Stats for nerds
2recommend
4mentions
2people
2020–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Weiland is of the mode that how a character changes over a story is the plot.
She generally separates out the internal state of the protagonist from their external state.
She has 3 arc types: positive, flat, and negative.
Positive arcs are the typical Hero's journey (along with the other 5 archetypes of the title). The protagonist comes back changed in a good way and the story world is better in gestalt. Her concepts of the Truth, the Lie, the Ghost, the Need, and the Want are all intertwined here and are developed in other books and on her website. Positive change arc are 'comedies' in the classical Greek sense.
Flat arcs have the protagonist already in possession of the Truth and mostly have them affecting the story world with that Truth. Sounds boring, but they tend to be the most memorable characters for audiences.
Negative arcs come in 3 varieties that I won't bore you with. Generally, the protagonist rejects the Truth and embraces the Lie. These are 'tragedies' in the classical Greek sense.
Her overall structure is on a 11 beat framework that fits nicely with 3, 4, or 5 act structure (she has a lot to say about that).
I would highly recommend her work for deep dives into narrative and story structure.
John Yorke's Into the Woods is also a great read:
https://www.amazon.com/Into-Woods-Five-Act-Journey-Story/dp/...
He dives more into the 'why' when it comes to the reason we tell stories at all.
Both he and Weiland (among others) have convinced me that 'story' is one of the more powerful things in our world.
- The best book I’ve read on this topic is “Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them” by John Yorke.
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.
- Michael Tucker of the YT channel Lessons From the Screenplay has a very very good list of writing books here:
https://www.lessonsfromthescreenplay.com/reading-list
The list is geared towards film media, but is a great guide on writing in general. I've read and annotated my way through all of them with gusto. I can very much recommend Into the Woods and Anatomy of Story as superb guides that really dig in deep into why we humans fall for the same stories time and time again. They are brass-tacks books and pretty philosophical at the same time, a rare combo.
Michael's list is a great place to continue studying film specifically, but writing in general.
- If you've not read Into the Woods by John Yorke, I'd suggest it highly for this type of enterprise.
https://www.amazon.com/Into-Woods-Five-Act-Journey-Story/dp/...
It's more for screenwriters, but his theses on plot, pacing, characters, and world are good and easy to read. It's a very good book.
The ideas for the pivot are great. Read the book, it's seriously good.
