Letters Remain

Tag: story

  • Learning storytelling from a Sitcom writer

    What is a story? How can you tell better stories? There is a wealth of knowledge and research into story telling, story structure and techniques for enhancing narrative. The classic text is The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but this tome has been is criticised for being dense and academic. Syd Field‘s book Screenplay has influenced…

  • Vonnegut: Narrative Arcs and Why We Love Drama

    For millennia we have told and absorbed fantastic stories with simple yet strong narrative structures, and the structure of these stories is in contrast to the much less erratic “plots” of our own lives. This discrepancy between the dramas present in our stories and our real lives causes many of us to create unnecessary and…

  • The Basic Plots of All Stories

    That there are a finite number of basic plots from which all other stories are formed is accepted as fact by many literary theorists: Georges Polti, for instance, believes that there are thirty-six dramatic situations, while Ronald Tobias believes there to be only twenty. The Internet Public Library has compiled together the most commonly accepted lists…

  • Story Types for Speeches (and TV)

    Each and every time I begin to structure a speech or presentation I consider which ‘story type’ to use (if it is suitable at all). Not being particularly well-versed in these, I recently came across a couple of useful resources. First, Nick Morgan’s description of the five “basic stories that Western culture has to make…

  • The Final Salute: A Touching Story

    They are the troops that nobody wants to see, carrying a message that no military family ever wants to hear. It begins with a knock at the door. Final Salute is a double Pulitzer Prize winning article (writing and photography) from The Rocky Mountain News profiling the work of Major Steve Beck – a US…