Into the Woods

Process

	Status	Items
Highlights	Done	See section below
Claims	None
Questions	None
Output	None

Highlights

Location 442

The key to empathy, then, does not lie in manners or good behaviour. Nor does it lie, as is often claimed, in the understanding of motive. It’s certainly true that if we know why characters do what they do, we will love them more. However, that’s a symptom of empathy, not its root cause. It lies in its ability to access and bond with our unconscious.

🔗 Location 442

Location 467

Indeed, all archetypal stories are defined by this one essential tenet: the central character has an active goal.

🔗 Location 467

Location 558

A character seeks what they want and in so doing realizes instead their need. Their lack is lacked no more; they have overcome their flaws and become whole.

🔗 Location 558

Location 570

Characters then should not always get what they want, but should – if they deserve it – get what they need. That need, or flaw, is almost always present at the beginning of the film. The want, however, cannot become clear until after the inciting incident.

🔗 Location 570

Location 615

Change of some kind is at the heart of this quest, and so too is choice, because finally the protagonist must choose how to change. Nowhere is this more clearly embodied than in the crisis.

🔗 Location 615

Location 831

‘Dramatic structure is not an arbitrary – or even a conscious – invention. It is an organic codification of the human mechanism for ordering information. Event, elaboration, denouement; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl; act one, act two, act three.’

🔗 Location 831

Location 862

Storytelling, then, can be seen as a codification of the method by which we learn – expressed in a three-act shape. The dialectic pattern – thesis/antithesis/synthesis – is at the heart of the way we perceive the world;

🔗 Location 862

Location 1092

if a character wants something, they are going to have to change to get it.

🔗 Location 1092

Location 1176

learning is central to every three-dimensional story: that is how the characters change; they learn to overcome their flaw and, what’s more, they appear to learn according to a pattern. Their unconscious flaw is brought to the surface, exposed to a new world, acted upon; the consequences of overcoming their flaw are explored, doubt and prevarication set in before, finally, they resolve to conquer it and embrace their new selves.

🔗 Location 1176

Location 1296

it’s the point from which there’s no going back. A new ‘truth’ dawns on our hero for the first time; the protagonist has captured the treasure or found the ‘elixir’ to heal their flaw. But there’s an important caveat … At this stage in the story they don’t quite know how to handle it correctly. The ‘journey back’ is therefore built on how the hero reacts to possessing the ‘elixir’ and whether they will learn to master it in a wise and useful way.

🔗 Location 1296

Location 1392

It’s the moment of truth in both.

🔗 Location 1392

Location 1453

In all the stories we’ve looked at or mentioned, whether two- or three-dimensional, there have been a striking number of elements in common: ‘home’ is threatened the protagonist suffers from some kind of flaw or problem the protagonist goes on a journey to find a cure or the key to the problem exactly halfway through they find a cure or key on the journey back they’re forced to face up to the consequences of taking it they face some kind of literal or metaphorical death They’re reborn as a new person, in full possession of the cure; in the process ‘home’ is saved.

🔗 Location 1453

Location 1534

Friedrich Nietzsche declared in The Birth of Tragedy that ‘art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian–Dionysian duality’, he was implicitly declaring his belief that the tensions between form and content, head and heart, discipline and desire were the building blocks of dramatic structure.

🔗 Location 1534

Location 1537

Jimmy McGovern, the godfather of British screenwriting, once said, ‘You write a script twice. The first time you pour out all your passion, anger, energy, and frustration. Then you go back and write it with your head.’

🔗 Location 1537

Location 1618

In Thelma & Louise the worst possible consequences of two women stopping at a roadhouse without male company (the mini inciting incident) are that one of them will be victim of an attempted rape (the mini crisis). In the final act of the film, the worst possible consequence of blowing up someone’s gasoline tanker is that the police will pursue you to a point of no escape. In both acts, the second turning points work as typical crisis points, presenting the protagonists with a classic choice: in the former will they shoot the rapist, and in the latter will they hand themselves in or go on the run? Their decisions in both (effectively the climax), propel the drama to its next stage or end.

