Dramatica: A New Theory Of Story
By Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley

How This Book Is Arranged

Part of what makes a story great is its underlying dramatic structure and part is the manner in which that structure is related to an audience, often called "storytelling". Therefore, this book is divided into two principal sections: The Elements of Structure and The Art of Storytelling.
In The Elements of Structure you will explore the essential components that occur in all complete stories as they appear in Character, Theme, Plot, and Genre. In the Art of Storytelling you will examine the Four Stages of Communication that occur between an author and an audience: Storyforming, Storyencoding, Storyweaving, and Reception.


By the time you have finished, you will have gained a whole new understanding of what stories are and a whole new set of tools for creating them. For a glimpse of how some of Dramatica's basic concepts can be employed to improve a story, you might want to take a look at a constructive criticism of the motion picture Jurassic Park appearing in the Epilogue section.


You will note that the majority of examples provided in this book are drawn from motion pictures. This stems from the authors' personal backgrounds in the motion picture industry. Dramatica, however, is a theory of story -- not a theory of screenplay. All of the dramatic concepts presented here are equally applicable to any medium of story expression.


Note about Pronoun Usage: Some characters are best looked at by their dramatic functions. To help keep this perspective, we use the impersonal pronoun "it" when referring to such characters. Other characters are best explored in terms of their growth. To help draw the reader into a closer relationship with such a character, we use the personal pronoun, "he". Earlier editions of this book used "she" as the personal pronoun. Because of this uncommon usage, readers were jarred out of a relationship with personal characters, rather than being drawn in, defeating our purpose. As a result, this edition employs masculine pronouns.

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Dramatica: A New Theory of Story



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Copyright©1996, Screenplay Systems, Inc.

The Dramatica theory was developed by Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley
Chief Architect of the Dramatica software is Stephen Greenfield
Dramatica
is a registered trademark of Screenplay Systems Incorporated

Index of Dramatica Theory Materials

Storymind.com is pleased to present this collection of materials about the Dramatica Theory of Story. We hope you find it both useful and through-provoking.

This information is divided into three sections:

The Dramatica Theory
A complete exploration of the theory in every detail

Historic Documents
The development of Dramatica from the beginning

Speculations
Dramatica applied to psychology, physics, religion and more

The Dramatica Theory

Dramatica Theory Book Online
Free online edition of the 400+ page book, Dramatica: A New theory of Story, in which Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley originally documented their work.

Dramatica Dictionary
Official definitions of all terms in the Dramatica theory and software.

Dramatica Writing Tips
Useful and informative articles on how to approach and employ both the Dramatica Theory and Software.

Constructive Criticisms
Practical illustrations of how applying the Dramatica theory could have made some well-known successful story's even better!

Dramatica Q & A
Answers to questions from users of the Dramatica Theory and Software.

Instant Dramatica
Even more directly practical essays on using Dramatica for real-world writing situations and problems provided by noted screenwriter Armando Saldaña Mora.

Historic Documents

Dramatica - The Lost Theory Book
Early attempts to document the theory, including many unfinished conjectures and false starts.

Dramatica Development Archives
Early documents created during the development of the foundations of Dramatica.  Often later discarded, they show the roots of the thinking that ultimately evolved into the theory as it stands today.

Speculations

Deep Theory
Transcript of a class on the outer fringes of Dramatica Theory I taught as part of a now-defunct Dramatica Certification course.

Dramatica Math
A mathematician takes a stab at describing the Dramatica model in terms of dimensional distortions.

Mental Relativity
An exploration of the theory of psychology modeling which grew out of the development of Dramatica.

Dramatica I Ching
Several of our users have noticed a similarity between the character grid in Dramatica and the elements of the traditional I Ching.  Though unintentional, perhaps all models that look deeply into the mind will resemble each other.

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Unlike any other story development product, Dramatica Pro uses a patented Story Engine to interactively help you build a structure, find and fix dramatica holes and inconsistencies.  (Details)


20 Hour Writing Course on CD ROM

This intense program features 20 hours of video documenting the entire college-level course in creative writing given by Melanie Anne Phillips, creator of StoryWeaver and co-creator of Dramatica.  Just $19.95  (Details)

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