The Dramatica Book | Preface

What follows is from an early unpublished draft of the book that ultimately became, Dramatica: A New Theory of Story. This excerpt is a note from me to Chris explaining the layout of the material in the draft to be considered for inclusion in the final relase version.

CHRIS:  This material is divided into seven sections.  Each is described briefly below:

Section One:      The existing book

This is the most complete and updated version I wrote.  I have edited in additional essays to fill holes, and changed and updated terms.  Aside from the Exploratorial, this approx 200K document contains all our best shots at explaining the whole damn thing.

Section Two:      The Storyforming Exploratorial

Much of this material is culled from the book in section one.  Still, there are important updates and changes in perspective and terms in this version.  In fact, if you choose to use the book material, look to this part of the tutorial for slightly different and sometimes better versions of the same material.  There is also much new material here.  This section was designed to describe what Dramatica is.

Section Three:    The Storytelling Exploratorial

You’ve already read through this one and shared your comments.  I have not yet incorporated any changes, pending what your decisions are about what ought to be used of all this material in the book.  This section was designed to tell an author how Dramatica will affect their audience.

Section Four:      The Dramatica and the Creative Writer Exploratorial

This section describes the relationship between Dramatica and the author in a conceptual, philosphic sense.

Section Five:       The Putting it in Motion Exploratorial

This section describes what it feels like when writing from the appreciations, so that an author can tap into their emotional experience of creating.

Section Six:         The Scientific American Article

‘Nuf said on this one!  I do feel this should be in the book in the back somewhere to give the tenacious reader something to dig into and to document the extent of our work.

Section Seven:         Various appendices

I’m sure you have updated versions of these, but I just threw in the Help, DQS and Definition stuff to have my most recent versions all in one place, since these need to be at the back of the book anyway.

Read the entire unpublished draft here.

Read the free online edition of Dramatica – A New Theory of Story in its final form.

Get a paperback of the published version for easy reference on Amazon.