Sunday, April 04, 2010

story structure












After reading Dramatica and devouring Robert Mckee's book entitled Story and not to mention John Truby's book, Anatomy of story; I think the most solid structure in storytelling is the Argumentative style of storytelling. Dramatica details most of this in the free downloadable book. http://www.dramatica.com/theory/theory_book/dtb.html

The Argumentative style is the most prominent in all the best movies and television. It is only second to the hero's journey which was made famous by the Star Wars franchise, however Argumentative style isn't really fascinating like Hero's journey. In fact its the opposite. Hero's journey structure deals with the lone hero and his fight against tyranny which is fun. The Argumentative style deals with the character's weakness and delves into those the problems related to that weakness..huh?...yawn!

A good example would be in GodfatherII. Michael is determined to reign supreme by eliminating all opposition. By the end we see what Michael has given into weakness. He has become the very thing he was opposed to and now he has become the devil in a three piece suit.

Argumentative style deals with internal tickerin's of the character and Hero's Journey deals with the external. I'll talk more about this in later posts. It gets pretty deep and I'm tired. See ya.

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