Brainstorming Your Way Through Dramatica
May 30, 2007
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t crack the code of a story. Whether it’s a film you are analyzing or a spec screenplay that you’ve been working on for weeks, the storyform can remain frustratingly elusive. There is a technique I’ve found that works, and although it’s not revolutionary, it might help you get over that Dramatica-imposed writer’s block.
In my last post, I boasted how easily I would show that the X-Files episode from Season 6, “Milagro,” was definitely written with the aid of Dramatica. I was certain that the language and the sequence of events in that stand-alone episode would easily prove my argument.
That was, until I actually started writing that article…
I quickly found that what I thought was so easy to prove was, in reality, quite difficult to justify. There was one piece of the puzzle that was missing and it was driving me crazy. Furthermore, I couldn’t decide who the Main Character and who the Impact Character was. I knew which of the two players I could choose from, but trying to line them up within the Dramatica Table of Story Elements was a nightmare.
I spent Friday and all day Saturday going over it in my head. Why wasn’t it working out? I would try (mentally) shifting the Main Character into a different domain. But that would require moving the Impact Character to a different domain as well. And then the Objective Story and Subjective Story were not where I thought they were. I kept moving things around and around, over and over again, trying to get it right.
And then I gave up.
I figured I’d enjoy the rest of my 3-day weekend, and hopefully get by without ever having to address my claim from the previous article.
Of course, a trip to the grocery store Monday night changed all that!
I promise you, I was not thinking of Dramatica at all. As much as I love writing on this site and contemplating story theory, I was officially on a break. There wasn’t a hint of story theory rolling about in my head (at least I thought there wasn’t). I was listening to some music, dreading my return to a regular workweek, when all of a sudden, it just hit me.
“A-ha! Of course!!”
The answer seemed so clear to me. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Of course the Main Character was this person, and of course the Impact Character would be in that domain. It was so obvious to me, and strangely familiar - as if I had always known it. It’s hard to fully explain, but it just felt…comfortable.
This has happened several times over the past couple of months as I write more and more about story theory and its application within films both current and past. I’ll focus so intently on something for so long that eventually I have no other course to take but to give up. And then somehow the answer will come to me when I’m not even thinking about it.
I’ve read about it before. It reminds me of Stephen King’s book, On Writing, where he suggests putting a a first draft away for 6 weeks to 6 months before going over it. In the past, when I was able to convince myself to “let go” of my spec scripts for that long, I found that the screenplay I was writing seemed completely new to me…almost as if someone else had written it.
So perhaps that could be a good technique for you if you can’t quite figure out why the Impact Character’s Response would be Projection or how the Main Character’s Benchmark would be the Preconscious. Just focus and concentrate on it as hard as you can. Mull it over and over in your head until you have no other option than to just let it go.
Hopefully, when you’ve completely forgotten about it, the answer will come to you as it did to me.