1. Theme 7. Treatment

2. Paradigm 8. World of Story

3. Premise 9. Genre(s)

4. External Structure 10. Research

5. Internal Structure 11. Image System

6. 5 Character Relationships 12. Story Break down

What’s the story really about?

“…the reality is that the single most important thing contributed by the

screenwriter is the structure.”

William Goldman

Myth

Hero OutlawInverted Myths

Messiah Avenging Angel Blithe Angel

Fairy Tale Kingdom

Drama

Provincial World

Magical World of Journey

Return World

1 2 3

Fairy Tale Kingdom

Most Condensed Locale

1. His birth is prophesized and highly anticipated.

2. He is an Orphan.

3. His Mother is royalty and a virgin

4. His Father is a king

5. His conception was immaculate or unusual.

6. He is reputed to be the son of a god

7. At birth an attempt is made on his life.

8. He is spirited away at birth and raised by his nemesis or in order to hide him from his conspirators/assassins.

9. Reared by foster-parents in a far country

10. Sketchy Details of his childhood.

11. On reaching manhood he goes on a quest.

12. He defeats a dragon, ogre or Threshold Guardian.

13. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor.

14. He enters the Underworld/ defeats the Lord of the Underworld.

15. He returns to the provincial world

16. He prescribes laws and moral dictums

17. He later loses favor with the gods and or his people

18. He is driven from from the throne and the city

19. He meets with a mysterious, gruesome or untimely death

20. Often at the top of a hill. The Hill of his ancestors.

21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless he has one or more holy sepulchres.

22. His Spirit or ghost returns one day as p.

Orphan

Inciting Incident

Wanderer

Warrior

Mid Act

Innocent Apprentice

Wizard

Extreme

Conflict

Six Phases of Character Arc for Mythic Hero

Richard Cory

By

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,

We people on the pavement looked at him;

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

“Good Morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich- yes, richer than a king-

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish we were in his place.

So, on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.

Sex and beauty are as inseparable as life and consciousness and the intelligence that arises from sex and beauty, as with life and

consciousness, is intuition.

D.H. Lawrence

Intuition is the very fount of consciousness from which springs: Science, Physics, Math, Medicine, Art, Literature, Myth and religion. Anyone who has ever spent time with a physicist will be impressed with how much they rely upon their intuition. The fundamentalist is just as preoccupied with his intuition and is obsessed with proven how right he is at every turn as though his god’s effectiveness depended on it. Indeed, it does. He will even subvert the truth in pursuit of his intuitive correctness.

The dark shadow of intuition is the intuitive opportunism of the sociopath.

James Hillman

Perseus Theseus Orpheus Odysseus, Ulysses Hercules

Achilles Proteus Bellerophon Jason Moses Virgil Prometheus Arthur Osiris

Horus Isis Jesus Hathor Inanna Atlanta Ishtar

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Myth is an enzymatic roadmap from Lower Consciousness to Higher Consciousness.

It guides us up the Cerebral Cortex through the six thresholds along the Spinal Column, and the three

evolutionary phases of the brain: The Reptilian, the Limbic and the Higher Brain (human brain).

The Orphan Hero is the protagonist who leads us there.

Page 1 Page 30

5 10Page 15

20

Inciting Incident

Act Two

3545

6075

90

Mid-Act Climax

Wanderer Warrior

Death/Rebirth

Innocence

90 120100 105 110 115

Apprentice Wizard Return

The Keys to the Mythic Journey

The orphan hero possessing only a birth object talisman sets forth from the

provincial world and is either lured, carried away, or voluntarily proceeds (inciting

incident) through the threshold of adventure. He must defeat or satisfy the threshold guardian before he can enter.

The Hero wanders through the strange world encounteringfriends and foes who either severely threaten or aid withmagical assistance.

The inhabitants look to the hero to depose the evil ruler, butto do so he must first seek out and find the great Wizard.

The Wandering warrior undergoes a series of trialseventually being stripped bare of pretense and attain aninnocence while preparing to apprentice with the wizard.Through training he learns the secret of the talisman andthat his whole purpose is to defeat the lord of theunderworld.

