What do Sean Penn’s Into the Wild and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense have in common? Much more than you would probably think. Beyond the obvious differences in genre and subject matter the basic structure of each story is almost exactly the same…except for one major difference.

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In my previous analysis of the film I Am Legend, I examined the meaningful differences between the theatrical and the alternate version released on DVD. In this “deeper” look into the film, I’ll go into more detail why I made the choices I made using the Dramatica theory of story as my key reference point.

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Although the software is not properly set up for it, you can create the structure of your story based on how you want your audience to receive your story, i.e. how you want your story to feel to them. In order to do this, you need to understand the connections that some appreciations have with one another.

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In Children of Men, rich thematic elements of hope play out against despair in a dystopian vision of the future. Many have commented that while they found the film highly entertaining, they felt cheated at the end. They often go on to complain that the movie was half-finished. I disagree. I would say it was 3/4 finished…

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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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There are some very interesting relationships in Dramatica that aren’t covered in the manual or in the software itself.

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Dramatica can seem a bit overwhelming when you first start out. I remember flipping through the dictionary at the back of the theory book and thinking, “This is insane!”
But after eight years of working with it, I’ve got the model pretty much memorized (at least down to the Variation level) and have a pretty good [...]

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Another way of understanding how your Main Character feels at the end of the story is to define whether or not they can tell the difference between their real inner problem and the symptoms of that problem.

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So now on to the Plot Dynamics - the Driver, the Limit, the Outcome and the Judgment. The character dynamics explain how things are spatially related to one another, while the Plot dynamics explain how things are temporally related to one another.
So if you think about your story in the context of Time, the Driver [...]

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