So again, because I don’t know your familiarity level with Dramatica and maybe it’ll be helpful to some others that stumble across this thread, I’m going to go pretty basic. Forgive me if I go too basic.
The First thing to know is that the elements in the storyform are the source of inequity in the story. There have been a few threads on this forum about what that means, but the way I take it is like this: when element X is at play in the story, it will lead to some type of conflict. Here’s some examples.
-Being stuck in a graveyard (Universe) causes Fred to have panic attacks.
-Eating PB&J sandwiches (Physics) costs Ryan a sale when his peanut breath sends a potential customer into anaphylactic shock.
-Being a role model for children because she is the star of the nations most popular children’s show (Psychology) causes Anna great emotional fatigue.
So choosing a storyform means picking the elements that will cause the conflict that will be seen in your story. This can be a difficult challenge even when you have a completed story to look at, but it can be all the more difficult (if not impossible) when an idea is only half formed. This is because the storyform is supposed to represent your story as a whole, in its entirety. This is why Dramatica has the ability to predict what should be in your story. Because it’s seeing the whole thing at once. The good part about building an idea and a storyform at the same time is that you can mold your ideas to fit any storyform you want while also molding the storyform to fit the story you build. So even though we’ve pointed you in a particular direction, there’s nothing locking you in to that if you decide to explore the problems in your story from a different angle.
I see that as I’m typing, you’ve mentioned some other story points and it seems like maybe your suggesting they might change the alignment we suggested above. I haven’t read your new comment thoroughly yet, but if that does change the alignment, that’s fine. I can see this post is going to be much longer than I thought, so I’ll break it off here and come back to it.
What do you normally charge an hour? Whatever it is it isn’t, it’s not enough!
"as violent of realisation should be ‘moment of realisation’. Self-gratification (comical) was meant to express how pleased he is with his progress.
To put it another way, there really isn’t a storyform yet, only possibilities.
I think its worth trying your material out on a few storyforms. That is, do some story encoding at a high level. I’m doing this right now with a story I’m collaborating on using Dramatica in 10 seconds (you can find it under the storyguide - Instant Dramatica). I may do a couple of versions using the full Instant Dramatica process. (If you haven’t yet, you must read that chapter in Dramatica for Screenwriters.)
Two opposite ends people (with age a difference} meet, interact, go their separate ways onto new tracks. I’ve never gotten around to seeing it, yet, tho.
Right. And what I was really thinking when I said it could be impossible to find a storyform for a half formed idea was that it would be impossible for Me to find a storyform for You when I don’t know your whole idea. But if I am finding a storyform for my own idea, I can’t really go wrong. Watch.
I want to write a road trip movie. Sounds like a Spacelock. I’ll go with it. I can’t be wrong as long as I don’t throw a timer in there for some reason. I want there to be two people in the car together who are enemies. Sounds like they’re stuck together, so that’s RS Universe. Can’t be wrong as long as I show conflict in their relationship coming from the two of them being stuck together. No, wait. I want the conflict in their relationship to come from things they do on the trip, like running out of gas and having to walk six and a half miles to find a hotel to stay the night in. I’ll switch it over to Physics. Still can’t be wrong as long as I show the Physics of the trip creating relationship conflict and not the Situation of being stuck in a car together. Even though I don’t have a vision of the whole story yet, by selecting RS Physics, Dramatica can show me the whole vision of the RS.
And that’s why I keep saying I could be way off, or that it’s not a problem, @emm, if you change the selections we suggested. We don’t have a whole vision of the story yet, so anything could change that.
I still haven’t had a chance to think about your post about your earlier notes and how it affects the alignment we offered, but let me speak to how I got to MC Psychology. As I said in my last post, the elements in your storyform are meant to be the source of inequity, or the source of conflict. Given that, when you tell me about how Mitch is dreaming and conceiving and doing all these other things, even if I don’t know what conflict it creates I assume you are telling me that those things are what will lead to conflict in the story. That’s why I might make statements like these:
I’m saying that what you said prior to that sounded to me like the process of Psychology, and then reiterating that that process needs to lead to conflict. If you don’t have that process lead to conflict, then all you’re doing is using the storypoints as storytelling. Because I love to give examples, let’s say you have a Sign Post order of Conceiving, Being, Becoming, and Conceptualizing and you encode it like this.
