A nasty sick bug forced me away from the computer for a few days at the end of last week and has given me the space I need from the editing, which has been refreshing.
Instead, I’ve spent the past couple of days developing a web page that will show my Dramatica PSR reports, along with various other useful information in a conveneint and manageable way.
I’d got it all layed out in StoryView, but I was getting fed up with scrolling up and down to compare what was going on between the different storylines. What I wanted to be able to see the information for the four throughlines running parallel down the page. OK, it wont be perfect and it won’t necessarily be in sequence, but it will allow me to see links between the througlines with more ease and plot more tightly. Dramatica almost gives you this view, but little option to do anything with useful it.
I’m quite pleased with what I’ve come up with. Sure, it’s hokey, but it’s given me a chance to see the each act as a whole, which has led to some very useful plotting developments.
One thing I’m desperately trying to do is not overcomplicate the matter, so I’m restricting myself to two key events in the first and second acts, culminating in one big event in the third. Heaven knows if this will work, but I want to keep my focus very much on telling the story in such a way that I don’t have to resort to dropping in lots of expository scenes. The exposition must come from within the main drama. I watched M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village* the other day and felt very uncomfortable for the first few minutes where he throws a lot of information at you in what seemed a very clumsy way.
One of the dangers I’ve found with Dramatica is that if you focus too much on the macro level, you end up with lots of bits, lots of short scenes. They logically fit together, but they feel a little contrived, and often there’s no flow to them, as if they exist to serve their own purpose, and that of the main story, but not of those around them**. I think (though I shouldn’t diss my own efforts before I’ve released them) that SToA almost certainly suffers from this.
I want to avoid this and blend the throughlines together more. With this new screenplay I want to make things a lot more fluid.
* Which I actually enjoyed more than I thought I would, having read the reviews…
** Spookily enough, I’ve just realised that this is actually the key theme of the story I’m writing.