The hero is attacked and utterly defeated.He must enter the land of the dead wherehe is challenged utterly to reclaim his newfound powers. He dies symbolically and isresurrected as a true magician. His destiny

is manifest. He marches into battle.

The hero triumphs over the evil ruler and there inthe dark recesses of the overlord’s castle the heroreunites with his missing half, either a sister or akidnapped princess. He marries her or restores herto power and is presented with a great boon fromthe people he freed.

Though he could live the rest of his life in luxury,he elects to return home to save, instruct, and leadhis people to greatness.

One of the most amazing images of love that I know is Persian – a mystical Persian representation as Satan as the

most loyal lover of God. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to

pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused – because, we are told, of his

pride. However, according to this Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored God so deeply and

intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell,

condemned to exist there forever, apart from his love.

The Fall of Lucifer, The Light Bearer, lux, lucis, "light", and ferre, bearer bring. "to bear, bring

Whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted, but also

reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped

out the door.

Asobase-Kotaba: Japanese play form

But that, precisely, is the great mystery pageant only waiting to be noticed as it lies before us, so to say, in sections, in the halls and museums of the various sciences, yet already living, too, in the works of our greatest men of art. To make it serve the present hour, we have only to assemble- or reassemble- it in its full dimension scientifically, and then bring it to life as our own, in the way of art: the way of wonder- sympathetic, instructive delight; not judging morally, but participating with our own awakened humanity in the festival of the passing forms.

Every study undertaken by Man was the genuine outcome of curiosity, a kind of game. All the data of natural science, which are responsible

for Man’s domination of the world, originated in activities that were indulged in exclusively for

the sake of amusement.

Konrad Lorenz

“The Play’s the thing…”Da Bard

There are three pathways to Genius:

Music, Math and Myth

James Hillman

The myth is the foundation of life, the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows

when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

Thomas Mann

Inanna abandoned her realm of heaven and earth, to descend into the "great below". "With the me in her possession, she

prepared herself: placing her crown upon her head, beads of lapis lazuli around her neck, sparkling stones fastened to her

breast, a gold ring around her wrist, and a royal robe upon her body. She bound a breastplate about her chest and took a

lapis measuring rod and line in her hand.

Then she set out for the kur, the netherworld, with her faithful servant, Ninshubur.

All mythology and the corresponding symbols that derive from them originate from specific regions of the human body.

1. Anus/Hell/Misogyny/Evil/Oppression, Dragons, Jerks, Orphans, homophobia

2.Genitals/Desire/Gods/Wealth/Heaven/ Couplings.

3. Stomach/Religion/ Sacrifice/Labyrinth/ Eternal life/After life/Power

4. Heart/Love/Romance//Life/Death

5.Throat/Communication/MagickHarmony, Law, Education, Art

6. Pineal Gland/ Intuition/ Soul Omniscience/Wisdom

7. God/Genius/Wizard/Imagination Paradise/Myth/Epiphany/Enlightenment

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie-- deliberate, contrived and dishonest-- but the myth-- persistent,

persuasive, and unrealistic.

Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forbearers. We subject all facts to a

prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the

discomfort of thought.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already

earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by

mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”

Albert Einstein

Where do Myths come from?

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Spirituality

God = Imagination

Soul

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie-- deliberate, contrived and dishonest-- but the myth-- persistent,

persuasive, and unrealistic.

Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forbearers. We subject all facts to a

prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the

discomfort of thought.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Where Eastern Mysticism and Western Psychology meet:

1. All the gods and demons are within the human brain

2. A man’s fate is his character

3. A man’s character and fate can be altered through Brain Change

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and

catastrophe. 

H.G. Wells, The Outline of History

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. 

~Albert Einstein

Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless? The deeper we sound, the

further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the

earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomably.

Thomas Mann

Tetrologu Joseph and His Brothers

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed, must not wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live”, Nietzsche says, as though the day were here.

It is not society that is to guide the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.

