Types of Story & Why it Matters.
Regardless of the genre it makes makes a big difference.
Storytelling for entertainment is all about the escape from our everyday world and experiencing a different point of view which is something new and exciting. These techniques translate to books, movies, comics, the web, blog post and more. This is an art-form we are really needing these days. So how do we begin?
When teaching storytelling, a very important topic we discuss right off the bat is story types. One of the first things to determine is the kind of story you are writing. Why? The story type will dictate the structure. How many kinds of story are there? If you were to give this a number what would you say? Maybe 5, 7, or 12 kinds of story?
What if we were to remove genre out of the equation? What then? Believe it or not there are really only two kinds of story and it is a throwback to the ancient Greeks: Comedy and Tragedy (which we normally recast as drama). Regardless of story genre, including fiction/non-fiction, whatever we write will be either funny or serious. The reason why this is important is that the structure for these two types is totally different.
Comedy plays out the worst in human nature for laughs. Take any sitcom and you will see that they set up a premise at the very beginning of the story, and based on the character archetype…
