Dramatica Is Challenged By Its Interface

Dramatica isn't complicated; only the way it is presented.

Bret Victor, human interface designer-extraordinaire, comments on a better way to do our work:

“The example I like to give is back in the days of Roman numerals, basic multiplication was considered this incredibly technical concept that only official mathematicians could handle,” he continues. “But then once Arabic numerals came around, you could actually do arithmetic on paper, and we found that 7-year-olds can understand multiplication. It’s not that multiplication itself was difficult. It was just that the representation of numbers — the interface — was wrong.”

This is what I want to do with Dramatica and what I believe the Dramatica® Mentorship Program is achieving...so far. Improve upon the Roman numerals of the Query System and Dramatica for Screenwriters with the Arabic numerals of my work with Narrative First. I'm sure the program could be better and every week I learn some better way to explain the theory to writers. It is the place where I learned why novelists struggle with the theory more than screenwriters and the place where I am reminded of the advantage found working with Dramatica.

Dramatica itself is not complicated or difficult; it is the representation and the interface that needs work.

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