The Rhetoric of Story : learn the 7 foundations of powerful storytelling

1. Course introduction: Hello, This is the writing practice. Welcome to the rhetoric story. For you go away telling yourself. This sounds like a really complicated course I met. Tell you that actually it's very, very simple. My name is Daniel Walter. I might teach up with the rhetoric of story. When we were designing this course. We had a subtitle for it. I'm not subtitle was it's about the stories. Cupid know that I'm calling me stupid or anybody. But as writers, sometimes we all, sometimes we lose sight of what it is we're trying to do. There are so many details involved when you're writing a book and you're trying to craft the perfect sentence or making a film and every shot needs to be exactly correct, or putting on a stage play and the lights have to be amazing in order to create the illusion of a weld on the stage. It's very easy to lose a sight of the fact that all of these things, while very important, are all serving a much more fundamental purpose. And that's telling a story. It's about the story. When the audience come into the federal or the cinema, or the reader picks up a big fat best-selling novel is a story that are deaf or, and it's the story that they keep coming back rule. And what we're really doing as writers is creating and crafting stories. That's our job. The aim of the rhetoric of story posts, and we will come back this term, the rhetoric of story a little later in this introductory lecture. The aim of the course is to give you a really simple, straightforward introduction to the fundamentals of storytelling. This would apply if you're brand new writer. You want to tell compelling stories. You might be more advanced offer, you might have many books in the world and wanted to review some of these issues. See them from a slightly different perspective because Tomasa storytelling, we have to keep coming back to these fundamentals. If you're a creative professional and you want to use storytelling within your industry, you will find that this is also a really good course for you. One of the key things I've learned on my journey to understand storytelling much better when we struggle with storytelling, whether it's myself or the writers I've helped to edit, whether it's writers I read in slush pile. When we struggled with storytelling, it's because we have forgotten or we lack an understanding of the basic fundamentals of how a storytelling works. Even though we live in a world where we're surrounded by stories and there's thousands of years of history as of storytelling, which we're going to take a quick look at, those basic fundamentals have remained unchanged. That rhetoric of storytelling, that what we're looking at on this course. 2. What is a story?: Let me pose you a question. What is a story? It sounds simple, but when you start to think about it, take a moment, think it through. It's actually more complicated than it sounds. I pose this question to a hundreds of different groups of people. Too many of my friends online and in person, I get radically different answers. I have no doubt you can pose your own answer to me. Once we're talking. In order to explore these questions, I want to take a very, very quick journey for the history of storytelling and we're going to go backwards, starting to die in 2016. Right now, where we are in this time and place, we have more storytelling techniques available to us than ever before. Computers, digital technology and the Internet have a revolutionize the ways in which we can tell stories. You can log onto a computer, you can watch YouTube videos, you can read blogs and websites. You can go onto Twitter and Facebook and social networks. Get involved with stories whilst that are happening around you. And this is massively important, yeah, video games, we have virtual reality coming which can massage this into a three-dimensional worlds and literally take us inside virtual realities. This is tremendously exciting. But for all of this, the question to what a story is remains the same. We think further back in the last century, without films in cinema from the steam train station, which blew audiences away when they saw a century ago, to today's multiplex cinema extravaganzas, the Avengers and Captain America install walls. We have tens of thousands of films that have been made. They're all very different. But storytelling techniques that they use really very much the same. The modern novel. You walk into a bookshop today, you see thousands and thousands of different levels. They all seem very differently, tell very different kinds of stories. You have genres like science fiction, the crime novel, the romance novel. The history of the novel goes back, in fact, centuries at the beginning of printing and even further back, you can go back to the Tale of Genji, medieval China and find the first origins of novels. But for this history and all of this diversity, the way that they tell stories, It's fairly much the same as it's always been. If we go back even further, if we look at the history of theater, I show you are familiar with William Shakespeare who developed some of the most compelling stories in our history, who wrote a huge number of stage plays. The storytelling techniques that he used all the way back to ancient Greece and the tragedies that were presented in places like Athens and Sparta. They were designed to help people better understand the human condition by telling stories. And even if you go all the way back to ancient Greece, the storytelling techniques that they were using were much the same as they are. Today. You can go back even further to epic storytelling, like the title of Gilgamesh, which is the oldest written story we have available to us. The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer. You can come through to medieval epochs like payable. We don't know who wrote via Wolf these epic tiles and there's others like them or how the raw data or in India were designed for just one storyteller who would travel from the courts of the rich and the powerful and kings and princes of the day. Until these great stories that help people better understand the culture that they were living in. Some of the most ancient myths that have come down to us, like the myth of feces, founding stories of cities. And they helped the residence of those cities understand the values and the history of the culture that they were living in. But the way that that story was told remains unchanged to how we tell stories today. Some of the very oldest stories of old. If you look at great religious texts like the Bible. The Bible is a collection of stories. Some of them true, some of them mythological story of Adam and Eve or Genesis, the creation of the world that we live in has helped generations of people have a context for that culture and for the history that they are dealing with. The way those stories are told is almost the same as the way they're told. Today, storytelling techniques have evolved and developed. We need to understand those. But the basic rhetoric of storytelling remains almost unchanged. 3. What is rhetoric?: Rhetoric is the art of communication, or more precisely, the art of persuasive communication. Whether it's giving speeches in the written word or in the modern era, in visual imagery as well. Rhetoric is how we persuade people of a particular message. The tongue comes to us from Tesco, Greece, where rhetoric was one of the routes that old, young men, noble born young men within Greek society were expected to be able to practice because it's part of their lives. They would be often standing up in front of others giving speeches and having to act persuasively to exercise power and control within Greek society. We're taught the art of rhetoric by the philosophers of the day whose names have come down to us. The most famous of which is Aristotle, who is a student of the also very famous philosopher Plato. These philosophers defined the basis of western philosophy. Among the teachings that came down to us from them were records of the art of rhetoric as it was practiced in Classical Greece and then in Rome as well, which is how it came into the Western world. Aristotle documented very specific rhetorical structure, which he divided into three parts, which were ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos men roughly experience publics, beaker or military general. A politician. Young man would stand up in front of an audience and he would outline subtly his experiences, but meant he was qualified on the topic. Sorry, for instance, if the city of Athens was considering war with its next door neighbor, the speaker would talk about the previous wars that he fought in. Great act that he had made during those complex. Following up on the ethos. He would then introduce pathos. He would talk about an emotional experience that would incite a similar emotion and the audience. So he would talk possibly about how wall could be both heroic and terrible on how it would allow men to achieve the highest potential, but also demand they live with losses on particularly loss of a loved one. And this would incite similar emotions in the audience. And then finally, he would turn to logos, and He'd introduce the word that we've taken from Legos into modern English script is logic. And he talked about the logical reasons, perhaps, for hymns, lead an army, wool. And these three elements of the argument, of the rhetorical argument that he's presenting to the audio ethos, pathos, and logos. Very powerfully. They do that, but because they mirror how we as humans assess the authority of somebody who's speaking to us. We look primarily at their experience. Then we turn powerfully to emotion and the emotions that they have AUC within us. And if we move by those emotions, it only it doesn't matter what the logic of the situation is. And you see this particularly in American politics today with presidential candidate like Donald Trump. Hopefully you're watching this point where he lost that election because I'm recording it just before. So we will see that people don't make decisions based on logic. They make decisions based primarily on emotions. And those can be very easily invoked by a speaker understands the rhetoric of ethos, pathos, and logos. 4. The rhetoric of story: How does this relate to story? Story is simply another rhetorical structure like ethos, pathos, and logos at certain parts. Stories, however, even more powerful than those ideas that Aristotle brought down to us. This story does something really profoundly powerful and interesting. The rhetoric of story mirrors how we see the world. And it mirrors how our mind and our brain construct a model of the world which then become reality. At the center of that model is us set surrounding us. People. I'm relationships that we have. We have a central goal we're trying to achieve, which is the heart of all personal story in the way of achieving that goal, a certain falses blocks challenges of antagonism that gets in outlay. This continues, and this is where the seven basic foundational elements of the rhetoric of story come from. That is seven ways that are mined. Models the world around us, informs our reality. When we go into a cinema, watch those flickering images on the screen. When we go into a feta on the lights dim down. When we pick up a novel, we are in the pages and we looked at those squiggles on the page, they become story in our imagination. If the storyteller is doing that job properly. If they understand the seven basic principles of the rhetoric of storytelling. When that story becomes a story in our own imagination, it becomes our reality. This makes story incredibly compelling and incredibly persuasive. Because for the time we're in the story, the messages that it carries, the experiences that it's telling us about become our reality. The focus of the rhetoric of storytelling porcelain, is to give you a well-rounded, solid grasp of the seven basic principles of torrential rain storms. 5. This story is over 5000 years old: Hello, welcome back to the rhetoric of story. Thanks very much for joining me for our second lecture. Which is on, I know you already gets another. This is on the idea of chain. First part, the rhetoric of story. If you are a member. First lecture, we talked about the idea of how we can best understand stories. That as writers, as creators, we can tell stories effectively. Sometimes we might storytelling you very complex techniques of storytelling, particularly in the modern age, when making films, producing novels, making video games, they are rather complicated, driven by technology. But we fought about in the first lecture how actually all of these technologies simply allow us to tell stories in much the same way as we always happy. We can say that some of the history of storytelling, going back through playwrights like Shakespeare, all the way through classical Greek beta, and even further back to the roots of oral storytelling, epic poetry. And going right back in the history of stories all the way through the last 5 thousand years. And further, we did this for very specific idea. We were trying to think about what's constant and continuous through this history of storytelling. What that gives us is a rhetoric story. We had to think about the route of persuasion and persuasive communication as defined by Aristotle, which is the idea of rhetoric itself. The ideas of ethos, pathos, and logos that are the basic elements of rhetoric, of speech giving. And we also employment writing today. And how we persuade an audience by imitating the way that we as humans make decisions. And that's what's really pivotal in the idea of record. But it reflects back to it how we think, how our brains work and how our minds operate. This leads us to the idea of the rhetoric of story. But the reason why storytelling is so effective is because when we tell a story in a powerful way, it reflects back to us how we think, how our minds work and how our brains work, and how they make sense the world around them. This is the rhetoric of story. When we employ the seven basic elements of storytelling, we lead the reader or the audience into an imaginative well, which is the world of the story itself. But the way that we do this is really quite simple. Today we're gonna be thinking about the thoughts one, bead basic elements. The first part of the rhetoric of storytelling, which is the idea of training. There was a young man. You know that this young man, you'll recognize them seems I tell you, I know as a young man called John, what's important to know about Jackie's that Jack enjoyed spending his time sitting around in the living room on the sofa, possibly playing Xbox, watching the television, maybe doing all the other kinds of things that lazy young men in jackets with the idea of tidying up the house during what didn't have a job, just stay at home. One day. His mother was simply sick of it. But that's my other boss is living room. He said, Jack, I've had enough of your laziness, typed the cow, a one and a really valuable possession. I want you to take it to the market and sell it. Because it relates to sell the cow for money. We won't have any through and we're going to stop. Jack said, All right then I'll take the cow, whatever. Jack and EPA house he took the cow, he went down the road, but Jack, he rarely was on the move that any of this. When a crazy old man wandering down the street and just had a bag of beans in his hand. But he came down the lane and he said to Jack, I have the most amazing bees in the weld. Nobody else has my bees. That absolutely fantastic. And Jack Fortran self, well, I'm a smart boy. We offered to swap the cow for the beams on the old man said, I don't know. All right then yes. Sorry, I handed over the Bs. The old man went off with a cow, which was the only body possession of Jack and his mother. And Jack had to Hollywood the beans and he thought it was the bees. It needs and he went, Mom, mom, I've got these beings, got a cow. His mom held beings in her hands. She was disgusted and she was terrified because Jack had given away the only valuable possession. And she screamed and she said, Jeff, No, How could you do this as you go through the bees out of the window and she began to cry? I went to began crying. Jack felt terrible because he wasn't being told what to do anymore. In fact, his mother had normal suggestions. We could say that his mother was terrified and upset and that was the cause. I'm Jack went to bed feeling sick in the stomach the next morning, Jack, or what can he saw outside his window of being stalked and enormous, massive giant being stored, curling up from the ground all the way into the sky and reaching up through the clouds. Jack for, I wonder where that goes. I enjoy climbing. I'll just climb off it a little bit. Project client up to the first sprout, coming out to the stoke, any point where I can make it further than this, I'll carry on. And he went up all the way to the clouds. We went through the clouds. From above the clouds Jack could see a mansion. Jack felt were like climbed all the way out the Beanstalk. Just going to go and see what this matching is about. Crept up to the manager. There was enormous even with thus flow is ten times smaller than the shack where Jack and his motherland. It was so huge. In fact, the jack could creep under the door. So he did and Jack crap ton to the dual. And it crept around in the mansions until he heard a booming voice which declared fy dy. I smelled oblige of an Englishman. Be here, live or be dead, all grind his bones to make my bread. And Jack was terrified at his voice and he ran for his life. But on the way, Jack saw a sack of gold coins and grab them. And he ran out of the building and ran back down the Beanstalk and said to his mother, mother, look what I've got. I've got a sack of gold coins, checks. Mother was statically happier because now they have money and they could eat. The next day came. I'm Jack fault. Well, if I got a sack of gold coins last time, I wonder what I'll get from the giants house this time. Jack client up the Beanstalk all the way to the clouds. He ran along for clouds and decrypt under the door of the mansion, and he crept through the mantra until he had once again, five. I smell the blood of an Englishman. This time Jack Brown from his life quickens, found goose, grabbed the deuce and tucked under his arm and he ran again. He ran all the way back now and he gave reduced his mother. And his mother was twice as happy as she even being with a gold coins because now they had a goose. The light eggs, feed them every day. For the next seven days for the hallway, Jack repeated bits and cranked up the base doping crept back down again every time hearing you saying giant fellow. On the seventh day, Jack heard another voice, you heard the voice of a young woman and she was crying. Got credit for the management. And he found the bedroom, two giant daughter. And he said to the giant school, why you call him? Joints? Thought it said because I'm never allowed to leave. The giant matching, has me trapped here. My father does. Jack said, right, we're getting out of him. So Jack took the giants daughter hand in hand, they ran back to the maximum, the radicals, the coyotes and I began to climb down the Beanstalk. But the John had enough of this. It lost his gut sack of gold coins. We'd lost his goose, he lost his heart, his magic light. You've got something else to check. Stolen lives without seven days now, lost his daughter. He was gonna find out who this was laws and where it came from. The Jack stormed out, mismatched. Let me run across the clouds and he began to decline down the Beanstalk. And it was a race between Jack and the Giant. And Jack is climbing down to being stopped carrying joints daughter on his back. And he made it to the bottom and you could see the giant coming. Jack ran back into their hands and he picks up the ACS, used to cut firewood for the whole of his life. And he took the axon and he ran to the Beanstalk, can activate it again until the Beanstalk toppled over, typing the giant with it on the giant crashed into the ground. After all his adventures, Jack was now great. We had the belongings of the giant who had the joints daughter here in the giants go to wed. What Happy. Jack had gone from the lazy boy. Bro man. We've all grown man should have money and a family. And why he was able to take on the world, which is the quality man should always be able to embody. This is why Jack and the Beanstalk is such a powerful story. We've been calling Jack, Jack for about 250 years. There's a whole series of Jack stories and jackets, Usually either in English when we're told what traditional English folk titles, Jack and the Beanstalk is the most famous of them. And it's the one that's come down to this pretty edges. But we think that the story of a young boy who robs from a giant or from an ogre is over. Als and ESL. I'm folklorists, have categorized them under the arm Thompson UFA, categorization of folk and fairy tales. It is number 328, the treasures of the giant. Why is it restores has come down to us for so much time, not just pretty centrally, five millennium of time spoken from mouth-to-mouth, maybe even thousands of years before that with just the first written record of it. If you trace back to it's because of a key change. But the story tells us about, which is the story of a boy becoming a man and across every culture on the planet, across all the things that divide us. And we see as different or archetypical transitions that we might combine archetype changes. When we talk about these changes and stories, they become really tremendously compelling. I'm happened. This is the first part of the rhetoric of storytelling. The idea of change. 6. Story is how we understand change: There's an old saying usually attributed to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus. But no man ever steps in the same river twice. The water that's running down the path of the river is always moving. It's always changing. It's always different water. When we take our bare foot and step into it, where he stepping into something essentially different than we were before. Because Heraclitus isn't just talking about the river and it's not just talking about water. He's told me about life and the until I weld around this. Because everything, everything is continuously changing. From tiny sub-atomic particles zooming around on quantum probabilistic paths to the planet, which is turning and spinning around the sun, which is in turn moving as part of the galaxy. And in fact, nothing is ever the same and people are never the same. Either mind or brain has evolved, is developed to be constantly tracking and trying to make sense of change. We get up in the morning and it's daytime. And as the day progresses, the sun goes flying across the sky and it becomes the nighttime. Brain is trying to make sense of why the light has changed around us. The people that we know ourselves, days pass and weeks and months as we age. Over time, we're changing continuously. We're born into wealth where there's maybe a right-wing government. And then a few years later, there's electorally number. And again, the world has changed around us constantly trying to make sense of all this training. How do we do that? We tell stories. Stories are the way that we have of giving meaning to change and that turns are important naming and how we make sense of the changes that go on around us when we come to creating stories of our own idea or which is arguably the most important elements storytelling, but also the mice overlooked and forgotten because it's so fundamental. How many stories down so far? Thank you. About Jack and the Beanstalk. We saw how the basic change in the story for all the Italians are there. Over 5 thousand years has remained the same. It's about the transition of going from a boy to a man. So many of the really great stories about these basic archetype or life transitions that we make. I may help us not just to understand, but they often define what these transitions all we understand what it is to become a man, being a boy, because of the many stories that we grow up, they tell us how we should do this. Sometimes they give us bad ideas about it, and sometimes very good idea. This is true. Some of them I spend the stories around us today. Let's have a think about a few examples. Pride and Prejudice as a young woman, Elizabeth Bennet, which is part of a family of many daughters. She's faced with the challenge of getting married, which at the time that Jane Austen we talking about with the most important trained in the lives of most women. She's based on number of possible suitors, one of whom enigmatic Mr. Darcy. But she is suffering from problems which gets in the way she has Pride and Prejudice against the things she believed that this D'Arcy, who is rather relieved from trifle cell, doesn't seem to be the kind of charming sense demanded she would like to be with a number of other men posture alive from one after another. She finds that actually they aren't suitable for marriage. Assistance are going through similar experiences. They show us In what ways women perhaps become unsuitable themselves from maybe like one of others versus sensors is far too serious. And taking yourself far too seriously to ever find a good wife. Or maybe it's just too lightly, just going to end up with the wrong man. Or maybe she's already beautiful. Frankly, not very clever. And she ends up with a very rich book, broad adult husband. Whereas Elizabeth Bennet manages to chart a way for the middle, these various balancing acts. And she finds a mis, a Darcy, ultimately the perfect husband and the perfect house as well. These stately manner. That she inherits as becoming miss adults with white. This is an interesting way to look at Pride and Prejudice. There's a huge amount you can say about that. And I've always wanted to be written by giants. Because we're fascinated as humans by change. Because we always Charlton the kinds of changes. Don't want to bounces. We've watch raise the details of the story that's being laid out as with incredible attention. Because Jane Nelson is a very astute social commentator. She can take this really into the details and the nitty-gritty of how these changes happen. One for storytelling, obey surround the changes made from a young single life to a mature adult married Spider-Man. One of my favorite stories, since I was a very young boy myself, I read in the comic books. Wide Spider-Man, fascinating. Is it because you can shoot web so in his hands? Is it because you can climb buildings and it's because of his red and blue costume. No, it's because in a more modern way than Jack in the base. Peter Parker, who becomes Spider-Man after being bitten by a radioactive spider. Then it has to deal with the great powers and responsibilities that come with them. More modern kind of example, an adolescent who struggled to failings of being an outhouse, feelings of not fitting the masculine model of the day that he admits. He said he finds a different kind of masculine take shape and becomes a different kind of men grounds aid, superpower and super-strong. But it's a more modern telling you that transition from young man's responsible adults, king Leon, will be our classic plays of all time by William Shakespeare. Looks at other range of light. How do we opt to having had a whole life or your account powerful and rich and a k and a pinnacle society. What happens when we lose all that? When we try to let all of that dog when IT goal of our relationships with our family, with our daughters, ganglia during the course of the plight, loses everything and he descends into madness and faces get itself accompany all the wildfire. Boom is commenting on the absurdities of King Lear has behavior and the choices that he might, which is all the William Shakespeare's waves, are commenting on this massive changed the light, the decline of life. This is why King there with lost didn't being produced on almost 400 years. It's all the basic elements of storytelling, the basic elements of the rhetoric of story change. The stories tell us about important changes