More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A speaker tells a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why.
Good storytelling doesn’t just tell audiences what happened in a life. It gives them the experience of that life.
Stories are really giving the audience a form of knowledge—emotional knowledge—or what used to be known as wisdom, but they do it in a playful, entertaining way.
Withholding, or hiding, information is crucial to the storyteller’s make-believe. It forces the audience to figure out who the character is and what he is doing and so draws the
audience into the story. When the audience no longer has to figure out the story, it ceases being an audience, and the story stops.
Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a s...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The dramatic code, embedded deep in the human psyche, is an artistic description of how a person can grow or evolve.
the code of growth is what the audience ultimately takes from a good story.
The “story world” doesn’t boil down to “I think, therefore I am” but rather “I want, therefore I am.”
A story tracks what a person wants, what he’ll do to get it, and what costs he’ll have to pay along the way.
A character pursuing a desire takes actions to get what he wants, and he learns new information about better ways to get it. Whenever he learns new information, he makes a decision and changes his course of action.
Any character who goes after a desire and is impeded is forced to struggle (otherwise the story is over). And that struggle makes him change. So the ultimate goal of the dramatic code, and of the storyteller, is to present a change in a character or to illustrate why that change did not occur.
The premise is your story stated in one sentence.
KEY POINT: What you choose to write about is
far more important than any decision you make about how to write it.
Don’t ever tell yourself that any idea
you come up with is stupid. “Stupid” ideas often lead to creative breakthroughs.
To figure out the central conflict, ask yourself “Who fights whom over what?” and answer the question in one succinct line.
This is a false distinction, born of the old romantic notion of writing in a garret and suffering for your art.
Your hero should not be aware of his need at the beginning of the story.
Give your hero a moral need as well as a psychological need.
The other reason you want to give your hero a moral need is that it prevents him from being perfect or being a victim. Both of these are the kiss of death in storytelling.
Keep the problem simple and specific.
KEY POINT: Your hero’s true desire is what he wants in this story, not what he wants in life.
Opening with desire does give your story a quick start. But it also kills the payoff, the ending of the story.
If you give your hero and opponent two separate goals, each one can get what he wants without coming into direct conflict. And then you have no story at all.
Action is not possible without some plan, in life and in storytelling.
Don’t have your hero come right out and say what he learned. This is obvious and preachy and will turn off your audience.
