What follows is an excerpt from an early unpublished draft of the book that ultimately became, Dramatica: A New Theory of Story. This section introduces the concept of a Story Mind – the notion that characters, plot, theme, and genre are all facets of a larger super mind that is the structure of the story itself […]
Every story has a mind of its own with its own psychology and its own personality. A story’s psychology is determined by its structure, and its personality is developed through storytelling. All the characters within the story are like facets of the overall Story Mind. And so you see characters who represent Reason, Passion, Conscience, […]
Click on the image below to hear episode 2 in this rare recording of a weekend seminar by Dramatica Theory of Story co-creators Melanie Anne Phillips and Chris Huntley in the mid-1990’s just after Dramatica was made public for the first time. Test Drive our Dramatica Story Development Software Risk-Free
From my 113 part course on story structure recorded in 1999…
The Story Mind concept is a way of visualizing story structure that sees every story as having a mind of its own and the characters within it as facets of that overall mind. So, one character represents the Intellect of the Story Mind and another functions as its Skepticism, for example. Of course, this is just […]
The Story Mind concept is a way of looking at a story as if all the characters were facets of a larger personality, the mind of the Story itself. To illustrate, imagine that you stepped back from your story far enough that you could no longer identify your characters as individuals. Instead, like a […]
Excerpted from the Book “Dramatica Unplugged“ By Melanie Anne Phillips, Co-creator of Dramatica The structure of a story, then, is the psychology of a single mind made tangible. For the story to be sound and ring true, the psychology must be complete and valid. But to make a complete argument, it is not enough to simply reproduce […]
Excerpted from the Book “Dramatica Unplugged“ By Melanie Anne Phillips, Co-creator of Dramatica So what, exactly, is the Story Mind made of? Dramatica says that “Every complete story is an analogy to a single mind trying to deal with an inequity.” Now that’s very scientific, but what does it really mean? It means that characters, theme, plot […]
Excerpted from the Book “Dramatica Unplugged“ By Melanie Anne Phillips, Co-creator of Dramatica What happens if you mess up and just alter part of a structure without considering the structure-wide impact that change may have? Here’s an example…. Consider the Bill Murray film, “Scrooged:” (a remake of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”) as opposed to “Scrooge” (the 1951 […]
Excerpted from the Book “Dramatica Unplugged“ By Melanie Anne Phillips, Co-creator of Dramatica By now, you’re likely pretty familiar with the concept that every story has a mind of its own – a psychology (the structure) and a personality (the storytelling). But, if you are like many authors, knowing that and being able to identify the difference […]
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