in human life. As humans, we are fascinated by change, continually trying to understand all the millions of kinds of changes going on around at any given time and telling stories about those changes were also a bit terrified of change. With change comes the unknown. We never know what's gonna happen. On the other side, particularly if a major Live trains when you go away to university, when he stopped new job, when you get L in place, possibilities of all the changes that come along with that terrifying experiences. They can be adventurous and challenging, but we always feel a sense of fair or about them as well. Change's scary. Change means letting go of, means letting go of the people that we know our ideas are true. We all job. We, maybe we're going to head off in a brand new direction, like they were emigrating to another country. And everything that we have in this country is gonna be left behind. It's scary. Change is difficult in tau and challenging very often. When we sit down to be entertained by stories. Whilst that fundamentally about change, they also deny change. This brings in an idea that very important in storytelling. This is the idea of equilibrium. That the story will be a bouncer magnitude change in life. But at the end of the story, the situation before the change is stored in this happens all the time in accommodates because we go ahead and we want to think about. An episode of friends, or really almost any American situation accommodate. You can think of what happens in a typical episode of friends. Well, there's six characters gather together and the inner, lovely New York apartments, and they face a problem. Somebody has come up is going to be some kind of change happening in their lives. Maybe Chandler's has quit his job. Rachel was being fired from the coffee shop. We want to know, well, Rossum, Rachel, get-together. But we do eventually find out very end, like seven seasons of brands. But within each individual episode, whatever is built out, whichever problem comes up, it resolved. By the end of the episode. We've finished back with a same-sex characters. They haven't really gotten any older. Nothing bad has happened to them. Nobody has died. This isn't king there were watching. I'm not sure that humor and in fact the comfort of a lot of storytelling, it's about the restitution of equillibrium, particularly in comedy. But you find it in all kinds of popular storytelling because very often people don't want to deal with these big life changes. Just when they're being entertained. When you find an, a story that change gets way instead to restitution of equilibrium because of base change. When we're thinking about change in storytelling. There were tears of change. There are ways that change happen and may affect people in different manners. Big, boisterous adventure stories, action movie, kids, comics that very often about physical change in the outer world. A war story is about the allies versus the Nazis. And the allies defeat the Nazis. And the world is kept as a democracy as it truly should be, depending upon your politics. Obviously, if you were reading in Nazi Germany, that would have a different ending. This is a big physical change in the outer weld. An action movie like Die Hard is about to faint thing. The terrorists who've taken over NACA told me about a couple of other things which we'll come back to. You have social changes we've considering in Pride and Prejudice. And this is an area that stage plays and good literary fiction often deal with. This is about how the relationships between people shift an altar over time. So our daughter growing up in a family home will age and develop new relationships with parents who will have to go from being mother and father to becoming friends in their life. And now she forms new relationships, people in the rest of the world. And these social relationships really compelling there in most kinds of storytelling. Then you get down to the internal level of change. This is often the most difficult to observe. If you look at rarely, rarely. Powerful storytelling usually revolves around what's happening inside this as people and how we change internally over time in ways that we actually find very, very difficult. We often times they offer the storyteller short expressed for us. What these changes are. One of my favorite novelists, Haruki Murakami is a real master of the internal change. In Norwegian Wood, the external changes, the physical changes in the world with very limited, while it's much as we find it as the beginning of the story, ever social changes very limited as well. But the internal trend as we followed the story of a young man who's 21 when we meet getting a battalion ages few years, the internal changes that he goes fruit of experiences of isolation, loneliness, grief, loss. These are ready path and explored and needs. For me Bs, of the most important things. Storytelling can take a century. Now the most difficult things as well. When we stopped, consider the stories that we're writing, this level of internal change, how it relates to social change, physical change. Beyond it. Really important. You can charter epic magnificent tail just by considering those different tiers of change. 7. The small story within the big story: One thing that you see very often, in fact, I, without hearing stories, isn't that always really telling? At least true sort? That's the small story of the character at the center of the drug. The big story going on around. These two stories always interrelate. Only one I mentioned. Detective geometry by Bruce Willis. He's on a mission for most of the movie to stop the terrorists will taken over. And Mac Antonie town. If you're going to look at it, you could say, well, Die Hard is a story about terrorists, but that's not why we find die off cattle. There have been hundreds of trashy straight to video movies made about defeating terrorist. Most of them were Chuck Norris. But the Bruce Willis version is better. And we watch it over and over again in decades after it has made it such a classic cinema. Why is that? Well, it's because around the big outlet story, there's a smaller store. The other story is much simpler. It's about how a man gets lost, loved that I'm reunites with is divorced y, and also later on the rest of his family and the die-hard SQL, because the filmmakers know this, they understand that what's really compelling, even if we are turning up to the cinema to watch gun fights and explosions and the defeat of terrorism by a low heroin gunslinger out. What's actually really powerful and important in that story is the much more in Tylenol tail detected geometry driving his wife back. And this begins in the very first frame and beat or the movie. We understand trauma claim. Character is isolated and cut off from what should be the most important things manualized like which reads family. The Eden, while we're watching all the gun fights and explosions of diehard, we're actually following the details of how a relationship is rebuilt through the metaphor of an action story. This is wonderful because any kind of storytelling, however, grand and boy strokes, however client and small and turn off. We actually have these two stories running side-by-side. The big story, the small story, the big stories generally if the outer world, the small story, the character and how they change had the center of all of this. Again, we come back to the idea of change as the most important part, really of our seven elements of storytelling and the rhetoric store. In the early parts of any story, the opening sentences and paragraphs. We tip the reader up, we prime, the reader, can begin to guess and then understand what the story is about and what change the story is exploring. In Pride and Prejudice. The classic opening sentence, any man with a fortune must be in one to the white. I paraphrase slightly. We're being told. This is a story about marriage. Socially focused story about how we find a good marriage and how young women developed that lights. And these are very important values David, Jane Austen's writing. And so very quickly, the audience, the cadence of the story is going to be for them or not. Also be. On the opening shots of Die Hard. Detective geometry claim on board while he's carrying, gets the kind of gets divorced, rather buys for his children extravagant, overblown. Gets, even though we don't know absolutely. Because the human mind, we all as people are very strict observers of the society around this, we start to pick up on these clues of what we're trying to is gonna be on it's enjoyable. Press to put these pieces together. But once we primed our audience, once we have defined what the meaning of the story is, what change we're thinking about. It's very important storytellers that we stick to that we don't go leaping around for all other kinds of other changes. No matter how complex and apparently ethic and enormous story we're telling, it really will only ever be about one child at any given time. So type Game of Thrones, epic, huge novel series by Georgia, our mountain. Now a tremendously successful television show on HBO. This is enormous, it's been for five now six seasons of television. There are six enormous volumes of the book. There's only really one outer change, being exploding DAG runs. That is, the change of power who has gone to win a particular game. And all of the characters. But we are involved in one way or another with this power struggle. For the opening scenes all the way through chapter after chapter of this story. It's the fact that it's coherent and it has a unity around one form of change that we keep coming back. Whereas if Georgia are mounted, had gone leaping around for different kinds of change in timing switched character. Story would be much, much less compelling to us. So this unity, a changing unity of storytelling, really, really important. Another very important thing to consider. There's also another change, of course, happening within guy, we're friends and that speech. All of the individual characters. We have 6.5 a dozen individual, really powerful archetypical transition. John Snow going from young boy to great arrow, REI stopping of a young girl and she's becoming what we think would be an assassin sensor is becoming for great suffering and travails the ultimate archetype, whole, clean, bigger, light, Queen Elizabeth, write down the red hair. We also recognize these archetypal interchanges, like all relate the outer change, the power struggle. They continue to be unified because the relationship between these changes really strong and powerful. So even if you're talking about more than one kind of change at a time, you want to try and keep this unitary very strong in your storytelling. Because as soon as you lose it, as soon as he strived from the pulp, you primed your reader on the audience right away. Because I come expecting something and you start getting them something else. With this idea of change of tools comes the idea of meaning. Paraffins writers today we're a little bit of fright. Phobic of the idea of not necessarily a bad thing. If we go into our wet trying to convey a very specific and narrow, particularly a political meaning. It can become very deducted very quickly. But what we really turn to story is to look at the great changes of how they affect us on the physical or the social plan, or critically, how we change internally over time to give some kind of meaning to these ideas. So if we go all the way back, story of Jack and the Beanstalk, exploring the idea of change. Exploring how a young man becomes a mature adult. It's society. You could tell this story about a young woman as well just as easily. What we really want is not just a guide to the change. Idea is changed, is mainly beginning of the story. Jack's life is meaningless because of his lane in their basic needs. And at the heart of Jack and the Beanstalk is the idea of adult life has been, has value and that we can enter it and we can become valuable members of society. In storytelling, in the novel. Cinema operating, these meanings might be much more complex. We might question the value of an outline. You might consider ideas as American economy does. Being isolated or alone in mind. This in its own meaning. But we turn to as adults living complex modern life because we need that kind of convenient in our lines. When we talk about change, births are talking fundamentally about our need for meaning. What we turn to the best storytellers. What we're trying to achieve, storytellers are sounds is the exploration of change. I'm finding a found unimportant meaning within that change question, but I'm going to leave you with this lecture. Thinking about your own storytelling. Stories that you're working on in your imagination, that you're writing, development scripts for, that you're working on as movies that you're taking into other areas of life. What is the change at the heart of your story? It might be difficult to describe it in a single sentence to unselect pressure in any way simpler than the story itself. But it's worth considering what's the change at the heart of your story and perhaps, What's the meaning? You're giving your audience? Exploring change. Thank you very much again for joining me for the rhetoric story we've been exploring. First part of that rhetoric number one and the seven elements of basic storytelling. The idea of change. I hope you'll join me again for the next lecture. Thank you very much. 8. Know thyself: Hello, welcome back to the rhetoric of story. Thank you for joining me again for our exploration of the seven basic elements of compelling, powerful, immersive storytelling. Today we're moving on to the second seven elements. We're thinking about the rhetoric of story, which we've defined as a way of structuring stories. It mirrors the way our minds work and the way that we see the world around us to make sense of the world if all the changes that are going on. We tell story about the world when we place ourselves at the center of that story. This is why when we mirror for the structure of story, this way the online works, the stories become very, very compelling because we place ourselves into the center of the story that's being told. If the storyteller, it has done their job, right? We thought in the last lecture about the either change an archetypical human, changing that the heart of every really powerful, long-lasting story. To illustrate this, we looked at the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. She think might be as old as 5 thousand years, lasted all that time because of the change it talks about, which is the archetype will change from boy to man, from young person to mature adult. We looked at how that story illustrates that change and how it friends who every part of the story. Because once we have that archetype or human change in place, everything story does every scene, every decision made by the characters, every exchange, a dialogue in some way or another relates back to that changing gives the story unity. We also thought about the two kinds of story that are in every story, the big story of the small story, the epic outer change. For instance, in Die Hard fighting terrorists, which is balanced, made more powerful by the small in a story, the change of the character, John McLain reclaiming his wife and family. Powerful archetype story. Thoughts. At the heart of the story. Whatever change we're exploring, wherever powerful, complex it is, that change must be happening to somebody. At the center of every story. Is a hero, like holding a protagonist, essential character, a person. Self as a self experiencing everything in the story and it's this self weight go into the reader as the audience of the story. And that's the idea we're gonna be exploring for today's talk. The idea of self on how it sits at the heart of powerful storytelling. Cast your mind back some 2500 years. The Greek city of Thebes, which is one of the great city-states, the classical Greece. Thebes is a terrible position. Thebes is afflicted with a drought. The crops died in the failed because of lack of water and people that feeds stomach. And they do what the people at the Greek city-state would do. They go to that King, the great king, Oedipus. Oedipus, we believe in some way the city of pizzas offended the gods and you as alkane, me to investigate and find out what lies at the heart of this problem. It's your responsibility. I need a percent. Alright, I am the king of beads. I take on this responsibility and I will investigate what we have done to offend. And so to his chambers. Oedipus Cole's, The Blind philosopher Tiresias. Teiresias comes holding a stick and he is completely blind and blindfolded. Star UCSC is on a level beyond sight. I need to possess territories. What have we done to offend the gods and Teiresias response, you don't want to know. Don't ask me this question. Etapas, it leads to places that you are not ready to explore. I need to post explodes impurity and says I demand or ECS that you tell me what you know about this situation. And Teresa says, Okay, this problem is caused by an outsider to the city of thieves and he has offended the gods by murdering his father and sleeping with his mother. Needed purposes. Shocked and terrified by this means. When he was a young man, Oedipus was told that a prophecy existed that he would indeed murdered his father and sleep with his mother to great crimes and to escape the fate of this prophecy. Oedipus fled from the city of corn, where he was right, and he fled along the road to Thebes and his chariot, his path was blocked by another man, accrual, arrogant man. Oedipus fought this man and he killed in the road, was friendly to press Continue to the city of feeds. Neither purse finishes this story and his wife, the queen a fades. Jocasta responds and says, Oedipus, My husband was killed by a strange man on the road to cholera in his chariot. And I think that was you and I think you have murdered my husband, who was married to me before we were wet. Needed percent, that can't be possible. So he summons one final witness to his chambers. I'm not witness is a messenger and an old man who for all his life was carried messages for the city of Thebes down the bidding of its kin. I need to possess. Ok. Now, what do you know this mystery? And the old man says, as a young man, the king of Fame, Stan layers, gave me his firstborn some a baby and told me to take it into the wilderness and kill it because there had been a prophecy that this baby went and GRU, would murder his father layers and sleep with his mother. Jocasta. Upon hearing this story, oedipus finally understood the truth because he, as a young child, had been found in the world and then slept for the worlds and adopted by his family in current. Now Etapas finally understood what is crime. Once he didn't know himself? No. Self. One of the most famous, most important ideas in the whole field of philosophy, most commonly attributed the Greek philosopher Socrates. What does it mean to know yourself and how do you know yourself? This is the question Socrates is putting to his audience for this statement. Know thyself. What does it mean? Oedipus, at the center of the story of Oedipus. Oedipus, the King Oedipus Rex, which is a 2500 year-old play by the playwright Sophocles, presented to Greek audiences and embodied many of the values of their society. At the center of this play. Oedipus is lack of self knowledge. There's a major fact about his own life that Oedipus doesn't know which uses parentage. And in Greek society of parentage was very important. It was seen to determine your fate, who your father wounds, particularly I needed plus doesn't know that his father is Laius. Laius has committed a great sin by throwing his only son out into the world. And has by committing that sin, bro true the prophecy that he will be killed by his son. And this is the core of the Greek tragedy. The thing about the central character that they're not aware of themselves, they are lack of self knowledge. We have a more complicated view of the world. We don't believe that everything is about who our parents are. But with posts with an equally difficult question, how do we know ourselves? Everything that we see comes through our eyes. Everything that we hear comes from areas, everything that we can feel or sense comes to our hands and our sense of touch. Unavoidably. However, we see the world where always at the center of it. So to truly understand weld, we have to know ourself. And that's helped today is a complicated idea. Many people in the world believe in the idea of a soul. You are determined by the unique solid is placed into, possibly by God. Many other people believe in the idea of Karma, just quite similar to the Greek idea of the fates, your actions will bring about a certain direction in your life. So if you do sinful things, you'll come on board, band and you all experienced bad events in your life. In the Western modern world where more driven by psychological and cognitive ideas of stealth, that the circumstances that were placed into beta position of hyper or great poverty, all the people were surrounded by a, have a great impact and shape our behavior and our storytelling tends to reflect this. We're all faced with the task as storytellers answering these hard questions of life, why do people, do they often strange and crazy or perhaps wonderful and beautiful and sometimes deeply self-destructive things that people do. Why do Romeo and Juliet kill themselves over a youthful love affair that most people might simply grow out of. Y. Does Hamlet end up killing everybody in his family? These are the big questions that dramatic stories explore. The recent novel we need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Explosive, powerful question in modern science, we find very hard to face. Why does some parents not love their children? The inverse of that? Why do we love our children? Told what is the power and energy behind this? And these are all the really deep questions the gray storytelling explores and it does it in the most powerful way. By diving inside a human experience. Placing that experience at the center of the story as a self. 9. The formation of desire: Why do people do the things they do? This is the mystery at the heart of every great piece of storytelling. Whenever we sit down to start work on the story, we think about the central character, the hero, the self that we putting at the center of his story. We are asking the same question. Why is this person going to go on this epic quest? They send tunnel, obviously, whatever the style or shape of the story might be. This question is, why is this person going to do any of this? The most common answer that as storytellers we get, but it's a profound palliative. The human psyche is we give the character a great and powerful desire, something they want to achieve in the world and motivation, if you will, think about the character of rocky, rocky bowel bar. Famous late 70s boxing movies starring buying, written by and directed by Sylvester Stallone. Character Rocky. When we meet her, Is a bomb. He's a box of it is washed up. It doesn't fight real fights anymore in froze fights from money. Nobody. Almost entirely at random. The current boxing champion, Apollo Creed, selects Rocky to be his next opponent. Oppose coming towards the end of his career. He doesn't want a toughy, He's a showman. He wants to be able to get in the ring and show off with fightings, not going to impose too much of a challenge. So he picks rocky Bel bar, the Italian Stallion. Now from nowhere, Rocky has a shot, he's a loser, and he has a shot of being the champ as a trainer mic and they set about training. But Rookie just count its heart and soul into the EPA. He doesn't want it enough. He has a new young wife, Adrian, and they're having a baby. During the training process, there's an argument and Adrian almost has a miscarriage. The situation is tense and rocky might be about to lose everything that actually values most in the world. And he's prepared to get into everything's prepared to kick the fight to one side for a fight so that he can have what you really want in life. The woman that do nots in a family. But then as Adrian awakes from a coma, she says to Rocky the now famous words when rocky, when we go into one of the all-time great montages in film history of rocky running upstairs and he's being chased by children for the neighborhoods of the parts of the city where he lives. It's in that moment. Rocky then goes on to almost win the world championship or boxing. Not quite. It gives polo created such run for his money, but a rematch is setup and I get to make a second Rocky movie. But the whole film hangs on the moment that we see explicitly within the story. When Rockies desire for victory is formed. And if we don't see that moment, if it is not properly shaped, we don't really empathize with the character of locking. We immerse ourselves properly within his story. So seeing and understanding how Rockies desire is shaped is really important. There are parts to this design. On one hand you have the boxing match, the rocky is going to go onto almost went, and he's gonna prove to be a true champion in heart in the process. But there's something more fundamental underlying this. Deep down Rocky has a desire to be a winning, it has a desire to fulfill his potential in the weld. And all humans have this desire, however lost or hidden, it might seem however difficult circumstances. We all have this basic desire to achieve something well, to be what we can be, to be the champion. On some level. It's because the rocky story taps into this design that it's so powerful for us and people have been going back to the cinema and television screens to watch Rocky again and again and again for decades now, resilience that we give to the characters in our stories really manifest on two levels. If we go back to the story of Oedipus, Oedipus has a conscious desire to solve the mystery while how Thebes has offended the gods. And therefore what is causing desperate situation that the city finds itself in. This conscious desire plays out in a number of ways. Firstly, Oedipus, someone's Teiresias, he doesn't satisfy his needs. He speaks to his wife jocasta. This also doesn't solve the mystery, so he brings in the messenger, each of these given him a different clue. This eventually builds up to the climax of the story. This is very similar in many ways to Jack and the Beanstalk from our last told. Jack finds out the Beanstalk and there's a number of items that you find is these are all the conscious designers, the character, but they're driven by something more powerful that lies underneath. And that's the unconscious desire bronchi, the unconscious desire that rocky isn't quite aware of is to fulfill his life potential. And this is played out in the conscious desire of winning the match against Apollo Creed. Oedipus, the unconscious desire. It's for the character to know himself. And this is again, one of our basic desires and dries as humanists to understand who we are and see the parts of Ansel that we're blind to. By the way that we see in former ideas of the world. You can place this in a much more action oriented sense to get a better idea of it. And then James Bond movie, for instance, james has the conscious desire to go and defeat the enemy of the British State. And he sent on a mission and it goes to a series of locations is a new clue is revealed in each part of the story. This is how he's conscious desires. But in really powerful James Bond story. For instance, Casino Royale, which I think is the best Bond movie, where given a hint of what James is, unconscious desires. And the unconscious desire is formed by the fact that James isn't open and he's attached his sense of well-being and safety to the British state and therefore, he will go on the missions that most people won't because it feels almost like he's saving his family and the process. And it's this interplay of the conscious and the unconscious design gifts, the self that we place at the center of the story. It's dr is the engine that pushes the story forward. And if we haven't on some