Things you have to decide about your protagonist

In every story (and short story of course), you must decide different aspects of your protagonist before having him/her act. Otherwise, people won't be able to empathize with him, and the story will loose it's strength.

Here is a simple checklist:

• Who is your protagonist (develop his backstory)
• What does he/she want?
• What or who stands in the way of your protagonist to obtain he/she wants?
• What is your protagonist risking if he or she doesn't get what he wants?
• Will your protaginist obtain his/her goal?
• How will s/he feel in the end?
  

Remember, it is utterly important that you get to know your characters before writing about them. I am sure you could easily and perfectly write a story about your best friend or a family member. You know what challenges them the most, and the ways they are going to try to resolve their problems. Try to familiarize yourself with your protagonist, so much that you might even feel he or she has been part of your life for a long time. Then, and only then, will you be able to write his/her story.

How to write a short story for film

My students at WEFIS have asked me this lots of times . Writing a short story is very different from writing a full length feature film in that there is almost no time to explain things.

One must use every tool, be it visual, dialogue or plot, to introduce the viewer to the story problem, make him empathize with whomever you wish to, and keep him interested in the outcome.

In order to be able to fit all this in such a short period of time -say, one minute-, one must start the story at the very end of it. There's no time to develop your character traits on different scenes. Instead, you must present them as they are at the moment of conclusion.

I developed a quick formula so my students could easily start creating their stories. Before starting to write anything, I recommend you to define the following aspects of your short script:

1. Who is your protagonist?
   
2. What is his objective?
3. Who is the antagonist?
4. What is the critical moment that has led them to the actual state of your story?
5. How does the story end?

The rest of the work will consist on developing the ways the antagonist will block the protagonist's efforts to obtain his objective (or viceversa), and why is he going to fail or succeed.

Ok, enough with the theory, here is an example:

1. Protagonist: Alfred is a truck driver. He has been driving for 10 hours, and he is very tired.
2. Objective: Alfred wants to sleep
3. Antagonist: Miriam is his road companion. She wants to talk about politics, marriage, and just about anything that comes to her mind. Of course, Alfred's objective is against her's
4. Critical Moment: Alfred can't keep his eyes open, he is now too tired, and is ignoring Miriam.
5. Ending: Alfred manages to make Miriam stop speaking and to sleep peacefully.

Now all you have to do is to define ways Miriam and Alfred come into conflict, and how is it that Alfred manages to achieve his objective. I'll leave this to you :)

In a following blog I will address how to create interesting characters in a short story script.

Cheers!

Mauricio De la Orta

Writing with Dramatica

We have been exploring Dramatica at Avikoo Studios (where I work at), and our first impression was that it was a very limiting writing tool.

A couple of weeks later though, we discovered how powerful a tool it could prove to be, specially when you understand that the software works along with you, providing a framework to thread your ideas.

I have to admit that it does take a while to understand the terminology that the authors use. We have been studying it for around a year now. The science behind this "Dramatica Theory" is so ample and thorough, that I couldn't believe anyone could actually grab all this information in a shorter period of time.

All in all, I would definitely recommend any writer to give Dramatica a try with any story he/she has previously developed and see what comes out of it.

I'll be posting some tips about using this theory to improve your stories.

Regards!

Maurice