Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them

There’s one overriding desire – to survive and prosper – yet each episode contains its own sub-goal

The less back-story a character has, the more readily an audience is able to identify with them

In the first act of any story a character is presented with a particular flaw or need. An inciting incident occurs towards, or at, the end of that first act, and the protagonist ‘falls down a rabbit hole’. In the second act, the character attempts to return to the world from which they came, whilst slowly learning that another equally important wor

When the shapes coalesce and evoke a truth from their association, the observer is rewarded with an overwhelmingly powerful experience.

All stories at some level are about a search for the truth of the subject they are exploring.

Something, confronted with its opposite, makes us recast our notion of that ‘something’ again.

Thus the ‘journey there; journey back’ structure exists in all archetypal stories. It’s either literally presented (Jack and the Beanstalk), hidden underneath the literal story as part of an internal change (E.T./The Godfather) or embodied as knowledge sought, retrieved and acted upon (Spooks).

Series characters can’t get to the end of their journey or the story is over, so their creators face the same dilemma as Hollywood but massively amplified. How do they create change in a world where their characters must always stay the same?

in both films the protagonists are dead and the audience is manipulated to think the opposite, before being exposed to reality in the final scenes.