level ourselves, whether consciously or unconsciously as writers, put these desires into place by engine will be missing from the story. And it's the most common reason that stories, they lack the drive within the central character that comes from a deep desire, which in turn gives the character willpower from the central desire that we give to a character and it's conscious and unconscious levels comes the real force that drives them for the events of the story, which is the Wilhelm. The playwright David Mamet defines willpower is the single most compelling quality of any character in a novel, film, a stage play, any form of storytelling, the world power that keeps bringing the character back to difficult situations to achieve that desire that drives the story along. Consider again the character James Bond. Imagine a character with less willpower who's sent on a mission to defeat Specter, the secret all powerful criminal organization that manipulates the world. If you or I was sent on this mission, Firstly, we'd be terrified and secondly, we would run away. However great desire we might still run away. Not everybody is born a James Bond heroic, archetypical character and it's changed his willpower. It's the fact that if there is a car chase or 150 miles an hour, James, or drive a car at 160 to win the chase. If he's finds himself fighting and guy who's a foot and a half toilet and him, James would just fight harder. And this is all an aspect of the unique willpower that drives the character along, but it doesn't have to be in a purely action-oriented heroic sense. We look again at Oedipus. Oedipus doesn't face physical challenges during the course of the plate. Earlier in his life, he has killed a man who turns out to be his father. Oedipus, challenge is psychological because he knows very early on in the play this is about him. It would be much easier not to face the situation that he finds himself in the end of the play. Oedipus is aligned it. In fact, he's willpower has driven him to a state of self destruction. Although the model of the Greek tragedy that self destruction later on in the later Etapas plays leads to enlightenment and his wisdom as blind Sam. Again, it's the willpower the adipose possesses, which allows him to pursue the place. So we're always dealing with current since you have a level of willpower beyond the normal. And that's one of the elements that makes the storytelling so profound for us. Whether it's watching James Bond chase an adventure for circumstances that we wouldn't be able to deal with. Whether it's watching King Oedipus pursue the clues to tragedy. And this can also be brought into much more modern, realistic situations. David Mamet, who made a statement about willpower. One of his great state plays turn into a screenplay. Glengarry, Glen Ross is really a story all about the nature of human world and the power that comes from it were placed into a sales team. We don't quite know what they're selling real estate and other things attached to it. And this is a failing sales team. It's a bunch of guys, late thirties, middle aged were families. They're trying to living and they're selling to do that. And they all want the best leads to Glengarry, Glen Ross leads because the salesman with the best leads gets the most sales. Each of these characters we have the oldest man played by Jack Lemmon was once a great salesman. He once had great willpower. Now is on the final leg. He's trying to make money based daughters operation, the yellow and it needs to pay for our operation. They can't make the sounds is really as broken by the situation is in their younger men in the sales team, we simply don't have the power to hack it. One of the Goldman Brothers, Alec Baldwin, turns up as a top salesman from out of town and he gives them a speech. And the speech is all about imposing K as well over those men in sales team. The lead salesman and team play by Al Pacino. Goats were a long sequence of scenes where he convinces some Pulse app to buy this worthless piece of land. And the drama all times in our observation of how much more powerful opportunities Willis than the man he's negotiating with. Wonderful drama, all driven by these different ideas and models of what it is to be strong-willed and to have willpower and how much they sits. At the heart of all the stories that we tell. 10. What is the Self becoming?: When we find ourselves really in love with a story, when we've drawn into the weld that story creates and it becomes for the time that we're reading that book or watching that film, the reality that we've seen to be inhabiting. It's because more often than not, the self at the center of that story has convinced us of its reality. And we treat that self as a real person. In fact, for the time that we're engaged with the story, we muscle cells inside that cell from we become that person and share all of their experiences for the events, the story, as it unfolds. For that to happen. There is small dog behind me. I don't know where it's come from. For that to happen. We need to understand the desire, conscious and unconscious that is driving the character alone. We'd need to see the formation of that desire ideally, and we still have some capture Rocky Balboa. We see the moment when he's designed to win the championship and become the great boxing champion is formed. We need to feel the strength of the well driving that character along. Whether it's in a heroic adventure story like James Bond, much more down to earth narrative like Glengarry, Glen Ross. The thing that's really hooking us At the heart of this self, at the center of the story is what? The self is becoming. Really, really important in storytelling because humans are social creatures. One of the things that our brain is continually modelling is how we're changing. Picking up on this first element to the rhetoric of the story and what it is that we are becoming and what the people around us are becoming. So there's a whole parts of our mind which is really dedicated to watching this happening in the world around us. And so we're continually watching it in the stories that we go to the cinema to see that we pick up books to read. The classic novel, fantasy fan by William might be spattering. We are introduced to the young woman Becky sharp, the self at the center of the story. Becky is an open. We could speculate that deep desire is to overcome a sense of isolation as an orphan child, which pulls up a whole ninth. And this manifests as her conscious desire initially to find a rich husband which will give the place in society that she wishes to claim. This unconscious and conscious desire give her a strong willpower to go through the many challenges which is going to face in achieving this willpower that leads her in many ways to do the wrong thing. Fancy Ferris subtitled a novel without a hero. And Nike shop is not a heroic character in the sense of James Bond or Rocky Balboa. She's a flawed real human being. The things that Becky is trying to achieve, the things that many of us who are trying to retrieve climb in society. And through that we think really achieve happiness. We as the readers followed story of Bantu fair. For all the major transitions of Becky shops life. Initially she becomes a young debutante, looking for the right husband within society of the day. She moves on, she married, and she becomes a mother. She's a rather cold, unfriendly monitor, has some xi then clients hire in society at the time. She joins the aristocracy, and then she falls from that position. And C ends up among gamblers and card shops. And we follow these transitions because we're fascinated, again as humans by how we all make these changes in life and how we become one kind of person after another. Was written over 2 thousand years later than the Oedipus, the King. It's the same questing quality at the heart of bouncy fair, that drives his fruit. Because just as Oedipus didn't know himself when he was ignorant of his parentage. At the heart of the self and Vanity Fair beckon sharpies, also a form of self ignorance. Becky doesn't really understand the older films she wants. Won't give a real desire which is overcome a basic loneliness. As an orphan, I'm not lack of self knowledge makes Becky sharp like a two plus a tragic figure at the heart of the story and continues to file an achieving a real desire as well as tracing these conscious desires that are actually taken very far away from who she would really like to be. When stories file. Let me walk out at the cinema Auditorium when we close the novel and never pick it up at that page again. It's almost always because the self at the center of the story isn't strong enough to carry the story that we're building around them. Find ourselves when we're working on a story, continually returning to the self and the questions that we need to ask of it in order to make it strong and compelling character at the heart of the story, what is the desire? But the conscious and unconscious desires driving his character along. How does their willpower manifests? What are the events in the story that they have to overcome in order for us to see for the entire their willpower. This question at the heart of many of the great characters in fiction and storytelling. What is it that this character doesn't know about themselves? What is it that they're requesting for in order to understand themselves better? These can help us to build really powerful self at the heart of the story. But this is only one way of understanding this idea is self. It's important to understand that this is how we can model the self in many stories. But what we're really doing is just arriving one answer to these big questions of life. It can help us answer why Rocky Balboa wants to become the World Boxing Champion. It can help us answer why Oedipus, the King, trying to solve the mystery of why the goats had been offended. It can help us understand why Becky shop. He's looking for the right marriage in the world and decline in society. But ultimately you as a writer, are facing these rarely hard questions of life. Why are we the way that we will need to find your own models and answers to those questions. 11. Demeter & Persephone: Hello, thank you for joining me for this bird call talk in the rhetoric story course. In this talk, we're going to be looking at the idea of the other, which is the next major elements in the rhetoric of story. Our framework for telling immersive, compelling, powerful stories. In the previous talks, we've introduced the idea of the rhetoric of story this way. Composing information, it words on a page, flickering images on a cinema screen, that creates this powerful effect of story. Before about the idea of change. The central archetype will change big external out in the world or internal, the central character that drives the story. Ahead. We've thought about the idea itself, the core of the story, there is a self central character or protagonist, a hero. Desires of this character. Conscious and unconscious desires are driving the story along and not the willpower of the characters providing the engine for the story. Today, we want to look at the third of these elements. The other, what do I mean by the other in this context when talking about, of course, the other people that surround the cell. The way that we make sense of the world around us. We tell a story about him. At the heart of that story, we put ourselves, we looked at the major changes happening around us. And then we sketch in all the people is surround us. And our brain is absolutely fascinated by other people. And it's this element storytelling that we're gonna be considering today. Young Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Clarice Starling called to the office. First superior, Jack call fringes, given a mission which is told to go and interview the psychologist and serial killer, hannibal Lecter. She goes and psychiatric institute, or Hannibal Lecter is kept. She's taken down into the dank deep basement. Lips just to interview lecture for a psychological examination. Unless she's doing this lecture avails inflammation. An ongoing case that the FBI holds a one, Buffalo Bill serial killer so-named because he skins as victims. Clarice takes the clue that she's given, she returns to Jack Crawford and grow for the extensor mentioned it says Paris, you have to continue to interview Hannibal Lecter to get information from them about this case. It's not just Buffalo Bill is killing people. He's adopted the daughter of a powerful United States senator. Senator In Heaven and **** to get a daughter back. The FBI's resources now dedicated to a hunting down serial killer. Buffalo Bill Clarice returns to Hannibal lecture in the series of meetings. She gets vital information from him about the case that a serial killer, but she has to give personal information about herself to achieve this stakes of growing. Clarice gathers more clues. She has a friend that the academy who backs up a decisions that she does this. She meets researchers Museum who identify the chrysalis mock. That becomes a pivotal turning point of the movie. Clarice Starling. Let's track down the first victim of the crime. Young woman who would like all of the victims is the largest size woman, has to go into the bedroom. This young woman, not much younger than six years. And look at all of the personal items that belongs to another human being with a sense of being briefly killed another. At this point, Clarissa is motivation. A deep desire becomes to catch this killer, killing other women. In the town. The first victim Clarice beliefs you might find the killer and she goes house to house, searching for possible mothers. Jack Kroll for tails or not to do this, he says, Clarice, we have the address, lecture has given us the vital important information. In fact, Clarissa's being pursuing the right course information. The FBI agents are taken to the wrong pounce, and now they've blown up and now Clarice is on her own. There's nobody to help her in this hunt. She ends up at the house of one James Gunn, who is in fact Buffalo Bill Clarice, sees a single mole that confirms his identity and knowing is about to be captured, Buffalo Bill flees into the basement where he's committed the mothers, the dark. Deep hole where he's keeping. The daughter of the senator. Clarice has no choice but to follow him. But she pursues Buffalo Bill into underworld. The leaf is house. With only a gun and a torch. She tracks in for the darkness and she manages to locate the centers daughter who is panicked and petrified and screaming doesn't mean they have because she knows if Clarice loses this backwards, nobody else is going to come and find me a one on one Clarice hunts Buffalo Bill jane gone through the basement and finally shoots them twice in the chest and in the head. And in so doing, blows open the window that brings light streaming into the basement. Clarice Starling is victorious in her quest. She's able to save the Senator's daughter and bring justice for the other women who have been killed. This the story of signs lamps. Initially a novel by Thomas Harris, fantastic honor, the all-time great froze film directed by Jonathan Demi. Hugely popular storage. There have been a number of SQL novels. It's been television series. Hannibal made quite recently. Question I would put to you is, why is this film so successful? Why is this story? So while it's set in our modern world, signs of glands is really not a modern story. You can think of it as a retelling at the ancient Greek method, Persephony and Hades diameter, who is the mother of the sheets, the tildes responsible for all the groves in the world has a beautiful daughter that's like the Senator and science lands. And diameter. Story is called the 77. He is young and beautiful. She plays in the fields. From jealousy. The diameter has such a beautiful daughter, the dark god of the underworld. Beyond dwell much like Buffalo Bills, underworld. Hades comes into the above. Well, he kidnaps, is happening and he takes up into the underworld. This sparks a chain of events. The diameter who goes crazy and she brings winter upon the world, has to be brought back to life to find a daughter by a number of the other Greek gods. These classic archetypes reoccur throughout the history of storytelling. In the fairy tale. Bluebeard. Bluebeard is a rich old man and he comes home to his town. He's gotten from for many, many years. And one of his fortune, he is able to die for himself, a young wife, and he takes the young wife back. His great mansion. On the young life first is excited to have a rich husband, but then she finds, in the basement of the matcher, finds a dead bodies of all the other young wives, much like the dead bodies of all the victims of Buffalo Bill. The story of bluebird ends with the arrival of Piero's to rescue the muscle like Clarice Starling and the story blue bed. It's usually the brothers of young women who had been adopted. These archetypes continue. What makes these stories so powerful, remote chance burden through time. The characters who are writing the story, the relationships between those characters and the archetypical qualities of those relationships. And it's really this that we're exploring when we think about the idea or the other. In storytelling. 12. The web of relationships: As humans, we are fascinated. In fact, I'd go surprise to say that we are absolutely obsessed with other people constantly absorbing how others are behaving, what they might think, particularly what they might be thinking about. When we think about other people, when we think about characters in storytelling, what we're really thinking about relationships. There's a very large part of our mind about brain, which is dedicated to charting and monitoring and developing relationships with other people. This is really, really important for us to do as humans, we are social creatures. A great deal of our advantages as a species. It's our ability to work together in groups, to do complex things. Whether that be a try hunting, whether it be a corporation full of people making computers today, throughout our history and throughout our evolution as a species, this ability to work socially as being paramount for us. This is why in storytelling, when we develop relationships between characters, these are fascinating to the audience. And the audience will pick up tiny snippets of information about relationships and draw conclusions from them. Think about any soap opera that you've ever seen in the UK. Most famous so-called quizzes ascendance. It's also Coronation Street or it might be in the US. Dallas. Other soap operas which are ongoing today. The soap opera for its huge popularity and people come back week after week, sometimes two or three times a week to watch the latest episode of favorite soap opera. The soap opera is entirely driven by relationships. It's about who is marrying, who, who is betraying, who, who's allied with who, who's taking advantage of the circumstances. Quantity of dots it about the soap opera. Because this is how we think about the relationships around us historically, we got it about people so obsessed with the relationships that develop in soap operas that there's an entire business of magazines, a speculates on these unreal fictional relationships and how they're going to develop in future episodes of the soap opera. What we have been at the core of almost any compelling story is a network of relationships. The all revolve around a self at the center of the story of soap opera. That self moods between a handful of characters and other forms of storytelling fill the novel. It tends to be just one self at the center of the story. But in either case, around, in each step of the story is fooling around. There's a network of relationships that spread out from that central self. While the specifics of the relationship, unique relationships, and the archetypes that they form really fall into just a few categories. However many stories you look at, whatever kinds they are. However many characters are involved. One or two at the center of the story to hundreds, and the costs are very huge, epic. You'll find that the same archetypal relationships repeats the self at the center of the story around them. You nearly always have family relationships, mother, father, siblings. We would hope that these relationships are supportive, but as we'll find with all of the archetype of relationships, in fact, they very often have a dark side as well. So if siblings, these are the people who we know best in world, we've grown up with them and they know us. But while there is a bond of familial support, There's also continually with siblings. The issue of competition, jealousy, I'm sure you can have brothers and sisters yourself. You'll have encountered at least aspects of this and the novel East of England, for instance, the story tons on the competition between two brothers. Story, which goes all the way back to the biblical story of Cain and Abel, where we see the archetype or relationship between brothers transmitted from thousands of years of storytelling. The mental is another of the archetypical forms of relationship that crops up again and again in storytelling. The mentor is there to guide and support the development of the character in size of the lens. The mentor is Jack Koffi, is older, is more. Experience and Clarice Starling. But the mentor has a dark side as well. The mental has their own agenda. The mentor was once the young hero. As in science to the Latins, the mental is on some level, manipulating the hero in the actions that they take. And that's equally true of Obi-Wan Kenobi installs or Dumbledore, the wonderful Dumbledore, but he is slightly manipulating young Harry Potter. Along the way. These archetypes relationships always have these twin aspect, supporting friendly roll, slightly manipulative, aggressive role that goes with it as well. Antagonist, character archetype that we'll be looking a lot more at later in the rhetoric of story towards the antagonists, stands against the hero. And it's in the way of everything that the arrow, the self at the center of the story wants to achieve. However they manifest, the antagonist is always one of the most central and important characters in any given story. In science lands. The antagonist is Buffalo Bill. Throughout the story, as in most mysteries, Clarice is tracking Buffalo Bill, trying to defeat his crimes. And at the end of the story is Buffalo Bill who Clarice it to confront and kill in the dark underworld. But he just has. This antagonist role is incredibly important across all forms of storytelling. Very often the antagonist is very, very close to the hero, the protagonist at the center of the story. In the recent HBO television series spectacle soul. Features weren't quite often happens in very interesting, complex storytelling. There's a hidden antagonist throughout the first season of Better Call Saul, which traces the career of a charismatic lawyer. We believe that the antagonist is a senior partner in the law firm that actually at the end of the first season, spoiler alert, at the end of the third season that's revealed at the antagonist is actually the central characters brother. And it's the closeness of the relationship between the characters that makes the brothers such a powerful antagonist. We think a little bit more about signs of lands are available. Another one of the archetypical relationships form this network of characters around ourself, octagonal, centrally store. That's the trick, or the shadow or the shape shifter character. They come in a variety of forms. The signs, lamps, the tricks is Hannibal Lecter. It's very, very dark example of a checks the character. The trickster is here to continually push forward and drive the self at the center of the story. Hannibal Lecter does a number of very scary things to Clarice across the arc of science or the land. He eventually escapes from prison and becomes possibly a very great threat. In Clarice, Starling forces Clarice, it reveal personal information about herself and in so doing, forces for us to confront aspects of her own personality. She's an orphan, that she's going to pull background issues that she's being hiding in her life. She forces had to confront these issues, which is what ultimately quite apart from the clues that she's given, this driving forward, Hannibal Lecter provides the character of peristaltic. In this way, he's a classic example of the trickster. Out the shape shift or enough the shadow, who drives a central character forward. It's all of these archetypal relationships that repeats except for the story after story. This is what really comes through time in the history of storytelling. To die, we have science labs. And it evolves from the fairy tale blueberry, 3400 years old, which has in turn evolved from the ancient Greek myth. Diameter and Persephony. And Hastings, which is around 2 thousand years old. What really comes down through time, the archetypal relationships between the cell and formed with the others. In the world. 13. Archetypal relationships: Around the self. Then at the heart of the story, form a network of relationships which represent the other people that character is engaged with. These relationships are archetypical. They repeat again and again and again in stories free time, and they're tremendously compelling and powerful for audiences. But why, why is this? Think for a second about the sea. Imagine you're at the beach. You're watching waves rolling. So let's see. And any beach you might go to on the entire planet, or for that matter, if you haven't made it to another planet with oceans, would have waves coming into the sea. Waves factor of a number of forces operating. The sea. Gravity, the influence of the moon coming past, which creates the types, the shore coming in from the deep sea and coming into the other shallow waters until it comes up onto the beach. Wherever you get these forces and large body of water or any other liquid, you will have waves. In that way. Wave is an archetype. It's created by forces beyond the object that you're looking at. The archetype repeats again and again and again. Whether it's at sea, whether it's in a lake, small waves lapping at the shore. Similarly, people behave in archetypical whites. One of the best ways to understand this in humans and in the characters that we're telling stories is through the idea of royal court. Throughout the history of storytelling. Storytellers being depicting the entries and politics of kings and queens, imprints days and nights and members of the clergy and whoever else you might find in a royal court. And these royal court archetypes repeat again and again for the history of storytelling. And it's not simply because it's storytellers a copying each other. It's much more fundamentally because humans are placed under the pressures of being empowered. They tend to behave in certain archetypical ways. The king, whether this is a king depicted in ancient Hindu mix, like the Mahabharata. Whether they say is a king in European fairy tales, whether this is a king in modern storytelling today. Whether they seize a fantasy king and a fantasy world like Game of Thrones. The King tends to behave in certain ways. The king has to keep power. The king, it is, authority is challenged, might have to lash out and kill people. Became has to create a certain amount of filter around himself. Became always has to sit at the front of the room in a fraud. These archetypes are so powerful. They run through all the characters in the world court. So the queen is the person married to the king, is very often center intrigued because the cane can't be seen be exercising His power in certain ways. So the queen will do that instead, the young princes will be continually competing with each other for power. The clergy, the bishops and priests rolled into the royal court as well. We'll always be using their power to undermine the material power of the kings, because that's very much what the spiritual power of God allows him to do. These archetypes so powerful that they repeat, not just in rural courts, but we use the model, the archetype of model of the royal court. Just talk about all kinds of other things. If you look at pantheon of gods, we have days in almost every culture in history. They run through from the Hindu gods, nasa and others. They run into the Greek gods that we've discussed already in this talk. Even when they're not specifically a royal court. These archetypes, women stories where the Commedia dell Arte, it was a form of fear to specific, to the period of Renaissance Italy was evolved in the city-states of that period. Featured very, very powerful archetypal characters. Each character wore a mask that represented their archetypal quantities and will be performed by the actors almost as a mind with very strong physical performance, which gave you each of the archetypes. The Commedia dell Arte was a very large influence on Shakespeare. Shakespeare's characters repeat these archetypical quality. It continually comes back to royal courts being King Lear, Macbeth, hamlet, the histories. Shakespeare's plays, profoundly caught up with these archetypal storytelling forms. And he was one of the important ideas that brought these archetypes audience, the mountain wealth, and even beyond. Storytelling. A set of playing cards or Tarot deck had the same archetypical symbols, king, queen, princes. They also delve deep into archetypes of the rest of society, as well as chessboard has the same archetype elements. These archetypes human behavior. Hugely interesting, hugely compelling for us to observe, and tremendously important in realigns. Because we as humans end up replicating many kinds of archetypical behavior. If you go into a big business, you will find that the CEO that business behaves much like a king and around him behave like courtiers. And this behavior repeats in all kinds of areas of human life. This archetype or shaping that makes stories which employ these archetypes really interesting to us because we were learning all the time these intricate social relationships that were psychologically evolved to be fascinated by how these relationships are evolving and how the others around us of behavior. 