Book Review: John Yorke’s Into the Woods

In Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (2013), John Yorke offers us a deep and compelling look into the origins and manifestations of dramatic structure. He argues that stories “aspire” to a certain, symmetrical shape, just “as water seeks a level.” This shape is nearly unavoidable; even writers who decry three-act structure tend to manifest it anyway, and those stories that buck the pattern gain their power and meaning through their relation to the pattern (i.e., by subverting audience expectations in a way that reveals authorial intent).

The book explains what dramatic structure is, and it attempts to explain why it is this way.

In essence, a good story consists of one or more protagonists, driven by desire (both an external "want" and an internal "need" that may be at cross purposes), opposed by a source of antagonism. These elements coalesce in an inciting incident, which catalyzes a journey into a "new world" of some sort, culminating at a crisis point, followed by a climax and a resolution. Stories are about change, and the process of change is best embodied by either the three-act structure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or the more nuanced five-act structure (Yorke states that Act 2 in a three-act story is just expanded into Acts 2-4 in a five-act story; Acts 1 and 5 remain the same).

Yorke explains that the ubiquity of dramatic structure results from fundamental truths about the human mind and Nature itself:
1. Humans need to (and derive pleasure from) imposing order on the world.
2. Order is often found in the juxtaposition of opposites (e.g., Newton's Third Law: "To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction")
3. The juxtaposition of opposites is the basis for how humans learn (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), heal (pathology-health-healing), and empathize (me-you-us)
4. Truth/Order manifests as fractals (as vascular systems incorporate the same pattern at smaller and smaller scales, the dramatic structure holds true at the level of full narratives, acts, and scenes).

I was shocked at how many parallels I found between this book and my reading about Systems Theory and Thinking. At the heart of these approaches, we must learn to see these patterns as a type of living process, rather than an inert fact of life. I wish Yorke had explained a bit more why characters change in a predictable pattern, perhaps with reference to the neurology or psychology of assimilating new thoughts and behaviors. At any rate, this book is required reading for anyone interested in storytelling, or the ineffable mysteries of an ordered universe.