All modern religions derive from three primitive obsessions

Cannibalism

Human Sacrifice

Animal Sacrifice

Interceding Images from the Right Brain

Bodhisattva

Gate, Gate, Paragate Parasam Gati

Bodhi svaha

Chance favors the prepared mind.

Louis Pasteur

THEME

Every screenplay is the living proof of an idea or theme.

Truth/Falsity

Greed/Bounty

Love/ Hate

Slavery/Freedom

Ignorance

Deception

Manipulation

ViolenceWrath

External Story Structures

Structural Archetypes

MYTH

HERO Outlaw

The Magical Stranger Returns

Three Tiers of Political Power

1. Prevailing Elite

2. Marginal Bureaucrats

3. Dissident Rebel/Revolutionaries

Return

World of Story

30

Inciting Incident

Reversal

Page 60

Ghost

Betrayal Trial

Martyrdom

Miracles and Wonders

The Messiah Story

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Cool Hand Luke

Jesus of Montreal

Dead Poets Society

Jean De Florette

Spartacus

Always do what you’re afraid to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since the beginning of civilization mankind has had but one choice; to

conform or not to conform. Should he choose to conform,

that individual is a dead man for every life decision he will make has already been determined for him by society at

large.

Should he choose to conform,that individual is a dead man for every life decision he will make has already been determined for

him by society at large.

Should he choose not to conform he buys himself one more choice-

To become outlaw or hero.

Sigmund Freud

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the

mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot,

indeed, must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized

avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live”, Nietzsche says, ‘ as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide

the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.” Hero with a Thousand Faces

"Indeed, the great Leonardo remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way; It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.

Sigmund Freud, 1910

Everywhere I go I find that artists and poets have been there before me.

Sigmund Freud

“A belief is not an idea the mind possesses, it is an idea that possesses the mind.”

Robert Oxton Bolt

“History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to Awake.”

James Joyce

1. The Shadow 7. The Objective

2. The Inner Flaw 8. The Antagonist/Adversary

3. The Moral Consequence 9. The Conflict

4. The Immediate Desire 10. The Epiphany

5. The Inciting Incident 11. Desire Achieved or not

6. The Over Arching Desire 12. Impact on World of Story

Thirteen

13

Moons MONTHS

Menstrual/Lunar Cycle

Days Years

12 Jurors/1 judge

Buildings/Stories/Floors

Bar Mitzvah

Circumcision/Initiation/Catechism

13 X 28 = 364 plus 1=365

Witches Coven

12 Olympians

13 Signs in the Zodiac

Including Ophiuchus

13 Disciples= Judas and Mathias

13 Norse Gods ( Loki)

Egyptian 12 Stairs Life and Death

Fairy Tale Year and a Day

12 Tribes of Israel

•13 original colonies The Flag: 13 Stars 13 Stripes

The Great Seal: 13 levels of the truncated pyramid,•13 letters in "E Pluribus Unum

13 letters in the phrase "Annuit Coeptis", which appears over the pyramid on the left side of the bill's reverse.•

13 stars above the Eagle

13 leaves on the olive branch

13 olives on the olive branch

13 arrows held by the Eagle

13 bars on the shield.

Virgil’s The Aenid Demeter and Persephone

The Eleusinian Mysteries Eros and Psyche

Orpheus and Eurydice

"Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them...." - Albert Camus

Inanna and The Seven Veils

Gilgamesh Scheherazade and Farlimas

The Imramha of Brain The Harrowing of Hell

Mythology and the

Lineaments of a New Science

Sign Stimulus

Innate Releasing Mechanisms or IRM’S

Faculty X

Archetypal Icons

DNA Imprinting

Parallel Development

Diffusion Theory

Culture Area Theory

Pseudo Historic Metamorphosis

Asobase-Kotoba

I’ve always disliked words like ‘inspiration’. Writing is probably like

a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer

thinking about an engineering problem.

Doris Lessing

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

..the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.

H.L. Mencken

Fire Theft

Deluge/Flood

Virgin BirthSacrificial King The

Dying godThe World Tree

The Resurrected Hero/God

The Land of the Dead/Underworld

The Mound of the Ancestors

The World as Dream

The Orphan Hero