Book

Into the Woods

John Yorke

I always hear “Good marketing and brand building is story telling”. So I read this to learn about stories and how they work.

“Why do all mavericks prove so popular? Largely because that’s how many of us feel at times too. Haven’t we all at some time felt we’re surrounded by idiots, by overly bureaucratic managers who don’t understand us?”
“The attraction of wish fulfilment, benevolent or masochistic, can’t be underestimated.”
“Antagonists are central to character development. The detective and monster templates illustrate this well. It is most interesting when antagonist is within the protagonist. Cowardice, drunkenness, lack of self-esteem all serve as internal obstacles that prevent a character reaching fulfilment. All, for reasons we will discover, Make the person more real.”
“If a character doesn’t want something, they’re passive, and if they’re passive, they’re effectively dead. Without a desire to animate the protagonist, the writer has no hope of bringing the character alive.
Aaron Sorkin ~ “Somebody’s got to want something. Something’s got to be standing in their way of getting it. You do that and you’ll have a scene.”
“While it’s possible for characters to get what they want and what they need, the true, more universal, and more powerful archetype occurs when the initial, ego-driven goal is abandoned for something more important, more nourishing, more essential. In Rocky, Cars, Saving Private Ryan, the heroes find a goal they weren’t initially looking for.”
“Acts are a unit of action bound by a character’s desire. They have their own beginning, middle and end, the latter of which spins the narrative off in a new and unexpected direction.”
“Occurring almost exactly halfway through any successful story, the midpoint is the moment something profoundly significant occurs. In Titanic, the ship hits the iceberg.”
The 5 act dramatic arc: 1) Call to action; 2) Initial objective achieved; 3) Midpoint; 4) Things start to go wrong; 5) Victory or defeat.
“Change is the root of all drama. Detective stories are an example of change through growing knowledge. Rather than a flaw, these characters have a deficiency of knowledge which improves as the story progresses. Poirot knows nothing of the killer at the beginning of his journey, but everything by the end.”
“All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to attribute it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple and complex as that. That’s the pattern. That’s how we tell stories.”
“For drama to occur, a protagonist must be confronted with an equal and opposite desire. The goals of protagonists and antagonists in every scene are in direct conflict.”
“All scenes proceed on the basis of action-reaction-action-reaction until the moment they suddenly hit an unexpected reaction, the moment when one character achieves their goal and the other loses it.”
“Story as such”, said E.M. Forster, “can only have one merit, that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely, it can only have one fault, that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.”
Mirroring in The Social Network: Act 1) - Mark is dumped by Erica; - works on Facemash, enlists Eduardo; - Winklewoss recruit him. Act 5) - Winklewoss sue him; - works on Facebook, sacks Eduardo; - tries to befriend Erica.
“At the end of Act 1, a character stands at the edge of the forest about to begin their journey.”
“The second act contains its own call to action and crisis that will force our hero to make a choice between their old and new selves.”
(Act 3) “Once again the protagonist must choose whether to stop and return to their former selves or drink the dark elixir they found and, with its magic working on them, head towards home.”
(Act 4) “Faced with the ultimate crisis, the structure asks the protagonist one simple question. Will you revert and die or change and live?”
(Act 5) “Using the knowledge gained at the midpoint and tested through the trials of the fourth act, they are, against all odds, able to defeat their enemies, overcome their flaws, and in doing so become complete.”
On the way theatre operates and why it’s different to television: “[t]here are no close-ups, there is little or no fragmentation, be it in time or space. And we rely, for example, on the soliloquy to convey the feeling that a grey filmmaker can create through the manipulation of pictures.
“In every scene, a protagonist is presented with a mini-crisis and must make a choice as to how to surmount it. Meeting with a subversion of expectation, a blur to their established plans, a character must choose a new course of action. In doing so, they reveal a little bit more of who they are.”
“The conflict between how we wish to be perceived and what we really feel is the root of all character.”
“The absence of identity allows the animal off the leash.”
“At the end of Oliver Stone’s Nixon, the eponymous president stares at a picture of Kennedy and intones, ‘When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.’”
On conveying information other characters don’t know (and therefore to us): “Most new series have an ingénue. The questions they ask provide the answers the audience need to know. Tourists, students, strangers and authority figures all perform the same function. They provide a dramatic imperative for the facts to be explained. They are us.”
“What’s important is not the emotion they’re playing, but the emotion they’re trying to conceal.”
“The underlying format of all successful series is very simple, the enemy is without. Each week, the precinct is invaded by a physical manifestation of the other, the sick patient, the psycho killer, the lost soul, aliens in every shape and form. And every week, the regulars make things better and order is restored.”
“The inciting incident asks the question, ‘what are the consequences of this?’ And the worst point provides the answer.”
“‘It is only through fiction that facts can be made instructive or even intelligible’, said George Bernard Shaw. ‘The artist, poet, philosopher rescues them from the intelligible chaos of the actual occurrence and arranges them in works of art.’”
“It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and it is the beginning of morality.”