Blame it on Aristotle
For several years, as a high school English teacher, one of my favourite units to teach was Aristotle’s Poetics . This short and ancient book is the bible of storytelling. It’s still so relevant today that, in Hollywood, one of the hottest ticket for aspiring film writers is *Robert McKee’s Story Seminar which is his take on successful scriptwriting based on Poetics . McKee’s approach has since been adopted by novelists, comic book writers and story-tellers from many other genres. Do you remember the plot graph from grade 9 English? Inciting Incident, rising action, complications due to inciting incident, reversal, climax, and denouement… Is that all ringing a bell? The terminology has changed over the years, but it all started with Aristotle, 450 BC. Or at least, Aristotle was the first to commit it to parchment. I’m sure that there were ancients telling stories orally and that the best ones followed the same intuitive rules later es...