More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
As a storyteller in training, the first thing you probably did was read Aristotle’s Poetics. I believe Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history. But his thinking about story, while powerful, is surprisingly narrow, focused on a limited number of plots and genres.
It is also extremely theoretical and difficult to put into actual practice, which is why most storytellers trying to learn the practical techniques of their craft from Aristotle leave empty-handed.
“three-act structure.”
This is also problematic, because three-act structure, albeit a lot easier to understand than Aristotle, is hopelessly simplistic and in many ways just plain wrong.
Three-act theory says that every story for the screen has three “acts”: the first act is the beginning, the second is the middle, and the third is the end. The first act is about thirty pages long. The third act is also about thi...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
But what’s worse is that it promotes a view of story that is mechanical.
The idea of an act break comes from the conventions of traditional theater, where we close the curtain to signal the end of an act. We don’t need to do that in movies, novels, and short stories or even, for that matter, in many contemporary plays.
Three-act structure is a mechanical device superimposed on the story and has nothing to do with its internal logic—where ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
A mechanical view of story, like three-act theory, inevitably leads to ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Just as many writers have a mechanical view of what a story is, they use a mechanical process for creating one.
This is especially true of screenwriters whose mistaken notions of what makes a script salable lead them to write a script that is neither popular nor good.
In this book, I want to show you a better way.
My goal is to explain how a great story works, along with the techniques needed to create one, so that you will have the best chance of writing a great story of your own.
I believe it can be done, but it requires that we think and talk about story diff...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Show that a great story is organic—not a machine but a living body that develops
The main challenge facing any storyteller is overcoming the contradiction between the first...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Yet the story must feel organic to the audience; it must seem like a single thing that grows and builds to a climax.
If you want to become a great storyteller, you have to master this technique to such a high degree that your characters seem to be acting on their own, as they must, even though you are the one making them act that way.
But in fact he has so mastered the techniques of his sport that his technique has simply disappeared from view, and the audience sees only beauty.
A speaker tells a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why.
He tells what happened, laying out a set of actions that have been completed in some way.
Even if he tells the story in the present tense (as in playwriting or screenwriting), the storyteller is summing up all the events, so the listener feels that this is a single unit, the full story.
The storyteller is really selecting, connecting, and building a series of intense moments.
These moments are so charged that the listener feels he is living them himself. Good storytelling doesn’t just tell audiences what happened in a life. It gives them the experience of that life.
Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.
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.
the storyteller is constructing a kind of puzzle about people and asking the listener to figure it out.
he tells the audience certain information about a made-up character, and he withholds certain information.
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...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
KEY POINT: All stories are a form of communication that expresses the dramatic code.
The dramatic code, embedded deep in the human psyche, is an artistic description of how a person can grow or evolve.
The storyteller hides this process beneath particular characters and actions.
In the dramatic code, change is fueled by desire.
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.
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.
The genres that highlight taking action the most are myth and its later version, the action form.
The genres that highlight learning the most are the detective story and the multiperspective drama.
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 ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Myth tends to show the widest character arc, from birth to death and from animal to divine.
Film (especially American film) shows the small change a character might undergo by seeking a limited goal with great intensity.
Classic short stories usually track a few events that lead the character to gain a single important insight.
Serious novels typically depict how a person interacts and changes within an entire society or show the precise mental and emotiona...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The focal point is the moment of change, the impact, when a person breaks free of habits and weaknesses and ghosts from his past and transforms to a richer and fuller self.
The dramatic code expresses the idea that human beings can become a better version of themselves, psychologically and morally. And that’s why people love it.
KEY POINT: Stories don’t show the audience the “real world”; they show the story world. The story world isn’t a copy of life as it is. It’s life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.
A great story describes human beings going through an organic process.
