Category Archives: Storytelling

Storytelling

The following  excerpt is taken from

The Dramatica Class Transcripts

Dramatica : Are there any particular areas of story you’d like me to cover? Plot, Character, Theme, Storyforming, etc.

Nawtigrl : Storytelling.

Dramatica : Okay, here’s some information on Storytelling. Stop me if you have any questions, or want to change the subject. First of all, Dramatica theory divides stories into two broad categories: Storyforming and Storytelling. To see the difference, look at West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet Both have essentially the same dramatic structure, but the storyTELLING is quite different.

Nawtigrl : How to handle all the resolutions with all the elements at once to move forward?

Dramatica : Ah! Dramatica has SO MUCH detail about your story, that to try and use it all as a blueprint, would smother your creativity. The heart of creativity is to blend many meanings into a single symbol. What we suggest is, that rather than trying to use the 150 pages of reports and all of the storypoints as a blueprint, just read the reports to get a “feel” for your story. The reports and storypoints are designed to shine some light into the areas you may not always think to look. Then, when you see what’s there, your instincts can take over again.

Nawtigrl : OK, I’m rewriting and ..

Dramatica : So you are coming to Dramatica with an existing draft, and want to know how to get some use out of the software in that case?

Nawtigrl : yes

Dramatica : Okay. When rewriting…authors, in their first draft, often don’t know exactly what they want their story to be, until they have completed the first draft. By following their personal muse, they are able, in the end, to discover the essence of what they want to say.

By that time, however, they have put a lot of work into things that may not all work, in light of the eventual message they discovered. So, the trick is, to locate things that are inconsistent, and things that are missing or redundant. Here’s how you can use the software to do that. There are two different approaches. Number one: go ahead and try to create a storyform that describes your story as you now see it, without actually referring to the draft itself, just from your personal understanding of what you are trying to achieve.

Nawtigrl : I’ve done 3

Dramatica : This works fine for drafts of any number. Once you have a storyform that is just what you wanted to say, then you go into storytelling and try to find parts of your story that “tell” each of the dramatic points you need to make, as indicated in the storyform. If there are points which you can’t find anything in your story that matches then you have left some holes in that draft, which need to be addressed.

By knowing what is missing, and by having done so much work and thinking about the story already, concepts and images that could fill those holes are often not hard to conjure up. You might find, however, (Hi, Dan!) that you have items in your story, which don’t fit anything that is required in your storyform dramatics,

Dan Steele : hi. Traffic!

Dramatica : In that case, those parts of your story are not really part of the drama, and unless the audience is made to understand by the way you present them that they are just entertainment, you may be confusing your own message. But as I mentioned, there is a second approach to rewriting, which I like even better. When you go into the software, go directly into storytelling without creating a storyform. Dramatica will present you with all the same storypoints, (goal, Main Character’s Concern, etc.) but will not have supplied any dramatic items to fill them in.

Goal will not be listed as “obtaining” or “becoming”, for example, but will be left blank. Now, you fill in the storytelling for each of these points, because every complete story is going to have to address them. Then, once you have found or written anew story illustrations that cover all of the dramatic points. You go into storyFORMING mode. When you are in the DQS (Dramatica Query System) If you select Storyforming, and then push the Helpview button in the middle of the screen that says “storytelling”, all of the storytelling you have already entered will show up in the text box beneath the storyFORMING question. In this way, you have your own words, describing your own story as a guide in selecting which of Dramatica’s choices would best describe what you have done.

Start with the story points that are most important to you. Those you are sure to get. But as you move from one question to the next, eventually, you may come to a question in which all the available questions are not appropriate to the storytelling you have already done. At this point, you need to make a decision. One choice would be to scrap what you wrote as being inconsistent, and write something else on that story point, that would be more in line with the available choices that Dramatica predicts you can use and still be consistent with what you have chosen already.

You may only have to rewrite a few scenes to accommodate this. But if your mark was WAY off, and your own biases got the better of you, you may find that there are a number of scenes that need to be rewritten to keep all your ideas in line with one another. But the other choice, is that even though this particular point is not perfectly what it ought to be, it is a meaningful scene to you, the author. And therefore, you might want to keep it in even if it will slightly weaken your argument.

