Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them

It seems impossible to understand how, with only eight notes in an octave, we don’t simply run out of music, but just as tones give rise to semi-tones and time-signatures, tempo and style alter content, so we start to see that a very simple pattern contains within it the possibility of endless permutations.

If that show’s on your CV, you can effectively double your salary, because employers fall for a narrative fallacy.

Grammar, vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, sentence length, jargon or slang – when combined in a particular way, they all allow us to understand who a person is.

Pollock’s paintings are ‘fractal’; tiny sections of the work mimic the structure of the whole; simple geometric patterns are repeated in different magnifications.

stories involve characters being thrown into a world that represents the opposite of everything they believe and stand for – how an inciting incident embodies all the characteristics the protagonist lacks. The midpoint in every example we’ve used appears to contain the very essence of that missing quality – the opposite of their initial state. It’s

the person the audience care about most.

Most of us have been frustrated by long-running shows where ingénue characters never seem to learn from their experiences, or equally annoyed when they do learn and stop being the character we first fell in love with.

It’s growth, then decay, then

The antagonist they fear, then – the ‘monster’ they must overcome – is the embodiment of the very thing lacking in themselves.