The Domains of a Guy Stuck in a Well

[jhull]

@decastell

But would you say that you could take a new movie – not something especially out there but a reasonably mainstream and reasonably well-made film – give it to five people from the group and have them independently come up with, say, the same four throughlines in the same four domains with the same concerns? I’m not talking about getting down to the level of problem/solution/symptom/response or benchmarks, but just down to the level of concerns?

Absolutely. This happens all the time. In fact, most of us watch the film several days before and kind of try and figure it out on our own (the way you suggest) and then we come in and see where we all think the source of conflict is.

When our arguments fall flat - when they don’t hold up to scrutiny from others - that’s when we come to an overall consensus.

This sort of independent analysis happens all the time. I’ve been doing it for years as a means of improving my understanding of narrative.

I will concede that labeling them “Broken Storyforms” is not the best – probably “Insufficient Storyforms” would be better, but at the time I wanted to be more obvious about the deficiencies of those films. At one time @crayzbrian came up with a quad of these that might clear up any confusion (hopefully he’ll share it here).

@decastell

My reason for thinking this is specifically because it seems as if independent experts come up with different storyforms and only later make them conform to each other specifically because there’s a belief that there must be one true objective storyform.

This isn’t what we do–we conform because the storyform we come up with is actually better than any other storyform. It’s actually demonstrably better BECAUSE of those implied story points. I feel like my post above about the implied story points was skipped over, but it’s really the most important part of this conversation.

@decastell

It would also make sense (to me at least) that there wouldn’t be a single objective storyform to be derived from a finished product precisely because most creators are allowing a wide range of factors into their decisions about each beat of a story.

True, but the whole concept of Dramatica is that it is based on the mind’s problem-solving process and therefore each and every one of us instinctively constructs creative works based on this process. The theory is, we can’t help but organize narrative into a storyform because we want it to conform to the way we think. We’re not intuitive storytellers – stories are intuitively us.