You see, every story point doesn’t carry the same weight. And in different stories, that weight will shift around and redistribute from one story point to another. So, you can choose, for your particular story, to just ignore the inconsistency, and put in the scene or story point because it is entertaining, or fun, or the producer insists, and you will be confident it won’t do a lot of damage, and that the entertainment value might more than make up for it. But, of course, there are some storypoints, that even if you are off the mark a smidgen, it messes up your whole story. These are often crucial story points that occur near the end of your story, where the audience’s trust in you can easily be violated. That’s all on that point.

Introducing Characters in Act One

Some stories introduce characters as people and then let the reader/audience discover their roles and relationships afterward. This tends to help an audience identify with the characters.

Other stories put roles first, so that we know about the person by their function and/or job, then get closer to them as the act progresses. This tends to make the reader/audience pigeon-hole the characters by stereotype, and then draw them into learning more about the actual people behind the masks.

Finally, there are stories that introduce character relationships, either situational, structural, or emotional, at the beginning. This causes the audience to see the problems among the characters but not take sides as strongly until they can learn about the people on each side of the relationship, and the roles that constrain them.

Of course, you do not have to treat these introductions equally for all characters and relationships. For example, you might introduce on character as a person, then introduce their relationship with another character, then divulge the constraints the other character is under due to role, then revel the other character as a person.

This approach would initially cast sympathy (or derision) at the first character, temper it by showing a relationship with which he or she must contend, then temper that relationship by showing the constraints of the other character, and finally humanize that other character so a true objective balance can be formed by the reader/audience.

Don’t forget that first impressions stick in our minds, and it is much easier to judge someone initially than to change that judgment later. Use this trait of audiences to quickly identify important characters up front, or to put their complete situations later, thereby forcing the reader/audience to reconsider its attitudes, and thereby learn and grow.

No matter what approach you take, you have the opportunity to weave a complex experience for your reader/audience, blending factual, logistic information about your characters with the reader/audience emotional experience in discovering this information.

Character Dismissals

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Over the course of the story, your reader/audience has come to know your characters and to feel for them. The story doesn’t end when your characters and their relationships reach a climax. Rather, the reader/audience will want to know the aftermath – how it turned out for each character and each relationship. In addition, the audience needs a little time to say goodbye – to let the character walk off into the sunset or to mourn for them before the story ends.

This is in effect the conclusion, the wrap-up. After everything has happened to your characters, after the final showdown with their respective demons, what are they like? How have they changed? If a character began the story as a skeptic, does it now have faith? If they began the story full of hatred for a mother that abandoned them, have they now made revelations to the effect that she was forced to do this, and now they no longer hate? This is what you have to tell the audience, how their journeys changed them, have the resolved their problems, or not?

And in the end, this constitutes a large part of your story’s message. It is not enough to know if a story ends in success or failure, but also if the characters are better off emotionally or plagued with even greater demons, regardless of whether or not the goal was achieved.

You can show what happens to your characters directly, through a conversation by others about them, or even in a post-script on each that appears after the story is over or in the ending credits of a movie.

How you do this is limited only by your creative inspiration, but make sure you review each character and each relationship and provide at least a minimal dismissal for each.

*******

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Revealing Your Goal

Sometimes the goal is spelled out right at the beginning, such as a meeting in which a General tells a special strike unit that a senator’s daughter has been kidnapped by terrorists and they must rescue her.

Other times, the goal is hidden behind an apparent goal. So, if your story had used the scene described above, it might turn out that was really just a cover story and in fact, the supposed “daughter” was actually an agent who was assigned to identify and kill a double agent working in the strike team.

Goals may also be revealed slowly, such as in “The Godfather,” where it takes the entire film to realize the goal is to keep the family alive by replacing the aging Don with a younger member of the family.

Further, in “The Godfather,” as in many Alfred Hitchcock films, the goal is not nearly as important as the chase or the inside information or the thematic atmosphere. So don’t feel obligated to elevate every story point to the same level.