🔗 Location 1618

Location 1725

inciting incidents are simply the first important choice the protagonist makes in any story.

🔗 Location 1725

Location 1727

Every act has two turning points within it, the latter of which acts as an explosion that invites the protagonist into an alien world. In the first act, that second turning point is called an inciting incident; if it’s the penultimate act, it’s called a crisis point. Structurally they’re the same thing – a choice that presents itself to the protagonist, their name and function changing only according to their position in the story. In the first half of any tale, they lead further into the forest; in the second half they signpost the return.

🔗 Location 1727

Location 1902

In any first act the tripartite structure normally has a clear and defined purpose, the micro crisis point providing the catalyst for both the next act and the story as a whole.

🔗 Location 1902

Location 1913

The second act, then, contains its own call to action and crisis that will force our hero to make a choice between their old and new selves.

🔗 Location 1913

Location 1916

The midpoint of the story is, not unexpectedly, the midpoint of the third act too; once again, an individual act takes on the shape of the overall story. In both you see the same pattern – what a character is scared of in the first half, they now embrace with enthusiasm. Midpoints are, as we’ve seen, the ‘truth’ of the story,1 a truth the protagonist must embrace.

🔗 Location 1916

Location 1929

The crisis point of act four is of course the crisis point of the story. For the protagonist it’s the moment they’re confronted with the decision whether to embrace change and triumph, or reject it and fail. This is the ‘worst point’, the moment when everything could end and failure has won the day.

🔗 Location 1929

Location 1946

the ‘sub-goal’ of the fifth act is identical to the main – original – goal of the story. They have returned from whence they came with a truth they must deliver to their tribe – and not always a truth the tribe wants to hear.

🔗 Location 1946

Location 1986

Observe also how the final act, in its tripartite form, often mirrors, almost identically, the structure of the first act of each film:

🔗 Location 1986

Location 2156

loves being immersed in a new, confusing and possibly dangerous world that he will never see. He likes not knowing every bit of vernacular or idiom. He likes being trusted to acquire information on his terms, to make connections, to take the journey with only his intelligence to guide him. Most smart people cannot watch most TV, because it has generally been a condescending medium, explaining everything immediately, offering no ambiguities, and using dialogue that simplifies and mitigates against the idiosyncratic ways in which people in different worlds actually communicate. It eventually requires that characters from different places talk the same way as the viewer. This, of course, sucks.10

🔗 Location 2156

Location 2310

great characters are consciously or subconsciously at war with themselves. As the French philosopher Montaigne eloquently put it: ‘We are, I know not how, somewhat double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.’

🔗 Location 2310

Location 2327

‘I see and approve the better course, but I follow the worse’ goes the Latin saying. As St Paul succinctly put it in Romans 7:19: ‘For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ We hide our dark impulses, we deplete our energy worrying about how we may be perceived;

🔗 Location 2327

Location 2370

Not only do they all suggest that man lives in a conflicted, neurotic state in which primal desires are at war with socially acceptable behaviour, they also tacitly accept that these neuroses need to be integrated and overcome in order for ‘happiness’ to be achieved.

🔗 Location 2370

Location 2392

the conflict between inner and outer self is absolutely central to successful dramatic characterization.

🔗 Location 2392

Location 4667

This is Scribe’s full formula – it’s not hard to detect the Shakespearean pattern: ACT I: Mainly expository and lighthearted. Toward the end of the act, the antagonists are engaged and the conflict is initiated. ACTS II & III: The action oscillates in an atmosphere of mounting tension from good fortune to bad, etc. ACT IV: The Act of the Ball. The stage is generally filled with people and there is an outburst of some kind – a scandal, a quarrel, a challenge. At this point, things usually look pretty bad for the hero. The climax is in this act. ACT V: Everything is worked out logically so that in the final scene, the cast assembles and reconciliations take place, and there is an equitable distribution of prizes in accordance with poetic justice and reinforcing the morals of the day. Everyone leaves the theatre bien content.

🔗 Location 4667