Daily Dramatica has exploded over the past couple of months, nearly doubling the amount of subscribers since the first of the year. Most of this is due, I’m sure, to the fact that posts appear practically every day of the week. In addition, a sincere attempt has been made to provide really valuable information when it comes to structuring a screenplay (or any story for that matter). There were, however, some helpful posts that appeared years ago when the interest was not as great…

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By far, this was the funniest Google search term someone used to find this site. In an effort to provide more of what people are looking for when they come here, I installed a statistics program called Mint a couple of weeks ago. Alongside the countless searches for “children of men analysis” (people seem to really like that film!), this quote - “the cult of Dramatica” really stood out. How can a theory of story be so easily equated with the kind of fervor that sometimes accompanies religion?

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Holes in a story can be difficult to pinpoint and even more difficult to properly “fix.” Laura, the film noir classic from Otto Preminger, suffers from a cold and impersonal Main Character. As a result, the audience has a hard time finding some sort of personal connection with the story. Luckily, the Dramatica theory of story provides some insight on why this is, and suggests a way to fix it.

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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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Dramatica makes a distinction between the structure of a story and the way that structure is revealed. Many books on screenwriting dictacte that a certain event must happen at page 15-20 or that act turns happen every 30 pages. Well then, how does this explain the recent success of films like Memento or Crash that are told out of sequence and with complete disregard to any time constraints? How come their stories still work?

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Dramatica has a very different way of looking at the concept of Genre. In the world of this theory, the genre of a story can fall into four different areas: Entertainment, Comedy, Drama and Information. This does not mean there are only four different kinds of stories. Rather, these four items can be interchanged among the throughlines and shift throughout a narrative piece.

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Binary choices stifle authors. Does your story end in Success or Failure? Does your Main Character Change or Remain Steadfast? Dramatica questions like these offend seasoned and fresh authors alike. Turns out these questions might not be as binary as they seem.

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So back to the Story Project.
If you remember, last we off with the simple logline:
A hitman suffers a mid-life crisis in the middle of a snowbound Las Vegas.
Already I hate the idea. Completely unoriginal and devoid of substance. Who would ever pay to see a movie like this? There’s simply nothing to it.
Let’s see if we [...]

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Day 2 of the Story Project.
After the initial idea, I like to get a sense of where my Storyform might be in the Dramatica Chart of Elements. For those of you who don’t have it memorized (like me), you can click this link to download the Dramatica Table of Story Elements (PDF).
I’ll often just [...]

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After several days of going back and forth in my head, I’ve decided to try something out here. I’m going to document how I use Dramatica to take a story from the initial idea to the final screenplay. Now, whether or not it will be an outstanding screenplay is not up to me [...]

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