Advice — james bonnet

All great stories have the same structure (see my articles on The Essence of Story and Beyond Theme: Story's New Unified Field) which, for the purpose of this article and in its simplest form, can be summarized as follows: A threat, either agent or perpetrator, 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...

Visual metaphors are the secret language of great stories. In this article, I will discuss what they are and the source of their power. Great stories and dreams are among the more important visual metaphors. They are symbolic languages. And their expression in great stories is intimately linked to the source of our creativity. When we work with creative processes, the creative decisions we make are governed by positive and negative intuitive feelings. That's how we know what works - by how we feel about our ideas. Well, what's behind those feelings? Where do those feelings come from? I call...

The great myths and legends were not authored by individuals the way stories are today but were evolved naturally and instinctively by unconscious processes in oral traditions. Even if they started out as made-up or true stories, revelations or dreams, they still ended up for long periods of time in oral traditions and that became the principal dynamic behind their creation.The process went something like this: it began with a real or imagined incident or event that was worth repeating, something so intriguing that we were compelled to repeat it. It was passed along by word of mouth, from person...

This article can be appreciated by all writers and filmmakers but will be of special interest to writer / storymakers who are trying to decide where to best invest their creative energies and talents - the novel or the screenplay. I'll begin with some general observations concerning the novelist and the filmwright (a new term I'm coining to describe a film's true primary creative artist) and then I'll describe the similarities and critical differences between a novel and a screenplay.The novelist creates and describes everything that appears in the novel -- the characters, the emotions of the characters, their actions,...

The three act structure is not a story structure. You can't find it in myths and legends or other great stories of the past and you can't find it in nature. So why is it being applied to the screenplay or the story of a film? It's a good question because it makes no sense. And my very strong recommendation in this article will be that you avoid thinking in act structure terms when creating a story or story film.The three (four, five, six, or seven) act structures are the arbitrary divisions of the principal (or main) action of the...