Review by S Smyth

Having worked with, and studied the Dramatica theory of story development, and also looked at and read a few of the examples it is based on, it seems to me that Dramatica 4 is a product somewhat ahead of itself.nBy this I mean, that to convey the principles of Dramatica the prior art examples are either too archetypical with no real requirement for the use of Dramatica by those who intend writing such archetypes, or are too flawed so that they do Dramatica no favours due to them being little more than the nearest point of common reference.nBut by treating Dramatica as a philosophy and an abstraction, and not using it to see how prior art can be aligned to its principles, one can quickly see how Dramatica will enable the writer to create stories and forms hitherto unattainable, simply because the organisation of the story’s elements and form would have been too difficult to keep track of.nTherefore, in order to get the desired results from using Dramatica, the user has to gain expertise in the way of defining and structuring a story’s elements with Dramatica, and not be trying to defend the outcome on prior art which is a close call. This is the hard part to Dramatica, since ideal prior art probably doesn’t exist, from which to refer, except for the possibility of future works skilfully created with Dramatica.nNow there’s a chicken or the egg paradox.