In a story, the major plot points are either driven by decisions or actions. While a story may naturally ebb and flow between both, when all is said and done, one of these will be seen as the primary driving plot force in a story. This is because meaningful stories are really just an argument and effective arguments have a pattern they must adhere to.

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Although seemingly incompatible, current personal productivity paradigms have a lot in common with modern screenwriting. Today there seems to be two major camps when it comes to planning out your day: those that advocate “getting things done” and those that advocate doing “first things first.” Diving into more detail on where these paradigms come from provides a screenwriter with some interesting tools.

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Of all the four levels in a story - Genre, Plot, Theme and Character - the one that is hardest to distinguish is Theme. This is because Theme rests on a sliding scale whereas the others are seen as more static. Theme ebbs and flows within a story. Unfortunately, because it is so elusive, theme can end up muddied or worse, forgotten altogether. It was nice, therefore, to see it so obviously illustrated in the trailer for First Snow.

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The ultimate most important element of any story. This one part of your story is so important that it was sanctified with the word crucial. Without it your hollow storytelling would crumble like dried leaves…Or would it?

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Where your Main Character starts in a story and where he ends up are crucial for an audience to understand the meaning of your story. It is the similarity or difference between the two that defines the Main Character’s growth. The rest of the story must support this growth. Even if you have a great bit of storytelling - if it confuses the Main Character’s growth, you’ve got to throw it out. Leaving it in would be a problem…as it was for the latest Bond film.

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In Dramatica, the major drivers of plot are said to be either decisions or actions. Although you will have both in a story, one will be seen as the catalyst that causes the other to happen. If you’re having trouble deciding which one is the driver of your story, you might want to start at the end.

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Believe it or not, one of the more difficult things to do when analyzing a story is deciding who the Main Character is. Because the Dramatica theory of story separates the concept of Main Character from the Protagonist, determining that essential character calls for a more precise analysis. This became a problem when analyzing the last film for the Dramatica Users Group - Laura.

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At the point of crisis, your main character has a decision to make. Should he make that final choice based on his feelings, or based on his intellect? As an author, how can you tell which one is the right answer for your story?

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Powered by a meteoric performance from Denzel Washington, Training Day offers up a complete and riveting story. An analysis of the film and in particular, a deleted scene available on DVD, proves that no matter what you do, the storyform will always win out.

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This blog is switching over to a new server today. There may be a slight interruption of storytelling services! As soon as you can read this post on the main domain then all updates will have been completed.

UPDATE If when you try to access the main site you get the command line: “when this page disappears the transfer will be complete” there is a fix I discovered…

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