OMGods, my head wants to explode. I’m taking an online class and the instructor keeps referring to the IC as the antagonist. I’ve almost punched the screen several times and I’ve definitely yelled at her through the screen “NO! THAT’S THE IMPACT CHARACTER, you Nu-nuh-nuh (yes stick in your favorite bad words there)!” It’s really hard to learn about the thing, I’m trying to learn about when this part is just WRONG! It’s distracting. Deep breath! In through the nose, out through the mouth.
I’ve been there. Just pretend they’re speaking a different language, and you have to translate.
I find always considering Dramatica terms to be capitalized helps. e.g. the Antagonist is not the same as an antagonist. The latter has no real fixed definition, you have to try and figure it out based on the context and who’s speaking.
Or are they saying the “character challenging the MC on their viewpoint” has to also be the antagonist in the overall story? Then it’s more than just a translation problem!
I understand, Diane/Jassnip. Even accomplished screenwriting friends of mine, because they find Dramatica too “boxy,” use “non-boxy” vocabulary that clearly lacks precision and tends to default into unexamined “Hero’s Journey” ambiguities—which limit these writers’ story options and terribly confuse their students. But hang in there; your Dramatica knowledge will grant you the much-greater storyforming range that such imprecise teachers often lack.
No, they’re just saying the person influencing/forcing the protagonist (shudder-- cuz they mean MC) to change their perspective is the antagonist. They have no concept of an OS. And that the protagonist (MC) MUST change. The limitations that are built into their mindset – it boggles. And when I said my MC/Protag was steadfast–well–the tongue clucking was audible over the interwebs–you can’t possibly tell a compelling story that would interest readers about a character that doesn’t change.
Oh…and one more for the vent file…my inciting incident MUST stem from a decision/choice my MC/Protagoinist makes that—how did the teacher put it?–shows the protagonist flaw at risk.
Well for one, that’s not how my story starts…it starts with the character and her brother being kidnapped. And for two, I don’t even know what the heck that means.
I keep trying to remind myself that I paid for the class and I know there is something useful here for me to get out of it, I just need to get out of my own way.
I was having the argument about Steadfast characters on a writing class forum recently. I just decided to give up when the advice was “every character in the story changes”. You could try calling it a “flat arc” and see if anyone’s on board with that, although I despise that term!
If you can just ignore the part of the class that’s wrong, and do what you know is right for your story, then do that.
If they’re forcing you to make your story fit their paradigm, that’s another problem. Then you have two options:
Try to explain what you’re talking about using film examples, etc. Chance of successfully convincing them to see your side: 1%.
Rationalize how your story actually does fit their definition, even though it doesn’t. “Well, if she hadn’t decided to do this (unimportant thing) then she wouldn’t have gotten kidnapped, and it shows (character flaw) because of (lame excuse).”
Option 2 might stick in your craw, but is more likely to work!
Also, for a Steadfast character, you could try thinking of their drive (Problem) itself as a flaw, even though it’s the thing they need to stick with (assuming Judgment Good).
I think that @mlucas’s advice here is the best: you have to translate from their language to yours.
There’s no point freaking out about it: ask any actor who has worked with a director. It’s every day for them.
If it makes you feel any better, one of my clients keeps talking about how both her characters “influence each other and they meet in the middle”. So not only do they both change, they compromise. Gag me.
But the reality is that it doesn’t matter if they see it this way or not; it only matters if they produce a story that is structurally sound.
And, as for you (and many of us here), it’s important to remember that stories are absorbed as whole. It’s what we do that is so odd. If you try to see your own story as a whole, your teacher’s perspective might actually provide some insight.
At least they are referring to the MC and the IC, so it is internally consistent.
I think this might have a sound piece of advice in it. (Though I can’t really parse the grammar.) Your teacher knows that your MC must have a flaw that creates problems, and it needs to be clear up at the front of the story. Most people key in on what the character is going to go through, and it’s when the “plot” meets the “character” that people get piqued about the story-to-come. And you have attach stakes to this (“at risk”) or the audience knows nothing dramatic is coming.
[This is a classic flaw: they know that a specific result is needed, but they only know one path to get there, so they push it on others. It’s not for lack of a desire to help, just a lack of real breadth of knowledge.]
And – crucially!! – remember that you do not need this person’s approval. You are there to get information from them, and that’s it. So you can let everything she says about your bad decisions and lack of understanding of story roll right off your back because it doesn’t actually matter. If you decide that there is something they are really good at (like, scene description) then seek their approval there.
