Working With Dramatica

There is a moment when it finally all comes together; it's worth the wait.

From writer Mike Matthews, a client of mine whose story I have been consulting on:

Everything is starting to tighten up and synchronize, which is very cool.

This is the fun part. Starting out with Dramatica can be overwhelming at first, four Throughlines, Problems, Solutions, Focuss and Directions in each, Benchmarks and Critical Flaws and on and on ... at times it feels a bit like spinning your wheels. Until you come to the end of the work and you begin to see connections between the Throughlines that the theory was telling you all along.

That's when the real creativity starts and the sparks fly.

This is what drew me to Dramatica in the first place. It would be very hard/lucky/basically impossible to create a story as thematically and symbolically consistent and resonant on intuition/Experience/Skill alone. And I think that's what has happened with many timeless stories that just stick in people's heads "for some reason."

Exactly what I have been saying all along. Dramatica quantifies writer's intuition in a complex and elegant theoretical model. The theory has always been there; it just took a bit of work to put it down in words. And courage on our part to listen to it.