Did you know that ‘Good Bye, Lenin!’ (2003) is the most famous recent German film? What kind of storytelling choices are behind this story, which fascinated audience and critics alike?

Here I want to show you how clear storytelling – applied to each storyline – amounts to an expertly perfected structure. I will also explain how unplaiting single narrative strands in a script can help your own writing. This kind of storytelling means to not only work with one main character, one conflict, one goal and one set of plot points, but – in the case of ‘Good Bye, Lenin!’ – with four storylines with respective main characters, conflicts, needs and wants, several twists as well as an individual insight and realization.

‘Good Bye Lenin!‘ is the story of an East-German family around the fall of the Iron Curtain. It tells how individual family members deal with the father’s Republikflucht (escape from the GDR) to the West several years ago (backstory) and how the remaining family deals with the mother suffering a heart attack and falling into a coma for several months, and then waking up to a new world.

The tragicomedy is told from Alex’ point-of-view, his sister Ariane’s as well as their mother Christiane’s and creates therewith several storylines:

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DramaQueen visualizes the architecture of your story. But what kind of information can you gain from the graphic display? Use these questions to check the narrative arcs of your storyline:

1. Which narrative strands or storylines constitute my story?
2. Does each of my central characters have his/her own storyline in which he/she is the main character? Is each strand told from the point of view of its main character?
3. Do all important characters have a want or need? Do the individual storylines provide information about the different wants / needs of my characters?
4. If my protagonist has a want and a need it is useful to define two storylines from his/her point of view: a wantline and a needline.
5. Does the narrative arc rise or fall dramatically for each main character at the first plot-point of their storyline? If yes – it creates an incising event for the character. If not, the character has nothing to lose. Or there is no contrast between their habitual life at the beginning of their storyline and the first plot-point.
6. Is the second act twice as long as act 1 and act 3?
7. Are your story’s individual sequences or phases about the same length? Or are there single passages which are over-proportionally long or contain many short scenes? If yes:  Are there steps or scenes you could shorten or cut out?
8. Do the main secondary strands start not later than at the beginning of the second act?
9. Is the main strand (and therefore the main character) present throughout the story, or are there longer periods in which the strand is (unintentionally) exposed or neglected (recognizable by the broken line)?
10. Does each storyline have significant highs and lows? When a narrative graph features steep arcs the storyline offers strong turning points and contrasts. Should the storyline run flat and straight-lined over a long period it lacks turning points and twists.
11. Does each strand have a complete arc?  Is there an inciting incident, a plot-point 1, a midpoint, a plot-point 2 and a climax? Every secondary strand, however small, needs at least two turning points.
12. Does every sequence close with a plot-point? As a general rule: the more turning points a storyline has, the more unpredictable and thrilling it is – provided that the twists are motivated by the action and characters.
13. Do the narrative strands intertwine? Are there connections between the plot-points of storylines – e.g. is the plot-point of one strand also the trigger for another strand’s plot-point?
14. Are there scenes where the plotpoints of several storylines coincide? These are your story’s master-scenes which should get your special attention during the writing and development process.
15. Do particular storylines run parallel or reverse to each other?  Arcs running in opposition to each other can be dramatically very effective. They can reveal, for example, that the protagonist’s and antagonist’s goals contradict each other or that the main character’s want and need contradict each other. Parallel storylines point out that their main characters pursuit the same goal or that they have the same problem or conflict.
16. Does the story escalate in the third act?  If the arcs of all storylines become steeper in the third act the story’s drama intensifies.
17. Do the “climaxes” of the various storylines coincide? Only when that is the case, they do make up the climax of the story.
18. Do all storylines have a happy end or do all end tragically?  This could have a one-dimensional effect. When all storylines end differently – positive and negative – we get an ambivalent ending.  This could be emotionally very satisfying.  An example: the main character did not get his want (negative ending of one storyline), but has met the love of his life (happy end of another storyline).

Our goal is to make DramaQueen run intuitively so that the writer doesn’t even notice many of its features.  Several DramaQueen features don’t even have a button but run invisibly under the surface. Our latest feature the automatic character recognition is a good example of that.

Automatic character recognition

What does ‚DramaQueen automatically recognises characters as well as their gender and age’ actually mean? First of all DramaQueen has to figure out which words actually signify characters: DramaQueen looks for the first appearance of characters in the synopsis, treatment and script. Why? Because a character appearing for the first time is written in all-caps – as the convention goes. With a script DramaQueen also looks for characters having lines of dialogue because they start with their own kind of paragraph spacing.

