Simply making a point doesn’t necessarily keep people’s attention throughout a story. Well-crafted stories, from Shakespeare to Seinfeld, set up a tension from the beginning that holds you until the story is over.

To use our desire-action-realization model, we are talking about how we establish a central desire in the beginning in such a way that the satisfaction or denial of that desire must be resolved in order for the story to end. The conflicts that arise between our desires being met and the desire of other characters or larger forces to stop us creates the dramatic tension.

Dramatic and storytelling theorists, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists since the time of Aristotle have attempted to analyze how the action of a story is established and sustained. We have found that delineating structural story components for students who are essentially working in a short narrative form is much too complicated. Writing a script that slavishly follows a formal structure tends to create wooden, melodramatic writing that we can smell a mile off as not reflecting the author’s true voice. So we have reduced these several concepts to one.

We refer to a term coined from dramatic theory, "the dramatic question," to summarize an approach. In a romance, will the girl get the guy? In an adventure, will the hero reach the goal? In a crime or murder mystery, who did it? When any of these questions are answered, the story is over.

Again, sophisticated story making distinguishes itself by burying the presentation of the dramatic question, like the realization, in ways that do not call attention to the underlying structure.

Tanya’s Story was created in the very first digital storytelling class we taught at the American Film Institute in 1993. It remains one of the most poignant and efficient expressions of digital storytelling we have experienced and also has served as an ideal example of a number of the elements we are currently describing, particularly the dramatic question.

The statement of the dramatic question is elegantly posed and resolved in the first and closing lines. Monte states at the beginning that she didn’t understand friendship. At the end she leaves us with a rather open-ended statement, "I couldn’t believe she knew my middle name." It does not take much sophistication to interpret the dramatic question, "What is the meaning of friendship?" The answer suggests that it is the ways in which we un-self-consciously exchange intimate information with each other.

In this case, the particular meaning of the resolution of the dramatic question is in fact the central point of the story. But here is an important distinction. What we are really talking about with the dramatic question is a structural "setup," corresponding to a logical "payoff." The meaning of the story, as we have suggested, doesn’t have to have anything to do with the structure, just as there are hundreds of ways to draw different meanings out of any given sequence of events.

We are trained from early on to recognize that different dramatic questions often lead to predictable answers. If the question is about how the girl gets the guy, our immediate assumption is that either the guy, or someone the guy knows, doesn’t want the guy to be gotten. As a result, manipulating expectations is precisely what entertains us. What if the girl thinks she wants one guy, but she really wants the guy who is trying to stop her from getting the original guy? What if she decides to chuck the whole thing and become a nun? Are we unhappy? Only if there was nothing to suggest that these events were consistent with her behavior will we be confused or dismayed. A good author will make you think the central dramatic question was "Will the girl get the guy?" when it really was "Will the girl find happiness?", and we have learned early on that she doesn’t define herself completely by her role as spousal partner. If you watch movies, you know the possibilities for manipulating the dramatic question are endless.

When we have the expectation pulled out from under us in a story, when the realization is dramatically different than the setup, it tickles us. The classic short story does the same, leading us quickly into a direction that establishes our expectations, only to twist the expectation at the end.

The more you learn about dramatic structure, the more you dissect familiar stories into their structural components. The more you experiment with rewarding or surprising your audience’s expectations established by a dramatic question, the more rich and complex your stories will become.