Sorry, I just meant what word on the chart. That’s fine, don’t keep looking. I’ll be back in a bit.
Sorry, I typed it but neglected to press Reply…Get CONTROL of?
CONTROL (Conquer) PROGRESS
Hi Emm, hope you don’t mind me asking some questions too. Originally you had talking about the OS being about all the characters overcoming their addictions. I wonder if you could give some examples of that, preferably with characters that aren’t Mitch or Sadie. (If possible – it’s not that Mitch and Sadie aren’t part of the OS, but they can be easily confused with the MC, IC or RS throughlines.)
One of the reasons I’m asking is that it’s possible Mitch needing to accept the loss of his mother, is more part of Mitch’s personal issues (the MC throughline rather than OS).
Thanx for the catch up!
MC Solution of Acceptance) is the answer to the (MC Problem of Non-Acceptance)…
… By accepting that his desire for a romantic relationship with Sadie is ridiculous, Mitch is able to get his life back.
(OS Solution of Acceptance) is the answer to the (OS Problem of Non-Acceptance)…
… By accepting (stage seven of the 7 stages of grief) the reality of his mother’s death, Mitch is able to properly grieve, and eventually move forwards with his own life.
Yes, the OS was meant to deal with the daily fight to feed their addiction, or the daily struggle to end it.
I see what you mean. They need to be switched over. It should be …
(OS Solution of Acceptance) is the answer to the (OS Problem of Non-Acceptance)…
… By accepting that his desire for a romantic relationship with Sadie is ridiculous, Mitch is able to get his life back.
(MC Solution of Acceptance) is the answer to the (MC Problem of Non-Acceptance)…
… By accepting (stage seven of the 7 stages of grief) the reality of his mother’s death, Mitch is able to properly grieve, and eventually move forwards with his own life.
Hello mlucas: Yes, the OS was meant to deal with the daily fight to feed their addiction, or the daily struggle to end it.
I see what you mean. They need to be switched over. It should be …
(OS Solution of Acceptance) is the answer to the (OS Problem of Non-Acceptance)…
… By accepting that his desire for a romantic relationship with Sadie is ridiculous, Mitch is able to get his life back.
(MC Solution of Acceptance) is the answer to the (MC Problem of Non-Acceptance)…
… By accepting (stage seven of the 7 stages of grief) the reality of his mother’s death, Mitch is able to properly grieve, and eventually move forwards with his own life.
This is still referring to Mitch. Is there any way to describe something in “they” terms – e.g. referring to all of your characters? If you can think of them as a named group, that’s useful. Like “A group of bookstore employees …” or “a group of friends…”
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As well as his need to be in Sadie’s presence, Mitch is addicted to online porn; although shewas suffering from emphsima, Mitch’s mother was smoking forty cigerettes a day, right up until the day she died; Fitzy is a street busker and recovering heroin addict; Lionel, a colleague of Sadie, is never off his phone; Nile, manager of Mofax, the charity shop were Mitch works, is in and out of the bookmakers across the street, everyday; and other, subtle examples in the background of scenes will depict addiction of some form of other.
I will hopefully be able to seek more advice from you chaps tomorrow. Until then, goodnight and good rest! Emm.
Awesome!!! So what happens with all these people in the story?
Hey, @emm, sorry I didn’t get back around today.
I’m glad @mlucas and @Lakis jumped back in because I feel like we were kind of starting to split into two directions with what we were doing and I was going to suggest we back up and get in one track. So let’s follow their lead and work out the OS thread. I like how you answered Lakis’ question with lots of detail about your OS characters. And I want you to answer Mike’s question next ( “So what happens with all these people in the story?”), but I want you to do it with what we’ve been talking about in mind. So I’m going to go ahead and summarize what I’ve been telling you. This shouldn’t take too long.
Your storyform is about finding the source of inequity, or the source of your problem, in your story.
In order to show your audience (right now, that’s me, @Lakis, and @mlucas ) that there’s a problem, you need two things. A process from the Dramatica chart (everything on there is a process, even the ones referred to as states) and the conflict that stems from that process and proves that process to be problematic. When you have those two, you should be able to find your throughline or Concern or issue or whatever at least little easier. So when you tell Mike what happens with all these people, try to keep that in mind.
I’m going to give you a quick example using Mitch’s mother.
