On Writing: The Shape of Stories

Is there a universal pattern to stories?

Story is an organic pattern embedded in human consciousness

Ten Shun!

I remember when I first learned , quite late in my life as an author, that all stories tended to conform to the same basic structure, I was astonished. Surely every story was different and unique.

This turned out not to be the case. In fact, the more I studied story structure, the more I realised that it was inescapable - even if you were a dedicated modernist or avant-gardist who wanted your novel resemble a literary Jackson Pollock painting.

How could this be so?

I came to understand that story, with its pattern of beginning-middle-end ( first identified by Aristotle, the first story theorist, in ancient Greece) was inescapable not because of some invisible law of physics, but because the structure of story was ingrained in the human brain.

It reflects the basic way we process information and solve problems.

Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.

I Want To Learn About Writing.

I Join Tim Lott’s Boot Camp.

I Decide It Is Rubbish/Brilliant ( delete as appropriate).

Act One. Act Two. Act Three.

There are many other ways of formulating this three part formula.