In his fascinating book on story structure Into the Woods, John Yorke argues for a hidden symmetry in story, in which protagonists and antagonists function as opposites with their rising and falling fortunes mirroring one another. Partly inspired by Gustav Freytag’s nineteenth-century analysis of Ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama, he argues for a ‘universal’ plot design that centres around a midpoint peak. This he describes as a ‘big, epochal, life-changing moment’, occurring ‘exactly’ halfway through ‘any successful story’, in which something ‘profoundly significant’ takes place that
...more
