We will be guided by a simple idea: All stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams, and movies.
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2020, p. xiv)
Literary theorists as various as Victor Turner (an anthropologist), Tzvetan Todorov, Hayden White (an historian), and Vladimir Propp (a folklorist) suggest that there is some such constraining deep structure to narrative and that good stories are well-formed particular realizations of it.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 16)
Understanding the ceremonial way we enjoy storytelling allows us to demystify the basic concept of all narrative writing, which is that every good tale ever told is made up of a series of prescribed steps through a ritual structure of story that speaks to the very way we experience life itself.
Eric Edson, The Story Solution (2011, p. 4)
But if we look deeply, if we strip away the surface, we find that at heart all [great movies] are the same thing. Each is an embodiment of the universal form of story. Each articulates this form to the screen in a unique way, but in each the essential form is identical, and it is to this deep form that the audience is responding when it reacts with, ‘What a good story.’
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 20)
The structure of a story acts like a pump to increase the involvement of the audience. Good structure works by alternately lowering and raising the hero’s fortunes and, with them, the audience’s emotions.
Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (2020, p. 189)
All screen story structure exists to drive some worthy hero onward through every more daunting conflict toward an important goal. There’s just no tale to tell without this battle.
Eric Edson, The Story Solution (2011, p. 37)
While there are general structural principles, and a clutch of basic story shapes which are valuable to understand, trying to dictate obligatory dos and don’ts is probably a mistake.
Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling (2020, p. 6)
…fairy tales possess a quite particular structure which is immediately felt and which determines their category, even though we may not be aware of it… But if this is so, if in the basis of classification there is subconsciously contained the structure of the tale, still not studied or even delineated, then it is necessary to place the entire classification of tales on a new track. It must be transferred into formal, structural features. And in order to do this, these features must be investigated.
Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale (1968, p. 6)
Campbell didn’t discover mythic structure, he discovered story structure, and not realizing that, wrapped it in the patina of myth.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 221)
A screenplay is really a system of sorts, comprised of specific parts that are related and unified by action, character, and dramatic premise.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 183)
It seemed axiomatic that the rules of narrative had to be the same across both forms [film and literature]…yet in academic circles the whole idea that you could analyze narrative structure was—is—seen as little more than a quirk.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. xi)
Structure and character are interlocked. The event structure of a story is created out of the choices that characters make under pressure and the actions they choose to take, while characters are the creatures who are revealed and changed by how they choose to act under pressure.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 106)
Once a writer genuinely understands story structure, adding character growth becomes a relatively simple task.
Eric Edson, The Story Solution (2011, p. 139)
Storytelling has a shape. It dominates the way all stories are told and can be traced back not just to the Renaissance, but to the very beginnings of the recorded word. It’s a structure that we absorb avidly whether in art-house or airport form and it’s a shape that may be—though we must be careful—a universal archetype.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. xv)
Classical design means a story built around an active protagonist who struggles against primarily external forces of antagonism to pursue his or her desire, through continuous time, within a consistent and causally connected fictional reality, to a closed ending of absolute and irreversible change.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 45)
These narrative elements are tools for clarity, like the rules of grammar, and similarly it’s best to know the rules before you break them. Like grammar, if unconsciously or casually misapplied, readers will feel at best confused, and at worst betrayed.
Gail Carriger, The Heroine’s Journey (2020, p. 53)
Do all good screenplays fit the paradigm? Yes. … The paradigm is a form, not a formula. Structure is what holds the story together.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 34)
You have your story or play the moment you can answer authoritatively why this man must do something so urgently and immediately… It is imperative that your story starts in the middle, and not under any circumstances at the beginning.
Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (1942, p. 200)
Storytelling, then, can be seen as a codification of the method by which we learn—expressed in a three-act shape. The dialectic pattern—thesis/antithesis/synthesis—is at the heart of the way we perceive the world.
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013, p. 29)
In every act, crisis, climax, and resolution follow each other as day follows night.
Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing: Its Basis in the Creative Interpretation of Human Motives (1942, p. 230)
Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out.
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927, p. 169)
[The Dispossessed] doesn’t have a happy ending. It has an open ending.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti” (2014) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 24)
…structure is not something embedded in concrete, or something that is unbending; rather it is flexible, like a tree that bends in the wind but doesn’t break. Understanding this concept allows you to play with the plotline so you can tell your stories visually, with narrative action rather than explanation.
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (2005, p. 141)
Once a verbal structure is read, and reread often enough to be possessed, it ‘freezes.’ It turns into a unity in which all parts exist at once, which we can then examine like a picture, without regard to the specific movement of the narrative. We may compare it to the study of a music score, where we can turn to any part without regard to sequential performance. The term ‘structure,’ which we have used so often, is a metaphor from architecture, and may be misleading when we are speaking of narrative, which is not a simultaneous structure but a movement in time. The term ‘structure’ comes into its proper context in the second stage, which is where all discussion of ‘spatial form’ and kindred critical topics take their origin.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981, p. 63)