After DramaQueen has found a character it checks whether there’s a number in brackets directly after the name. If that’s the case the number is put down as the character’s age in the character list.
Afterwards DramaQueen checks the character’s name against a very comprehensive database of first names – separated into female and male. Should the list contain the given name DramaQueen will assign the gender appropriately and record it in the character-panel.

So far, so good. The next step is about not just recognises the character for the first time but to detect all their appearances.  This way the outline-panel is able to list exactly which character appears in each single scene. For this to work DramaQueen needs to be able to match all versions of the character’s name:  the full name of a character when they first appear (e.g. ‘JANE SMITH’) and the name used for any further appearance (‘Jane’). Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated…  Not every first part of the name is a first name and not every second part of the name is the family name. Characters can be called ‘Ms. Smith’, ‘Sister Jane’ or ‘Female Police Officer 1’.   That’s why DramaQueen contains another key-word list with titles and official titles (e.g. ‘Father’, ‘Princess’, ‘Professor’ etc.) so that DramaQueen can figure out that ‘Inspector James Miller’ is not ‘Inspector James’, but ‘Inspector Miller’.

But what happens when the writer decides to rename ‘James’ and call him ‘Jonathan’? Then it is DramaQueen’s aspiration to not only change the name in the character-panel or in the script but everywhere the character appears within the DQ-file – all text-levels and all panels.
As if that weren’t enough: DramaQueen even makes it possible to substitute all possible name variations (e.g. nicknames) and already suggests the grammatically correct possessive form (e.g. “Alexis’, “Joyce’).

All these processes – the constant searching, finding, matching, transferring, correcting etc. – are optimised in a way that DramaQueen manages them in real-time – second by second. The writer doesn’t need to press any synchronising-button because the character recognition always runs synchronously.

Smart-Import

Another example for DramaQueen’s ‘deeper levels‘ is the smart-import service for scripts which is much more than a simple import. In reality our importer analyses the outer form of the script and obtains all kinds of further information contained in the imported script:  all single scenes are gathered and listed, as well as all characters (along with their age and gender).  It also gathers all information contained in scene headings: location, interior or exterior setting, time of day. Again the importer doesn’t just transfer the text but interprets it: regardless of whether the time of day is ‘EARLY IN THE MORNING’, ‘MID-DAY’ OR ‘LATE AFTERNOON’ DramaQueen will extract the significant information – meaning that this scene takes plays during day light. All ‘DAY’ scenes are marked with a sun-icon while all ‘NIGHT’ scenes get a moon and all ‘DUSK’ and ‘DAWN’ scenes receive a setting/rising sun. This way the outline-panel offers a quick overview of all scenes and their times of day as well as the alternation between different times. (By the way:  the smart-import is managed within seconds as well).

Automatic storyline recognition

It gets even more convenient when single DramaQueen tools work in unison.  Because when we combine and mesh both features – the automatic character recognition and the smart-import – DramaQueen will be able to automatically detect single storylines in the script during its import. This is possible because every storyline tells the story between particular characters. And when it is known which characters interact in each scene the deduction of scene-storyline-affiliation is no longer a problem!

That’s the theory… In practice we will find that the implementation of this feature – coming up in our next update – won’t be that straight forward and that we’ll have to consider and deal with a bunch of special use-cases.  But don’t worry – we’ll make sure to come up with very ‘intuitive’ solutions.

Listing and sorting of characters*

What is this about?
You’re writing a text.
DramaQueen detects all characters appearing for the first time in all-caps or having dialogue lines in the script. Furthermore the gender and age (as long as it is listed behind the character’s name in brackets) are recorded.

What for?
All characters are recorded in real time in the character-panel (if possible with age and gender). The character column in the outline-panel automatically displays which characters appear in which scene.

What’s the advantage?
Characters no longer need to be manually set up and attributed to each scene.

Furthermore all characters can be sorted in order of appearance or according to the number of appearances (in general or per scene). Without having to do anything writers get an even better overview over their story‘s character constellation and are able to find scenes even faster.

What comes after that?
The automatic character recognition is the basis for the automatic plotline recognition via its character constellation.
This means: DramaQueen Pro can quickly attribute single scenes to different plotlines. The writer doesn’t have to do this manually for each scene anymore.
This function will be part of the next update!

Central linkage and global renaming of characters*

Do you want to rename a character?
Simply go to the character-panel and overwrite the character with their new name. DramaQueen replaces with just one click all name appearances (including all name variations) in the entire document, i.e. in all panels and text-levels!

ramaQueen replaces with one click all occurrences of the name (including all name variations) in the entire document, i.e. across text in all views and text layers!

*in PLUS and PRO

The next post will look a bit closer at what exactly DramaQueen is doing to recognize and rename characters.