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 Narrative works in the real world as accurately and efficiently as it does in fiction. Not surprising since fictional narrative is nothing more than our attempt to refine and understand how people are driven and how they behave in the real world. At a most basic level, one can see real world […]
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. […]
We all have certain fundamental broad-stroke mental traits such as Reason, Initiative, and Skepticism. As individuals, we use the full spectrum of these tools to try and solve our problems. But when we get together in groups, we quickly self-organize so that one person emerges as the Voice of Reason for the group, another as […]
What’s my day job? I just got this question from a Dramatica user, and my answer follows… A Dramatica user asked: The layout of the archetypal characters are the same in Situation and Manipulation, but different in Activity and Attitude. In attitude the dynamic pairs are all in the same quads, which makes the archetypes […]
Excerpted from the book, Dramatica: A New Theory of Story For some authors, applying Dramatica at the beginning of a creative project might be inhibiting. Many writers prefer to explore their subject, moving in whatever direction their muse leads them until they eventually establish an intent. In this case, the storytelling comes before the structure. […]
What’s “Ability” have to do with story structure? If you look in Dramatica’s “Periodic Table of Story Elements” chart (you can download a free PDF of the chart at http://storymind.com/free-downloads/ddomain.pdf ) you’ll find the “ability” in one of the little squares. Look in the “Physics” class in the upper left-hand corner. You’ll find it in a […]
Just updated – your favorite articles on creative writing, story development, story structure and narrative science: Our Most Popular Articles on Writing of All Time Title Views The 8 Archetypal Characters 7,562 Dramatica Audio Program 2,303 Dramatica Theory Book 1,746 Dramatica Video Program 1,526 Sidekick & Skeptic Archetypes 1,297 The Best Story Structure Articles of […]
Excerpted from the book, Narrative Dynamics The Narrative Circuit If you are familiar with deep Dramatica theory, you know that all the output of the Story Engine is not made available in the Dramatica software. In fact, the Story Engine generates quite a bit more information about a story’s structure than it makes available to […]