Building Your Story

When you've finally decided on the perfect¹ Premise for your story, tap Build this Story located at the bottom of the Premise Builder.

You can also add a title to your structure before you send it off to be built. If you decide to wait and title it later, your new structure will appear in your Story List as "New Story from Premise Builder."

Sending Your Story Off to be Built

Once you tap "Build this Story," Subtxt will then send your settings to its servers and ask them (the story gnomes) to start building your story for you. Note that building a story in Subtxt is a complex and sophisticated process. This isn't a simple look-up table that finds a predetermined story structure to match your Premise. Unless this is a Premise that has already been built (by other users or by us), Subtxt will need to start from scratch and begin to adjust the complicated model out of position to simulate the kind of thought processes that go inside our own heads when we make narratives.

This is a process that can take anywhere from 5-7 minutes. We ask that you please be patient, knowing that the wait will be well worth it. Subtxt will email you with a notification the moment it is finished putting everything together.

Due to the complexity of the process, every Author is limited to building one story at a time.

This limitation--as with all limitations in art--is a good thing. You should not be building stories to see how they play out in order to understand your Premise. In other words, don't look to structure to appreciate what it is you are trying to say. Subtxt simply doesn't work that way. In fact, it relies specifically on the inability to ascribe meaning from structure in order to create your structure.

If you are building a structure to "see" if it's the right one, you're approaching the process from a non-sensical point-of-view, and you're simply engaging in projecting meaning onto structure, rather than gaining a structure from meaning. Narrative structure is meaningless without intention.

Why Is the Act Order Different Compared to Dramatica®

The Storyforms built with Subtxt are more accurate and closer to the original concepts of Dramatica theory than the Dramatica application itself. Some Storyforms, particularly those with a Changed Resolve and Linear Mindset, deviate from what you might find elsewhere. In addition, Subtxt’s Storyforms provide the “atomic” elements of the Storyform (Scene-level)—something never seen before in this area of narrative structure.

You’ll find the Storyforms you create in Subtxt to be easier to manage, require less “shoe-horning”, and match more readily—and quite eerily—to your own writer’s intuition.

In short, the Storyforms in Subtxt are better 😊