Into the Woods. A five-act journey into story

298 Pages·2014·2.61 MB·English

by  John Yorke

Praise for Into the Woods:
A Five-Act Journey Into Story
“Love storytelling? You need this inspiring book. John Yorke dissects the
structure of stories with a joyous enthusiasm allied to precise, encyclopedic
knowledge. Guaranteed to send you back to your writing desk with newfound
excitement and drive.”
—Chris Chibnall, creator/writer, Broadchurch and Gracepoint
“Outrageously good and by far and away the best book of its kind I’ve ever read.
I recognized so much truth in it. But more than that, I learned a great deal. Time
and again, Yorke articulates things I’ve always felt but have never been able to
describe … This is a love story to story—erudite, witty and full of practical
magic. I struggle to think of the writer who wouldn’t benefit from reading it—
even if they don’t notice because they’re too busy enjoying every page.”
—Neil Cross, creator/writer, Luther and Crossbones
“Part ‘how-to’ manual, part ‘why-to’ celebration, Into the Woods is a wide-
reaching and infectiously passionate exploration of storytelling in all its guises
… exciting and thought-provoking.”
—Emma Frost, screenwriter, The White Queen and Shameless
“John Yorke’s Into the Woods is brilliant. It illuminates and explains.”
—Susan Hill, author of The Woman In Black and the Simon Serrailler crime
novels
“Even for a convinced sceptic, John Yorke’s book, with its massive field of
reference from Aristotle to Glee, and from Shakespeare to Spooks, is a highly
persuasive and hugely enjoyable read. It would be hard to beat for information
and wisdom about how and why stories are told.”
—Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director, the Globe Theatre
‘Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the
frame.’
G. K. Chesterton
Copyright
This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 2015 by The
Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at
the above address.
Copyright © John Yorke, 2013, 2014, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be
invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for
inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-1094-8
Contents
Praise for Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey Into Story
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
ACT I HOME
1. What is a Story?
2. Three-Act Structure
3. Five-Act Structure
4. The Importance of Change
5. How We Tell Stories
ACT WOODLAND, DAY
II
6. Fractals
7. Acts
8. The Inciting Incident
9. Scenes
10. Putting It All Together
ACT
THE FOREST
III
11. Showing and Telling
ACT THE ROAD BACK, NIGHT
IV
12. Character and Characterization
13. Character and Structural Design
14. Character Individuation
15. Dialogue and Characterization
16. Exposition
17. Subtext
ACT V HOME AGAIN, CHANGED
18. Television and the Triumph of Structure
19. Series and Mini-Series Structure
20. Change in Drama Series
21. Home Again
22. Why?
APPENDICES
I. Act Structure of Raiders of the Lost Ark
II. Hamlet – The Structural Form
III. Being John Malkovich – The Structural Form
IV. My Zinc Bed – The Structural Form
V. The Godfather – The Structural Form
VI. First and Last Act Parallels: Some Further Examples
VII. A Lightning Guide to Screenwriting Gurus
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Credits
Index
About Into the Woods
Preface to the paperback edition
There is an awful lot of nonsense written about screenwriting. As soon as you
read, “There has to be an Inciting Incident on page 23. Not page 20, not page 24.
1
Page 23. Put it there,” one should be suspicious. That the command mentions
neither page nor font size should be warning enough, but the sheer
prescriptiveness of the instruction should make even the credulous recoil. This
kind of writing (and teaching in many places) is symptomatic of whole swathes
of an industry that in recent years seems to have grown out of control. It needs to
stop.
2
On March 27, 2013, the screenwriting guru John Truby posted an article
that in many ways encapsulated—certainly if one takes into account the
comments it generated—all that was good and bad about the study of
screenwriting.
With “Why 3 Acts Will Kill Your Writing,” Truby launched a broadside
against the uniformity of teaching, built as most of it was around the “three act
paradigm” first popularized by Syd Field in the 1970s. Truby roundly declared
that—
The so-called 3-act structure is the biggest, most destructive myth ever
foisted on writers. I would like to call it obsolete. But that implies that it
worked in the first place. It didn’t.
Warming to his theme his ire increased—
The 3-act structure exists for one reason and one reason only: a story analyst
declared it into existence. He found that something important seemed to
happen in some successful scripts on page 27 and on page 87. He called
them plot points, said that based on these plot points every screenplay had
three acts, and incredibly, everyone bought it . . . Such has been the sad state
of screenwriting training and the desperation of screenwriters themselves,
that no one noticed that the emperor was in fact naked.
It was a powerful argument. To a new writer trying to make their way in the
industry, or to anyone who has read a handful of the books he described, it was
immensely attractive. Where there was doubt it offered certainty, where there
was intellectual vacuity, it promised clarity.
Truby, then, was on the side of the good guys: those like Russell T. Davies
who are infuriated by the spurious instruction so many receive. Davies, the
creator Queer as Folk and the mastermind behind the rebirth of Doctor Who,
rails—
Wherever I looked, the writing of the script was being reduced to A, B, C,
plots, text and subtext. Three Act Structure and blah, blah, blah. And I’d
think, that’s not what writing is! Writing’s inside your head! It’s thinking!
It’s every hour of the day, every day of your life, a constant storm of
pictures and voices and sometimes, if you’re very lucky, insight.
So what did John Truby recommend to replace all this reductive literature?
A 22 point story structure.
To which the only sane response can be: “What?”
Truby’s post is regularly recycled on social media, and what’s striking about
it is the length, volume, and fury on all sides of the comments it provokes. The
responses range across all sides—from enthusiastic agreement: “I have found
that most people who use three-act structure can’t tell me what an act is”; to
great scepticism: “it’s an extreme luxury to allow oneself the authority to dismiss
formal craft in screenwriting . . . or painting . . . or ballet . . .” There’s displaced
anger too: “A major reason for the three-act structure being adopted as gospel
was not as an aid to writers but as a way of helping the more hopeless brand of
development executive”; and finally a weary resignation with an argument that
never seems to find resolution: “oh sod it . . . just go watch Blue Valentine.”
As a debate, it proves inconclusive. As a snapshot of the state of an industry
it is far more enlightening. What’s its most important lesson? Film and television
are the dominant art form of the twenty-first century, yet there is absolutely no
consensus as to what constitutes that art, what the craft skills required to make it
are, or how they are taught.
Still—the old mantra goes—you can’t teach writing. But is that true? To
answer it let’s look somewhere else for a while—because you can’t teach
painting either, can you?
The story of the African-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is instructive.
Born in 1960 of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, he rose to fame as a graffiti
artist, a talent fermented in the cauldron of the Lower East Side. It was the late
1970s—Manhattan was still accessible without wealth, and in the cross-cultural