The Princess Bride is one of my all time favourite stories. Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles… whats not to love?

It was also the introduction to week eights lectorial as we talked about narrative. It seems a simple idea, telling a story, but it holds such importance for us culturally as a species. Stories are how we differentiate ourselves from animals, they’re how we pass on our culture and knowledge. Until the invention of writing and even for a long time after that, many cultures histories and legends were passed on orally.

So what makes a story? A story is a retelling of a sequence of events in which causality is shown or implied. A story demands character development, plot and a resolution.

Understanding story becomes important when we look at how to understand and write literary criticisms, a device that was first used by Aristotle to break down the elements of Comedy and Tragedy. There are a lot of ways of looking and dissecting stories, through the characters, the writing, the plot. Bloomberg conducted a study looking at exactly ‘How Fast, How Furious’ the ‘Fast and Furious’ films were.

In pairs during the lectorial we looked at graphic some elements of story, such as character importance in order to determine the protagonist, and emotional response during the stories arc.

It was found that most films had a similar three-part structure for emotional intensity. Part 1 theres some kind of conflict or problem that creates an emotional response, either negative or positive. Part 2 is when things quiet down, theres exposition or plot development that leads into Part 3, the end of the film when the guy gets the girl, things explode, or they catch the murderer.

In understanding aspects of narrative we are better suited to creating our own.