The best book I’ve read on this topic is “Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them” by John Yorke.<p>The author is British, so it doesn’t suffer so much from the “Hollywood has all the answers” syndrome of American screenwriting guides. It’s definitely about mainstream stories, but with a bit of a wider perspective.
Word of caution regarding that kind of advice:
It is okay to read those helpers, to try them out and so on, but the surest way to write a totally bland story is to follow these narration formulae to the dot. You should always read them as "if nothing else helps use this"-type of advice.<p>That doesn't mean you could totally write a meaningful impacting story that follows that pattern, it just means if you have the problem of what to write, it is probably misleadingnyou into writing crap.<p>So my advice (as a MA of Arts who studied film and did their own writing) would be to read all of these helpers, extract the narrative advice from them and then write freely without following any simplistic formula that everybody and their dog has seen a million times in thousand low budget television series.<p>Or better: If you want to write good stories, instead of reading these "How to tell a story"-books take your favourite stories and analyze them meticulously: What are the major beats of the story? How does the story interact with the setting? How are figures introduced? What perspective is the story told from (and does that change throughout the story — if yes why)? Which part did impact you the most? Why did they impact you? What was used to create that impact? Which parts appeared to be just ornamental and without narrative function? What would happen if you left them out? And many more questions.<p>Do that with your ten favourite stories, series, films, theatre plays or whatever and you will probably learn more than in all of those books combined. And more important: <i>You</i> will do the thinking and it will give you story lessons that are relevant to material <i>you</i> like.<p>As my prof once said: the crows over Van Goghs field serve no direct function yet they are part of the picture, art does not need to be formulaic and it does not need to explain itself.
Counter-example: the play Antigone by Sophocles.<p>(spoilers)<p>The lead character commits suicide half way through and the second half of the play is what the other characters do.<p>(more spoilers)<p>It all ends in tears.
1. Get yourself to write anything.<p>2. Get yourself to write every day.<p>3. Get yourself to continue writing something you previously started.<p>4. Improve the quality of your writing with specific detail.<p>5. Learn that it's not enough to just have specific detail--it must be significant detail.<p>6. Learn about the architecture of story.<p>7. "Story Structure Architect" by Victoria Lynn Schmidt.<p>I have completed 13 book manuscripts, and had 4 published. My last thriller novel got me an agent. (Took me 2 years for the original draft followed by 4 years of rewrites over 30 drafts.)
I've been reading HN more this past week to avoid rehashing now unavoidable horrors in the news. And here I am, "hearing" this guy telling me that society is having a macrocosmic psychotic break - that the downstairs had been invited up to run things, but not the just the house, the country. Awesome.<p>\wrong topic
Back during the times of the Ancient Greeks, there were Tragedies and Comedies.
What kind of story it is comes from the architecture of the story:<p>Structure of a Tragedy: "They're going to win, they're going to win, they're going to win--they lose."<p>Structure of a Comedy: "They're going to lose, they're going to lose, they're going to lose--they win."<p>As you see, it is the reversal that makes the story pattern.<p>Great example: In 1840, Charles Dickens was writing the serial novel "The Old Curiosity Shop". It was published in weekly serial installments over 88 weeks. Dickens was writing it as it was being published. The story is about a Grandfather and his granddaugter Little Nell. The grandfather owes a huge amount money to a loan shark Quilp. Quilp says pay me by giving me Little Nell.<p>The story is about the flight of the old man and little girl across the London countryside with Quilp in pursuit.<p>As Dickens was writing the story (and published two chapters a week), his friend John Forster said: "You know you're going to have to kill her." Dickens was horrified because he realized he had been writing a Tragedy--which had to end in "they lose".<p>In the famous account, when oceanliners crossed the Atlantic Ocean with copies of the 88th and final installment, a crowd of 100,000+ were waiting on the docks of Boston harbor, all yelling the same thing to the debarking passengers: "Is Little Nell dead?" She was.<p>"Fiction is not interior decorating--it's architecture"--Ernest Hemingway.
See also <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero's_journey</a>