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Stories can make a girl laugh, a boy cry, or send a child to sleep. They can make a man leave his wife, a woman join a cult or a boy wear a bomb. Stories can make a felon a president or an heiress rob a bank. Stories create religions and cause them to divide; they provoke civil wars, spark genocide too. Stories bring peace, bring love, bring pleasure; they deliver death, destruction, and despair. To command narrative is to control a frightening power. So what, exactly, are stories? How do they work, and what gives them that strength?
When Syd Field wrote in 1979 that there were three acts to every story, it was a distillation of his observation of film fiction. That observation led in turn to the explosion of an industry of screenwriting gurus who have expended a great deal of energy on telling us what shape stories should be, but hardly any on why. They have had even less to say on what makes some tales hit home with such astonishing force.
In my first book on storytelling, Into the Woods, I attempted to answer how and why narratives cluster around a similar shape – not just in film, but in all types of storytelling. I steered clear of asking why some were able to transform the world, while many with similar three-act structures simply, well . . . weren’t. But after publication I continued to wrestle with this question. What was it that turbocharged some tales? Might it be possible to understand and harness that terrifying potency? And if one wanted to understand how to do that, where would one look ?
Nearly all screenwriting books draw on fiction for illustration and example. Into the Woods was no exception, and called largely on Western works for reference. This was born partly from a desire for simplicity, and partly because the target audience were almost exclusively practitioners of Western forms. Ten years on, planning a second book, this felt both an abdication of responsibility and a missed opportunity. If our only forms of reference are fictional, then we can never escape fiction’s orbit – we are trapped in its self-referential loop. Narrative, however, doesn’t imprison itself within fictional restraints. Surely, to really understand story we need to not only break out of the prison of Western fiction, but also fiction itself.
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