SP1. Dave conceives of an idea to get rich quick.
SP2. Dave pretends to be a successful business man in order to attract investors.
SP3. Dave becomes a millionaire and starts acting like a rich snob.
SP4. Dave makes plans to travel the world.
If that’s all I come up with, and then I try to tell that story, it’s not going to be particularly interesting. It’s just a series of events showing what Dave does. Maybe it’s okay, maybe not. But it’s probably fairly dry and dull because there’s no conflict. But what if I encode it like this?
SP1. Dave conceives of an idea to get rich quick, which causes his girlfriend to kick him out of the apartment because she can’t rely on get rich quick schemes when she thinks they both need stable jobs.
SP2. Dave pretends to be a successful business man to attract investors. His old boss shows up to his seminar and jeopardizes the whole scheme.
SP3. Dave becomes a millionaire and starts acting like a rich snob which drives away any friends he might have had left.
SP4. Dave makes plans to travel the world which alerts the police to his presence allowing them to find and arrest him for fraud.
Not perfect by any means, but there’s much more going on. Now there’s some conflict, something to make it interesting, something for the audience to care about.
So back to how I came up with Psychology, when I said “Being jealous leads to conflict in his relationships”, I don’t know what that conflict is. I’m just assuming that you’re going to add that. Without that conflict, there really are no Psychology problems in the story. If we decide that the MC is in Psychology, as I said above, as long as we encode that conflict in there, we can’t be wrong. From there, of course, Dramatica places the IC Physics. I’m interested in how your particular IC will work because it sounds like all of her Physics are in his mind. But that can be a topic for later on. Anyway, after I suggested MC Psychology and you said the OS was about addiction, Lakis pointed out that that seems like a Mind problem (again, as long as dealing with addiction leads to conflict!). I agree that addiction seems like a Mind problem, but I wonder if that might be a Psychology problem in some cases-but that’s also probably for another time.
So to answer the questions I asked earlier:
The reason we suggested that alignment is because the processes we were privy to sounded like MC Psych and OS Mind assuming they lead to conflict. And what to do with that info from here is just to make sure you add that conflict.
Now let’s talk about your post where you mention your earlier notes:
When I suggested Mitch in Psychology, I was doing so based on all the information I had about Mitch. Now you add that Mitch is struggling to stay away from the bookstore but ends up going in and it sounds like you’re saying that creates conflict. So now it’s up to you to decide if Mitch’s personal conflict, or maybe the relationship conflict is actually coming from, say, the Physics of entering the bookstore. If so, we’ll need to find a new throughline alignment.
The other option is to keep the stuff about Mitch trying to stay away from the bookstore only to end up going in and show how whatever conflict might be related to that is coming from Mitch’s Psychology. Just in keeping with the Concern of Conceiving suggestion (and I’m playing kind of loose with things here, i’m not sure this will be a perfect illustration of Conceiving as a Concern), maybe Mitch has the idea that staying away from the bookstore is the way to solve his problem, but that leads to him having a internal conflict, arguing with himself until he finally relents and goes inside. Then he has the idea that if he shows up everyday, she’ll eventually notice him and he ends up missing out on some other important events because he keeps going to the bookstore. I don’t know, something along those lines. Anyway, it’s all up to you. However you want to approach that particular problem.
Hopefully all that makes sense. Let me know if or where you have questions. And forgive me for the long “Dramatica for Beginners” post. I’m obsessed with Dramatica and love talking about it. I can’t help myself.
PS. OH YEAH! One more thing:
My current hourly fee is free, but I’m thinking about doubling it! Haha. I just hope I’m being helpful and not leading anyone astray with my advice.
Ok, I’ve got you, but I don’t think I’m after the same storyform. My male character, Mitch, has become dependant on going to get place of work to be in close proximity, so he can admire, from a ‘distance.’ They never actually chat, only as customer and bookseller.
