Three Chords and the Truth - TV Tropes

Important things are inevitably cliché, but nobody wants to admit that. And that’s why nobody is deconstructing Saved by the Bell.

Nevertheless, the entire harmonic system of Western European music developed through the Church, step by step. After Gregorian chant, only gradually did the Church allow harmony (different notes sung together) to trickle back in. First came the octave along with fourths and fifths, followed later by thirds and sixths. Church composers avoided disso

There are endless riffs on story shape – sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal explorations and excavations of an original tune. Often you may have to search long and hard to find it, but the tune – even in its absence – will be there. In music, poetry, film – arguably all art – digression merely confirms the archetype’s importance.

As want collides with need, the greater truth – the gap between what characters say and do – is revealed. And that gap is the stuff of drama.

We need our archetypes, because without them life turns into a farm scene painted by an incompetent child, where you can't tell which animal is which and we're all just brown blobs which barely stand out from a background of indeterminate grey.

What are the universal structural elements of all stories? Hook. Build. Payoff. This is the shape any story must take.