The art of storytelling is also a science, narratology.
Here is a critical overview of the great authors of screenwriting technique and the main theories of screenwriting and narration.
In a nutshell The narrative scheme is this: The 5 stages of Algirdas Julien Greimas’ narrative scheme The actantial scheme is this: Greimas’ actantial scheme I have taken up these two concepts, simplifying and universalizing them even more, in my screenwriting course series and in my analyses. Now, would you please take a few more …
Narrative scheme of the plot, actantial scheme of the characters Read more »
Story, by Robert McKee A seminar, then a book In 1984, Robert McKee began teaching storytelling in a seminar called Story at the University of South California. In the decades that followed, he offered his teaching in the form of a 3-day seminar in many cities of the world: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, …
Creating Unforgettable Characters The “script doctor” Linda Seger published in 1990 a book entitled Creating Unforgettable Characters, with this subtitle: “A Practical Guide to Character Development in Films, TV Series, Advertisements, Novels & Short Stories“. Linda Seger has notably worked as a consultant for many films and series (such as McGiver and The Bridge), and has seen thousands of …
Creating Unforgettable Characters, by Linda Seger Read more »
The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell In 1949, the American professor Joseph Campbell published his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, in which he described what he called the “monomyth” of the “Hero’s journey”: all the myths of the world would come from a single archetype, which Campbell claims to be …
Review of The Hero with a Thousand and One Faces, by Joseph Campbell Read more »
Genesis of the Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler Subtitled “Mythic Structure for Writers“, Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey presents itself as a sort of universal recipe for generating storylines. Screenwriter for Hollywood, Christopher Vogler says he was strongly inspired by reading Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Christopher Vogler made a sort of …
In 1928, Soviet humanities researcher Vladimir Propp published an essay, The Morphology of Tale, in which he attempted to determine common narrative structures in a corpus of around a hundred Russian folk tales. The narrative functions He thus determines a list of 31 “functions”, which he asserts that they are the prototype of all tales; …
36 dramatic situations to generate all the possible stories? In 1895, the Frenchman Georges Polti published a book, Les 36 situations dramatiques (The 36 dramatic situations), in which he listed 36 dramatic situations and their variants, which according to him were the prototypes of all human stories, whatever their genre, their era, their culture, their …