breaking down the art of storytelling
October 27, 2005
The move is over and now I’ve finally got full time access to my Dramatica notebooks. Scanned through the first one and found a really interesting observation. This one is from a weekend workshop I took way back in October of 1998. Melanie Anne Phillips, the other co-creator of the theory, was the instructor. I have pages and pages of notes from the workshop, but unfortunately, not much of it is comprehensible 7 years later. (If you’ve ever listened to a tape or taken a class from Melanie then you know how fast she can talk when she gets going!)
This is what I jotted down in my notebook:
As with a lot of things in Dramatica, “making up stories” can be seen as a state and as a process. From the state perspective you have the structure of your story. From top to bottom on the chart above you have Character, Plot, Theme, and Genre. In creating a story these things are constant - you know, what you want to get across - how you want the audience to feel and think.
From the perspective of process you have the art of StoryTelling. Again, from top to bottom you have StoryForming, StoryEncoding, StoryWeaving, and StoryReception. And yes, I did say art, because even though Dramatica breaks down writing into these four precise movements, there is still an art to how the author proceeds through them. How you do these four things determines how you’re going to give the story to your audience.
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