Right now, the way it’s worded, you’re really just giving us information about Mitch’s mother. There’s no problem there to put into a Dramatica storyform because there’s nothing inherently wrong with smoking forty cigarettes a day. You need to prove to us that doing that is a problem. In order to do that, I’m going to use your same information, but I’m going to present it in a slightly different way.
-Mitch’s mother had a habit of smoking forty cigs a day (Process) which gave her emphazema and eventually took her life (Conflict).
Do you see the difference? The way you said it simply let us know that she had emphazema and smoked a lot. The way I said it let us know that smoking eventually killed her.
Does that make sense? If so, go ahead and answer Mike. You don’t have to put Process and Conflict in parentheses if you don’t want, but I think it was serving you well earlier.
(Hope I didn’t get in your way with that, Mike or Lakis!)
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Ok gang … I need to say something. 
You have probably noticed that my grammar etc is not as it should be. The truth is, I left school without taking a single exam. 
Yes, I know it’s bad but please keep this in mind when reading my posts. I am writing on a small Tab that has no grammar check 
Thanx… Emm. That said, 🙋 greetings from Liverpool, England, UK.
I M P O R T A N T: Despite having plenty of notes on my story, because of my limited knowledge and experience of DramPro, i am unable to properly answer or provide examples to your prompts. Thefefore, I think it would be best if I stepped back for afew days and studied DramPro theory. So, if you folks would be kind enough to post me a list of topics - you feel I need to understand in order to better represent my story at this stage - I will be very grateful. Best wishes and many thanx.
R E M E M B E R: I only have the Theory book, Dictionary, and structure charts to work from - I am working on a Tab so cannot access the software. Emm.
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Hey, @emm, hope I didn’t scare you off by throwing too much at you. Your original posts caught me during some downtime and I was in a much wordier mood than normal.
Not having the software is going to make finding a full storyform difficult, but there’s still a lot you can do with Dramatica to help your story.
One thing I’d suggest for you is to consider the difference between the four throughlines. When I first started with Dramatica, id try to make all four about the same subject. An example might be an OS of fighting zombies, MC with a fear of zombies, IC that was a zombie, and RS of…I don’t know, something about zombies (took me longer to figure the RS out than the 4 throughlines so I probably never had a proper RS at first anyway). But what would happen is when I tried to put it together, the IC and RS and maybe even the MC would just be extensions of the OS. One day I started trying to write out story forms where every throughline was about something very different. OS of exploring Mars. MC who loves baseball. IC who’s stuck in prison. RS of becoming friends. Then I’d try to outline the story so I could see exactly how all the threads tied together. That was a really helpful exercise for me. I think I’ve noticed that same issue in others a time or two as well.
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Thanx Greg. Who am I looking at now? By that, I mean your avatar! Thank you for the sage words and yes I think I have the same problem in terms of throughlines and seperation. But I was under the impression, a story would better connect with an audience if the MC Problem is linked to the OS problem. That being said, would it be rude of me to ask you to send me a step x step sequence of topics to study that will help me to go back to the beginning of this Thread and work though it again?
Supposed to be Thanos from Infinity War. I’m not super happy with it, but I didn’t like the way RDJ looked.
As long as you encode them properly, they’ll work structurally. In my goofy example, maybe realizing that baseball isn’t that awesome gets him to stop throwing curveballs at the Martians or something.
Hey … Don’t knock RDJ! He looked very alert for a hand-drawn avatar. But seriously, you did not say yes (or that other word) to my request for a list of relevant topics I might use to work through this Thread from the beginning up to this point.
Its hard to say. For me, a lot of Dramatica had to be read, absorbed, stewed on for a while, re-examined, restewed, and so on before it finally clicked.
I think some good things to work on as a beginner are getting the four throughlines separated, understanding how to apply a characters process to the proper Dramatica term (something I can still have trouble with), and figuring out how to use conflict to show a process on the Dramatica table to be problematic. Those are sort of the thee main things I saw from this thread. Maybe Mike and Lakis could add more.
I hope so. But don’t give up on me yet, oh wise one of many faces! I shall return in a couple of days with revamped versions of the answers to the questions in this Thread. Thanx for everything so far. Best wishes …Emm.
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Here are a couple of articles I’ve gone back to a few times:
The first one is actually a series that’s worth reading all the way through.
The second one is another way of explaining proper encoding (I think what Greg was getting at with his discussion process/conflict).
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Thanx Lakis. I shall study these. If you have more information or visual aids, anything that will help make “the penny drop” it will be most appreciated. Emm.
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