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Showing posts from June, 2007

Jack Black, Pixar, and the Eight Plot Points

Wow. Cue Sting, The Police, and Synchronicity. I was Googling for story structure tips and arrived at this site: Channel101 The first thing to yank my attention on that page was the 4-act circle diagram. That looks identical to my own 4-act Story Diamond . Immediately I knew the author and I were sympatico on 4-act story structure. Dan Harmon, the article's author, has numbered the eight compass points of his circle in clockwise fashion, one through eight. That's opposite to my story diamond, where progression is counter-clockwise. I cannot tell you why I chose counter-clockwise for mine. Maybe it's because I'm in Australia and water spirals down the drain in the opposite direction to you folk in the Northern Hemisphere. (OK, so that is actually an urban legend .) So I knew I was onto something here. Some new piece of the puzzle, I hoped. Or at least further confirmation that others prefer to work with the 4-act structure implicit in the traditional 3-act scr