Well, not being in close vicinity would do it. Some would choose to move far away. Some would have a family member entice the MC away with a dream come true opportunity, i.e. studying with a world expert in a certain martial arts the other side of the country…haha. Wouldn’t the storyform depend on how you want to resolve his struggle? Do you have a final scene in mind for him? Do you know where he is going to end up?
Greg, when you get a chance, how about this for a synopsis and something to help narrow down the storyform: "This is the story of a discontented man who sets out to recapture his youth, but learns instead to live in the ‘here and now’.
I looked at it. It was spam. Nothing to do with this conversation or Dramatica, just a link to an essay writing/tutoring service. I didn’t flag it but it definitely deserved to be flagged. Not sure what happens after that, but I think its safe to ignore.
No, I could see he had just joined minutes before posting the spam-reeking post, so I flagged it. I actually didn’t know it would take effect immediately – figured Jim (admin) would have to step in to remove it. Cool that it worked like that!
So if we were starting with a blank slate, I’d have to ask what kind of things are going to happen in this story that lead to conflict. For example, is this the story of a man whose discontent is the source of conflict? Or is it the story of a man who experiences conflict because of the physics of his attempts to recapture his youth? In the first one, the process of being discontent causes him trouble, but the physics of recapturing his youth does not. In the second, there’s no suggestion that being discontent is in any way a problem, but the activities he engages in in order to recapture his youth do cause problems.
Again, without the whole idea laid out before us, there’s no wrong answer. Whatever answer we go with, though, will determine what this story as a whole will look like.
That said, I’d still lean toward wanting to put this story in Psychology and show how his discontent is the source of his troubles. Learning to live in the here and now might be the Benchmark to a Concern of Being youthful if instead of “learning to live in the here and now” we change it to something like “concieving of the need or the benefits of living in the here and now” or “gives up on the idea of recapturing youth” or something like that.
Also, don’t forget when someone boils their story down to one sentence like this:[quote=“Emm, post:55, topic:2063”]
"This is the story of a discontented man who sets out to recapture his youth, but learns instead to live in the ‘here and now’.
[/quote]
… they may have mashed a bunch of throughlines together to get to the heart of the story. So it’s possible the “here and now” could represent, say, an RS Concern of The Present.
(In the same way that one might say The Princess Bride is about learning the potential of true love. Learning is the RS Concern, Potentiality the RS Solution; yet they apply to the story as a whole too.)
A slight caveat to this … I personally think that your subconscious grasps the mechanics of story structure in ways that you cannot consciously understand (similar to how we all appreciate music without comprehension or awareness of the mathematics behind it ).
So, I feel that when your subconscious (or “muse”) comes up with a story idea, it probably has a bunch of the structure settled. Not necessarily all the way down to one storyform, but maybe it knows the Domains and Concerns and the Resolve, or some other combination of story points. How much structure it has baked into the idea is probably a function of how developed the idea is, and would also vary from writer to writer.
Now you might be able to change your muse’s mind about things consciously – “let’s tweak this to MC in Physics” you might say, and maybe it would work. But maybe your subconscious wouldn’t like that and would silently rebel – sneakily writing the story the way it wants (not a big deal), or sending you feelings that the story’s not right, making it hard to finish (bigger deal).
So, I feel like the storyforming process for an unwritten story is a combination of unearthing what the muse has already figured out, and filling in the gaps that it has left blank. Does that make sense?
Thank you all for contributing, but I’ve suddenly realised I understand less about my story now than I did before; not through any fault of you good, kind folk, but because I need to narrow it down. These are some of the storylines: how can I put these into throughout and will they work?
Full time carer Mitch is arranging his mother’s funeral. At a loss,he needs to find some new meaning to his life.
Sadie Teak, a bookseller (waiting to hear if she has been accepted on to the English Lit at Oxford) has no idea she is the object of Mitch (one of her customer 's) desire.
Mitch is struggling to overcome his dependancy - his need to be around Sadie.
Mitch learns from Sadie that he needs to stop living in the past and dreaming of his future, and start living for today, the"here and now", The Present.