14. The sundered Self: Why do the same archetype or relationships repeat themselves throughout human society? Why is it that repeat themselves in stories? Why are they useful for us as storytellers that we can draw upon these archetypes anytime to create powerful, immersive storytelling for our audiences. Around the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, a lot of work was done about human psychology. Number of very important, biggest in the development of psychology came through at that time. One of them, Sigmund Freud, developed some ideas which has since then become simply part of our common day life. Ideas of the ED. The unconscious drives the push humans along the ego and the super-ego. The superego is the part of our personality which seems like a highest sell. The part that we're constantly striving to achieve. And the ego is intermediating. Between these parts. The ego, the super-ego, form parts of our mind, separate personalities in some ways. The psychologists call young. This either speculated that there are archetype or elements within argument cell. The aura divided into a whole range of different personalities that sit within the human psyche that act at different times. Today, on neuroscience reflects and reinforces many of these same ideas because we have processes within, online, within our brain activate in different circumstances. We have processes a based around fear and survival. We have brain processes are based around socializing and interacting with other people. Processes that allow us to be more creative and innovative as well. And these manifests as different forms or personality in a very real sense. Within each of us. Whole host of different people. When these different personality types are in balance, they work together fluidly. We barely noticed them unless replaced into extreme or very stressful circumstances. They simply operate together and we operate as a phone complete self-help lay in the world when the unbeknownst, in nearly all of us, there are some disk balances within our psyche. They come into conflict. These internal psychological clashes, conflicts drive much of our behavior and the heart, but much of the most powerful storytelling. Thank you again. About the story of sons of the lens. The earlier versions of this diameter, Stephanie and Hades, story of blue bed. And we have these archetypical clashes within storytelling. We have big young, innocent, 70 science labs, centers daughter, who is dragged down into the underworld by a monstrous part of the human psyche. Heydays and the original story Buffalo Bill jane gum. In scientific labs, blue beard. What we're watching or reading in the story. The progress of re, balancing these parts of our personality which are clashed. In science to lands. We have a heroic character a little bit. We have a heroic character. Comes into the story and defeat the dark parts of the personality that has taken the innocent and drag them down into the underground. When we tell a story, scientific labs, we write the progress. So Clarice Starling, who is the hero at the center of the story. When we show going in to the bedroom, young woman who was first killed. When we see the human at the heart disorders, we see the innocent, a monster, Buffalo Bill. And then we follow her progress hunting the monster, going down into the basement, going down as the underworld. Our emotions are triggered by this and I triggered tremendously powerful even telling you this now I can feel my heart coming up. They triggered because we all experience this conflict. We all know what it's like for the innocent, the creative, the hopeful part of ourselves to be overwhelmed. File jock is signed in edema and off fears. We all know what it's like to long perhaps to create, to write stories, to make art, but to fear that we can't do this well will prevent us. And instead, to go and do that job that we hate to put up with the relationships that are no longer supportive in our life. This in day-to-day life. The dark side about personality, wedding. I, when we watch chlorine stylings, the hero overcoming that dark side, we say he owns struggle within ourselves. And the hero within our cell is triggered. Every time we go to the cinema, every time we pick up a novel about this archetype or relationship, isn't being dragged down into the dark by the monster and the hair obese in them, and this is the archetypical relationship. Next part of so many powerful stories, so many, I'm not even going to name them for you. You can do that for yourself. It triggers this deep emotional empathy within us. We will go to this story again and again. And again. It's not formulaic. It's not because we're lazy and just go into any store would be given. Because because we need this, you need to say this repeatedly throughout online. So we'll go back to the stories that show us how evil triumphs over good in the form of a heroic character. Because this is what sits at the center of our own personality or in cycling. And the ways the outbreak. This is what makes the relationship between self and other, how we treat other and stories. Tremendously powerful part of rhetoric. That story. Because it's not just the details of every day Monday line, not just repeating characters as they've been done these stories before when we draw on a typo carrot folds. There are many of these, but the relationship between light and dark and our personality is arguably the most powerful of them. When we draw on these archetypal forms that reflects in the world as they are reflected within our personality. Which happened into some of the most powerful emotional response rates that we will ever be able to sync with at all. 15. Achilles and Hector: Hello, welcome back to the rhetoric of story. Today we are going to be discussing the fourth part in our structure for creating compelling, immersive, powerful stories. And I will get to telling you what that fourth part is. Ingest a moment. First of all, I would like to quickly look back at what we have discussed so far. The rhetoric of story. He's a way of structuring information, pictures, words, whatever it may be, that creates what we might call the illusion of a reality for our audience. And when we do this properly, this rhetorical structure is so powerful that it sucks audiences into films, Extensions, chose, plays, books, whatever it might be. An odd job as a storyteller is to nail this rhetorical structure, part one. The rhetoric of story was change. All stories have at their heart and major change, usually an archetypical human change. The change from Boy, two-man girl to woman, child to adult. The change of the foal of a nation, the change of the rise of a new political party. Whatever the change is, these archetypal changes, power. Our stories at the heart of the stories is a self, a central character, a hero, a protagonist. The self experiences that change everything we know about the story comes through the senses of the self. At the center of it. It is their story and the self foams around powerful central desire. And the formation of this desire kicks off the story and the willpower the character, drives them through the story and provides the engine and the power for the narrative that we're trying to convey to the audience around the self. Part three of the rhetoric of the story around the self or the other, the other characters in the story. The relationships between the self and the other. And also the way that we as human beings have archetype or processes within our mind that we project down onto these other cells around this an element that we will be talking a bit more about today. But as inevitably happens, once you have the change, the archetypal change ongoing Once you have to sell for the centroid at once you have the other is arrayed around the self. What arises conflict? It's an unfortunate in fact of life, but a fortunate fact for storytellers that conflict rages all around us. Rages in the world at rages in our societies. It rages in our families. It reagent rages inside ourselves as well. This is the fourth part of the rhetoric of story, the conflicts that arise inevitably. In our lines. Achilles, the great Greek warrior, looks down on the body of his friend and lover, patrick lease. For many years they'd been fighting the war between the kings of the Greek islands and the city-state of Troy. The war began when the Greek kings grade between them that the beauty of Greece, Helen would be married to the Greek king Menelaus. Refusing they steal the young prince Paris stole Helen away and took a back to the city of Troy. Men Elias and his brother Agamemnon, the great king of Greece, declared war upon the city-state of Troy as one of the heroes and great fighters. Agrees Achilles joined the war, but really, his heart was never in it. And he was offended by the King Agamemnon who denied him his property, a slave who was taken in battle. And since then, Achilles has been soaking in his tent and refusing to join the battle. And slowly but surely the Greek kings had been losing against the mighty armies of Troy. Another PATRIC, please, unable to watch the defeat of the Greek armies, disobeyed Achilles order not to enter the battle. He stole Achilles armor. Leptin to a chariot. And joined the conflict. The great Trojan hero Hector, son of the king Priam, brother the prince Paris. Seeing Achilles finally taking the field, also left into his chariots. And the two men fought. One another. Hexose much more easily than he'd been expecting to. Knocked the helmet from Achilles and saw that it was in fact PATRIC please wearing Achilles armor. The Trojan soldiers were so offended by this slight theory ulna, that they butchered Patrick lease on the field. Now as Achilles looks, his lover, he sees him covered in blood, pierced by hundreds of wounds. And Achilles, who in truth, never had any passion for this war and was partaking in it only for a sense of sport, has now lost the thing that was most important to him in the world. And he decides that he has no reason to carry on living as conflict has cost him everything that he held dear. And it results, take his own life to count his veins on the Greek King Odysseus, king of the smallest island, Ithaca, within the Greek realm. Very, very clever but immoral man comes into the tent of Achilles. It says, Achilles, don't take your life now this is not what the gods demand or do you think Achilles, think? What is it that you can do with this pain that you're feeling? Where can you take it? Don't kill yourself, Achilles. What is it that you truly need? I'll tell you it's revenge. You need revenge against heck. Do you need to revenge against his father prime? And you need revenge against the soldiers of Troy. And Achilles feels from the desperation and loss, rage on merging and Achilles takes up the sphere and shale the PATRIC lease had died wielding any challenges into battle. He locates hectare on the field of battle belief, the walls of Troy and the two men fight an epic battle both a great way as they fight with spears and they fight with swords. They leap onto chariots and horses. And eventually, ultimately Achilles is victorious in the moment of victory. He feels spot of glory he has never fought. Another man is capable, is hectare. Having defeated the hero of Troy. He ties into the back of his chariot and for the next 12 nights, brides back and forth across the field of battle, dragging Hector's body behind him to utterly disgrace the hero Troy for killing his lover. 12 nice later, Achilles is resting in his 10th finally cited from the blood ****, the lead him to kill Hector. An old man, comes through the Greek camp silently by night, creeping past the guns and enters Achilles tent. The old man is Priam, the king of Troy, one of the most powerful man in the known world, who now is humbled himself wearing the clothes with beggar and come into the tent. The man who killed his son. The king Priam of Troy, now dressed as a beggar, humbled, tons to Achilles. Achilles, great warrior Greece. You've taken my son from me. I ask the return him. Or reason, does a Kelly's have to ground this wish to prime? Prime then says, as a boy, Hector listened to the stories of great Achilles. You were the inspiration, drove him to become the hero and warrior that he wants the man that you killed. In that moment, Achilles realizes that Hector was the truest friend he had on the field of battle. He had been fooled by Odysseus and Agamemnon and the Greek kings into fighting against the person he might have made a friend. The story of Achilles and Hector. One of the central stories of the Iliad written by Homer, great epic of Greek legend or myth. About 3 thousand years old. Again, story that has traveled through history. In this case because of the conflict at the very heart of the story between Achilles and Hector. Between the kings of Greece and the city of drawing. As you probably know, the war is brought to an end when Odysseus, again, the Trojan horse. Outside of the city of Troy and manages to sneak a force of Greek soldiers pass the wolves alive otherwise be unable to conquer. The fate of Achilles is to ultimately be killed. He is a demi god, the son of a god, almost indestructible apart from one patch of skin on his heel, for which he shot by Paris, the prince of Troy. Homer's story of the war between the Greeks and the Trojans asks us a major question about the inevitability of conflict in human life. Why is it that despite the fact that the Greeks and the Trojans would've been better off if they've worked together. Why did they end up fighting? Why was it that Achilles, who have more in common with hexagon, any other man in the battle ultimately had to kill the person who could, in other circumstances have been his friend. This is, the question is put to us as writers, as storytellers is dramatized to understand the nature of the conflict, the goal on in the world, and to examine them for our audiences. Conflict plays Anna sense apart in the rhetoric of story because our attention as humans is unavoidably captured and drawn by any form of conflict that we encounter. Imagine for a second, your in your local cafe writing, you have your notepad and pen, maybe your laptop. To the side of you. An argument begins. Maybe two people sitting at the table there and they're trying to hide the argument, but unavoidably, your attention will be drawn to it. Imagine you're working, started a new job and you have an argument with another employee at the office where you're working, and you go home that night and you keep thinking about this argument. Another possibility, imagine that you are taking a plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean and the plane is hit by lightning, unavoidably, fear rises up within you. And you can't do anything other than look at this conflict going on between the plane and the world around it. These are all forms of conflict and they all capture our attention in utterly compelling ways. When a storytellers, we put any food conflict into the story that we're telling. It will capture an eruption. Our audience in exactly the same way. Because as we've discussed through the rhetoric of story so far, our way of understanding the world is driven by stories, driven by narratives. We place into our narratives. We focus them around any element of conflict that arises. When we see conflict in a story, we begin to model it. We enter into the conflict and we see what our role might be within that conflict, how it might service, how it might possibly hurt us. In the same way that we assess conflicts and pay very close attention to them in the world around us. When they arise in the story, we begin to examine them in exactly the same way. 16. Levels of conflict: Just as in life. Story, central characters, the self at the heart of the story. It's the desire that forms at the center of that self. The willpower which drives them towards achieving that desire, which is the engine that creates conflict and story. And it does this because inevitably, those desires are frustrated when characters run into forces that prevent them from easily achieving their desires. In the story of The Old Man and the Sea. It's written by Hemingway, published in 1952. Went on to win the Pulitzer Prizes, shortened umbrella. Old man. Who has been a fishermen for his entire life, is having a very unlucky spelling vishing. He hasn't world's fish back to the Shoal for somewhere in the region of a 100 days. Young boy who's parentheses term has been told you're not allowed to fish with the old man anymore. He has to fish on his own. Most of the people expect that he's going to die. So the old man takes an epic journey out to sea and his small boat. He hooks and Marlin. Day and night and day and night. You fight to this massive Marlin swordfish, whole it onto his boat. And after days of this, he manages finally to hold them all and up to the Boeotians, stab it with his knife and he straps IT. Side of his Bowden is fighting against his own tiredness, against the wind and the rain. Even as he's bringing his great catch the myelin back to see, he finds shocks and the sharks come in and they strip them all in all its flesh and exhausted. The old man lands backup at the fishing village with only the bones of the giant Marlin. But the bones are enough for other people to see this giant fish, to see the dramas that he went through. And the old man regains the respect of the other fishermen in the young boy. The Old Man, and the Sea is a fantastic example of physical conflict against the natural world, against elements, against everything external to the character. One of Hemingway's great novels because it encapsulates this idea of what it is to be at conflict with the world around us, with the forces are those world. In order to overcome those conflicts. The character's desire, in this case, to capture a huge fish, which perhaps mask is deeper desire to regain his old status, to recapture the essence of life, his life as a fishermen. This desire and the well-powered the old man to pursue that desire, which creates this massive conflict at the heart of the old man and the sea. These physical conflicts drive a lot of the storytelling around us. The four sites saga, jungles worthy, but then Safari, different kind of conflict. It charts are a number of generations, the Foresight Family, the British family of what was called at the time new money. That's around the turn of the 19th, 20th century. The foresight family are profoundly concerned with all things material, with money and foresight character at the center of the story, It's Leicester. He spends all of his time pursuing money and material wealth, and that's how he understands the world around him. But he falls in love with a young woman called Irene, who's an artist. Greatly admired music, painting, song, dance. All the things that sometimes doesn't quite understand that this is why he falls in love with Irene. Irene does not pulling up with sounds but F31 move off to another. She's forced to marry psalms and to enter this family of the four sites were so materially focused, free while Irene, number of other characters as well. And to the Foresight, Family Botany, who is an architect and he has an affair with Irene, which leads ultimately to his death. Over time. Foresight, family and social support site experience, a great conflicts. This is. A social conflicts between the members of the Foresight Family as overtime. The material values, the values of money and commerce and business. So they hold onto a slowly challenged by the values that Irene represents of art or creativity. You could say spirituality. The clashes and social interactions that these producers are. What power the foresight saga along as a series of novels. Full site, is driven on the conscious level by his desire for money, wealth, material, standing, safety. But unconsciously, as we see through his deep attraction to Irene, his desire for Irene needs the arts, the creativity that Irene represents. So in fact, to the rest of the Foresight Family. And as John goals wherever he is commenting in the novel, The rest of British society. From this deep desire that sounds pursues, be in contact with something greater than the material like he's obsessed with making. A huge range of social conflicts are wrapped across the Foresight Family until many of the younger members of the family and really abandoned the old values on the old money of the family to form a new kind of life. This is the social level of conflict within storytelling powers. Many of the most fascinating stories around us today. But with these external complex and social complex, There's always as well, an internal conflict lodged at the heart of the story. In the full site slog of this internal conflict happens within some support site. And it's this conflict between the material and the spiritual. He's conscious desire for one is unconscious desire for the other. His deep designs driving in through the story. The Old Man and the Sea. Yes, we have this archetypical physical conflict between man and nature of man and the elements. But this is really driven forward by the internal drives, the old fishermen. Because what he's really fighting against is his own willpower. He's really struggling to see how strong it is, how good is he as a fishermen and is this really who he is? Because he's now at the end of his life, he's approaching death and he's driven in a way to renew himself. And again, this internal conflict is central to the power of storytelling. The story of Achilles and Hector. We have a huge range of conflicts happening in nearly at the wall between the Greeks and the Trojans. You have the arguments over Helen, The Great Beauty of Greece. You have the conflicts that rage on the social level in between the Greek kings themselves who are fractious, bunch, who aren't really designed to be fighting together, but really powering the story. Is the internal conflict that Achilles faces. There's a, Kelly's is driven to this act of revenge by the death of his lover Patrick Hayes. But rarely he's taken revenge against the wrong person. Hectare is not the appropriate focus for Achilles, right? Yes, He Kilpatrick lease, but rarely PATRIC please, as being killed by this wall, by the actions of the Greek kings. And the situation they're in therefore becomes a tragic situation brilliantly sculpted by Homer. As we consider complex in storytelling happens on all forms of levels, the physical, the social conflicts, which we find fascinating as an audience. But the storytelling is powered by the internal conflicts are the characters which are links to their deep desires, their willpower, and the web of relationships around. 