Thursday, October 19, 2017

One shoe drops

After looking at this dramatica.discuss post by LunarDynasty, I realized that the right types (especially the lower right ones) just feel inherently unsatisfying.

They're like the Dominant/Subdominant in Music (instead of the Tonic).

They're like the question.

They're a ball in the air.

It is weird and unsatisfying to end on them.

"Have you written your book yet?" Nah, I'm just writing, you know, practicing.

"Do you understand this?" Nah, I'm still learning the basics.

"Did you change for the better?" Nah, I'm still trying things out, dipping my toes in this and that.

"Do you know how we can do this?" Nah, we're still at the idea stage of things.

You could possibly find some sort of argument about the Ability/Thought elements, variants and types being more... "suspended" than Knowledge/Desire ones.


Right Type Endings (TM) feel like Dramatica Sequel Bait (TM). It seems like making them satisfying and not anti-climactic requires strong story telling more than anything story encoding can provide.

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Narrative Structure in a Single Sentence

Mr. Lucas wrote a blog post about finding his Story Form in The Sentence created with the method by Holly Lisle.

A few things I noticed when reading this:

The small satisfaction of printed tables

Dramatica Forum Frequenter and Princess Bride Aficionado Mike Lucas recently posted his "Essential Tools for the Running Writer," one of which is a story form table printed on paper. That table was generated by my Table of Scenes Generator.

Now, this "Generator" does not really do anything on its own. It merely takes the results of the Storyform report und Plot Sequence Report of the official Dramatica software, and turns them into one HTML-table. And the design was taken mostly from someone else as well.

Still, I feel a certain satisfaction over seeing something I had a part in being not only used, but printed on paper and taken along.

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Obscuring the Story Form

In some threads of the disccuss.dramatica.com forum, it has been mentioned that it seems like a good idea to obscure your actual story form in the final product. The reasoning behind this seems to be that we all know instinctively how any particular story mind would proceed (since it is "an analogy for a human mind trying to solve a problem) and (1) we don't want to read/watch predictable stories, and (2) get annoyed when we notice that someone is trying to make an argument even though we expected entertainment.

I thought about it for a while, and collected a few ways to hide the author's intent.