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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There are several different ways one can figure out the unique Dramatica storyform for a story. The straight ahead linear approach presented in the software’s StoryGuide, while helpful and ultimately necessary when first learning the theory, can actually be quite cumbersome to work with later on in your understanding. Your best bet is to use a combination of the Theory Browser, the Story Engine Settings Panel, and yes, even the Plot Progression Panel.

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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 ultimate most important element of any story. This one part of your story is so important that it was sanctified with the word crucial. Without it your hollow storytelling would crumble like dried leaves…Or would it?

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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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An interesting thing happened this week as I began a rewrite on a screenplay.
I was going through Dramatica for Screenwriters, working step-by-step to get a quick look at the story I was developing. Halfway through I realized that I wanted my story to end in a Success, not a Failure. I reset the Story [...]

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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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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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