There are a couple of writing podcasts I started following before I learned about Dramatica that are almost unlistenable now, because it’s only a matter of time before they start talking about how every scene must have a hero, a victim, and a villain, and how these three roles change BETWEEN characters from scene to scene, and I’ll have to turn it off before I start yelling at them in my car.
That or talking about how every scene must have a value shift, from “negative” to “positive” or from “innocence” to “worldliness,” which seems ALMOST like a PSR, except they never define their terms! So it’s all arbitrary, yet with this veneer of objectivity pasted over top like yes, we’re being SO analytical right now and I just . . . can’t anymore.
You’ve been listening to storygrid with Shawn and Tim. I started sending Tim Dramatica stuff way back at the beginning, I mean I even sent him -his signposts based on stuff he said he wanted his story to be at the beginning. And there was an early one of the podcasts where they reference me specifically, but indirectly because I went ballistic because Shawn was telling Tim how to write his story. I feel ya, I do.
However, in Shawn’s defense he’s savvy as hell as an editor which means even though he doesn’t have a clue about Dramatica, he still understands story.
Yeah, that’s the one! And I agree, Shawn is clearly someone with a keenly developed story sense, but as is so often the case, the problem is translating that intuitive story sense into a language someone else can understand. I mean, how many times has Shawn been trying to explain some concept to Tim or trying to get him to add some crucial part to the narrative to make it work, but because he can’t say “who’s the influence character here?” we just get a lot of, “well, the brother character needs to be more important in this scene,” or something of the sort.
That’s where Dramatica really shines, because it gives writers and editors a shared vocabulary to discuss storycrafting in a way that is precise and accurate, yet flexible. Otherwise, it’s too easy to get lost in the weeds of “well, this looks like worldliness to me,” to which the response is always something like: “Really? I think it’s more about composure versus instability myself.” Which is like, nooooot super helpfullllllll
While they are making an annoying mistake here, I want to stress that you are also making a mistake here, which is assuming that they are talking about the objective view of the story when in reality they are not. (They don’t know this, but you do.)
Now, not every scene has a hero and a villain. (That’s kind of dumb.) But you can see that scenes with conflict and stakes and whatnot can loosely breakdown this way, and once you see that, maybe you can actually get advice from these podcasts about storytelling if nothing else.
I’m stressing this idea of giving people a break in this thread, because I recently looked at something I heard from a story guru and:
• It was so easily disprovable that it is almost unbelievable that this person believes and teaches it; and yet,
• Despite that, once it was married with Dramatica it actually became something workable. Without understanding the difference between MC/IC/Prot/Antag the whole idea could be so misleading, but you know these things, so you can take ideas further. Not only that, but studying it actually helped me understand Dramatica better.
This bothers me so much. But, truth be told, this happens everywhere. My wife was once asked to edit a paper for a top business school professor, and she went back to him and said, “You never back up your assertion that small businesses create jobs” and he shrugged it off and said, “I can’t back it up, but it has to be true, or my paper has no value.”
This is the point I’m trying to get at here, said better. Shawn drives me crazy with his analyses of the “Love Story” in “Kramer vs Kramer”, but I think he’s developed his skills through so much experience that he’s probably right about things. That said, he also talks about “creating new genres” and I can’t stand the idea of working in a theoretical framework that is always capable of expanding, plus… does he ever define what a genre is? He probably does, but I haven’t heard it. (Which podcast are you in? I have only listed to a few.)
Well, no, I’m not making that mistake. I understand that they are assigning roles based on a subjective view of the story, but my point is simply stressing that those assignments are not super valuable because they are like describing how the taste of a dish varies from forkful to forkful, rather than providing a list of ingredients for how the meal was made.
I once heard Michael Arndt use the term “philosophical antagonist,” and that might come in handy as a rough synonym for the IC until they get “dramatica-ized.” Another intermediate term I generally use is “opposition.”
Philosophical opposition = IC
Personal opposition = MC throughline opponent (can be MC herself)
Logistical / caper opposition = antagonist
Long term, they need to just get with dramatica via listening to analyses by the dramatica users group.
I use something similar to that too. A surprising advantage to it is that you don’t have to worry about hand-offs, because it’s easier to have multiple people have contrasting philosophies. (But then that gets slippery, because everyone technically has a contrasting philosophy…)
