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Story Plot: What the Masters have to say
For centuries, we've wondered how great writers structure their stories and put their plots together. The answers have been scattered out in Aristotle's Poetics, in books written by Joseph Campbell, Syd Fields, and others - each detailing one theirs.
Until this book. Wijeratne, himself a fiction writer on a journey of discovery, brings together all these complicated theses into an easy bullet-point format, reducing thousands of pages down to quick summaries that can be easily understood and implemented by authors, screenwriters, and storytellers.
Until this book. Wijeratne, himself a fiction writer on a journey of discovery, brings together all these complicated theses into an easy bullet-point format, reducing thousands of pages down to quick summaries that can be easily understood and implemented by authors, screenwriters, and storytellers.
- GenresWriting
76 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 28, 2017
7 people are currently reading
34 people want to read
About the author
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
29 books239 followersYudhanjaya Wijeratne is a Nebula-nominated science fiction author and data scientist from Colombo, Sri Lanka. By day he is a senior researcher with the Data, Algorithms and Policy team at LIRNEasia, working at the intersection of technology and government policy.
He is the co-founder of Watchdog, a fact-checking organization that sprung up in the wake of the April 2019 bombings in Sri Lanka. He built and operates @osunpoet, an experimental Instagram poet using OpenAI technology to test a human+AI collaboration in art - a thesis currently being explored in an entirely separate trilogy of novels.
Yudhanjaya blogs at Yudhanjaya.com, and has written for Slate, Foreign Policy and more besides.
He is the co-founder of Watchdog, a fact-checking organization that sprung up in the wake of the April 2019 bombings in Sri Lanka. He built and operates @osunpoet, an experimental Instagram poet using OpenAI technology to test a human+AI collaboration in art - a thesis currently being explored in an entirely separate trilogy of novels.
Yudhanjaya blogs at Yudhanjaya.com, and has written for Slate, Foreign Policy and more besides.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 11, 2018
This is an excellent overview of various plot structures.
I appreciated the author's input on how different structures relate, their similarities and differences. I also rather enjoyed the addition of Propp's folktale morphology and Kishotenketsu, two unique plot structures that I'd never heard of.
The comparison to modern stories is helpful in solidifying the concepts, and the short and easy to read format makes it easy to breeze through the content. You can choose to pursue further studies of your preferred structures via the references mentioned in the book, or use the concepts outright.
This is a great reference book for any storyteller.
I appreciated the author's input on how different structures relate, their similarities and differences. I also rather enjoyed the addition of Propp's folktale morphology and Kishotenketsu, two unique plot structures that I'd never heard of.
The comparison to modern stories is helpful in solidifying the concepts, and the short and easy to read format makes it easy to breeze through the content. You can choose to pursue further studies of your preferred structures via the references mentioned in the book, or use the concepts outright.
This is a great reference book for any storyteller.
January 23, 2018
Outstanding summary of the major analyses of plot structure. Author Wijeratne begins with Aristotle's three-part story structure and goes in time order through various methods of systematizing plots to our current day.
What really makes this book interesting is how he applies the various plot structure theories to modern, popular works, like The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and Star Wars.
Writers familiar with 'The Hero's Journey' and 'Save the Cat' will find them both in here, as well as more esoteric approaches like the Japanese Keshokentetsu.
I recommend this book to any writer of stories.
What really makes this book interesting is how he applies the various plot structure theories to modern, popular works, like The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and Star Wars.
Writers familiar with 'The Hero's Journey' and 'Save the Cat' will find them both in here, as well as more esoteric approaches like the Japanese Keshokentetsu.
I recommend this book to any writer of stories.
April 29, 2018
All the structures.
This is a (very) basic outline of all the different story structures while no one is better than the others, they are all here for any to read.
This is a (very) basic outline of all the different story structures while no one is better than the others, they are all here for any to read.
February 21, 2019
If you are planning into writing your own novel / fantasy / romance, then buy it and read it.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews