Part of what makes a story great is its underlying dramatic structure and part is the manner in which that structure relates to an audience, often called "storytelling". Therefore, we have divided this book into two principal sections: The Elements of Structure and The Art of Storytelling.

In The Elements of Structure we explore the essential items that occur in all complete stories as they appear in Character, Theme, Plot, and Genre. In the Art of Storytelling we examine the Four Stages of Communication that occur between an author and an audience: Storyforming, Storyencoding, Storyweaving, and Story Reception.

When you have finished, you will have gained a whole new understanding of what stories are, and a whole new set of tools for creating them.

Want to see how Dramatica's basic concepts improve a story? Take a look at a constructive criticism of the motion picture Jurassic Park in the Epilogue section.

You will note that we draw most of the examples in this book from motion pictures. This stems from the authors' personal backgrounds in the motion picture industry. Dramatica, however, is a theory of story--not a theory of screenplay. All the dramatic concepts presented here are equally applicable to any medium of story expression. This includes novels, stage plays, teleplays, radio plays, and even short stories, poems and ballads.

Note about Pronoun Usage: It's best to see some characters by their dramatic functions. To help keep this perspective, we use the impersonal pronoun "it" when referring to such characters. It's best to explore other characters in terms of their growth. To help draw the reader into a closer relationship with such a character, we use the personal pronoun, "he."

Earlier editions of this book used "she" as the personal pronoun. Because of this uncommon usage, it jarred readers out of a relationship with personal characters rather than drawing them in. This defeated our purpose. As a result, this edition employs masculine pronouns.