Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.

Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally put the art of writing dialogue succinctly: ‘What’s important is not the emotion they’re playing but the emotion they’re trying to conceal.

A character’s want is a superficial conscious desire for the thing they think they need in order to present themselves to the world, a

Great characters are consciously or subconsciously at war with themselves.

... the midpoint of each film is the moment when each protagonist embraces for the first time the quality they will need to become complete and finish their story. It's when they discover a truth about themselves.

Well, technically it’s the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change. Now just think about this. Electrons, they change their energy levels. Molecules? Molecules change their bonds. Elements, they combine and change into compounds. Well, that’s all of life, right? … It’s solution then dissolution, over and over and over. It’s growth, then decay, then transformation.

The conflict between how we wish to be perceived and what we really feel is at the root of all character.

Yes, of course the audience has to relate to your characters, but they don’t need to approve of them.

Theme is a writer’s interpretation of life. As anyone who’s observed the judicial process will tell you, the stronger both sides argue, the more riveting the trial. If a writer is going to make an argument about life, then they really should test it to destruction.

if you disguise exposition with ‘emotional overlay’, it’s rendered undetectable.

The greater the conflict, the less visible the exposition.

Exposition, after all, is telling and drama is showing.

If someone offered us £10 million, we’d all spend it differently.

Three-dimensional characters…do change; their purchase is deeper. They have both a want and a need, and they are not necessarily the same thing.

Delacroix countered the fear of knowledge succinctly: ‘First learn to be a craftsman; it won’t keep you from being a genius.

Paul Schrader says of Taxi Driver, ‘You can make [the audience] empathize with someone they do not feel is worthy of empathy. And then you’re in a very interesting place’ (from Mark Cousins, The Story of Film, More4, 2011).

What are Facebook and other social media but adverts for how we’d like to be seen?

All good exposition is disguised by making it dramatic – by injecting conflict.

A character’s façade, then, is an outer manifestation of an inner conflict.

Our favourite characters are the ones who, at some silent level, embody what we all want for ourselves: the good, the bad and ugly too.

Aaron Sorkin put it succinctly, ‘Somebody’s got to want something, something’s got to be standing in their way of getting it. You do that and you’ll have a scene.’11

Tell me what you want,’ said Anton Chekhov, ‘and I will tell you what manner of man you are.

All great artists – in music, drama, literature, in art itself – have an understanding of the rules whether that knowledge is conscious or not.

…following the conventions of form didn’t inhibit Beethoven, Mozart and Shostakovich. Even if you’re going to break rules (and why shouldn’t you?) you have to have a solid grounding in them first.

This book won’t make you a better writer. No one book will. But as part of something bigger—the steady, solid, consistent thrum of practice; the belief that study and application are important; and perhaps above all the understanding that if a writer’s job is to explore truth, then the least they can do is first seek it out in their craft.

Simply put, five acts are generated by inserting two further act breaks in the second act of the traditional ‘Hollywood’ paradigm. The first and last acts remain identical in both forms.

It’s important to underline that a five-act structure isn’t really different to a three-act structure, merely a detailed refinement of it.