Throughline Therapy

theory
#1

As I’ve been developing my current story, there’s been one throughline that hasn’t quite been coming together, and I was ignoring it. I was really excited about the other ones, but somehow, throughline X just didn’t gel. There was no REASON for it. It was just kind of lying there.

So I went through the PSR again and just focused on that one throughline. I realizes there were some central issues the characters had to face I’d been avoiding. I solved some plausibility problems (the great question: why don’t they just stop?)

So I just followed the dots and wrote out the story of that throughline and ignored the rest of my world. I gave it the attention it was due–it felt like, finally you’re paying attention to me, and it rewarded me by showing itself to me.

And there was a moment when I could feel my own interest light up. I now understood my throughline and fell in love with it.

I think that was key. I couldn’t feel close, intimate with that throughline, I hadn’t been able to bring it ‘inside’ me.

I’m still kind of learning how to do this, so my understanding is crawling along here. I do have this experience in my software career, learning a new language or technology. There is a moment when my understanding of a language ‘flips’ - I’m no longer looking at it from outside, but from inside. I think the same kind of thing has to happen with a story, or throughline, and that’s how you know you’re in the right place to actually perform it, and also that it’s got something close to the right shape.

Just some thoughts.

4 Likes
#2

So cool.

And that, right there, is the reason for Dramatica.

You’re basically describing how and why Dramatica can work for writers … You have this great story but something is missing and you’re not sure what it is. Dramatica can point you in the right direction so you know what’s missing, and help you figure out to fill the hole with something that both fits the rest of the story AND comes from deep within you.

Thanks for sharing.

#3

My plezh. There’s that moment when you pass through the membrane from outside to inside. You have to both work towards it and wait for it. I have no interest in commencing the writing performance until I am inside.

Just thinking, always heard there are writers who like to invent extemporaneously (like my friend Larry Block) and writers who have to outline the story. I’m definitely the second kind–I can extemporize until the cows come home but the result is drek. But it’s the for the sake of the structure. The point is to make the right mental moves that makes a space for the story inside me, for the moment when it decides to join me. I can’t put it any other way. It’s like making a home for a beloved, I suppose.