Throughline of Story Goal

#1

Apologies if this was covered elsewhere, but I couldn’t find it when I searched the forums:

The Dramatica software forces the Story Goal (static plot point) to be the same as the OS Concern. However reading the Dramatica: A New Theory of Story book, it says the following:

An audience sees a story’s Goal as being the central objective of the story. The goal will be of the same nature as the Concern of one of the four Throughlines. Which one depends on which throughline an author wants to highlight in his storytelling. For example, suppose your Main Character and his experiences are the most important thing to you, the author. Then you will most likely want to make the Main Character’s Concern your story Goal as well. On the other hand, if your story is about a problem that is affecting everyone, you will probably want to make the Overall Story Throughline Concern (from the chapter: The Art of Storytelling Stage One)

So has the model itself been reconsidered such that the Story Goal must be identical to the OS Concern? Or does the software not reflect the flexibility of the model?

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#2

Hm. I think that usage of “story’s goal” is different from the Story Goal. For example, if you’re writing a romance novel, arguably the most important part of the story is the Relationship Throughline between the two lovers. So the “goal” the readers have in mind when reading the story is to see what comes of their relationship; the OS Concern in contrast sort of falls on the back burner. One could imagine an alternate version of the same story where the OS adventure is most prominent, with the romance between the two characters taking place on the sidelines.

In either case, the OS is still the “They” perspective, which gives it the widest, most impersonal view. The OS Story Goal is still the Goal every character is concerned with, so it’s still important. It may just not be the foremost concern on the readers’ minds.

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#3

It’s just the software. It’s tailored more to western stories. But really the story goal can be any one of the throughline concerns. That’s the theory anyway. And for me, theory > software.

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#4

Yeah, the idea would be that an Author can choose which Concern to emphasize more and that would make it appear to be the “Goal” of the story.

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#5

I don’t want to add a “me too” post here–especially one so late, (just catching up on the digests) but yeah, I think this is another case of Dramatica using a common (and slightly ambiguous word) to communicate a rather narrowly focused idea.

(I’ve slowly been compiling my own personal translation dictionary for those concepts I’ve tripped over because of this.)

As has already been mentioned, even though the story form doesn’t change, if the story telling is focused on a particular throughline’s POV, then the story goal may well feel like that throughline’s issue is the story goal.

Even in storys where the story goal doesn’t seem particularly relevant, I suspect that if the story goal was missing entirely, it would feel unresolved, as if the author just forgot about a bunch of characters or plot threads. That’s assuming the story was written well enough that the reader can at least intuit what the story form was trying to be and not just a confused mess.

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