Aristotle (384-22 BC) was the first to establish a comprehensive understanding of storytelling based on thorough analysis. Throughout his life, he developed methods to examine a wide range of subjects across the inner workings of plants, animals and politician’s speeches, and so established the foundation to today’s natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, as well as the arts. Aristotle considered the differences between tragedies that proved popular, and those quickly forgotten. In his book Poetics he identified the criteria of successful storytelling, or those that cause the audience to turn away. Writers and narrative theorists have since built on the Poetics, first in theatre and later in modern screenwriting guidebooks and online screenwriting courses. Matching later anthropological conclusions discussed above, he observed how humans desire knowledge (Poetics, ix). Facing an astonishing world, Aristotle saw that we have a choice between fantasising and inventing mythologies; or investigating, gaining knowledge by analysing both the facts, and our experience of them. This leads him to look for Mimesis, roughly translated as ‘imitation’, which is natural to us when playing as children (Poetics, 6). The emotions experienced through a story connect understanding and pleasure: we act out our observations of a world we don’t yet understand, yet in the safe space of play where the world cannot harm us. Stories combine the best of both worlds, as Aristotle’s conclusions resurface in Oscar and Emmy winners.
| For a tragedy to affect audiences in Ancient Greece | For an Oscar winning film or an Emmy winning TV show to affect on the screen (Warning: spoilers included) |
| The tragedy begins with the first event that is relevant to the story. | In Parasite (2019) the family is cut off from Wifi, and so from any future income. How can they respond? |
| Events introduce us to a ‘glorious hero’, whose values, like courage and curiosity, we share. |
In Birdman (2014), the hero recognises that he wastes his talent on frivolous entertainment and challenges himself by putting together a heartfelt stage play.
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| Adverse circumstances prevent a talented person achieving the success they deserve. | In Promising Young Women (2020), the bright heroine is stuck in a dull job, living with her parents, and objectified by men when she goes out. |
| Events include a complication and a resolution. | In Green Book (2018), protagonist Tony faces the racist treatment alongside his passenger, Don. |
| Characters are shown the way people as are, but better looking. | See Green Book (2018), when Don helps Tony to write moving letters to his wife. |
| Each story event causes the next, or provide the illusion of such a connection. | In The Father (2020), his apartment and visitors drastically change their appearance throughout the story to reflect the protagonist’s dementia. |
| The connection is contrary to how we expect the story to develop, creating surprise. | In The Imitation Game (2014), the World War Two protagonist helps winning the war but is punished for his homosexuality. |
| Astonishment also gives pleasure – that’s why we tend to exaggerate when passing on news (41). | In Birdman (2014), the hero moves objects with his mind, levitates, and later flies across the city. |
| For climactic surprise to be meaningful, it needs to follow an unexpected yet necessary outcome. This is caused by the hero’s admirable actions. | In American Fiction (2023), the protagonist writes a cliched book only to provoke the establishment through bad writing, but against his expectation, this becomes a popular success. |
| Unity of time and space helps an audience to follow and make connections - a more sprawling scope dilutes them. | Series like Sopranos (1999-2007), Breaking Bad (2008–2013), Top Boy(2011–2023) and The Handmaid’s Tale(2017–2025) focus on key characters and locations to great effect. |
| Avoid deus ex machina – a trope where the hero is ‘lifted’ out of trouble by a stage crane. | In Get Out (2017), the friendship with a security guard who expresses doubts about a trip to the in-laws is set up very early on, making his last-minute rescue credible. |
| Characters make the same ’moral errors’ that we might make, allowing the audience to investigate the consequences of mistakes. | Like in Coda (2021), when the protagonist goes swimming with her love interest, instead of helping her deaf parents liaise with intolerant authorities. |
| ‘Well-being and wrong-being residing in action’: our behaviour, not our thinking determines our fate. |
In Moonlight (2016), the protagonist smashes a chair over a bully’s head, isolating himself from his community.
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| Characters reveal their personality through actions, which are more believable than words. |
In Manchester by the Sea (2016), the protagonist steals a police officer’s gun to attempt suicide, revealing the depth of his guilt.
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| We engage with the protagonist dealing with adverse but undeserved circumstances. Only in conflict we can prove ourselves and show our true nature. |
In the Breaking Bad, we meet timid, sleepless chemistry teacher Walter White as he faces a cancer diagnosis. With nothing to lose, the imminent mortality liberates him from fear.
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| The hero experiences an unexpected change of fortune, makes an error leading them to damage loved ones, to evoke pity. Our hero is on the verge of performing an irreparable deed but ultimately saves the day. |
In Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), the protagonist is drawn into a fight to save a multitude of parallel universes from destruction by an incarnation of her daughter’s gay girlfriend. She is about to hurt everyone dear to her, but relents to her husband’s plea for kindness, discovering empathy as her new superpower.
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| A ‘reversal’ shows that reality is different from what we thought, allowing for catharsis to release tension, regulate repressed audience emotion, to emerge more in tune with others, and allow pleasure. |
In The Usual Suspects (1995), a witness recounts a violent heist led by a criminal mastermind. Yet after the witness leaves, the agents see names and places mentioned in the statement on items around the office. Now they understand the true nature of the story world - that the statement they believed in was made up, and that they just let the mastermind antagonist go.
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| With the right story context, impossible events can be made more believable than stories that we would not believe - even if true. |
In The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), the unhappy leading couple have each other’s memories erased by subjecting their brains to a new procedure. As in many visionary science fiction worlds, whilst this would be impossible to achieve with current technology, we can imagine that such external brain manipulation may be possible in the future.
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| Even a tragic failure can be noble when we understand that events are impossible to reverse, and we accept them. (Grodal 135). | In Anatomy of a Fall (2023), a court investigates if a mother killed her husband. Unsure if the mother may have had a role in his father’s death, the son is isolated before his testimony. Anxious about what to say in court, her son asks the court appointed carer for advice. She suggests that, if he really does not know if his mother may be to blame, or if it may have been suicide, he can decide what is true for him. |
| At the end, there are no more consequences. | We learn about many cases of rape and abuse in the religious community that is the setting for Women Talking (2023). In consequence of the story’s events, the teacher is about to kill himself. But the women, about to leave the community, ask him to teach instead. |
Aristotle already explored the difference between Knowing Writing and Doing Writing, and the calamity that all teachers face: The ability to do something well does not depend on our understanding, nor does understanding necessarily imply an ability to do it well (ix). A good poet, he finds, develops their craft through:
◦ Observation (leading to mimesis, imitation),
• Education (his term is tekne, meaning skill or craft),
• Talent (Instinct, see also the chapter on Reflection below), and
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