The goal of this article is to teach you how to write any kind of feature article, or script by using a technique employed
by scriptwriters from Shakespeare to Pixar: reverse engineering. Aristotle outlined this technique in the ancient world. It remains at the center of the empirical method used by modern story scientists to analyze narratives today. However, if you're new here first sign up here.
Contents
Thinking Like
A ScreenwritersEffective Stories
The Benefits Of Reverse Engineering
Applying It Now !
This opening article cover the basic two-step process for applying reverse engineering:
First, identify as precisely as possible the unique emotion, mood, or other psychological effect generated by the story, or the script. Does the story generate wonder, suspense, romance, or something else?
Second, work back to isolate the unique blend of story
components that create this psychological effect, just like a chef works back from a particular flavor to identify the unique mix of ingredients that produced it.
THINKING LIKE
A SCREENWRITER
There are three main benefits to studying scripts. The first is that
studying scripts can boost your storytelling powers. The second
is that it deepens your appreciation of story. The third benefit is that studying scripts can help you learn how to write them by yourself. This article is designed to help you gain all three of these benefits. They all start from the same place: breaking down scripts to see how they work.
EFFECTIVE STORIES
To grasp the secret of an effective story, let go of the widely peddled cliché that there’s a universal set of formulas for all great stories.
Story structure is not a preprogrammed, eternal piece of neural hardware. It’s better understood as a flexible form of software that your brain uses to map the world and imagine different pathways through it.
Since the world is tremendously big and forever changing, and
since the possibilities for human action are open-ended and always increasing, your brain is capable of deploying an endless numberof story forms and structures.
This diversity is exciting and liberating. But it also poses
a major practical challenge: If there isn’t one master narrative
for every good story, then how do you learn to become a more
effective storyteller?
To discover your own most effective stories, use the technique known as reverse engineering. It goes all the way back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. In his Poetics, Aristotle gathered up the most popular scripts of his time and decided to figure out the nuts and bolts of how they worked.
To do that, he started by observing that tragedies had a pair of cognitive effects on audiences. The two cognitive effects were pity and fear. Aristotle then traced these two neural outcomes back to a specific plot event called an anagnorisis, in which a character
has a tragic epiphany. An example is the moment when Oedipus suddenly realizes that he has fulfilled the ancient prophecy that he’s tried to escape all his life: that he’ll kill his father and sleep with
his mother.
Aristotle’s analysis of Oedipus is the most ancient example of the simple two-step process of reverse engineering a script. First, you identify the script’s cognitive effect. A cognitive effect is anything
that happens in the brain: emotions, feelings, moods, attitudes, and perceptions.
Second, once you’ve identified the script’s cognitive effect, you
trace it back to the particular story structure in the script that
causes that effect. Aristotle identified two cognitive effects, fearand pity, and traced them back to specific features of the plot.
Aristotle’s method of reverse engineering stories is still going
strong today. It’s used by theorists and by practitioners like thescreenwriters in the story labs of Pixar. Whether you want to analyze stories or create them, Aristotle’s ancient method is still very much on the cutting edge.
The Benefits Of Reverse Engineering
From a screenwriter’s perspective, the value of reverse engineering is that it allows you to recreate the brilliant effects of your favorite scripts without plagiarizing them. If you use reverse engineering to go beneath the script’s surface, you can discover its deeper
creative logic, coming to understand why the author made the choices that she did.
Reverse engineering will also allow you to develop your own original voice. It gives you the freedom to choose your own storytelling models because the premise of reverse engineering is that there are endless ways to write a good story.
Lastly, reverse engineering helps you glimpse the deeper intentions of the authors you emulate, allowing you to do what those authors did while making your own unique story choices and innovations.
Applying It Now!
Above all said, but have you ever wondered if people even care about your writing?
You pour out your heart and soul, but sometimes that feels like shouting your words down a bottomless abyss.
You know you have a world of knowledge to pass on – but you have no idea how to wrap it into an exciting package your readers will love.
Could it be that … your writing just isn’t engaging enough?
After all, if even famous writers like Hemingway or Steinbeck took many, many years to excel in their craft, how are you supposed to instantly produce a moving masterpiece out of thin air?
You just feel overwhelmed.
And when the time comes to crank out another post for your blog or writing client, that huge blank space with the relentlessly blinking cursor … frankly, it’s terrifying. Because you fear the response to your efforts will be radio silence … once again.
Luckily, you have an applicable fool-proof technique at your disposal here, that is guaranteed to make your readers long your powerful words, actions and ideas.