2.1.2 The Topic Selection Logic for Microdrama Scripts - Product Characteristics and Core Elements

The Three Core Characteristics of the Microdrama Product

We said that for the microdrama product, we highlighted three main things in the last lesson. One, we said, is stress relief. We watch microdramas to decompress, not to get stressed, right?

From a product perspective, when users purchase this product, it serves three functions. First is stress relief. The second is having a very strong sense of immersion. I feel like this event could happen to me or someone close, it feels very relevant, creating a strong sense of immersion, or I’m willing to immerse myself in this story.

Then, we said this product also has significant stickiness. We’re talking about one-minute episodes, around a hundred episodes. Often, the first 20 episodes are free, followed by pay-per-episode, buying ten-episode packs, or various other payment templates—what we call top-up models. But they all involve what we call payment gateways.

If there’s no stickiness, after watching the first 20 free episodes, when it switches to paid, they might stop watching. Insufficient stickiness is obviously not good. So, this product—the microdrama product—from a product perspective, has these three characteristics.

The Four Elements of Story and Their Application in Microdramas

Since it is, to some extent, also a story—a story in the broad sense—what are the attributes of a story? We say a story has four elements, right? When we discuss a story, there’s the Worldview, Characters, Events, and Theme.

We say a complete story contains four elements: Worldview, Characters, Events, and Theme. As a microdrama, its worldview is part of the story—when does it happen, where does it happen, and the basic operating rules of that world.

Remember, the worldview isn’t that crucial for our microdramas. But for writing stories, you need to know that a story’s worldview has three elements: the time period, the location, and the fundamental rules governing that world.

For example, is it a dog-eat-dog world? A world under invasion by external enemies? A world of professional competition? There’s a basic operating principle. A story is a slice of a world. A world has many operating principles, but when you write a story, you often can only reflect one operating principle. That’s the worldview.

Characters are easy to understand—there must be roles in the story. Microdramas have them too. Events refer to what actually happens.

The Emphasis and Omission of Story Elements in Microdramas

Theme essentially refers to what you gain from watching the story. This is different from the ‘central idea’ we learned in language class as kids. The central idea often focused on what the author intended to express. But we shouldn’t always think from the author’s perspective—I somewhat disagree with that language education method. How would I know what the author intended?

And even if I force a guess, I suspect someone like Lu Xun might not have actually thought that way! So, for theme, we often consider it from the audience’s perspective of ‘gain’ or ‘takeaway.’ We don’t focus solely on what the creator wanted to express. The theme is actually the audience’s gain.

In traditional film/TV, or in mainstream values and mainstream dramas, what kind of themes do we often get? For example, we might get a theme like ‘Hard Work Can Change Destiny’—movies like The Pursuit of Happyness, right?

Or we get a theme like ‘I am the Master of My Fate’—‘My fate is mine to command, not heaven’s’—isn’t that Nezha? All sorts of positive, uplifting themes. But among themes, there’s also a type where the audience’s gain is stress relief.

In storytelling, we call this type of audience gain, which provides stress relief, ‘satisfaction’ or ‘cathartic pleasure.’ This corresponds directly to the stress-relief demand in the microdrama product.

That is to say, the microdrama product, or its story, places greater emphasis on this fourth element. Microdramas are very short, everyone. Sometimes we genuinely cannot兼顾 all four elements equally. We often don’t expand on the worldview, we often don’t fully develop the characters, there might not be complex characterizations, or even character growth and change.

We know that when writing a traditional story, to enrich the characters, we often write about their growth and change. In a traditional film/TV drama, a character might start off disliking Ma Dongmei, being unsatisfied with his current life, wanting money, pursuing elegance.

But in the end, the character grows, realizing he should cherish the person right beside him. Goodbye Mr. Loser, right? We say characters undergo growth. But in microdramas, we focus more on the fourth element (satisfaction), while compressing the others relatively.

In the next part about how to write the story, I will cover this content. Right now, we are discussing the basic logic of topic selection. These are the basic elements of a story. We are selecting the element of ‘satisfaction’ as our primary element.