How to Build a Strong Narrative

Building dramatic tension through inequity

File this under very-important when building conflict within a story:

Novelist Alistair Dyte, a client of ours and student in the Dramatica Mentorship Program (now the Advanced AI-Powered Storytelling Workshop), recently describe the inequity of a story better than we could:

I have this idea now (don't know if its correct) that an inequity is like being between a rock and a hard place, a kind of mini dilemma, so a character has to be kinda damned if he does and damned if he doesn't, and that is what causes the conflict.

One hundred percent correct. And exactly the kind of thing you need to encode in each and every story point within Dramatica. If you don't, you're not really using Dramatica to its fullest. The Domain, Concern, Issue, and Problem of a Throughline all describe the inequity of the story—just at different levels of resolution.

Dramatica is a complex, yet sophisticated theory of story. Understanding inequity in the way that Alistair describes above is the first step towards making complex terminology approachable.