The point was that the psychiatrist doesn’t claim to know with certainty what’s going on inside the patient. They work on probabilities. It’s the constant notion of absolute certainty in an objective storyform – regardless of how many times that storyform may need to be changed and revisited – that seems like it calls for an empirical test.
We’re sort of going round and round on this, and I’m not sure repetition is producing more understanding. So let’s say the conventional wisdom on this was true: there is a single, absolute objective storyform discernible for most movies (excluding broken ones) and this is the means by which one arrives at it. A Dramatica user therefore spends a fair number of years achieving a high level of proficiency with the model in order to reach a point where they can conceivably and with the help of several other similarly proficient users arrive at a storyform for a movie that might be right. Or, it might later turn out to be wrong once other proficient Dramatica users have spent time reconsidering it.
How does that benefit the Dramatica writer compared to the one who perhaps never achieves this zen-like objective view of story but instead devotes that portion of their time to writing and – equally importantly – to developing the many skills that are necessary to the writer’s craft but not solely concerned with structure? You can say they’re not mutually exclusive, but time is a finite resource whether you’re writing on the side or if it’s your day job.
I can only speak for my own profession, but I cannot imagine someone thinking this was a sound approach to becoming a novelist. Writing is an incredibly rich and multi-faceted activity. Prose matters – it takes constant study and practice. Rhetoric matters – an Aaron Sorkin monologue isn’t easy to achieve. Ideation matters – the ideas don’t come out of thin air. Research matters. Having a sense of the boundaries of suspension of disbelief within one’s genre and sub-genre matters. And yes, structure matters, too, but the notion of spending so many hundreds of hours of time hoping to reach a point where you can kind-of, sort-of, in a group analyze a movie or book?
The only thing that makes this level of compromise between craft skills necessary is this commitment to the notion that there’s only one right storyform. That belief is likely to cost a bachelor’s degree’s worth of study and even then requires debate and consensus and later revision. It’s got vastly more in common with an academic endeavour than a creative one – making for an interesting life pursuit, but putting Dramatica’s usability so far out of reach of most writers that I’d imagine many if not most simply get frustrated and move on to something else.
I can still see the virtue in a Dramatica Expert as a story consultant (something I’ve leaned on @jhull for many times), and I can see the four throughlines as a useable guide for most writers (who can get the idea of distinguishing between OS, MC, IC, and RS and benefit from them), but as someone who’s spent a few years with Dramatica and put quite a bit of time and thought into it, the analysis process – which constantly gets referenced as vital to being able to use Dramatica for story creation – ends up looking indistinguishable from an exercise in sophistry.
Maybe the middle ground is finding “levels” of Dramatica which deliver different benefits as you go for a deeper and deeper understanding and so each user finds their natural stopping point. For me there’s tons of value in the model and the questions it poses – it’s been helpful in a number of my published novels – but the point of diminishing returns is at the notion of buying into the idea of extracting singular objective storyform from a finished work.
@jhull: I’m still up for writing an entirely dramatica-driven novel sometime, though!
