays don’t give you as much space to explore all the levels and layers that Dramatica offers. Here’s the thing, though: it’s frustrating as hell. Sometimes this frustration comes from the language of Dramatica (which is a huge problem for novelists as we’re experts and using individual words to denote a variety of different concepts), and sometimes from the fact that it reveals weaknesses in your story.
One thing to watch out for is approaching Dramatica as a steady-handed guide who will lead you step-by-step through all the hard parts of writing a novel. It won’t (or at least, it doesn’t for me). Dramatica is a confusing cowboy philosopher who whispers the weirdest damned nonsense in your ear and its only after you’ve thrown your hands up in the air, convinced you’ve been listening to a demented drunkard, and say, “to hell with it, I’m just going to write whatever comes to mind” that you then realize you’ve followed the advice and found something meaningful to say in your story.
My experience is that most novelists who can write decent prose can get to 80% of a great book just by applying their craft. Every percent after that comes at the cost of your sanity or your soul (or sometimes you get real lucky.) All I can tell you is that as someone who makes a good living from writing novels, fighting for those extra few percentage points of quality and inspiration is the real job. I’ve found Dramatica to be a good way to push myself to find them.
If you’ve ever thought any of these, then Dramatica is potentially useful.
“This plot is fine, but I don’t know beans about any of the characters apart from the caper.”
“The story explores all kinds of character personal life, but the story feels like it’s meandering. It’s engaging, but I have no sense of when the story will end–or even what could cause it to end–in a satisfying way.”
“There’s a fine plot and an exploration of a character’s personal life apart from the caper, but there’s really only opposition in the caper and no one really challenges the main character apart from the caper antagonist.”
“There’s a caper, a personal life, and another viewpoint, but the story still feels like it’s missing heart. The key characters don’t seem real.”
“The story has a mishmash of themes that are explored, and some fit less well than others (or not at all).”
In short, there’s no cookie cutter template. I describe Dramatica as: given what you want to say, Dramatica makes sure you explore it without having gaps or (unwittingly) including extraneous material.
Not that you were necessarily referring to Dramatica as “cookie-cutter” or formulaic, but’s lets someone were doing that. The response might be that if Heroes Journey or Save the Cat is a cookie cutter, then Dramatica would be a collection of every possible cookie cutter that it made any sense to have!
If you create a new Dramatica story form with the Novel template, it creates a scene list for a novel. It takes that scene list from Propp.
Actually, if you create a Novel template and go to story guide, then at the very top of the left-hand list, there is a “folder” labelled “Story Sources.” Click on that.
Ah - you mean it’s baked into the Story Query system – not baked into the model or theory of Dramatica. Propp is being used as a storytelling template.
I get that – but because the software and the theory are often confused as being one and the same, it’s important that people understand that Propp is not a part of Dramatica.
I think what you meant to say is that Propp is not a part of Dramatica theory. That’s a true statement.
But, this discussion raises some interesting questions. Given how Propp is used as part of the story structure, it seems to my noob mind that the Hero’s Journey, Save the Cat, etc. could be used in the same way that Propp is used. That would mean that it isn’t an either/or situation in choosing whether to use Dramatica or any of those cookie cutter outlines. So, if an author is a diehard fan of the Hero’s Journey, they can use both that and Dramatica theory.
Of course, that’s just my pondering on the matter. Everyone here knows more about Dramatica than I do and can, I have no doubt, provide further clarity.
Reading this early on was another lightbulb moment. (Among other things I was impressed by Chris’ generosity of spirit toward other “competing” theories. Compare, for example, what Truby has to say about the about the traditional three-act structure.)
Anyway the gist is not so much that the other approaches are wrong, but that they are a. more limited (for example not having a concept of Steadfast main character) and b. take a different approach (subjective vs. objective).
The question maybe is, how useful is it to incorporate a “subjective” or “inside-out” theory alongside Dramatica’s “outside-in” way of looking at things. So far I haven’t really been too tempted to do that, which is odd for me. But I might at some point, especially for generating material early on.
But this gets back to another article that someone (besides me) should write about different approaches to using Dramatica. I do think there are quite a variety of ways to use it for writing and possibly to supplement it with other approaches if necessary, depending on the writer.
I think that one thing that Dramatica isn’t so strong in is applying the theory to create a novel, short story, screenplay, or whatever.
I believe it is absolutely not fair to accuse Dramatica of being cookie cutter, but I think that not being cookie cutter can be a problem especially for people new to the theory. While I’m not a fan of Propp (I think his stories are too tightly defined), I really do believe it is a good idea to include something like Propp in the scene lists (I’d go with the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey).
