Modern coverage of artificial intelligence and its use in a narrative is an exercise in self-delusion. The often passive-aggressive lashing out at the inevitable is almost always an act of self-preservation—as if the acceptance of a hyper-aware and hyper-intelligent automated writing partner will somehow end up in that AI "taking my job." The collective conclusion is comfortable deniability: computers can't write stories.

Flipping through some of the Premises in Subtxt, one might find them cold and uninviting. "Abandon your skepticism and can guarantee a profitable future?" Writers don't talk this way, do they? They don't--but they do think that way.

Hot on the heels of Jay Hayward's post about Giving Your Story the Subtxt Treatment, I present a detailed Plotting of Transit Two from the Season One Pilot of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

As a companion to the original blog post The Ultimate Collection of Protagonists Who Act As Obstacle Characters, the following is a list of Main Characters who function as Antagonists within the Objective Story Throughline.

It’s hard to pick a favorite feature in Subtxt. The AI, the Premise Builder, the whole app itself? But, in my opinion, that honor should really go to the Treatment, one of the most helpful tools available for writers.

Joanna Penn, the host of The Creative Penn Podcast, recently interviewed Andrew Mayne, international best-selling author and science communicator at OpenAI. In an episode entitled Writing with Artificial Intelligence with Andrew Mayne the two discuss some of the creative possibilities for storytelling with AI.

Earlier this week, my wife Summer and I attended a screening of Jason Loftus' latest documentary, Eternal Spring. Having worked with Jason prior on his first doc, Ask No Questions, I was beyond excited to see what I consider to be one of the most emotional and beautiful works of art finally up on the big screen.

One of the most confounding aspects of the Dramatica theory of story is the relationship between the Consequence of a story and the Concern of the Relationship Story Throughline.

Subtxt is the only narrative structure application that accounts for either Timespace or Spacetime when it comes to the sequencing of events.

GPT-3 is incredible. The "Gee-whiz" factor is undeniable. And while initial results are nothing short of pure magic, the majority of work being done in this space treats the tech as a replacement, rather than a collaborator.

Part of my plans for 2022 involve weaving GPT-3 text generation into Subtxt. You can see current incarnations of this in apps like sudowrite or LitRPGAdventures. The only difference?

The Shape of Water has always been particularly problematic to me (I always thought it was a cheap comic-book knock-off of Amelié 😄), so I've always resisted putting it into Subtxt. As I'm going through and updating all the Storyforms, it showed up again, and I knew I had to face it one way or another.

While teaching the latest cohort of The 2nd Act Solution, I stumbled upon this lecture from Alan Watts that perfectly described the center of every meaningful story. Entitled Coincidence of Opposites, this brief segment is all you really need to know when laying down the foundation of your latest work:

Subtxt generates an impressive blueprint of the meaning of a narrative. Based on the Dramatica theory of story, the 336 Storybeats present in each Storyform help transmit the intended message, or Premise, of a work to the Audience.

In Fight Club, the Dramatic Argument is between Aware (Narrator) and Self-aware (Tyler Durden).

In First Blood (Rambo), the Dramatic Argument is Reaction (Rambo) vs Proaction (Sheriff).

When developing a story around a Dramatic Argument, many writers think in terms of opposites...when they should be thinking in terms of dramatic pairs.

This would be the first time I had to pull a Storyform from Subtxt...and I'm not happy about it.

Recently, a student at Falmouth University in Cornwall (studying for a Master's Degree in Screenwriting and Storytelling), asked me a couple of questions about what I do as a story consultant. While many have a complete misunderstanding of what the work entails, my role as consultant really boils down to a single concept: collaboration without the ego.