In a conversation I had with Dramatica theory creator Chris Huntley last November, I asked him, “After 10 years of writing story analysis, what are the top 10 re-occurring problems you see in story today?” He gave me two.
His answer was to give me the top two, and in no particular order they are:
- absence of an Impact Character
- absence of a Subject Story Throughline (or Relationship Throughline)
If he was to draw a pie chart examining the reasons behind why a broken story isn’t working, it would look something like this:
And because those two items are such a huge portion of a well-crafted story (each one is about a quarter), fixing them will solve almost all of the other smaller scale problems that might exist.
The Main Character’s Symptom and Response to a problem is such a smaller cog compared to these two, that the audience won’t be as disappointed if they are missing.
On the other hand, leave these two out and the audience will surely notice! That’s why their absence is such a big problem - it’s obvious when half your story isn’t there!
And to clarify for all free-thinkers - this is a problem for authors trying to write a Grand Argument Story. All of Dramatica is based on you wanting to write a Grand Argument Story, which is:
A story that illustrates all four throughlines (Overall Story, Main vs. Impact Story, Main Character, and Impact Character) in their every story point so that no holes are left in either the passionate or dispassionate arguments of that story…Every complete storyform explores each of these perspectives entirely so that their views of the story’s problem are consistent and that they arrive at the only solution that could possibly work, allowing the givens built into the story from the start. When this is done, a Grand Argument has been made and there is no disproving it on its own terms.
Leaving half of your argument out (the Impact Character and Subjective Story Throughlines) defeats the purpose of a Grand Argument Story.
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