Wisdom

Basic Dramatic/Narrative Structure

By cvcarnel

There was this guy, Joseph Campbell and he went around and studied the myths and folklore stories of a whole bunch of different places and cultures, and tried to figure out what they all had in common. What he came up with was a book called, “The Power of Myth”, in which he outlined a basic structure of storytelling. This outline was then used and adapted to fiction film writing by another guy, Christopher Volger, who passed it around Hollywood where it became something of a standard format for screenwriting. The structure is about the Hero’s Journey, and it goes something like this:

  1. At the beginning of a film you introduce a hero, who lives in their normal world of the status quo.
  2. You have an obstacle, or a problem, that the hero needs to address, although at this stage he/she may be reluctant to do so.
  3. The problem won’t go away or resolve itself on it’s own, so something has to be done, and the hero sets out on a journey into a new world to take care of the problem.
  4. The problem is not easily solved. In the new world, there are forces that work against the hero which are the obstacles he must overcome. (This can be inexperience, enemies working against him, the world working against him whatever.)
  5. To overcome the obstacles the hero has to start to change. This change can come as a result of the hero making allies with people, taking the advice of a mentor, learning more about the situation through study…whatever.
  6. The Hero begins to have success, which grows and builds as he gets closer to his goal of solving the central problem or conflict. He then may make a first attempt to solve this central conflict, only to fail miserably, because he hasn’t fully mastered whatever it was he had to learn to win. Vogler calls this death and resurrection, with the idea being that the old way of life has to die, in order for the new way of life to start.
  7. In the climax scene, the Hero faces the problem and in a traditional Hollywood happy ending, he wins.
  8. The end is where he returns to his regular life, or the ordinary world, as a new person and claims his reward, which could be a new respect from friends and family, a girlfriend, a new job or whatever.