Just went through and knocked out the treatment for my story.
The Subtext Treatment editor is worth its weight in gold. Great work on this. I didn’t realize how well integrated the characters/groups/relationships editor was with the Treatment and Throughline Composition features. Huzzah!
The Milagro class changed everything, realized I had my Throughlines off and that was what was blocking me. Once I got that right, it took off.
Thanks - I should really try and make that all apparent!
I think it’s apparent, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. You just need that tutorial feature we talked about. Your system is an ‘expert system’ – it’s designed to support people who know what they’re doing and want to build a story fast. If you build in too many ‘support and explain features’ it will lose that zippy quality, and I don’t think you want that.
And you need to have a disconnected mode so people can work on their story when not connected to the web–on the subway in NYC for example.
This Treatment editor is helping me uncover some amazing stuff. I wrote rough draft of half my treatment in two days, and expect to finish the RD in two more days. Wow.
I feel like the training wheels have finally come off.
Yes - something I need to make more clear, which I think is super important when it comes to the Treatment view –
A lot of people ask to have the Dramatica stuff listed out under each Storybeat, or at the very least a toggle where they could decide whether its there or not. And that’s interesting to me because what you’re essentially doing is repeating yourself – you’re doing twice as much work.
All the work you do in the Storybeats or Throughline sections, the translating Dramatica storypoints into Illustrations/Encodings is work finished. So having them listed out in the Treatment is like asking your brain to do all that work over again.
“Well, I need to know that this beat is about Fact while Conceiving.”
Why? You already did the work of translating Fact while Conceiving into an illustration–maybe three or four sentences encapsulating what that is all about.
Anyone who has worked with Dramatica knows that looking at the storyform will always keep you from writing, you’re constantly conceptualizing meaning rather than conceiving scenes.
If you have the Dramatica terms there in the Treatment view, you’re just taking five enormous steps backward.
The whole point of Subtext and the Treatment view is to leave the process with something to write from. Dramatica is so incredibly super powerful and prescient that if you continue to be faced with the terms and the appreciations, you’re always going to be locked in that head state of structure, rather than storytelling.
My hope is that writers will eventually trust themselves that they’ve already done the work, so they can get to the business of finishing their work – which it sounds like you’re starting to really get the feel of.
I’ve made it as hard for myself as I could. 
I’m starting to get the point. It’s intended to lift you up into your story, not chain you down to structure as you write. You’re not supposed to be looking at your feet when you’re on the tightrope; you make sure the tightrope is tied on both ends before you get on, then trust that you screwed the screws in the right way and walk out onto that rope and perform. It’s the Greatest Show On Earth!
It’s not a set of chains, tying you to some structure. It’s a series of fractal trampolines.
I want to open a bar called The Fractal Trampoline, called FracTramp by it’s regulars.
Still another way to look at it. Each quad is like a wormhole, you contemplate the quad, it draws you down into it you go through the quad and then you come out the other side through a different exit with material that expresses the quad. But the quad is now behind you.
its liked your sucked down into one portal then spit out through a different portal
This is a great analogy.
I figure ya toss out enough analogies, one of them will be less wrong than the others. But I always was an optimist.