Arrival & The Zero-Sum Game

In this episode we make the connection between Arrival and the holistic approach to story structure offered by the Dramatica theory of story. Why speculate about how your story will end when you can make meaningful progress by developing a narrative that supports your artistic intent?

In addition we take a look into creating dramatic tension and hooking your audience into your story by looking both subjectively from within you story and objectively from outside of your story. Sound cool? Then dive in and open up your mind to a brand new way of thinking about story and story structure.

Show Notes & Links

The Dramatica Mentorship Program - our premiere service designed to give you the tools and techniques for applying Dramatica's powerful concepts to your stories.

Narrative First Storyforms All the Dramatica storyforms from our analyses located on one convenient page
Arrival Our analysis of the Best Picture nominee
The Yellow Birds Our analysis of what will probably be a Best Picture nominee next year
Discuss Dramatica our forum for anyone interested in learning more and more about the Dramatica theory of story
Storyform discussion of Pixar's WALL-E It was worth a shot :)
Narrative First Membership page the place to go if you want to sign up to support our site and have access to all of our cool super secret features
Finding the Major Dramatic Question of Your Story our third article in a series on Plotting with Dramatica
The Story Goal the concept of the Story Goal within a narrative. Great place to start when writing a film.
Series of articles on The Story Goal A power packed page full of insight into this very important concept of narrative.
Inner Worlds Outer Worlds Fun documentary on the fractal nature of the Universe. Dramatica works, in part, because of its fractal nature
The Dramatica Mentorship Program learn everything we learned about Dramatica over the past two decades in less than six months!
On the Nature of Daylight the opening and closing score for Arrival by Max Richter. Awesome and emotional. Put on repeat for best results.
Ex Machina Mea Culpa the podcast where I admit to getting a storyform wrong and explain where the misinterpretation came from
Ex Machina: The Narrative Code Hidden within the Machine our article explaining the Ex Machina effect--where you see the impact from the Influence Character as the source of the Main Character's issues...not so!
Dramatica Table of Story Elements follow along by downloading a PDF of the all-important Table of Story Elements
More insight into the storyform for Arrival an explanation of what we discovered once we created the actual Dramatica storyform based on our initial analysis
Tying the Towers of Story Structure Together discovering the connective tissue between the individual Throughlines of a story
Slipstream Time Hacking GREAT summary of a book exploring productivity through the eyes of general relativity