The Lost Act: The Farmhouse
A Detour Into Storytelling, the Importance of Detours, and "Fixing" Return of the Jedi
Structure Is an Illusion, Albeit a Persistent One
"Structure" does not exist. We impose it upon things, crushing the life from our subjects. In truth, no good story began as a structure, but only had observable structure after completion. Our teachers, philosophers, and sociologists may break down already perfected stories into patterns and call it story structure, but trust when I say that Mark Twain took a pencil and a piece of paper and just started writing. He perhaps had an idea, a message to convey, one or more characters, even an entire town in his head when he did so, but he did not sit down with some concept of a formal "first-this-then-that" procedural way of writing a story.
Plays and teleplays must be broken up into acts due to breaks in the performance called for practically: live costume and set changes, commercial breaks. But the act structures emerged not as a way to improve their narrative, but as ways to reduce the disruptiveness of necessitated breaks imposed upon a …
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