Just the other day I had another “real world” experience dealing with Mental Sex that I wanted to share. For the new readers out there, the Mental Sex of a character describes the sort of base operating system from which that character engages the world. It’s a trait that is hardwired and, as I’ll point out, filters out the world around a character without them even knowing it.

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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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The Problem Solving Style of your Main Character can be more than just the last choice you make in a storyform. It can also be a strong indicator of how much power your Main Character has over the Objective Story.

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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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I’ve yet to see Grindhouse (most of what I see nowadays are DVDs), but I have heard one comment repeatedly: the first half was great, the second half was boring as hell. Dramatica expert Armando Saldana Mora has a great post about why most audiences felt that way.

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Some people just don’t get French films. While on the surface many would attibute that to language barriers or xenophobia, there is something that is happening structurally that can account for the dislike.

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Ever wonder why Keanu Reeves is mostly distancing to a male audience?

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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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As with all things Dramatica, the Main Character Dynamics (Resolve, Growth, Approach and Mental Sex) can be seen as relating together in a single quad.

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