How Story Affects Your Life - Plots, Arc's, Heroes, Villains Download this episode.

How Stories Affect Your Life – and Explain Everything

(Show notes…)

Something different this week – thought I’d practice some free-wheeling ad lib instead of reading from a polished script.

What are you working on now?

Learning how great stories are built, as people understand something when they have a story to link it to. They remember the story.

Study of stories and storytellers, and story editors.

*How is that going – any breakthroughs to talk about?

a. Story as a metaphor for life (Robert McKee: “Story”)

b. Story Grid as a tool to learn about how stories are constructed.

i. Arch-plot – Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey
ii. Mini-plot – the endless quest for meaning or human resolution
iii. Anti-plot – the formless structure of the avant-garde and the coincidental (where God and the Atheists co-exist in harmony, Zen)

Three Acts, Four Builds, Five parts

Beginning Hook
Middle Build
Ending Payoff

Beats,
Scenes,
Acts,
Story

Inciting Incident
Complication
Crisis
Climax
Resolution

What does that have to do with anything in the real world?

Arch plot has to do with chosen goals. Most people don’t select their goals to achieve and so have no journey in their lives.

Mini-plot is always open-ended and is what most people share in common – or for genius-types, the search for having that meaning. (Scorpion on TV, as well as Supergirl, Marvel movies, and other bigger-than-life heroes who are working to make sense out of their extreme talents and abilities.)

The Anti-plot is the land of the overwhelmed, by the gods or the increasingly inter-related environment, while also being composed of belief and faith – which exist for everyone, not just the realm of the religious or enlightened. The world of the Avant-garde, and Zen. (It also increasingly describes modern government, sadly.)

Every person seems to have these, and can apply them in their own lives to improve what they have, or kill themselves off slowly.