Advice — james bonnet

Hidden Structures in Great Stories and Their Enormous Power

Posted by James Bonnet on

When I speak of a great story, I mean stories or films that are critically acclaimed and generally acknowledged to be classics. I also mean bestsellers, box office successes, and stories that have lived for hundreds or even thousands of years. So I'm talking about stories like The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, The Godfather and The Silence of the Lambs, Batman and Superman, Milk and Charlie Wilson's War, The Verdict, The Lion King, Groundhog Day, Shrek and Macbeth, plus the hundreds of other stories that fit into this category. Being familiar with...

Read more →

The Storywheel

Posted by James Bonnet on

In this article, I will introduce you to a new phenomenon called the Storywheel, which brings all the different types of story together into one grand design. To help picture the Storywheel, visualize a wheel with eight spokes. Then, starting at the bottom section on the right side and moving counter-clockwise, number the eight separate pie-shaped sections in between the spokes from one through eight. All great stories, ancient or modern, have a place on this wheel, and when taken all together in this way, they reveal their deeper, more amazing secrets, not the least of which are all the...

Read more →

The Coming Age of Story

Posted by James Bonnet on

The interest in story is greater now than it has ever been, and - putting aside for a moment the movie business, television, book publishing, other major producers of story and their consumers - that interest now extends to every facet of our society. Heavily funded, major research projects now exist throughout government, the sciences, and the corporate world. And everywhere that interest is growing. Everyone - from stock brokers selling derivatives, lawyers trying to convince a jury, preachers trying to save our souls, and neophytes looking for employment - wants to be able to effectively tell their story -...

Read more →

Narrative Structure and Infinite Creative Possibilities

Posted by James Bonnet on

In my previous articles - The Essence of Story, Beyond Theme: Story's New Unified Field, The Metaphor Is King, and The Tragedy, Mystery, and Romance of Genre, I pointed out that all great stories have the same underlying, universal structure - namely, there is a threat, either agent or perpetrator, that creates a problem that brings about a change to a state of misfortune and is the main source of resistance that opposes the action when someone tries to solve the problem and restore a state of good fortune. In stories that end tragically it's the reverse - the story...

Read more →

The Tragedy, Mystery and Romance of Genre

Posted by James Bonnet on

In my previous articles, The Essence of Story, Beyond Theme: Story's New Unified Field, and The Metaphor is King, I pointed out that all great stories have the same underlying, universal structure - namely, there is a threat, either agent or perpetrator, that creates a problem that brings about a change to a state of misfortune and is the main source of resistance that opposes the action when someone tries to solve the problem and restore a state of good fortune. In stories that end tragically, it's the reverse - the story starts in a state of good fortune and...

Read more →