You’ve heard it a million times and by now you’ve committed it to memory: screenplays are structure. It’s what brought you to this site and what you hope to learn more about. Clever dialogue, fancy locales, witty prose, all of it pales in importance when put up against the backbone of a truly great story.

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Need some inspiration to write your next screenplay? A quick look at the most talked about screenplays in Hollywood for 2007 might just be what you’re looking for.

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Every author that seeks out Dramatica to help them write better stories eventually comes to a point where they resent it. “Why is this program forcing me to write my story this way?” they ask. “I never wanted my Main Character to have an issue with expediency…I don’t even know what that means!” Often this resentment leads to the long and winding rabbit hole that is the attempt to perfectly understand the theory.

There can be no greater waste of an author’s energy.

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Pretending to be a screenwriter is easy. Anyone can do it. Coming up with a good idea however, can be a bit harder. Even more difficult? Finding a way to put all the pieces of your story together to create a compelling narrative. But the most difficult task of all is convincing someone to give you that big break - to transform you into that honest-to-goodness professional screenwriter.

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Is it possible that four throughlines are too much to think about during the early stages of writing a story? I’m beginning to think so.

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A story shouldn’t be “a bunch of things happen to or around our Protagonist, and then at the end, they change for some reason.” That potential for growth should be buried deep within every Main Character from the very beginning. Luckily for us, Dramatica provides some great insights into the most deepest recesses of your Main Character’s soul.

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One of the first things people ask when they delve into this theory is whether or not the big guys use Dramatica. Having personally worked with several of these big guys I can tell you that most, if not all of them would vehemently deny it. This doesn’t mean, however, that they’re not really using it…

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The New York Times recently ran an article about writers and the software they use. The most shocking aspect of the piece? One writer admitted to using Dramatica. GASP!!

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Some readers aren’t aware that you can actually ask me questions if you feel so inclined. While I don’t profess to know everything about this theory, or screenwriting in general, I do feel like I have a unique voice on the matter and enjoy helping to make stories and, more specifically, screenplays, better. The following is an example of the kind of feedback you’ll expect when you click on “Contact” above…

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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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