We are thrilled to announce that, thanks to the merger between Dramatica and Subtxt, we’ve finally achieved clarity and consistency in our terminology! Now you can leverage all the fantastic developments from Subtxt while keeping the original terminology you know and love from Dramatica.
Here’s what this means for you:
Signposts are officially back as Signposts (no more Transits!)
Non-accurate stays Non-accurate (not Deviation)
Uncontrolled remains Uncontrolled (not Free)
Unproven stays Unproven (not Presumption)
Non-acceptance is clearly Non-acceptance (not Rejection)
Problem-solving Style is officially Problem-solving Style (not Narrative Baseline)
Story Limit stays Story Limit (not Narrative Fabric)
Change is straightforwardly Change (no longer Relinquished for Resolve)
Steadfast remains clearly Steadfast (no longer Maintained for Resolve)
Additionally, we have some Melanie and Chris-approved updates to enhance clarity:
Prerequisites (Variation under Learning) is now Preliminaries
Preconditions (Variation under Learning) are now Contingencies
These changes are live across the entire platform. To further enhance your experience and help you quickly grasp each term as you explore your Storyform, we’ve included helpful hints right beneath each term.
Great! Some of those changes I really liked, but I’m happy going back to the original terms to reduce confusion. The key thing for any Dramatica term is to come to grips with the underlying meaning, which is more than any single word can offer anyway.
I really liked them too (for obvious reasons!), and you’ll see “Free” listed under Uncontrolled, but there was one thing I was missing…
In my enthusiasm to get everyone to think of them in terms of “-ing” (which I still think is helpful from a creating writing standpoint), the quad itself is always a balance of binary/analogue - so Control/Uncontrolled is more accurate in terms of the theory than Control/Free. Same with External Framing, Internal Framing - yes, thinking of it as a process is great for storytelling/writing, but they really are meant to be states…
The other issue was AI and semantic understandings of the term. In previous incarnations, if you were to ask for a “lack of Control” it would often get confused and mark it as Uncontrolled–when a lack of Control is not Uncontrolled at all.
With the new capabilities of the models, and the overall falling cost of intelligence, we can update it so that we get the best of both worlds–while still holding on to the theory as it was originally intended.