As long as each key story point is there in some way, to some degree of importance, there will be no story hole. You may still have a lot of interest in that story point, however. A character’s personal goal, for example, may touch on an issue that you want to explore in greater detail.

When this is the case, let your imagination run wild. Jot down as many instances as come to mind in which the particular plot point comes into play. Such events, moments, or scenarios enrich a story and add passion to a perfunctory telling of the tale.

One of the best ways to do this is to consider how each plot point might affect other plot points, and other story points pertaining to characters, theme, and genre.

For example, each character sees the overall goal as a step in helping them accomplish their personal goals. So, why not create a scenario where a character wistfully describes his personal goal to another character while sitting around a campfire? He can explain how achievement of the overall story goal will help him get what he personally wants.

An example of this is in the John Wayne classic movie, “The Searchers.” John Wayne’s character asks an old, mentally slow friend to help search for the missing girl. Finding the girl is the overall goal. The friend has a personal goal – he tells Wayne that he just wants a roof over his head and a rocking chair by the fire. This character sees his participation in the effort to achieve the goal as the means of obtaining something he has personally longed for.

And how does your story goal exemplify or affect the moral message of your story as part of the theme? When you see the story goal mentioned in your story synopsis, see if you can incorporate aspects of theme, and when you see theme, try to add a reference to the goal.

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain has the boy cooking up some food for Tom Sawyer. He puts all the vegetables and meat in the same pan and explain that his pop taught him that food is better when the flavors all “swap around” a bit.

The same is true for stories. Don’t just speak about goal, speak about goal in reference to as many other story points as you can.

In the space below, first describe how you will reveal the goal to your audience so you are sure you’ve at least covered that base. Then, describe as many other scenarios as you can where goal impacts, influences, or affects other story points.

Genre: Revealing Your Story’s Personality

Your story’s genre is its overall personality. As with the people that you meet, first impressions are very important. In act one, you introduce your story to your reader/audience. The selection of elements you choose to initially employ will set the mood for all that follows. They can also be misleading, and you can use this to your advantage.

You may be working with a standard genre, or trying something new. But it often helps involve your reader/audience if you start with the familiar. In this way, those experiencing your story are eased out of the real world and into the one you have constructed. So, in the first act, you many want to establish a few touch points the reader/audience can hang its hat on.

As we get to know people a little better, our initial impression of the “type” of person they are begins to slowly alter, making them a little more of an individual and a little less of a stereotype. To this end, as the first act progresses, you may want to hint at a few attributes or elements of your story’s personality that begin to drift from the norm.

By the end of the first act, you should have dropped enough elements to give your story a general personality type and also to indicate that a deeper personality waits to be revealed.

As a side note, this deeper personality may in fact be the true personality of your story, hidden behind the first impressions.

Revealing Your Goal

While the structural nature of a story’s goal is crucial to developing a plot that makes sense, the storytelling manner in which the goal is reveals can determine whether a plot seems clever or pedestrian. In this tip, we’ll explore the impact of some of the key methods of revealing your goal.

Sometimes the goal is spelled out right at the beginning, such as a meeting in which a General tells a special strike unit that a senator’s daughter has been kidnapped by terrorists and they must rescue her.

Other times, the goal is hidden behind an apparent goal. So, if your story had used the scene described above, it might turn out that was really just a cover story and in fact, the supposed “daughter” was actually an agent who was assigned to identify and kill a double agent working in the strike team.

Goals may also be revealed slowly, such as in “The Godfather,” where it takes the entire film to realize the goal is to keep the family alive by replacing the aging Don with a younger member of the family.

Further, in “The Godfather,” as in many Alfred Hitchcock films, the goal is not nearly as important as the chase or the inside information or the thematic atmosphere. So don’t feel obligated to elevate every story point to the same level.

As long as each key story point is there in some way, to some degree of importance, there will be no story hole. You may still have a lot of interest in that story point, however. A character’s personal goal, for example, may touch on an issue that you want to explore in greater detail.

