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.

The easiest thing for writers to do is to jump inside their characters' heads and illustrate how the story's world looks from the inside. The hardest thing is to separate themselves from that experience and look back to see what it all means.

Writer Daniel Williams, a subscriber to Subtxt, achieved success this year at the New Jersey Webfest 2021.

In this episode of Storyforming, I use Subtxt to dissect the narrative structure of Forrest Gump, one of America's top-grossing films. By analyzing key scenes and moments using the app, we'll uncover some fascinating insights about that make the film great---and what makes a story truly engaging.

Storyforming is the art of figuring out what stories are trying to tell us. That's what I do in this video when I take a look at the story structure of the film Wolfwalkers. There are a lot of films that have (almost) perfectly consistent story structure - The Shawshank Redemption, The Lives of Others, The Empire Strikes Back. Films like that are labeled as 'well-structured'. Wolfwalkers? Not so much.