17. Antagonism and fear: As we build conflicts into our stories to make them compelling for the audience, we're inevitably drawn to thinking about basic ideas of good and evil. Who is the goodie in the story? Who is the baddie? We think about this within storytelling because inevitably as humans, when we get into a conflict ourselves, we tend to think of our self as the person in the right, in the conflict. Whatever we're coming up against, the natural world, social relationships around us, or even in many cases, our own internal conflicts. We will cast ourselves as the hero in the stories that we tell and everything other that we come into conflict with becomes the baddie or the antagonist. Antagonists sit at the center of storytelling, right beside the central characters, heroes, the protagonists that we put at the center of the story. We considered the role of the antagonist, the archetype or roll a little bit. In the last talk. Antagonists recur again and again and again. Falses of antagonism. If it isn't a person, then there will be a force there in the way of the hero and centered the story. If you think about many of the hugely successful stories of today, they all turn on this relationship between a protagonist and antagonist. The antagonist is in the simplest terms, the villain, the body in the story. If it's Robin Hood and it's the Sheriff of Nottingham and King John. If it stumbles. And Luke Skywalker and the antagonist is Darth Vader, if it's Harry Potter, than the antagonist is Lord Voldemort. You can name rarely any children's story, any Blockbuster, Hollywood movie, lots and lots of stage plays and filter. And novels as well feature this strong antagonist in the story. And essentially what we're doing or the antagonist is taking all of the forces that stand in the way of the hero achieving their desire. Placing them into the body of a person who very often becomes overblown villain. In the story. You think about the antagonist and a classic children's tale. We can find a little bit more detail in a bit more nuance in the idea of what's happening with this antagonist figure, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis, tremendously successful children's story. There are a number of books, seven books in the series altogether. This first book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for children, are evacuated from London to the Second World War. Since the house of their uncle, who's a professor, big, rickety old building. And they're rather than neglected while So there and they start playing games of hide and seek. And they hide within a wardrobe. Wardrobe proves to be a portal to another world, the world of Nanyang. A number of occasions the children go through this portal, they find that time moves at a different speed and non-US, very little time has passed when they return to the real world. And pneumonia is a forest world. It's a world held in coldness and winter. One of the children travels through into the world of non-issue encounters a character, Mr. Thomas, who is a phone. Mr. Thomas isn't very sad character. He's emotionally, he feels sad. He invites the young girl who's come through from the wardrobe to have tea with him and I have a wonderful tea together. But Mrs. Thomas becomes deeply upset because he's been told he has been ordered that he has to report any humans who were seen any human children to the white, which it's the white witch who now rules over the world of nonviolence. There were white which with a magics who was cast an eternal winter over the world of Nanyang. What's happening in this story? Yes, of course, on one level is literally a story about the white, which in this magical world that she owns. And then as you probably know, as land lion in this world who ultimately with the help of the children, defeats the white wedge. But the white, which is standing for something that we encounter in our lives all of the time. Really the right, which as the antagonist in his story. And this is in many ways will antagonize, always represent in stories. The white, which is the force of fear. The well-done Nadia, the white which has come in and she has taken over and she's driven everybody into fear and all of the characters we initially meet Ananya like Mr. Tom. This a held in this fear, the fear of the white wedge and our magics and how revenge if she doesn't do is they told CS Lewis was writing here for the 1940s and the book was published in the 50s. He was thinking about the world of Nazi Germany that Britain had defeated in World War II. That world had fallen into fear, fear from the Nazis. Fair of adult Hitler. When people become afraid, whether it's on the individual level, when we fare the physical elements around us. Whether it's on the social level when we begin to fear the people who we interact with. Whether it's on the national level. Well level when the weld line nonane, when the nation like Germany under the Nazis is driven interferon conflicts arise. These conflicts extremely toxic and dangerous. We understand now more of why this happens. We experience very deep fear as humans when we placed into anything that we perceive as danger, it literally begins to shut down the higher parts of our brain. All the parts of us that make us compassionate, caring humans, a slowly stripped away. And that's the thing gets worse and worse and worse, we become more and more animalistic among people who often not find who had not experienced conflicts. The world of non neon on the grassland was not a world of conflict, so it's not a weld trapped in winter. The welded Nazi Germany was not a world of evil and conflicts and persecution of innocent people. The full Nazis inflicted a literal reign of terror, random fear over the land. One of the main causes of conflict in our world, and hence in our stories of that weld is fair. The effects of fear among people. And how as fair as brought into the world. It replicates and perpetuates itself. In some of the stories I've mentioned where we have a powerful antagonist, Star Wars, Darth Vader, the emperor, the evil empire ruling over the galaxy. Harry Potter with Lord Voldemort, who slowly arises and corrupts the world of magic around him. What we're really thinking about as a storyteller, the effects of fear. On the most primal level. The antagonist represents the power fair in our lines, and how it degrades and corrupts everything around it and causes conflicts to ripple around the world. Most of us, most of the time see ourselves as being the right. If we get into an argument with our parents, it's our parents who are wrong. If you have a falling out with our colleagues at work, it's our colleagues at work who are wrong. If we walk out of our door and it rains on us, it's the rain that is in the room. We don't have a problem. The rest of the world outside of us has a problem. But we are storytellers know that this is fall very far from always being the truth. At the heart of how we, as human beings create our own conflicts with the physical world, with our, in our social relationships. And our internal conflicts is a mismatch between how we see things and how they actually are. And this is particularly true in our relationships with other people. That the people were interacting with their loved ones, or family, or friends or work colleagues. Anybody that we meet in the world. They are of course, other complete cells as well. They're living their story. They have their desires. But we project onto them. Roles within our own narrative, within our own story that we're constructing to make sense of the world. And when people fail to fulfill those roles that we are placing onto them, conflict arises. We become upset when two people see things very differently when they're playing different roles within each other's dramas, conflict arises. It's this projection that we're all engaged and continually the producers, much of the rich but painful conflict of storytelling and it's this that we dive into. Slightly more advanced storytellers. 18. Happy endings: Perhaps appropriately, this talk was interrupted by the arrival of a thunderstorm, form of natural conflict which had been brewing behind me. As I was recording. I've reconvened few days later on the nicer, sunnier day to provide a conclusion to this talk on conflict. All of us, whether we like it or not. And in real life, most of the time we do not like it. Find ourselves in forms of conflict might be physical conflict. We live in some ways in a wealthier, kind of gentle a world today than perhaps we did in the past. But nonetheless, we still face forms of physical conflict. Whether it's floods affecting our domestic properties, whether it's aging, processes sometimes of becoming sick or even dying. We do still face significant physical complex and challenges in life. Are social complex, arguably even more difficult than they were in the past. We face tremendously difficult social interactions. Nose with families of those who have friends in our workplaces, in our society at large. So all of these conflicts out there facing us and our internal conflicts are as strong and as powerful as they've ever been before. And of course, as we've discussed, has exactly the same effects upon us, upon our physiology, upon our brain, and then reflect it out into the society around us as it's ever done. Conflict is still absolutely a part of our lives and that means conflict attracts us magnetically, powerfully into stories. But whilst it's conflict that drugs are sin to the story, It's piece brings us to the story's resolution that makes us close the book. Lead the cinema, walk out to the filter and go and say to everybody, We see my God, I've just seen an amazing story which took me deep into a conflict. And then it showed me that conflict resolution. It gave me a happy ending. And sometimes as writers, we criticize but happy endings in the world. And even when an ending isn't specifically happy, even when it's tragic. We still see at the end of the story what caused the conflict and we see the potential for its resolution. And so all of the great stories that we have been discussing in this talk come to their own version of a happy ending and Achilles and Hector for oral if the conflicts between the Greek kings and the city-state of try and between the two great heroes, Achilles and Hector, resolved when Achilles is able to return the body of Hector to his father prior, where we see the resolution, most importantly of his internal conflicts. But he's able to find honor and peace. Again, The Old Man and the Sea. This great physical conflict between a fisherman, the elements of the world and of the ocean reached their resolution and they're happy ending when having struggled back to the CPO. And we think the story is gonna be one simple, desperate desolation. What we actually see is that the bones are the great Marlin, the swordfish. So the old man is hold back to the sea port found by the young fishermen who were then able to see great evidence of the fisherman's greatness. The foresight saga, after an entire trilogy of amazing storytelling. The conflict at the heart of the story, the materialist foresights between the new members of their family led by Irene, who represent creativity and spirituality, is brought to a close when Irene have a final meeting in which they're different states. Now as ex husband and wife, a result, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the famous ending reflecting the stories, Christian themes where the lion as land as a kind of Jesus Christ is taken onto the altar at the white witch and sacrificed under her knife. But this act of self-sacrifice brings life back to the frozen world of pneumonia and defeats evil magic and the fear that the white which has inflicted upon the land. And this is the classic pattern. So much. In fact, I would argue all great storytelling, a conflict is introduced as grown out of the desires of the central characters and the way that those desires clash between the self and the other. This conflict is grown unexplored over time. And then finally, the skills of the storyteller show house how this conflict is resolved, on how peace is brought to the world of the story. 19. What are stories made of?: Hello and welcome back to the fifth lecture in the rhetoric of story. Today, as you might be able to see, I'm recording in front and amazing castle, the Chateau de bras. One of the many castles in the valley and locational inspired some of the great storytelling and history, not least, the recent success of Game of Thrones. They do in fact tie an orchestra musicians to sit outside the strands of land loss and remind the tourists coming in during the day. But these days for location, I see spire. Great stories from history. One of those stories that we'll be considering a little bit today is the story of King off the lights, the round table, which will be illustrating the theme of today's talk. Looking now, the fifth of the seven major elements in the rhetoric of story, the idea of events. All pods, or the rhetoric of story together, what we can call engine story. And if you dig into any great example of really, really compelling storytelling, beer, Jack and the Beanstalk, or Homer's Iliad, or Bruce Willis is die-hard. You will find the full elements and the rhetoric of story working together. As the n-channel driving the story down the tracks, the narrative that it's telling. You need this ending in place in order for it to be compelling. What is this engine? In order to understand the world around us, we tell the story about it. And at the heart of that story we identify great change that's going on in the world. Whether that be a great war that's raging across the land, an external change or whether it be the transition from child to an adult going on in the heart of the character or whether it be dealing with a grain of capital, emotions like grief or joy, happiness. This change in the heart of the story that we follow along as an audience number two, self. The heart of every story is a self that is experiencing the story. Because when we telling the story of the world around us where the person centered cubic, we need a self, we need a pair of eyes to see through. We need an experience to understand the story for driving the self along as a desire, a great desire that we're trying to achieve in the world, because this is how we understand the world around us in terms of our own personal desires and the things that are stopping us from achieving them. And as we've heard already, this can be and external desire which manifests. Or it can be the more internal kind of hidden desires, which really dry characters along and give us also integrally, it's the rhetoric of story, the willpower that drives us through the events of the story as they unfold. Number three, the other, the self isn't complete without the other characters who we encounter through the course of the story. And these characters tend to be archetypical. And very often they reflect archetype of the elements of the human psyche. Together the self and the other produce. Fourth part of the rhetoric of the story, which is conflict. It's not only asked who has great desires and what is everybody else that we meet when these desires between our own personal design, the designs by the characters in the story. When these clash, it inevitably produces conflict. This can be extended, won't be social conflicts which are at the heart of the soap opera. Or it can be the internal conflicts that rage within each of us as human beings. The interactions of these first of all parts of the rhetoric good story give us calling its day the engine of story. This is important to think about the way that we shaped these four parts of the rhetoric and story. Give us the power source, the engine for our storytelling. And without this, it doesn't matter which cosmetic elements we build into our story, doesn't matter what set pieces to redeploy. It doesn't matter how great our dialogue is, because all of this is powered by the engine at the heart. Of our storytelling. Change, self. The other conflict. If these four elements working together provide the engine of the story. Yet to think about the framework through which the story is actually told. And that's what I want to move into and consider in quite some depth over the next three torques on this course. But you're gonna be covering phrase separate areas, the last three areas. The rhetoric of the story is going to include questions, sets bit of a mystery for you. What do I mean by questions? We're gonna get to that in this talk, the SEC talk. We're gonna be looking at structure, the actual shape and form. The os story is given and we're gonna be taking a bit of a shortcut about how to find the best structure for your story. But what are we going to be considering today? To answer that question? I asked you a question. What Is a story made of? It sounds simple. Across hundreds of writing workshops with thousands of students, I have placed this question to people and I received dozens or hundreds of different answers. What is a story made of? If people are really interested in film? They tend to say pitchers, that the story is made of a series of moving images. People are really interested in books, writing. They tend to say words, stories are made of words. You've got all kinds of suggestions, puppets, light, and shadow. Stories are made of people. Have a think about it. Tell me your answers, note them down. What is a story made of the idea that I want to put to you and that we're going to consider. The course of today's. Stories are made of events. That's impossible to tell a story without thinking coherently about what the most important events in the story. Tone your imagination to the land of ancient Britain. Land ravaged by death and destruction and plague and violence. There is no king in ancient Britain in the Dark Ages are only warlords, knights who roam across the land taking anything that they wish. One of these nights is the powerful UFA pen dragon. And then with the help of the wizard Merlin, he has one-by-one, defeated all of the other lords of Britain until only one remains the Lord Cornwallis. And in battle, UFA pen dragon defeats Como. I'm reaches an agreement with them. The UFO will be the High King of Britain and como maintain control over small parts of the land. And this seems to be working out on the Great Beast is held until UFA sees co-morbid wife eat grain and he decides that he must have a grain. And he demands that myelin helps him. Gaps are in this restarts the war all over again and discuss it. And he says, okay, I'll give you what you want. I'll give you the woman that you want. Your child from. This match will be mine. And ultimately this decision destroys. He has attacked by other nights. And he rams who saw this sword Excalibur into a stone and there it is left for a generation. Young boy grows up as an orphan women and dumped it family. And he's taken to how the oldest southern family in a great tournament, winner of the tournament will attempt to pull the sword from the stone, but Harper has forgotten the sort of his older brother. He runs around crazily until he finds a sort of sticking out of the stone and he grabs her in his hands and he pulls it out. In fact, offers pulled the sort from the stone is revealed. The son of Penn dragging in the rightful high King of Britain. But of course the other knights can't stand for these. So often has to ride around the kingdom, defeating them one-by-one with the help of Merlin, just as his father roofer did, until eventually only one night remains. And he defeats this night in battle and the knight says, How can this be? You are not even an anointed line to the realm. In an act of great magnanimity, passes the 19th sword and says, please make me a night, then I can be the high King of Britain is one act of, shows that he is greater than all of the other ninths around having united all of the ninths of ancient Britain. Now king off decides to survey his new realm, but along the way he stopped by a foreign night called Lancelot. And lancelet has been traveling across the rounds of Europe looking for great Lord to serve. And he will only serve a man who defeats him in single combat, offer a Lancelot fight. An Alpha, uses the powers of Excalibur to defeat lancelet in combat, they are in the process of excalibur is broken. It tosses it into nearby lake and it's brought back to him by the Lady of the Lake, the true owner of the sword Excalibur, who tells him and lancelet and they must work together to create a union at night. And so the Knights of the Round Table formed Zhan slot takes a journey to bring the lady who went to marry King offer would've course arriving at the castle of Granovetter's family, he instantly folds in an up with The Great Beauty of the Land. Pledges. His undying devotion to other because he knows that she has pledged States best friend. And the Lord came out, exiles himself in the Knights of the Round Table. So it can never be tempted to act upon his love for the lady Gwen oven. But the witch more Ghana guesses the secret of Lancelot. And she whispers into the night gala hat and it says Perhaps, perhaps the reason why lots, lots is not a member of the Knights of the Round Table. Because of his secret love for Granovetter in Gala had pulled by the treachery of his fellow night calls lancelet out. The two men engage in single combat to decide which of them is telling the truth. Last slot, Just just managers. When the when the combat one night offer follows Gwen invariance of forests in there. Sita meeting with Lancelot and that last slide whenever making love. And he drives the scanner back into the Earth between the two lovers, and then returns to the Council where he falls into a dark and dispirited sleep. Alphas sleeps. The land of Britain returns to the chaos and pestilence from which he had helped him recover all the night. So the roundtable, a cold together and they're sent on inquest by alpha to recover the holy grail, which is the only item that can restore him to his former health and return the king to land. The Knights of the Round Table write out across Britain in search of the Holy Grail than the night. Percival, the youngest of the night. So the roundtable finds the Holy Grail Castle, which Madonna where some moderate holds it. Personal managers to find his way into the castle. But he realizes that are holy grail is not an item, it's an idea. Personal returns with the idea to the sleeping King offer and he says, Alpha, the truth of the Holy Grail is that the king and the land, R1. This proof, this idea wakes alpha from asleep and he rides out, recover the land britain to fight against moderate. But meeting moderate on the field of battle offer discovers that in fact, moderate is ******* son born from his relationship with the which more Ghana, who although he didn't know it, was his half sister. Knowing this, APA has to fight moderate on the field of battle and ultimately slaves him and his killed. In so doing, as it's lost act, he demands of the night Percival takes the sword Excalibur, and froze it back into the waters until the Lady of the Lake from Wednesday came. These are the key events. King off, nice and the Roundtable, the offeree and myth, which has been told across Europe actually for centuries and has its, the origins. Earliest telling in Wales and Celtic people before there was even a nation of whales. Told in the courts of medieval France. And in fact was known across the lower valley where I am today. Filming in front of the Chateau de Lambert has one of the oldest stories in European myth and storytelling. What's kept it told across all of that time. Other great events that the story no rights. 20. What is an event?: What is an event? Hours, days, weeks of our normal Monday nice compiles. Without us really encountering any events. We might think the events of happened. But on the whole our lives quite event list, we continue doing most of the same things that we've always done. So we get up in the morning, your brush our teeth, we have breakfast, we go to work. We do all of our daily work tasks. We've finished work. We come home on the way when you go shopping. At the end of the day, we sit for awhile, we watch television, and then we go to bed and we'd get up the next day. And we do all of this over again. If you are the great king, UFA pen dragon, every morning you get up and you go on slave some enemy nights. So just the fact that your inner battle, it backwards. What you do every day doesn't mean that an event has occurred. And this is why most of the time, most of our lives, initially, if endless, nothing really is happening. And an event is something happening. Happening is something that is beyond our expectations and beyond the expectations character in variances. This is because that's our minds tell the story through which we make sense of the world. Our attention is focused on the unexpected. Attention is focused on happenings, on events that occur in the course of our lives. There are not a norm that are not what we usually experience. And it's this element of the unexpected that defines what an event is. And it helps us find the events that we're going to tell the story for him. Let's think a bit more about the story of King Arthur and the Knights are the roundtable. What's the first event in the story? We know the background to the story. The land of ancient Britain is in chaos. Pestilence and plague are traveling throughout the land and killing people. There are warlords. They're riding around on their horses, killing people as well. It's a dark time. Ufa pen dragon rises up. Is this the event? No. We understand that this is what's happening. This is buffers. Normal daily life was weird and unusual as it might seem to us, for his fighting the nights one-by-one, he fights the Lord of Cornwall. The first real event in the story is the unexpected. Ufa after the battle against Como, attends the feast where he sees core moles wife, the lady or green, and he decides he must have that. This is the first event in the story. This is the unexpected. And they says, tell me, we're gonna think about a bit. The gap in expectation that defines the events of the story. Ufo tends the feast. He thinks he's just gonna eat a meal. He's going to conclude his truth with Como. He's going to go about his business being the High King of Britain. But instead, the gap in expectation arising is when he meets the lady a grain. This is what defines all of the events. King Arthur, knights of the Round Table, the next major events of the story. We move on some years, all of the knights and the land meeting for a jail. So decide who's going to try and pull the solid from the stone. But this happens all the time. This is not the event. The event turns around. Now the central cell for the story, the young orphan Alpha. He's just a boy at the time. And he's looking around crazily for a sword to give to his older brother. And he sees this sword sticking out to the stone and the pulsar cleanly with no effort from the stone. And alpha. The gap in expectation expected to discontinue being orphan boy, serving his older adopted brother. But know what has happened. In fact, he has become quite unexpectedly the hair more than myelin knew this was going to happen. He has become the High King of Britain. This is an event you turn up one day to a joust as an orphan and new leave as the High King of Britain. It's again this gap between the expectation of the character and what actually happens to them. It's the gap, defines the event and it's from this gap that change comes. Let's look at one other event, the final major event in the story of King Arthur king off of rice to battle against moderate. And he thinks he's going to defeat the Dark Knight who has been bringing evil back into the land. He's faced with an enormous gap in his expectations. He's shown that moderate. In fact is his son, his illegitimate ******* son. Boss and sons play a very important part in the storytelling of this era. And again, it's this gap in expectation, what we'll often do, well, he must still decide to slay something. In the course of doing that. Cell is destroyed. And you can see nice symbolic of novel, dangerous place since validate, possibly being born again and all messianic tellings of the king off mic. So it is these events with the gap in expectation define the story. And it's from these events that we'd get the stories major change because each of these events is in itself as part of the change that the stories and writing to us. But it's the gap and expectation between what characteristic expects to happen and what actually transpires and their response to this creates a real event. As a storyteller, to think clearly about what the events of your story. Because the mistake that less experienced storytellers mate is bringing to the telling all of the happenings or the smaller the events in the story. We're gonna, you only have so much space in a film and a stage play, in a video game, and a whole novel and a whole series of numbers. It doesn't matter how big your story seems, you have to choose the most critical events that make the story compelling for your audience. The events of a story, however, do not exist in isolation from each other. Imagine if I sent out To tell you the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. And I begin when the great Lord who for Penn dragon and the land is in chaos and UFA is going around beating the Knights of Penn dragon, but he happens to just get bored of that. So he just decides instead that he's gone to go on holiday and then it goes on all the way to your option because he already owns Yorkshire. It doesn't have to fight anybody there. Upa is in Yorkshire and there's also a farmer who's in Yorkshire. The farmer has been living there for generations. And the farmer, it has a son called a doggy, good old Yorkshire name. And doggie is actually a bit into the dice and the gambling and the beer, and he likes to go and have an evening. So doggy just goes along to his tablinum. As you can see. It's actually really hard to do this because in giving you a series of unrelated, in fact, non-events, I'm completely destroying any sense of his story and you very quickly lose any interest in what I'm telling you. And I've started off by telling you that this is King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But actually what I just told your series, random unconnected events that don't seem really make any sense to have any relationship to China. Your mind, the machine of storytelling that you lug around with you in your head very quickly gets annoyed and frustrated and stops paying attention to this. What is it the key to your mind going from one event to the other one? Let's think about the story of King off. As we've actually told him so far from pet dragon is fighting to become lord of the kingdom and he defeats the last lord of Cornwall and then he meets lady or this attract our attention because it's expected and this leads by a process of cause and effect to the next event in the story. Who for Meteor green leads to offer? An offer is then an orphan boy who finds the sword sticking out to the stone. He pulls salt out to the stony, becomes the King of Britain. And this leads by a process of cause and effects to offer fighting the dark nights across the land. Do we have to show the ears, the high King of Britain, they can defeat them, but they still don't think he's a night. And so he hands them. Historian says, dump me at night. The unexpected has occurred again. And this leads by a process with cause and effect or after surveying land and fighting the Nazis. This is what makes a story truly compelling. Great events linked by a process of cause and effect. 