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Sections in Lesson Thirteen |
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Sections in Lesson Thirteen |
Continuing with our brief exploration of all the features available through the Dramatica Desktop, in this lesson we'll take a look at the Reports tool - the place where you get all the output Dramatica produces.
Play Video on the Reports Feature
One of the most common questions about the Dramatica software is "What do I get from it?" In one sense, just by answering the questions you gain a much deeper understanding of your story. But there is a far more tangible result as well.
Dramatica provides over 25 different reports about your story. Each report focuses on a different aspect of your dramatic structure, from character and theme to plot and genre. Some are very structural, and other pertain more to your storytelling.
Each report has three components. One is the structural information you have developed using the Story Engine. Another is your storytelling and story development material. And the final component is the way the report is laid out in a conversational manner by Dramatica's sophisticated Grammar Parser.
The Grammar Parser is a complex set of computer instructions that put the information in each report into conversational English, and arranges it in complete sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Simply put, it is as if you are reading a report an actual person wrote about your story!
And Dramatica has plenty to say! Once you have created a Storyform structure, Dramatica presents over 150 pages of conversational reports about your story before you've even written a word!
All that information is about your structure - reports about your Main Character's personal problems and how they affect him or her - reports about the overall theme and value standards that all of your characters grapple with as a group.
In short, you practically get a whole book about your story, explaining all the structural ins and outs, all of the main thrusts and nuances, and all gather together so that all connected dramatic points are related to one another.
How to Use Dramatica's Reports
Most authors are very clear about parts of their stories, but uncertain about other aspects. Dramatica has reports about all areas of your story so that no matter which parts may be cloudly, you will have detailed information at your finger tips.
But, the information is so detailed, and so structural in nature, that if you try to read all the reports, you can actually knock yourself right out of the creative mood and straight into writer's block!
To avoid this, I offer the following advice about your story - if it works, don't fix it! In other words, if parts of your story are working well, don't even read the reports about those sections. Rather, just read the reports about the areas that need work. The information you encounter will help you fill in and refine your story where it needs it.
Be aware also that there are two very different kinds of reports, for two very different story development activities. One is the collection of reports about your story, and the other is a collection of reports about how your story will unfold. The reports about your story have been described above, but this second kind of report may be even more useful to some kinds of writers.
Most of the "timeline" reports in Dramatica deal with the structural order of events and experiences in which your characters will engage. But there is one very special report that lays out the storytelling order and content of your scenes or chapters.
One of the final stages of Dramatica's story development process helps you to create your scenes or chapters by drawing on all the story points you have built, and assigning them to each scene or chapter along with descriptive text about how they will unfold.
The report containing this information is a detailed timeline of where your story begins and what happens in it, step by step.
To access the material in your reports, you can either view them in the software, or you can print them out, or even export them in files that can be opened by your word processor or any script formatter.
If you own Movie Magic Screenwriter, you can export your work directly into that format so when you open it in Movie Magic, all your scenes automatically become index cards, and all your character names are loaded into memory, along with a lot of other useful tie-ins.
To aid in organization, you can also create your own groups of reports to cover whole areas of your story, or even future stories you will be working on.
We'll go into far more detail that this overview when we later return to the Reports Tool for an in depth tour.
Copyright 2003 Melanie Anne Phillips
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