Charlie Douglas

In ancient Greece, 2 forms of story dominated: Tragedy & Comedy Aristotle’s Poetics gives us a detailed breakdown of the 6 elements of Tragedy. But he highlights 2 as far more critical than the rest: 1. Plot A fan of metaphor, Aristotle compares plot to the untying of a knot. The knot should get tied tighter and tighter until the climax of the story (or peripeteia). Then, its complexity and open loops unravel as the story comes to its end. But what makes the best plots? For Aristotle, the most gripping plots contain surprises. Surprises that are hard to predict looking forward but obvious looking back. He says the best surprises are caused by peripeteia — reversal of fortune — or anagnorisis — discovery. 2. Character Aristotle lays out three keys to great characters: • Your hero must go from relatively noble and happy to struggle and misery • The audience’s pity and fear are aroused more when family members attack each other than strangers • The hero must have positive qualities, or at least a measure of competence, for the audience to care about them George RR Martin must’ve read these before writing GoT. If your audience doesn’t care about your characters, you don’t have a story. Aristotle put the six elements in priority order in Poetics. These are the other four (still in order): • Thought • Diction • Song • Spectacle My thoughts: 2500 years have passed and the same elements make great stories stand apart. Stories are about people, what happens to those people, and what changes within those people as a result of what happens. It’s a shame two-thirds of his writing has been lost to history. “The first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of a story, is the Plot.” — Aristotle For more on storytelling, follow me @nathanbaugh27.