21. Stories within stories?: Once you do know the events of your story, once you do understand the chain of cause and effect that connects those events, you find you have a tremendous amount of control over the stories that you're telling. One of the ways you can alter and change your stories is free scale. Well, this means is that you can tell any story that you know the events and the cause and effect for at any length. You can see this in the history of the telling of the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I was able to tell this story for you in just a few minutes by simply describing the main events of the story and how they were connected. This is the simplest way to tell a story like king off for much of its history can offer was an oral tile and it would've been told over a series of evenings. That's royal court. The residents of rich merchant for instance. The story we're telling a completely different style. Each of the major events of the story would've been an episode that was presented in the evening. The version of King offer, Knights of the Round Table that were most familiar with today actually comes from the right rather than Mallory Lamott data, which is in fact, an example of an early novelistic text is written down. It's designed to be read by primarily courtly, well-educated audience. And each of the major events in the story is presented as a chapter within the novel. They've also been hundreds of novelistic versions of king off old presented at that length. Versions by Steinbeck, versions by THY once and future king. The whites version as a novel, actually provided the structure and the form for one of the early film versions of King offer, because the Disney version, the sword in the stone. As a film, you can present almost exactly the same telling us the story of King Arthur, but it happens in only an hour and a half or two hours. And each of the major events in the story then are presented as a scene. Just as the events of his story can be told on any scale, any length. Story events also fit within each other. A little bit like a Russian doll. Stories exist within other stories and every story is part of another biggest story. In a way, stories of fractal. If you've seen on a computer most often very, very colorful patterns and pitches. And the more you zoom in on these patterns, the more you find that they repeat themselves, the closer you go into the detail of a fractal pattern, you find just the same patterns reflected again and again. Inside. Stories are very, very similar. We can see this again in the story of King off or in the Knights of the Round Table. If you take any of the key events of the story. For instance, once the knight Lancelot has been absent from the court of King Arthur because he's secretly in love with Granovetter. We have the story laid out of the accusations by gala had that last slot is a traitor to the Knights of the Round Table. And then the trial by combat, which unfolds, which possible intervenes with. This is one of the major events in most tellings of the story of King Arthur. And it reflects all of the key elements of the offer entirely features most of the main characters King offer. Whenever Lancelot repeats most of the same themes of what it is to be a knight. What it is to have all know what it is to be a strong fighter. And everything else that we understand to be crucial about the story king off on this fractal quality. That means you can drop into almost any episode of The Story of king off there, any other key events. And find it, it at least somewhat compelling without really knowing anything else about the story. We can also expand a fractural nature of our story in the other direction. Whilst the story of King offers a great epic, which can be told in just a few minutes or however many hours, many days for an epically tile. It's also just one story of lung King of England. It could be presented as part of the history of England, in which case the whole story of King off my only be a few sentences in the greater narrative of the entire history of a nation. And this is true all those stories and it's a great way of getting an understanding of the story that you're working with. However epic or however intimate, you can find other stories hidden within it. You can find that it's part of greatest stories that are around it. This is a really interesting way of thinking about story because it leads us to understand what the basic storytelling element that we're working with is. The events of our story that contain the gap in expectation, the upper part of the cause and effect and the story that we're telling. All miniature stories in their own, right. By working in that way, we arrive at the idea of scenes. Every part of the story is an explicit scene. Once we know what the events of our story, we can tell that story in a multitude of different ways and at any length and cruciate any scale. The story of King off it can be told as a five-minute title is positive, a lesson, or it can be an epic, sweeping drama and presented as a film over a number of evenings as a courtly entertainment, any story can really be told at any length. And all stories made up of other stories and are part of greater tails. So the title of king offers made up of a number of stories like the quest for the Holy Grail. And it could also be seen as parts of the greatest story of the history of Britain and all of its kings. In which case, the story of King offer would be a mere sentence. When we think about all of this together, we can see that every story, every event within our story is in fact its own story. In order to shape an event as a story, we present it as a C. Unlike any story, a specific scene has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So let's take the famous scene, the drawing of the sword from the stone from King Arthur and the Knights of the roundtable. And let's consider it as a C. Let's think first about the beginning, the classic story structure. The beginning is the exposition. And it's where we lay out all of the information that's required for the audience to understand the story. So what do we have? King off his early drawing the sword Excalibur from the stone. Well, we know that we have Alpha. We know that we have is Father, we know that we have his older brother. And the alpha is a page on the East helping prepare is older brother for a tournament. And we know that the tournament is about who is going to attempt to draw the sword from the stone, which of the Knights of the ancient Britain are going to have that Fauna. We're going to see offer and his father and his older brother turning up at the tournament. We're going to see the tournament in action where possibly going to see the winning night of the tournament attempting to draw the soul from the SONA, failing to do so. This is setting us are seen as giving us the exposition. And it's giving us location crucially when we think about the beginning of any story, we're trying to give a sense of location, trying to give a sense of the characters involved in the story. Middle. What's the middle of the scene or the drawing of the sword from the stone. Well, in a classic scene structure following the exposition is the complication. They send the complication that we also meet the key action of the story. We have a series of events within the event we're presenting. Once again, this fractal structure, stories within stories, events, within events. What happens initially offers helping his brother prepare for the tournament. He realizes that he has left his brothers sword back at the castle that they came from. And this is terrible because it means that his brother won't be able to compete the tournament. So now offer isn't a panic. He's found. The first complication, the action of the scene has begun. So often runs around him. He looks for solutions to this complication. What might you do? Well, there's another night next door he goes and arsenite if he can borrow a soul and the nice there is absolutely no way everyone needs their swords for the upcoming tournament. You won't be able to find one author. So often scratches his head and he thinks, What can I do? Well wizard, merlin is here. I'll go and I'll ask Merlin what I might be able to do. A Merlin says, Well, perhaps if you look really hard offer, you will find a sword in the forest. Melody. And here he is trying to shape the action of the story as it unfolds. He's imaginal character. In that way. The young orphan Alba heads off into the forest and he does indeed find a sword, just an old sold sticking out to the stone. Grabs the sword in his hand, and he pulls it out. And now we've encountered what have we found crucially? We've encountered the gap in expectation that's at the heart of the event. And that powers our scene and everything that's come before. This is about building up to the gap in expectation. The young orphan Alpha, he runs back to the Tawney and he tracks down his father and his brother and he says to his brother, look, I found you Assad here I've taken. And his brother, of course, recognizes the sword Excalibur, but pretends that he doesn't know when his father asked him, was it you who pulled the sword from the stone? First he says, yes, he wants the glory, but then he says No. It has to be honest. It was his younger brother, Arthur, who pulled the sword from the stone. And all of the Knights of the tournament gather around. And they proclaim that because alpha is drawn the sword from the stone, he must be the new hiking of Britain. This has taken us through the middle of the same. And now we end the event, we end the story. We end the scene with the resolution. The resolution to the same comes as alpha is being proclaimed. The hiking Burton potentially other nights fighting against this and this is giving us the tours and effects that's gonna lead into the next scenes of the story. The resolution gives us the emotion. We go into the self at the center of the story surrounded by other characters. We go deep into the cell for the heart of the story and we look at the emotion that the gap in expectation and his response to it as a reason we think, what is the emotion the offer is left with? In this telling us, this story, offer is left. We have a sense of his own fate as the King of England. This gives us the entire event. It gives us a complete seen. This structure is really important. The opening, which gives us the exposition, the information that we need to understand the scene. The middle gives just a complication, a series of events within the event. Finally, the closing, the resolution and the emotion to the same. Not only is this the structure for a classically designed seen within a drama, it is a basic structure for any story that we might wish to tell. This takes us on into the next, the sick part of the rhetoric of story, which is structure. And we will be coming to this. In our next talk. We've looked here at the basic structure that takes a series of events that focuses on one event within our story and that gets at a structure. In the next lecture, we're going to look at the nature of structure in storytelling. We're going to look at lots of examples of structure. And most interestingly, we're going to look at why structure is amazingly powerful and a bit of a cheeky shortcut for you as a storyteller. 22. What is structure?: Hello and welcome back to the SEC torque in the rhetoric of story that we're going to be considering the idea of structure, the sixth parts of the rhetoric of story that we've been exploring so far in this course. Recording for you for a special location Greek theater in the ancient city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily. For centuries. In this location, important and famous plays, a classical Greek society what acted out in this very ampitheater behind me. And today I want to talk to you about one of the most important ideas in storytelling, the sixth part, the rhetoric of storytelling. Today we are going to be discussing structure, how structure relates to your art and your craft as a storyteller. Why? It's so important in crafting compelling stories for your audience. So far in the rhetoric of story, we have been exploring the seven key techniques that way as storytellers employ to create a powerful, compelling, real world for all audiences. The first of these is change. The archetype will change that we as humans all go through in that power so many great stories. The second is the cell, the hero, the central character, the protagonist at the center of every story is the other. The other human beings have a character's that surround the central character in the four that arises from the conflicts between the self and the other is conflict. Of course. Taken together these four provide the engine of the story, the psychological truth and reality, the powers on narrative and our storytelling. Along the fifth, which we explored in our last talk in rhetoric, good story, all the building blocks of story itself, events. And it's by thinking about events, the ways that events can happen or lengths and all scales. The ways that like a fractal events fit within events in our storytelling. By thinking about the fifth element of the rhetoric of story that we arrive at. The sixth element, which is structure. How do we take the events of our stories and shape them into a story that stands up, not just for one audience but for thousands of audiences. And that loss, like a story's told here at the Greek fits or in sorry Cusa for hundreds or possibly even thousands of years. And it's the consideration of structure which reveals the answer to this really important question. What is structure? It's a big question, and it's a question that divides writers and storytellers of all kinds. Many storytellers, many writers, belief structure is a kind of cheating. They are quite the word structure with formula, with cliche, with stereotypes. We wanted to think a bit more openly about structure. And I asked you the, if you have, they sense the structure and to adopt a structure for your story is somehow cheating. I want you to put that aside for the course of our talk to them. Because the honest truth is that without fully understanding story structure, it's almost impossible to create a story of any size, scale, or scope that will be compelling for your audience. And without really understanding structure, you will find the process of creating story on any skills or to be much, much more difficult than it necessarily needs to be. But what are we talking about with the idea of structure? Well, let's have a think about structure in other contexts. What is the structure of a car? An automobile? Well, cause a different they come in different forms. You have a four-by-four, you can have a hunch about, you can absolutely car, but they will have various things in common. They tend to have four wheels. They have a number of doors, they have seats that have an engine, they have tires. It's these elements that come together to form the structure of a car. If you try and make a car which doesn't have that structure, you will run into great difficulties. What is the structure of a house? What is the structure of a skyscraper? Why is the structure of a cathedral? Or even indeed, what is the structure of? Greek theater, one of these physical objects, Let's further computer in there as well. All have a structure which has evolved over a long course of time. The builders are great cathedrals, did not invent every part of the cathedral they were building. In fact, all of the technologies that went in to building great Gothic cathedral, very similar to those found all over Europe. Evolved for centuries before the first full-scale cathedral was built. At the heart of the cathedral is the arch. The simple stone arch, which is one of the basic technologies and tools which are used to build a massive structure like Cathedral. If you put arches on top of each other, you can form walls from them. If you fall, marches into a circle and build a dome. And it's the understanding of how arches work that lets great architects and builders build massive structures like the Federals and fancies. Imagine if you set out to build a cathedral. You didn't know anything about techniques of stone masonry, about how to form a basic archway, about how to build a stone wall. Instead, you just took a big part of stone and started and free form, creative manner. Just Paul stones want to talk to the other and to chisel away with them with your hammer and chisel, what would happen? Well, I think you can quite obviously see that you wouldn't get very far in the task of building a cathedral. What would happen if you decided to build a car? And he didn't understand mechanical engineering or steel smelting. I'll how to make rubber tires. You just decided to take a big bunch of metal to start hammering and to form it into various different shapes. Maybe, maybe I've had many, many years, you might, by trial and error, arrive at something a bit like a car or maybe just a go-kart that might be the most you could achieve. Stories are really no different. If you just set out to tell us store any have no idea about the hugely interesting and beautiful and complex structures that stories take. You'll find the task incredibly difficult and frustrating. You might write an opening scene and then get stuck. You won't want to know what happens next. Because structure is not just painting by numbers is not just following rules blindly structures much more creative than that. If you understand the basic structures of storytelling, you're able to improvise around them. You're able in fact, to be much more creative or width structure than without it. Getting into this idea we're going to explore today one of the most important and widely used structures in storytelling. We're going to be thinking about one of the most successful, one of the most famous stories of recent decades, certainly at the last century as well, and arguably of all time. What is that story? Well, it's a story of a young person, young man or young woman and have low birth. Perhaps they're in often, there are often adopted into a family. They don't feel a great sense of belonging to the small world that they're in, but miraculously receive a call to adventure. And they meet very often an old man with a white bed who is wise and who advises them on their story. They're drawn into a strange or sometimes dangerous world where they make new friends and they're caught up in a great adventure and a battle, and a fight against a dark lord and the forces of evil. Dark lord represents and then a final showdown. They have to defeat the forces of evil and the dark lord. And in doing so, they become a great hero and find a sense of belonging in their community. What is this story? Well, this is the story of Harry Potter or send books on the movies. This is the story of the matrix with Keanu Reeves. This is the story of many great films are a popular television shows. Novels, video games have adopted this story as well. This is the story of the tremendously successful Star Wars saga. Whilst all of these stories have their differences, they're all variations on the same structure. And it's that structure that we're going to be exploring more fully today. And the torque ahead. 23. 3 and 5 act structure?: Well over 2 thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle came regulate. Fed says, just like this one behind me. Watch the Great Plains. Some of those places mentioned, a number of them are interethnic. Aristotle in these texts that's come down to assist the poetics. Try to determine what it was about the place that succeeded the Greek audiences that were popular and one the contexts for play writing. Part of Greek society. What it was about those plays, the successful stories, the place that we're unsuccessful, unpopular with the audience, most of which have not survived to this study was trying to determine what made each of these stories of success or failure. And he made a whole list of observations which are recorded in the poetics. Central to his idea was the concept of the Three Act Structure. Aristotle defined these a3x, the simplest way to define them, he says beginning, middle, and end. We'll talk in a bit more detail about these. But you find the three-act structure very similar to the one outlined by Aristotle throughout storytelling. Today you find it particularly in film and in Hollywood filmmaking, where three-act structure has been adopted as the default structure, fulfill. You find it in place. And in fact, from Greek times onward, act structures 35, act structure, common. In fact, almost role-plays employ the act structure. Structuring the slide. Across one storytelling, you find this three-act structure repeated beginning, middle, and end. But as a storyteller is useful to go into considerably more detail about how this actually works. And we did touch on this at the end of our talk on events. The act structure is formed of events in each of the atoms in it, and they fall into certain patterns. One three-act structure. And we're going to illustrate this by thinking about the story of Star Wars. What happens in the first act of Star Wars, or indeed in most films were any story exposition. Act one is dedicated to the exposition of all the details and elements in story that we need to know in order to understand what's happening. We're introduced to all of the characters, enactment of solid walls. We made a course and Luke Skywalker, the hero of the story, the cell center of the story. And we also meet many others around him. We meet Uncle going kindly but rather small. Mine didn't don't want Luke to go off to pilot score and get involved with their rebellion. They're also worried. We find out about his father, Anakin Skywalker in this mystery is introduced. We also mean Ben Kenobi, wise old man with a white only sounds and wellness waiting for Luke to come along. These calls a New Hope. The first Star Wars movie because he brings hope. One of the characters he encounters, we meet print size. The female character, the center of the soul was dark lord in this story by f theta, we also meet C3PO and A2 D2. In the exposition of the story, all of the characters, Given the premises story, famous yellow seeds on the screen, getting his Star Wars in which the amount of galactic assistance. All of the elements that we need to understand the general outline install wars in the events that are going to unfold in the story the following. A free act structure always contains absolutely always one very important event. We're going to consider the central events structure as we proceed. Most important events in act one of any a3x story is the inciting incident. This is the event. It takes the self, the hero, Luke Skywalker in Star Wars and helps him into a world of adventure, installs the inciting incident. Costs across a few scenes in the story is Luke Skywalker is discovering Princess Leia as being kidnapped like Darth Vader, unless she's going to be potentially executed so that Luke is going to have to go and rescue. And after discovering this, also finds that his parents, he is adopted parents. His aunt and uncle had been killed by imperial stormtroopers. And after this point, these events unfolded. There is no way for loop to return to the world he was in before. And this is a very important aspect of the inciting incident in Act One of the story. In any three-act structure. In fact, one is taken up maps twenty-five percent of the story act two is going to take up 15% tool must be in the middle of the story. The middle, and it's about complication. And act one, Luke Skywalker has been sent off by the inciting incident into his adventures in the world. He makes a series of complications which increase the tension of the story. It looks I walk is taken off in the millennium folk and what then happens, they need to get away from typewriters which are chasing them. So I look on hand firing laser bolts to escape the Thai fighters. Once they've done that, they need to escape from Lightspeed. This of course produces another complication that the engines in the right format to escape once Luke Skywalker and Han Solo on Millennium Falcon have escaped, the typewriters that are chasing them and made it to into hyper space. They arrive at what was the planet older around which was their destination, only to find yet another complication. It has been blown up and then now in the midst, It's rubble. They then encounter course, the Death Star, which tracks as the mean with its tractor beams. Now further complication that trapped on board the Death Star and they must find a way to escape. The complications continue throughout Act to this point, however, you reach the pivotal event within any second act of a three-act structures story. This is the turning point of the story of the inciting incident. Fru, the hero, into a world of adventure. The turning point is the point of which young hero luke Skywalker, in this case, takes control of the situation they find themselves in. Previous to this point, luke is being reactive, is being led by Obi-Wan Kenobi. He's been led by hand solo. The turning points in the movie, luke discovers with the help of A2 D2, the princess layer is being held a boulder depth stock and that he's going to need to break his promise to everyone cannot be too white. The loading dock of the backstop. In fact, he's going to need to take a decision himself and go off to Princess Leia. And this is the turning point while loop goes from a young adult on his way to becoming Jedi Knight, his first step towards becoming a true hero who is making decisions of his own accord. And it's this turning point that gives act two of three-act structure. It's dynamic power. Following the done, the turning point, the complications of act to continue. In a very long story, you can continue the complications for as long as you want. This is a technique that storytellers can use to control the length of the stories that they're telling. But it's most important just to understand that this is the dynamic of Act two. It's about the introduction of complications. These complications very often complies with the law of rising force. So each complication one after another, will be more important and more difficult for the hero to overcome. So at the very end of Act two, the Millennium Falcon is still caught in the loading dock. All the depth stone. And the complication that have toward the KM is Darth Vader himself, the ultimate challenge on board. The depth still enforced keeps the dynamic tension of act to building pose long as you continue to raise the stakes on your hero. Act three, the three-act structure. This is the resolution. Whatever forces in the story, well, unleashed, enact one whenever counts we've put in place in the exposition or whatever was adventure was begun with the inciting incident. It's an act, three of them, all of these elements resolved. The case of Star Wars. This happens for a series of events which also in, unfolds in every third act of every free act structure which has ever been written. And these are the crisis climax. And the resolution is this series of events which give act through its basic shape. So the crisis, the hero of the story is faced with a crisis which you can't escape from. It has to confront it. He can't run away from it. He can't dodge it, as he might have done with the earlier complications of act to install walls. This is the appearance of the deaf star at the rebel base and it's going to destroy the moon that the rebel base is on. And in so doing, it's going to forever end. The rebellion against the evil empire, which Luke as a heroine must bring down. Luke has no choice but to join the ex swing Star fighter pilots and assault the depth stone before it can blow up the Rebel Base. This in our crisis, climax and resolution series AS the climax, which is the climactic battle. Install is between the x doing fighter pilots and the depth Stein as the Death Star is closing around the planet, coming within firing range of the Rebel Base. Luton completes the final climactic Trench Run, and it's one of the most famous scenes in film history as he zooming along the trench, the other X-linked fighter pilots are being blown left and right away from him. Crucially, Darth Vader, the dark lord, who must be involved in the crisis climax, resolution of the story is flying along behind Luke and we have to famous line in the force is strong in swan, which prefigures the big revelation of Empire Strikes Back. The climax of the story of the third act reaches its absolute pinnacle. As Luke turns off his battle computer and uses the force to fire his photon torpedoes into the heart of the Death Star and blow up the monstrous demon, which is what the deaf star represents, installs that is trying to destroy the young heroes community. In this case, the Rebel Base is all massively archetype or storytelling. Following the climax, the third part of our three-part of all three-act structure. That completes the third act is the resolution. We wouldn't be happy just with seeing the death star blown up. We need to see the hero rewarded. And that's literally what happens at the end of Star Wars. In a special metal ceremony. The heroes who defeated the Death Star, Luke Skywalker, Hans Solo, anti-tobacco as well are all awarded metals by Princess Leia. And this also resolves many of the character relationships in the story in the kind of simple way that the heroic storytelling and Star Wars requires. 