Storyforming involves the natural process of thinking about a story before any writing begins. This covers the creative, intuitive, and practical decision-making skills common to all writers and storytelling styles.

By brainstorming with Dramatica, you can develop the dramatic framework that incorporates the structural and thematic elements of your story. The term Dramatica uses to describe this “deep structure" is a storyform. Working with Dramatica to determine the most suitable storyform takes your single idea and expands it into a cohesive story, rich with meaning.

Dramatica contains 32,768 potential storyforms. You could use any one storyform as the basis for telling your story, though each would have a different effect on the way an audience experiences that story--due to its particular themes and the order in which they are revealed. Each storyform, however, contains the entire set of story elements needed to create a complete story.

The number of potential storyforms is not the number of stories that have been or can be told. The variety of illustrations through which each storyform can be dramatized is limited only by a particular writer's imagination. There is no limit to the number of stories which can evolve from a single storyform, much less from all 32,768 storyform combinations.

The object of storyforming in Dramatica is to find a single storyform that best incorporates the structural, thematic, and dynamic elements of your story. Identifying this “one" storyform is done by choosing from a number of multiple choice topics.

Some topics have only two or three possible selections, others over sixty. Making choices in one topic will have impact on other topics. Sometimes the connections are obvious, other times obscure. Regardless of which topics you pick first and which options, going through the storyforming process will eventually lead you to that single storyform that best embodies the meaning and feeling of your story.

The StoryGuide / Dramatica Query System (DQS)  tackles storyforming in a traditional question and answer approach.

The Story Engine approaches storyforming from a more holistic point of view, working behind the scenes to ensure your selections are consistent with the priorities you establish. Choices made first have top priority, the second choice made has second priority, and so forth. In this way the story engine guides (and is guided by) your efforts to find the best storyform for the story you have in mind.

Try both features. They each have strengths and weaknesses, but between the two you'll develop a storyforming approach that works for you.