When this is the case, let your imagination run wild. Jot down as many instances as come to mind in which the particular plot point comes into play. Such events, moments, or scenarios enrich a story and add passion to a perfunctory telling of the tale.

One of the best ways to do this is to consider how each plot point might affect other plot points, and other story points pertaining to characters, theme, and genre.

For example, each character sees the overall goal as a step in helping them accomplish their personal goals. So, why not create a scenario where a character wistfully describes his personal goal to another character while sitting around a campfire? He can explain how achievement of the overall story goal will help him get what he personally wants.

An example of this is in the John Wayne classic movie, “The Searchers.” John Wayne’s character asks an old, mentally slow friend to help search for the missing girl. Finding the girl is the overall goal. The friend has a personal goal – he tells Wayne that he just wants a roof over his head and a rocking chair by the fire. This character sees his participation in the effort to achieve the goal as the means of obtaining something he has personally longed for.

And how does your story goal exemplify or affect the moral message of your story as part of the theme? When you see the story goal mentioned in your story synopsis, see if you can incorporate aspects of theme, and when you see theme, try to add a reference to the goal.

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain has the boy cooking up some food for Tom Sawyer. He puts all the vegetables and meat in the same pan and explain that his pop taught him that food is better when the flavors all “swap around” a bit. The same is true for stories. Don’t just speak about goal, speak about goal in reference to as many other story points as you can.

Quick Tip: Flashbacks and Flash Forwards

There is a big difference between flashbacks where a character reminisces and flashbacks that simply transport an audience to an earlier time. If the characters are aware of the time shift, it affects their thinking, and is therefore part of the story’s structure. If they are not, the flashback is simply a Storyweaving technique engineered to enhance the audience experience.

In the motion picture and book of Interview With The Vampire, the story is a structural flashback, as we are really concerned with how Louis will react once he has finished relating these events from his past. In contrast, in Remains Of The Day, the story is presented out of sequence for the purpose of comparing aspects of the characters lives in ways only the audience can appreciate. Even Pulp Fiction employs that technique once the cat is out of the bag that things are not in order. From that point forward, we are looking for part of the author’s message to be outside the structure, in the realm of storytelling.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Storytelling Technique: Out of Sequence Experiences

Changing Temporal Relationships:

With this technique, the audience is unaware they are being presented things out of order. Such a story is the motion picture, Betrayal, with Ben Kingsley. The story opens and plays through the first act. We come to determine whom we side with and whom we don’t: who is naughty and who is nice. Then, the second act begins. It doesn’t take long for us to realize that this action actually happened before the act we have just seen. Suddenly, all the assumed relationships and motivations of the characters must be re-evaluated, and many of our opinions have to be changed. This happens again with the next act, so that only at the end of the movie are we able to be sure of our opinions about the first act we saw, which was the last act in the story.

A more recent example is Pulp Fiction in which we are at first unaware that things are playing out of order. Only later in the film do we catch on to this, and are then forced to alter our opinions.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Storytelling Technique: Non-Causality

There is often a difference between what an audience expects and what logically must happen. A prime example occurs in the Laurel and Hardy film, The Music Box. Stan and Ollie are piano movers. The setup is their efforts to get a piano up a quarter mile flight of stairs to a hillside house. Every time they get to the top, one way or another it slides down to the bottom again. Finally, they get it up there only to discover the address is on the second floor! So, they rig a block and tackle and begin to hoist the piano up to the second floor window. The winch strains, the rope frays, the piano sways. And just when they get the piano up to the window, they push it inside without incident.

After the audience has been conditioned by the multiple efforts to get the piano up the stairs, pushing it in the window without mishap has the audience rolling in the aisles, as they say.

From the Dramatica Theory Book

Storytelling Technique: Building Importance

Changing Impact:

In this technique, things not only appear more or less important, but actually become so. This was also a favorite of Hitchcock in such films as North By Northwest and television series like MacGuyver. In another episode of The Twilight Zone, for example, Mickey Rooney plays a jockey who gets his wish to be big, only to be too large to run the race of a lifetime.

From the Dramatica Theory Book