24. Acts, sequences, scenes and beats: The three-act structure is without doubt, one of the most popular and most effective ways to structure a story in almost any medium with a beginning, middle, and end the ACT, one of exposition at to a complication and actually have resolution. The special events that exist within his story, the inciting incident, the turning point, the crisis, climax and resolution. You're given as a storyteller, very clear structure around which to shape absolutely any kind of story you might wish to. Within this act structure. There are other elements which very worth considering. The a3x also contains a series of sequences. Sequence is a set of events which tell you a small story within the story. In act one, exposition act installs. We have the opening sequence of the rebel beryllium Cruiser being pursued by star destroy across space and captured the rebel plans and Princess Leia being kidnapped by dark beta. This is a sequence of events. There are half a dozen distinct events within sequence. We then move on to the next sequence of the two Androids, R2D2 and C3PO, escaping onto tattooing and that early adventures and meeting the jawless. We then have the next sequence we're introduced. By organizing, storing into the sequential sequences. You write clearly. There might be reasons to do this, but if you chose instead to jump between these events, to jump kelp between them, you'd have a much less clear a storytelling for your audience to engage with. The sequences are very important. Within each sequence of scenes. We discussed scenes in the token events earlier in the course. Each scene is one event within your story. If we think about the sequence where Luke Skywalker heads is the deserts of tattooing. Often A2 D2, who's runaway to try and beginning his mission to rescue princesses like you're trying to track down Ben Kenobi. We have a series of scenes. We have Luke shooting off across the desert and his land speeder. We have looped being attacked by the monsters in the desert. We have Luke meeting ben Kenobi for the first time and we have loop being given his father's lightsaber by Ben Kenobi. This series of distinct seems forms our sequence. And as we considered in the last store, each scene has a major gap in expectation, a major turning point within it. And it's those turning points the really, really formed the compelling heart of each scene, another basic building blocks of our story. However, the structure goes down a level further. Each event in the story, each scene is composed from beats. The beats are the units of behavior usually expressed in dialogue. The arch changed between the characters. So if we take the single scene installs where Ben Kenobi and Luke Skywalker, uh, discussing Luke Skywalker's father who Ben Kenobi claims to have known a number of beats of behavior paths between the characters. Luke is intensely curious about Ben Kenobi and then intensely curious about his father. Then on the other hand, knows a great deal about Luke, knows in fact that Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader and is links farmer, but he doesn't reveal the bunny is implicit in each beat. On each beat, usually expressed through dialogue. It might also be key imagery. It might also be behavior, a look, conform, a single beat in a story. Each beat is an exchange between the characters and the beats of a smallest unit of storytelling. But very, very important to consider because when you're trying to write great dialogue, it's about the beats. It's about what goes on set between the characters. It's about the motivation of each kind to the expressed in the beats. It's about what each beat is trying to achieve. Because nobody ever says anything without a goal that they're trying to achieve for language. And ultimately your story, whilst it is an act structure, whilst it contains sequences and lost, it contains pivotal scenes. You're at, your story is long. Set of beats, is exchanges of human interaction. There's a lot more that can be said within the three-act structure, within any other structure, bounce. Kaleidoscopic structure of acts, sequences, scenes, and beats. We've really only just touched upon it here. But they are key to understanding the structure of absolutely any story that you'll attempting to tell. One very common variation on the three-act structure is a structure which allows EU slightly more scope to develop and grow your characters and to tell stories of a slightly longer period of time. And crucially to give your characters more emotional growth and trigger more emotion in your audience as well. The three-act structure tends to be devoted to shorter stories which are happening over a short period of time. The adventure. In the first Star Wars movie, a new hub, takes place over only a few days. And the three-act structure is ideal for that baby. We wanted to tell a story over a longer period of time. We often swap to a five act structure. To give you a good example of five-act structure, want to think for a moment about another Hollywood movie which is quite similar to Star Wars. When you actually think about some of the details of character and plot. That's the movie Gladiator starring Russell Crowe, which many of you will have seen directed by Ridley Scott and amazing visually sometimes movie, but also amazing storytelling. Gladiator is the story of the general Maximus, who is the leader of the Roman armies as a null. He's just defeated the Germanic tribes and then he's made defender of Rome. And he's asked by the Emperor, He's very old near-death to return to Rome and to return it to being Republic. But before General maximus can do this, the son Commodus of the emperor assassinate the emperor and takes over the leadership of the Roman Empire. This is the setup, this is ax1. This is the exposition of Gladiator. Next one and a five-act story is much the same as that point in the three-act story. It's in the second act that the changes really begin to show. Instead of an act purely of complications, which leads the story swiftly through and takes the hair row to the third act of the resolution, the crisis climax resolution story and a five-act narrative. The second act is divided into three. These three acts each have a distinct mini story which they play out, which extends the length of time that the story is told over and gives more scope for the emotional impact of the story. This is because each act of an act structured story reverses, or in some cases, tens, the emotional journey of our protagonists to the central character in the story, then you only have two opportunities to reverse story on its axis. So when Star Wars loop finishes act one, actually in quite a low place, his adoptive family of being killed. He's on the run from the evil empire. But by the end of Act two, with all of its complications, he's triumphed already once I've adopted later. And he's escaped the deaf song taking princess layer weapon. So he's now in a point of triumph. Act three then takes him to his ultimate triumph. You have these reversals and extensions of the emotional challenges of the story. In a five-act story, you get an additional three opportunities to reverse or extend the character arc and the emotional challenge in the story. This is exactly what happens over the central free acts of Gladiator. Russell Crowe as the General maximus. He has at the end of act one being almost killed. His family had been murdered by the troops accommodates these left as a slave. We follow through act two, the story of the gladiator. As he trains his gladiator skills is already a competent fighter, as impressive as the audiences and the provinces of Rome. An act to climaxes wave Russell Crowe in a way again victorious, although there's an irony that he's now become a brutal murderer. The process and act three, the gladiator is taken to the new gladiatorial games in Rome. The great Colosseum, which was actually a little bit like the Greek theater behind me here. He achieves an even greater victory. He triumphs in a fight where he should've been killed. The Emperor Commodus has to enter the arena to face him down. And Russell Crowe is the gladiator, winds over the mob to his side. Across x 23, we have this great rise in the characters fortunes. Then in act four or the five act structure, this is entirely reversed. At four, shows us a plot against the emperor, political forces rallying to the sides of the gladiator. But this is all destroyed in the full factor the story. And in fact, Russell Crowe is then left lower than ever, a prisoner in chains to face the fifth and final act of the story, which takes again the structure of the resolution, the crisis climax resolution of the three-act or five-act structure. In which case in Gladiator, Russell Crowe facing off against the emperor Commodus and finally defeating him. And then the restitution of the Roman Republic. This five-act structure gives you as a storyteller, more opportunity, as I've been saying, to reverse the fortunes of the character, to extend the emotional challenges of the film and create a story which runs over a longer period of time and has ultimately more force and perhaps more ironic force filler, simple three-act structure of an adventure story. Like stones. 25. Alternate structures: Beyond react and five-act structure, there are a whole host of alternative narrative structures that you can apply to your stories. One of these comes from Japan. One way to think of it is as four act structure and it's cold in Japanese storytelling to shorten ket sue. Each of the syllables in custodian cashew key showed kept them. Su stands for one of the four traditional acts of Japanese storytelling. And these work a little differently to the five X stories that we've been discussing. If you want to see an example of Kisho from Katsura. Once it was, they used it very often where the accountants of Charlie Brown and snooping. In fact, there are often used within cartoon structures, which is why they're very popular in Japanese storytelling. My cartoons are very common. Structure of construction. Cat suit is less dependent on conflict than the three or five acts structures of Western drama. Instead, it uses contrast, a twist in storytelling. So for instance, in the first act of the custodian gutsy structure, we might be introduced, introduced to the three daughters of a great emperor. And we're told a little story about the free daughters and how they enjoy hanging out in the emperor's gotten. The second act, we're showing the three daughters again. A little time has passed, and a small drama plays out between the three daughters. That's an, a pseudo who's interested in marrying them. Then in the full facts of custodian Katsura, we've run into an entirely different setting. Perhaps it's the steps of Mongolia and a Mongol Horde. And they ride around firing their bow and arrow people. Then in the full facts of Kisho concat. So we go back to the three daughters are degenerate and we're told that like a Mongol horde for three daughters also have bow and arrows, but they're not weapons. They are instead that iss, with which they fire terrible glances at young men who come to court them. And it's this contrast, different topics which can be expressed or in the polymorphs short story, or you can spend a whole play on this construct. Can't see structure is this contrast and this twist. The third act into the full facts which produce the irony which the custodian. So short share depends upon. As well as the whole host of alternative narrative structures. It's possible to employ the three-act structure which we've been exploring through this talk in a variety of different forms and mediums. We've been discussing it in terms of film and particularly Hollywood film-making, which such a powerhouse of storytelling today. But it's also the most basic structure of television, ALL storytelling. If you think about any of the currently very popular HBO television shows, Damon froze, The Sopranos Band of Brothers, or the currently very popular Mr. robot. They use the three-act storytelling structure as well. But instead of telling just one story over the course of a film, they tell a series of stories in episodes, usually ten episodes to a season. And each of those episodes is a complete three-act story. If you take a single episode of Game of Thrones, at the beginning, we will have the exposition of the key characters who are gonna be involved in that episode of Game of froms, there will be an inciting incident. The inciting incident, well, for us into a second act, which we'll industry says here is complications to the story. We will then have a crisis climax and resolution in a third act, resolving the story of that episode. And this is all done typically in around 50 minutes for a standard episode of HBO stone television. In addition, there will also be one or two subplots. And each of those subplots also has a complete three-act structure, but may only be shown in one or two scenes. Whereas as we felt about with the filmic three-act structure, each act has a few dozen scenes and those are divided into sequences. This episodic storytelling structures very popular because it allows you to explore wide range of character interactions and even more so than film. The very popular HBO format storytelling that we had at the moment is all about exploring the interactions between a wide variety of characters. And of course, with a three-act structure. In every episode, over ten episodes, you have a huge range of interactions between the characters that you can explore it, what, it's what makes a show like Game of Thrones. So popping up. We've been using the story Star Wars to explore the three-act structure in this top. Whereas I had to think about the story of Gladiator to explore five-act structure. Both of these stories are classic examples of actual lecture in storytelling. Also classic examples of what is one of the single most famous narrative structures of the last century. Definitely, as I suggested to you at the beginning of the talk, it's employed in all kinds of storytelling throughout different medias. Is the structure of Harry Potter, is the structure of the matrix. It's also, it starkly the structure of many religious myths. The story of Jesus, the story of Buddha, the story of Moses. It might surprise you to find that these are all in some ways the same story. To think about what the story is, I want to introduce you to the idea of the monomyth monument is very famous now you may well have heard of it. And it was developed by the comparative mythology. Joseph Campbell. Campbell became famous for the 1940's and then it's the 1980's. So thinking very widely about the Apologies at the world and as a comparative mythology, switch was a GOP invented. And he was the first one. He considered what all of these mythologies had in common. He fought not only about religious mythologies, as I've mentioned, the story of Jesus, biblical stories of the Old Testament story of Moses, story of Buddha, all of which came from very different cultures. But he considered as well, the plays of ancient Greece, which were played in fetters might be unfair to behind me, which were considered by Aristotle in his poetics. He realized that all of these stories contained many of the same structural and mythic elements. And he called these the monomyth. Because in the monomyth found the same elements and the thing characters repeating over and over again. He wrote about them in a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, suggesting that whilst all these heroes B they Hercules or Jesus or faces in Greek myth, Neo in the Matrix today or Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, or any of the heroes that we considering, while they all appear different on the surface, underneath, they're all playing out the same archetype story, which is the monomial. The hero of a Thousand Faces, outlines what these monogamy is. And it became very important to storytellers free the 20th century. What I meant as a number of stages, the foam on a myth has 17 stages and all are not going to run through today, but there's certain elements. And the monomer, one of these elements that appears very early in any story. The call to adventure. Young hero who finds himself often, often feels alienated from the world around them. In some way receives a call to adventure. In the hero of the Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell looks at the example of the golden ball, the princess and the golden ball, and the princess has a golden ball, and she's playing with her in her garden. She tosses the golden ball into the pond and it sinks into the pond where she cannot return it but from the pond, frog and he brings the golden ball, wave him in. The frog, invites the princess too, leap into the pond. And this is called to adventure. It's the same call to adventure that Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, where he's invited by Obi-Wan Kenobi to join him on an adventure to go into the galaxy and to fight evil empire. It's a very similar call to adventure that was received by Neo in the Matrix, who is in his apartment alone searching for clues the matrix when there's a knock at the door and a young woman with a tattoo of a white rabbit on her shoulder, which is indeed a nod to another call to adventure, Alice in Wonderland, when Alice spots the white rabbit who's running out of time and it leaps down a hole in the ground that she then follows. This is Joseph Campbell's point across all these stories which St, cosmetically very different. We have the same structural elements. The call to adventure is very often followed by the refusal of the coal. The hero scared of what might confront them on the adventure, refuses to take up the cool This happens to Luke Skywalker installs, he refuses bank and obese invitation. He says A-Master town homes in the farm. Only to find that at the farm, his adoptive parents have been very sadly slaughtered by imperial stone frequency, which then frozen on the cultural adventure. Another element in the monomyth is the crossing of the threshold. Skywalker crosses the threshold when he takes off the Millennium Falcon into space. There's no turning back at this point, he can't go back to farm anymore. These steps in the monomyth continue. You enter in the midpoint of the story, the belly of the beast, which is the darkest point of a hero's adventure that again install wars, the belly of the basis encountered when having just rescued princess layer from sale of board the Death Star, the heroes shoot a hole in the wall and they jumped down a chute into a trash compactor. They literally find themselves in the belly, the belly of the beast that they're fighting against, which is filled with trash, rubbish. And whether when I crushed by the trash compactor. All of these elements in the morning. Again and again, the temporary storytelling. Joseph Campbell would argue that they appear over and over again because they are mythic in nature and because they tap into something deep within our human psychology. And I agree with that. I think that's very much the case. And this is why we find these so compelling. But there is another reason why these monomeric elements pop up again and again in contemporary storytelling. And it's here that I want to come to my cheeky suggestion for you as storytellers in how to employ structure in your stories. Because structure can be complex and trying to invent your own narrative structure from scratch is extremely difficult, like building a cathedral, like making a car. You're going to find that the structure you use is very similar in many ways to the timeless evolved structure that hundreds of other creators have contributed to over decades or centuries. You might adapt this structure. You might twist it to become your own. But ultimately as a storyteller, you're employing structures that are larger than yuan. Very good example of this is the screenwriter and director of Star Wars, George Lucas. It became a tremendously famous and wealthy in creating Star Wars. Leukocytes, inspiration for the Star Wars movies where the pulp television series like Flash Gordon. But he had watched himself as a child. He also loves samurai movies, which is where the sword fighting Elements of Style was come from. But none of this was holding together as a cohesive story until he found the work of Joseph Campbell. George Lucas read The Hero with a Thousand Faces as a college student. And he applied it in his early career as a Hollywood filmmaker. And not only did he use it, it was then adopted by dozens, in fact, hundreds of very successful filmmakers and storytellers across dozens of different mediums to tell many of the most compelling stories of the 20th century. This ultimately is why these monomorphic elements appear again and again in films, novels, video games, plays as well throughout the later decades of the 20th century and still now in the 21st century. My suggestion to you as a creator of stories, that particularly when you're starting out, that you should steal really good narrative structures from other stories. Stories that you love. Stories that you can analyze, stories that you can break down in the way that we've looked at stories like Star Wars and Gladiator today as examples of three-act five extraction. In the way that we've been thinking about Kisho can Katsura for act structure, traditional Japanese story. Ultimately, along with the other tools and the retro good story, is the absolute key to creating compelling stories. On a professional level. If you take any storyteller that you really lobby at filmmaker, a novelist, playwright, I am absolutely 100% certain that when you look at your stories, you'll see that borrowing, which I would call stealing, but stealing in a good way. Dramatic structures of the kind that we have been exploring today in sick of our senate tubes for the rhetoric of story. Please come back for the seventh and final talk in which we will be exploring questions. 26. Catharsis, Kairos and Emotion: So what are we have for today? This says, Oh my God, Yes, absolutely. Hello and welcome. This is the final talk in the rhetoric of story. Cause I have been all over the world to give these talks. And now I'm back where I began on the island of Bali, an island and then culture with a fantastic history of storytelling itself. Hello. Hello, and welcome to the rhetoric of story and to the final told in our coasts IPO, we've been proved an exciting series of talks looking at the fundamentals of compelling and engaging storytelling. And when we talk about story here, we're talking about story in any form. So this might be writing a novel, making a film. If you're writing scripts for the stage, it might also be stored in a variety of other settings. Where else do we find story? We find story in advertising, every single advertisement you see a little miniature story. We find story in business writing. If you're trying to communicate what it is that your business does to the world. In fact, stories adjust tremendously important. Our whole world runs on stories. How do we understand what's going on in the world? We turn on the news. The news tells us stories about the world. How do you understand the country that we live in? We know about the history, the story of our country, and that's how we understand. How do we know What's going on? An origin lies? Well, we tell a story about our lives and this is the core of the rhetoric of story. It's about understanding what makes these stories, what, what makes them compelling. I won't make some the massive what creates the effect that we offer a time inside the story that we're watching what we're being told. At the heart of the rhetoric, that story or seven foundational elements of story. We have in the previous Tok. For the first six of these, we've considered the idea of change. There is no story without a true and profound change around which the story tons. And this might be a huge dramatic change in what it might be a wall won or lost by one side or another. It can also be a much smaller and more intimate change. It might be about simple things, how we grow up, how we go from a young person to an adult, how we achieve success in the world or how we grow owned. These are the changes that story is truly about. Following change. What is at the heart of every story? A cell. There's a person, a hero, a protagonist that we follow at the heart of the story. They self for his eyes and is incenses that we pick up only the details of the story. What is around the self? There are others. There are the characters who surround the hair at the heart of the story. These others tend to fall into archetypes, the friends that helped the enemies and villains that get in our way off to these others in the story, we have conflict, the forces of antagonism, which make the hero's journey, story we're telling HOD and conflict written. And again, these might be external forces like an old man fighting in the seed pool of fish back to the coast. But they might be in tunnel like the internal forms of resistance that we face every day is to get up and go to work or look after our kids. These first four are the engine of the story. Following that, uh, two more, the external shape of the story that we're telling events. Every story might have a series of events. And these events Follow order of cause and effect. One event leads to another and the telling of the story. The events that the story is made off, off formed into a structure. The structure of the story is bigger than the story itself. We find structures in the story that we love and admire. The most common. The three-act structure, which takes most plays near the old Hollywood films, many novels and other forms of storytelling as well. The beginning, middle, and end of the story, the opening exposition, the central conflict. And the final resolution of the story. These are the six elements of compelling storytelling that we've examined so far. Today we're gonna be talking about the seventh and final foundational elements of storytelling. This is two story as the ability to fly and jump over tall buildings is to Superman. The seven of these elements is a secret superpower of storytelling. That's why we've left it until last. What is the seventh of the seven foundational and storytelling? It is emotion. Let's think back briefly. The great Greek philosophy that we started. These series of talks we have in the metric of storytelling. That is, Aristotle is writing about Greek feta. I restore defined one quality of bubble else that we are seeking in a storytelling experience. Not quantity he called catharsis. I can phosphorus is quite simple to understand and it's really about emotion. Startle, Illustrator could phosphates with a simple story of a man fighting