Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Michael Wiese Productions (2011), Paperback, 280 pages
Description
Memo From the Story Department offers a battery of story-generating engines and story-improving tools, and reliable methods tested on hundreds of Hollywood productions. It goes far beyond the standard advice given in most screenwriting manuals. Drawn from sources as varied as vaudeville, classical Greek comedies, and Russian fairy tales, the book outlines a series of practical templates for creating believable characters and emotionally satisfying plots.
User reviews
LibraryThing member ex_ottoyuhr
This is a rather trite, breezy, casual guide to turning Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" (and, for some reason, a first-century-AD Roman comic poet) into good-enough stories. It's a work in the same genre as /Save the Cat!/, in other words -- although I get the strong impression that it produces
Still, if you bridle at the thought of all stories being cut from a single template (and they're not cut from a single template; any story where the hero's the protagonist, like many of Shakespeare's plays, can't be usefully analyzed by the Hero's Journey; nor any story with a reasonably active antagonist), or if you don't find the Hero's Journey template particularly appealing, this is probably not a book that you're going to get much use out of.
(The same goes if you insist on viewing the Third World as actually part of the world, as opposed to a magical kingdom inhabited by fairies. I did not enjoy reading the phrase, "the Special World of Columbia." That line of thought encourages exoticizing of foreign societies, and placing of them under glass; it also encourages destruction and massacre when fighting among them, because they're fairies who will magically rebuild everything you wreck, not human beings who live and die just like you do, and who will be impoverished if you ruin their country with artillery...)
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much better results than /Save the Cat!/ does.Still, if you bridle at the thought of all stories being cut from a single template (and they're not cut from a single template; any story where the hero's the protagonist, like many of Shakespeare's plays, can't be usefully analyzed by the Hero's Journey; nor any story with a reasonably active antagonist), or if you don't find the Hero's Journey template particularly appealing, this is probably not a book that you're going to get much use out of.
(The same goes if you insist on viewing the Third World as actually part of the world, as opposed to a magical kingdom inhabited by fairies. I did not enjoy reading the phrase, "the Special World of Columbia." That line of thought encourages exoticizing of foreign societies, and placing of them under glass; it also encourages destruction and massacre when fighting among them, because they're fairies who will magically rebuild everything you wreck, not human beings who live and die just like you do, and who will be impoverished if you ruin their country with artillery...)
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Language
Original language
English
ISBN
1932907971 / 9781932907971
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