Why Dramatica is So Helpful When Writing A Story

June 19, 2007

All meaning comes from context. Change the context and you change the meaning.

This line (from an early issue of Dramatica Storyforming ((A PDF of this issue of Dramatica Storyforming is located here.))) should be a tagline on the box for Dramatica. Why? Because that is all the software was designed to do: keep the context, and therefore the meaning of your story, constant. That’s all there is to it.

At first Dramatica may seem like a taskmaster. You have to have an Impact Character. He or she has to have a relationship with the Main Character. Your Objective Story needs Costs and Dividends. You have to follow a Four Act Plot Progression. There are a lot of rules, and sometimes, especially when first diving into it, these rules seem forced and unnatural. At times they even feel “made up,” as if they’re some elaborate ruse designed to sell unnecessary software.

But the opposite is true: we need the software for one reason and one reason only: our minds are terrible at holding context.

Keep the context consistent and you’ll have a meaningful story

It’s a fact of nature that one of our greatest strengths as a species is our ability to shift context. Our ability to swiftly adapt and change the meaning of what we see has been a great ally in our quest to survive. But this ability can also be a detriment, especially in the course of writing a story.

Stories exist for one purpose: to give an audience meaning. If we’re constantly shifting the context around, how can an audience possibly synthesize the meaning? Remember: change the context, change the meaning. Unfortunately, this great survival skill has forced more than one attempt at a great story off the road of audience approval.

The Dramatica appreciations (all those confusing terms like Symptom, Response, Costs, Prerequisites) are simply there to keep the context of a story steady.

For instance, yesterday I wrote about the Story Limit in Speed and how breaking that limit led to great disappointment. That same issue of Storyforming went on to say:

The purpose of [a Story Limit] is to provide an audience with a way to gauge the limits (or scope) of a story. Since all meaning comes from context (change the context and you change the meaning), a story’s limit is one way an audience has to get a handle on the story’s meaning. It also acts as a way for an audience to tell when (or where) a story is completed. In this way, the limit provides an audience a way to measure the progress of a story AS IT EXPERIENCES IT. This is a very important point. If the audience is misled for a significant period of time as to what the scope of the story is, then all of its interpretation of the events get messed up.

So the Story Limit is not an arbitrary concept thrown in there to simply complicate the idea of “the ticking clock.” It’s not there to sell you software or to convince you into paying for weekend seminars. It’s there to communicate the meaning of your story. If you’re trying to provide an audience with meaning, then you need to clarify the scope of that argument.

And that’s why every other appreciation that you are presented with is important. They are there to keep the meaning of your story from wavering.

When you set out to write a story, you have something you’d like to say, something you want to get across, something that can only be said through the magic of storytelling. Sometimes you discover this through the course of writing, other times you know exactly what it is you want to say before you even boot up that laptop. It is with the latter that Dramatica shines. Once you “plug-in” that meaning, the software will keep you on the straight and narrow path towards ensuring audience comprehension.

Whether or not they’ll love it is entirely up to your own talent.