a lion. And let's consider this for a moment as Aristotle did. If you were really fighting or possibly running from a lion, you would feel intense via the emotion of fear, which completely dominate your entire experience of the weld. For that time, you wouldn't be able to think. You'd be having a very intense emotional experience, but you'd have no opportunity to consider it. Much later. You might think about what it might be like to fight a lion. This consideration would be entirely logical. You wouldn't really understand the emotions at the half of the experience. So Aristotle said, story. The quality of falses give us the ability to experience both of these at the same time. Whilst you're watching a play about umami fighting a lion, we feel the intense emotional experiences, but not so powerfully that we aren't able also to think and consider what it is about this experience that is so powerful and possibly transformative. I'm further combination of logical thinking, mind and emotional feeling, mind, wet, able to reach a moment of catharsis, are able to purge ourselves of the fear that we experience when considering the idea of being eaten a line, when considering other fearful ideas. Able to package off self of the emotion of fear that we feel when we think about being eaten by a lion. And this experience of catharsis is tremendously valuable because we experience fear all the time. Experience other emotions like love, hatred. These emotional experiences drive us through onlines. And story helps us to better understand them through the effect. So cold, cold, cold faucets. Greek culture had a number of ways of considering emotion and i o, bound up with the idea of time. The Greeks had two words that time. One was Cronos, and this was where we get word from chronological time. This is how we generally considered a time to die. That there are a series of events that follow each other, one after another. And of course cry notes has a major part of planes storytelling. The Greeks also had another way of considering time, and this was the idea of Cairo. Cairo was emotional time. And you understand this. I'm sure because you will all have had the experience of feeling an intense emotion. Instead of experiencing time flowing normally around you, you become more internalized. You feel the emotion, and you remember all of the other times that you have also experienced this emotion. So perhaps the emotion of loneliness and you'll find yourself as an adult alone somewhere in the world. You remember the time that as a child you were perhaps separate from your parents for the first time you felt intense aloneness, that emotional experience. And this is kairos. This is the way that we perceive the world through our emotions. In fascinating match with our scientific understanding of both time and emotion today. We find that for the study of the brain, for neuroscience, and for a while understanding of human personality and behavior free psychology. We also consider two different folds of time and emotion and experienced. One of these is logical symbolic mind, which understands things rationally. The other is our emotional and social consciousness that understands things for our emotions. And this is really hard wired into our brain as a part of our brain which evolved to think logically and as a part of our brain, which evolved to give us information about the world emotionally. Crucially, this information is tied to other people. It's tied to our sense of self and sense of safety for ourselves. And it's tied to sense a family. It's evolutionary time to try and to the society that we live in. For all of us at storytellers, this is a fascinating insight and fail to crafted story. Why is this? Because if, as Aristotle says, we are trying to use logic and reason in our storytelling for the effect of catharsis. Then to create emotion in our audience, we need to tie it to people, to relationships, to family, to our tribal identity, and to society. We can see in stories that this is allow, deep and intense emotion is created in the audience of how do we create intense, powerful emotions in a reader's, in our audiences? And they say is the single biggest challenge that we face as storytellers in the fantastic world of young adult fiction. They call Creating emotions in a story, the fields, because you feel it, you feel the story is trying to tell you. You feel the events as they unfold. You feel the emotions of the characters that you are following. But why and how these emotions triggered in us. What we discover from both the Greek idea of kairos, from modern understanding of the social and emotional relationship. In our brain, the strong emotions are triggered by relationships to other characters in the stories I've given you an example. We find ourselves on a bus and the bus is going at 50 miles an hour down the street, but it's going to blow up if it goes below 50 miles an hour, which is the key idea from the film speed or county reads, this idea on its own. Isn't particularly emotional. But if we know that grandmother is on the bus or children are on the bus, somebody that pretty close to the story we have learned for love as a character is on the bus, then we will fail. Deep emotion about the experience. Through looking at the core relationships are the characters in our story that we generate rarely powerful emotional experiences for our audiences. And this is tremendously useful to know. Let's think about an example of this. Let's go back to the story that we started, the rhetoric of story course with Jack and the Beanstalk. You will know and love this story will add its children. It is to recap the story of a young man Jack, who ultimately has to climb of Beanstalk, FISA giant and steal certain valuable objects from that giant. This story has been remade a number of times in recent years. Blockbuster Hollywood movie with a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. And it launched in fail to tell the story in a compelling way. Why was that? Was because the very skilled team making the story, however, forgot the core emotion that drives readers for the story that is centuries old and is passed from one culture to another. What is the emotion? Let's think about this. What is that in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk? But my insight and motion in its audience. Jack and the Beanstalk is a story told for young people, young men, young women, who are faced with the experience of growing up. I'm a very specific part of that experience. Looking after your parents, who is there, who is the parent and Jack and Beanstalk, the mother. Jack's mother. It's the emotional experience of looking after your mother that really drives Jack and the Beanstalk. Tell the story in this way. Again a little bit earlier. There's a young woman, she is pregnant. Father is furious about this and frozen out onto the street. She's harmless. She traveled across the land. She has the baby. She has a young boy. She has a baby that she's looking off to. She eventually finds a terrible job of drudgery. A small house. They're living in poverty and chiggers, chiggers sick. And eventually in desperation she taunts a jacket, says, Jack, I need you to be responsible and be umami to take our cow to the local market and sell it for money. Otherwise, we're not going to have food and I'm just too sick to do this. Now, Jack, for the entire story, for every single event, is driven by this emotional desire. Is the desire that every member of the audience can deeply empathize with the need to look after your elderly parents responsibility. This is the motion at the toward Jack and the Beanstalk. And it grows from this relationship, the relationship between Jack and his mother. And it is the social and emotional parts of our brain and consciousness that allow us to feel these emotions very, very deeply. This is really important for us to work with as storytellers in many ways they say is the most important tool that we can draw upon. 27. Tools for shaping emotion: Any story that we might choose to tell. A novel regardless of the format, whether it's a tiny one minute or an empathic HBO Television say rates. We need to ask ourselves, what is the emotional experience that this story is exploring? Because any story in any format, regardless of the length, is ultimately exploring. One singular emotional experience, however complicated the story might seem however many characters, it might have many different plot lines. It might involve just one key emotion. There might be other emotional experience says woven for it, the compliments it. But there is just one key emotional experience, driving story and the most important question we can all of any story and his walk fat emotional experience is, and you can really take any story and one of the best ways to understand is to think about the emotional experience at the heart of the story is Pride and Prejudice. Again, another story we talked about in the course, the rhetoric of story. Pride and Prejudice, is about a young woman who is he Bennett, who ultimately marries. That's important part of the story, but what's the emotional experience? And often they say it's about falling in love. It's the emotional experience of love. Star Wars. Seemingly that could be no more opposite story than Pride and Prejudice. Yet something that it shares is that there's an emotional experience at the heart of the story. In the case of Star Wars and Luke Skywalker, who defeats the evil empire, it's the most experience of becoming a hero. Then it becoming responsible for your own heroic actions, heroism. That's a powerful, powerful emotional experience. It's not always possible to put the emotional experience of a complicated story into a few simple words like folding enough the story exists to help us explore this emotional experience. If the story is going to be powerful, if it's going to attract an audience. If it's gonna be a story that lasts for a long time and the way that Jack and the Beanstalk has lasted, then that emotional experience must be there. And the mole archetype or more universal, that emotional experience is, the more people will engage with a telling of the story. Let's take store example. Great piece of contemporary, hugely successful storytelling. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, both bestselling series of novels and here's a successful blockbuster movie. What is the singular emotional experience at the heart of the Hunger Games on how is it created. Gans are about a young woman, continous Aberdeen, and she lives in a kind of dystopian future where small nation is rule by a capital city with great dictator. She lives in one of the outlying regions from the capsule. This is a very interesting, She's going to, as the title suggests, gone and fight in the Hunger Games. That is a very interesting device for the story, but this is not what creates the emotion of the story. The emotional focus of the story is introduced in the first paragraph. And it's catalyses younger sister prim. This relationship. Thinking back to social emotional brain and it's triggered, I can't say it's relationship, whether young sister, who she needs to protect. Throughout three novels, full films, depending on how you count them. Cannabis is driven by the emotional need to protect her younger sister. And we, as the audience, driven because we deeply fail, these emotions are protective nuts to a younger sibling or to anybody who we are challenged to protect. This is the singular emotional experience and a half and a Hunger Games, and it feeds through a number of other questions for which the story is told. One of these, and again, you'll find this a nearly old stories. I'd go so far as to say, Oh stories, even if it might be unusual in some of them. And this is the dramatic question. We can't just write about emotions in the abstract. We have to have something concrete at the heart of the story. We can't just write about falling in love. We can't just write about heroism. We can't just write about being a protection. We need a dramatic. Question. The dramatic question is the concrete hot to the story? The Hunger Games for dramatic question arises in the first chapter, varies. A drawing of lots in a village where Cantonese slaves and the lots are for the Hunger Games. Cantonese ultimately volunteers to replace Prim, who she is emotionally driven to protect countless volunteers to join the Hunger Games. And this introduces the dramatic question at the heart of the story. Well, cabinets survive. The Hunger Games. Pride and Prejudice. This is a story about love. The dramatic question is about marriage. Early in the story we introduced and Mr. Darcy and the relationship between the central character, Mr. Dorsey. The dramatic question is, well, Elizabeth Bennett ended up marrying Mr. Dawson on all the events in the story relate to this cool dramatic questioning in Star Wars, the dramatic question is introduced in the first act. And it's quite simply, will Luke Skywalker be able to blow up the Death Star? We've had the plants introduced, we have Luke introduced. We know ultimately that this complex between Luke from a deck star is going to happen. And it's the dramatic question which Dr. Star Wars and it's the reason why you spend two hours absolutely nailed. You'll see watching that story. Once we have the dramatic question in place, however, we then need to divide our story into elements that are each emotionally compelling in their own way. And we do this by introducing tension and suspense. Consider for awhile with these two things are closely related that often confused. Many writers sadly, don't know how to work in the middle, and they are absolutely essential to compelling storytelling. Tension is to give it its simplest example. There is a bomb about the goal. Let's use a famous example. There is a bone on a public bus, and the bus has to keep going at above 55 miles an hour in order for the bomb not to explode. This is the movie Speed recounting Reeves and Dennis Hopper. Very successful movie in its day, full of tension. This is what the tension tons on. Well, the bus explode and then the tension is then moved into other areas. Lighter attention is extremely important. Stories have one form attention after another. For instance, in the Hunger Games. Throughout the after hungry diners themselves were given various forms of tension. Initially, Cantonese is training and there are certain goals that she has to hit to move through the story. These are old tents. But what gives them suspense? Once again, that important what emotion? When we take a story event that he's tense. And we introduce emotion and the social and emotional relationships. The other people that family members, the tribe members create emotion than us. This is how we convert tension into suspense. This is how Alfred Hitchcock, the great filmmaker, defined suspense. That suspense is tension plus emotion. This is incredibly important to understand as storytellers, let's look at that example. Speed. It's tense where we know you're about to explode. We experience suspense when we begin to phone the characters on the bus and Wayne County raise as the heroic off duty police officer falls in love with a young woman who was on the bus. This introduces suspense and it's these emotional inducing social relationships to create the suspense in the story. Let's look. An example of Star Wars were introduced to attention because we know that Luke has to fight the empire and delta theta. The tension becomes suspense when the character Princess Leia is introduced. And we know that layer is a princess. She's beautiful, she's the archetype of the innocent who needs to be rescued. And that Luke Skywalker is on a mission to rescue us from the moment that he sees the small holographic finger being projected from A2 D2. Base conversion of tension into Suspense. Pretty emotional relationship. Again, makes the story compelling. We also see install wars, that the tension in suspense package it out for the story. Initially we have Luke's mission to escape from tattooing and then to go to the desktop than the tension on both the depth star is transformed into me to escape the dextran, to liberate the Millennium Falcon from the ship. And then the tension and suspense or taken on to the conflict against the deaths don't. Most stories that are compelling. Going to hold an audience finding length per time. Have two pretty events and structure of the story. We both tension and suspense to complement the singular emotional experience at the heart of the story. The dramatic question, which is driving us fruit in concrete terms, attention and suspense, which a packet it out for the story. Great storage has will also employ mystery. There's another question that we put to our story. What don't we know? At the beginning of the story, we are desperate to discover what is the mystery. At the heart of our story. The most common form of mystery by phone in any form of storytelling is a dead body. It's such a common device that it names the whole mystery genre. This is most famously probably written by Agatha Christie. Almost all the packets Christy stories start in a very similar way. We're introduced to a group of characters and there's a detective among them, which might be MS. Mapo lo que borrowed. And this detective is then faced with a mystery when a dead body is discovered on the Orient Express, for instance. For the moment that we discovered the dead body at the heart of the mystery story with given the mystery. Who killed this person? How would I care why were they killed? These questions that relate to the mystery drive the story along. One of today's great storytellers, JJ Abrams, the crater of lost. I though, sorry about rebooting the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. Talks about mystery as a box. Mystery boxes. If I come onto a stage and I'm holding a box for the whole time I'm on stage. The audience will be wondering whether I asked him to, not what's in the box. This is how we think about mysteries, what's in the bulks. When you introduce anything unexplained in your story, it sets up a mystery story, Star Wars, very early on in the movie which hold about the force. But we don't know what the fullest is. This is a mystery. This is why later on in the style was stronger. When George Lucas explains the fullest sense kind of magnetic creatures called metta chlorines. He completely destroyed the mystery that was at the heart of the story, and he almost destroyed his own very great story in the process, mysteries already really profoundly important. Again, when we think about stole with this mystery of who aes dot Beta, it's very, very important storytelling. This is also a great example of another one of the techniques that we use to shape the emotions of your audience for your storytelling experience. Saul was introduces the character, adopt bait are also introduces the character of Luke Skywalker. And in doing this, it gives us one of the greatest setups in storytelling history. In a setup, we introduce one or more small details in the story that when they were introduced, same, almost irrelevant to the story which hold Ali on Install wards. The Luke's father was killed by a dog bite him. He's given the lightsaber that belonged to his father. This is one of the great moments of inheritance in any story telling saga. But they're setting up the great revelation that won't come until the end of the second stall. What was maybe four hours or more screen time. When we find out in the famous words, Luke, I am your father. The Delphi to, as indeed Luke's father. Mind, goes back for all of the details that were set up for the two films that proceeded that lumen. This invokes a tremendous emotional response in us. In any story that we're working on, these tiny details set up the lighter emotional revelation. One of the subtlest balanced folds. Emotional shaping that we can utilize in any form of story. You can see set-up introduced in a slightly more emotionally satellite in Pride and Prejudice, The Story of Elizabeth Bennett, miss a dossier and the dramatic question of, well they married. Because throughout the story, we're told that these tight as height each other. They suffer. As the title of the story suggests, from pride and from prejudice towards one another. But we're also given time effort, details, but the audience will enjoy interpreting for the lighter setup that in fact, these characters are in love and they have been enough throughout the entire novel. Again, this is brilliant emotional storytelling because the tiny details that set up this lecture, emotional revelation, create really profound emotion in your audience. These are the questions that we use to shape the emotional experience of any story that we might choose to tell. What's the singular emotional experience, the heart of the story, which is the dramatic question with which we're providing the concrete detail to the story proceeds. How do we deploy and divide tension? And it's Big Brother suspense throughout our storytelling. And how do we put tiny little set-ups interop story, which gives us the big revelation Lecture on in the storytelling. 28. Emotion and the seven foundations of story: Let's think more about the idea of motion by applying it to a simple idea. Restoring. Not only are we going to think about emotion, the seventh pops the retroactive story whilst doing this, we're also going to bring in all of the earlier six. We're going to review the whole thing. For example, of one story ideas. Let's take the idea from Aristotle. The classic idea of a man fighting and lion seems almost too simple. Just had a story about that. There's a tremendous story in their story. You could write it as and all that you can make as a film. You can produce even as a ten hour HBO television series if you wanted to. All begins with the idea of a man fighting a lion. Once the emotional experience at the house of that story idea, when a cold, it must be fair. That's the emotion that we're going to experience when we're fighting line that we want to give to the audience in our story. Once we have that emotional experience, we need to dramatic question to go with it. And of course, the dramatic question in this story is, well the man defeat the lion. Throughout the course of the story, we're gonna becoming bank. That dramatic question, will the man to fit the line? That gives us the seven parts of the rhetoric of story. The emotion, emotional experience at the heart of our story. Let's go back all the way to the beginning to number one, the first time into the rhetoric of story. Change. What's the change? At the heart of this story? We have an external change, the two feet, ultimately of the lion. We know already that from the beginning of the story that's going to happen. The lines gonna be defeated. This is the external, the external change that we're following. But what's the internal change? Faces at the baffled with fear? This is what Sal could type all about. The story of a man flight to Lyon is the, in this story, we see our own battles with fear. Whether it's a battle as a child because we scattered going to school or bathroom as an adult because we're scared to go into work. These are the fears that we face and they represented archetype in this battle of a man against the lion. We have the change in place. Number two, the self at the heart of his story. Man. That's too generic. Let's say he's a warrior. He's a tribal warrior. He's an a starting age, has his spirit. He sees a wild and dangerous weld around him. He's going to use this single weapons spear to fight the lion. This is the self, the heart of the story. Now we have details coming in. Number three. Once we have the self, we have the elbow. But efficient as a Tribal Warrior, we know he must have a tribal elders, other warriors, whites, and children, other people surrounding him. We know that there's an antagonist in the story the lion man is finding. We also want to introduce an emotional focus. Let's have a child, a child in the tribe, who the man must protect from the line. Now we're really starting to tell a great story. Once we have the chain, the cell, the others in place, we have conflict. This story is always telling itself. At this point. We have the Tribal Warrior, we have the child who needs to protect and we have the external conflict. The line, there's also an internal conflict, His own, they asked come over, overcome his fear, to go out and fight the line. In this way. This gives us the engine of our story. Now, we have the next element or the rhetoric of storing. We're gonna move on to structure. What's the structure of the story? Let's take a three-act structure. We have to first act of the story, the exposition. We meet the Tribal Warrior. We meet the child who's going to protect. We meet the tribe and the lines introduced. Then we move on to the second act. We're going to have a series of conflicts between the man I'm gonna lie on in protection of the child and there's gonna be rising action or growing drama as the story unfolds. And then finally, we know in a free act structure, we're going to have the final crisis climax, resolution of the story with a man finally finding and defeating the lion. And then of course, our marginal resolution, taking the child and returning whip him to the Trine. You see how much of the story we are already happy just by applying the basic elements of rhetoric story. We have. Events. We take our structure when we fill it in with specific events. We see an event between the man and the child. The child, let's say a is his daughter. They've gone hunting together. Now we have another event, the man teaching his child to hunt. This is taking us on a cause and effect. There's a huge storm. They're separated from the tribe and they're thrown out into the world myths. Now we know that there's going to be a key event. Other main countering the lion in the wilderness will also see farther events following the story. The first conflict with a lion, from which the man and the child runaways. Second conflict with a line. Whether man, he's desperately injured basic shelter in a cave. The cave. Let's have another character is an old wise man who imparts a secret to the Tribal Warrior about count fight, align with a secret alliance. Even more scared than the managers. Will turn implies further events in the leaders since the crisis climax resolution of the story, the final battle between the manual lion and then a key event returning to the tribe and a great party celebration at the return. Here we started with a simple idea and then fighting a lion. What we end up with is an archetype of story that we can tell in any format. Because we have applied the elements or the rhetoric. But story. The final one of these is the one that we've been discussing in this final torque. Emotion. How does emotion play? Furthest story otherwise, other elements, tension and suspense. How do you weight tension and suspense for this story and a final revelation, how is this set up? Earlier on? Perhaps we see a small scene earlier in the story of demand facing a fail. That's he's facing the file. The D cells at this story. We can add later. What I hope you take from it is how we can actually apply to record a quick story on how pivotal emotion is to that story. Because if we think back to the beginning of that process, was identifying the emotion at the heart of the story on what these elements, the Tribal Warrior, the young child, the lion, while they represented to the emotional experience, in this case, the round on Tolkien p-type. One thing away from this, it really should be. Whilst stories might be tremendously complex. Stories may come in many different formats from film, stage two books. Stories might have many different elements as there maybe about a change. They will have a self, they will have others. They will have a structure and they will have K events. What's really imperative in the story and what will Find your story for your audience is the emotion. At the heart of the story. You Italian. Fat brings the rhetoric of story to a close. I hope you have enjoyed it and you've got a lot from it. I've been Daniel Walter. Thank you very much.