Sublime

” and it’s hard to think of a verbal array whose structure better mimics both its subject and the larger text of which it’s part: precisely because, despite its exquisitely shaped adventure, the sentence finally fails to hold itself together.

It’s a truth on which all film grammar is based.

the essence all drama is built on: change, and the internal struggle a character must undergo in order to achieve it.

A sentence, as it proceeds, is a gradual paring away of options. Each added word, because of English’s reliance on word order, reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations. Yet even up to the last word the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball. A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy, without

Generally, a feature-length Archplot is designed around forty to sixty scenes that conspire into twelve to eighteen sequences that build into three or more acts that top one another continuously to the end of the line.

In storytelling, the most powerful instance of construction is personal, when a protagonist must change something deep within themselves to achieve their goal.

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).

Boiled down to its essence, the shape becomes: there is a problem the protagonists go on a journey they find the solution they return the problem is solved.

the Kuleshov Effect.