What Makes Drama Dramatic?

Posted by admin on March 18, 2009

What makes a good drama?  I can’t say that I’m the world’s leading expert on the subject, but as a guy who has a blog and the will to write, I am going to add my bit.

The real key to a good drama is risk.  Risk that feels important to the reader is necessary for a good drama.

Risk is nothing more than a chance for somebody to lose something.  Whether the risk is realized or not is less relevant than the risk itself.  The character involved doesn’t need to be aware of the risk or be emotionally involved with the risk, though these can be very helpful.  The reader, however, must be intimately involved with the risk.  The reader must care what happens and must want the lost to not occur.

Not all readers place the same value on a given situation or character so creating a sense of risk that is important enough to reader means finding a situation that appeals to the most readers.

Creating a situation that appeals to readers means understanding the target audience and applying a sense of risk that the audience can relate to.  Technology junkies would place more value on a loss of technology, for example, than perhaps a loss of bed sheets.