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

Fundamentally there are two types of exposition: conveying information that neither audience nor characters know conveying information the audience needs but all the characters know.

Good structure will deliver a crisis point that forces the protagonist to choose between their old and new selves.

When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them. You’re meeting their representative!’

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

next week they went back to how they were to learn the same lesson

of course the audience has to relate to your characters, but they don’t need to approve of them.

The climax

A lot of new writers spend an inordinate amount of time polishing dialogue to try to fix problems, when the problem is much more likely to lie in structure or

In doing so, it changed entirely the way the world heard stories about itself.