Sublime

In a story, audiences must always know who the hero is, what the hero wants, who the hero has to defeat to get what they want, what tragic thing will happen if the hero doesn’t win, and what wonderful thing will happen if they do.

There’s something buried deep within our DNA as humans that makes us respond to certain storytelling elements told in a certain order.

Here is nearly every story you watch, read, or hear in a nutshell: A character who wants something encounters a problem before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a guide steps into their lives, gives them a plan, and calls them to action. That action helps them avoid failure and experience a success.

storytelling is at some level about learning; the protagonist discovers something and we do too.

Thus the ‘journey there; journey back’ structure exists in all archetypal stories. It’s either literally presented (Jack and the Beanstalk), hidden underneath the literal story as part of an internal change (E.T./The Godfather) or embodied as knowledge sought, retrieved and acted upon (Spooks).

The story is the journey they go on to sort out the problem presented. On the way they may learn something new about themselves; they’ll certainly be faced with a series of obstacles they have to overcome; there will likely be a moment near the end where all hope seems lost, and this will almost certainly be followed by a last-minute resurrection

Storytelling, then, is born from our need to order everything outside ourselves.

All have very clear first and last acts – a call to action and a final judgement – but between them too, within the constraints of reality they’re derived from, the same structure as Shakespeare, as Terence and as Horace.

needs to have the following seven essential characteristics, the first letters of which form the acronym PROBLEM: