A Dramatica student asks: In Dramatica theory, are all Objective Characters be-ers and all Subjective Characters do-ers? My reply: No, there is no assignment of be-er or do-er to objective characters at all. Objective Characters, such as the archetypes, are all defined by their functions only, when seen in terms of structure. Naturally, in storytelling, […]
Chris Huntley and I developed a theory of story structure back in the early 1990’s. Our theory was all about the relationships among structural story points – like a Rubik’s cube of story structure. We programmed those relationships – that cube of story – into a software program called Dramatica where they became something we call […]
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By Melanie Anne Phillips Many people have asked how we came up with the Dramatica Theory. Well, it didn’t happen all at once. In fact, it was a three year full-time effort, 8 hours a day. In going through my archives, I just discovered four hours of recordings we made in 1991 to document […]
This is a video clip from the “classic” 1999 12 hour video program on narrative structure entitled, Dramatica Unplugged. In this segment, the key concepts and breadth and depth of the Dramatica Theory of Story are presented in concise form. See all 112 story structure videos for free…
By Melanie Anne Phillips Here are some clues for all you Dramatica theory hounds… Strong, Weak, Electromagnetic, Gravity Solid, Liquid, Gas, Plasma Mass, Energy, Space, Time Universe, Physics, Mind, Psychology Knowledge, Thought, Ability, Desire Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb The same relationships among them, repeated in different subject matter context. Reflective not of the items but […]
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For fans of the Dramatica Story Structure Theory (and software): Here’s part of a note I recently sent to a Dramatica user who is currently focused on the concept of Duality. Now, this note won’t make much sense if you don’t know anything about Dramatica, but you can get a pretty good crash course here […]
By Melanie Anne Phillips Here’s the “digest” version of the origins of Dramatica… Chris Huntley and I began our exploration of story structure in 1980. He and I had met a few years earlier while we were both attending the University of Southern California and both making short films. I had left school early to […]
By Melanie Anne Phillips Over the years, there has been considerable discussion as to whether Dramatica’s rather complex storyforming process could be operated by a natural language artificial intelligence system that could read a story and parse the text to answer Dramatica’s questions and arrive at an accurate structural model of the manuscript under study. […]