Friday, Jul. 2

Clarifying the Complexity of Dramatica

Jeff in Philly reviews Dramatica and asks:

…Dramatica refers to “dynamic pairs” of story elements. Some of them are easy enough to grasp: Order/Chaos, Help/Hinder, etc. But many of the dymanic[sic.] pairs are more difficult to get, e.g. Possibility/Certainty (one might have expected Possibility/Impossibility).

To quickly clarify, the dynamic pair for Possibility is in fact Probability, not Certainty. The dynamic pair for Certainty is Potentiality. But for now, let’s pretend that Jeff meant to say “Possibility/Probability when one might have expected Possibility/Impossibility.”

The reason Impossibility is wrong is the same reason that a lack of Faith isn’t the same thing as Disbelief. There are positive and negative variations for every dramatic appreciation found in the theory. If for instance the theory tells you that your story will have an Overall Story Concern of Understanding, that could be that the characters in your story are having problems trying to understand what is going on (like in The Sixth Sense) or it could be that there is some massive misunderstanding going on (like in The Usual Suspects).

This applies to every term in the book and speaks to Dramatica’s flexibility and power in determining and helping form the structure of a story.

Back to the Possibility/Probability conundrum…

If you have a group of scientists who are at each other’s throats (murdering, sabotaging) because there is the Possibility that one of them will be known as the world’s greatest mind, the kind of thing that would resolve their problems is a focusing on the Probability that they’ll end up killing each other off before anyone ever hears of them. Focusing on the possibilities was what was causing them issues in the first place. Focusing on the likelihood of their endeavors is the only thing that could calm those deadly urges down.

Fighting fire with fire doesn’t work in resolving a story’s conflict. Using Impossibility would only drive them to murder each other even faster. What else would these fame-hungry scientists do if they knew that it was a virtual impossibility that anyone would ever mention their names along with Einstein or Newton? Impossibility would only lead to more desperation, more killing.

Come to think of it, this was simply supposed to be a quick link and explanation, but now it has the beginnings of a very cool and dark story! See what Dramatica does…

Now if this was a Shakespearean tragedy, this desperation ending would be great. But that would just mean that the problems affecting the scientists weren’t solved. Possibility leading to Impossibility over the course of 120 pages would only maintain the problem, not solve it. Happy endings tend to resolve the issues in a story, so in that case, Probability would be the way to go.

Either ending is fine, it’s really up to the Author. No need for Closing Images or Transformational Character Arcs™ here.

The point is there are two sides to the spectrum when it comes to dynamic pairs. It isn’t so much black and white as it is black and white AND color. The negative of a term (Impossibility is the negative of Possibility) is not the dynamic opposite of a term and will not resolve the story’s issues.