List of story structures

This dramatic structure started out as a Chinese poetry style called qǐ chéng zhuǎn hé (起承转合) and then was exported to Korea as gi seung jeon gyeol (Hangul: 기승전결; Hanja: 起承轉結) and Japan as kishōtenketsu (起承転結).

In certain times, the candidates were expected to spontaneously compose poetry upon a set theme, whose value was also sometimes questioned, or eliminated as part of the test material.

Though eventually incorporated into a number of disciplines, it was most famously adapted, and thoroughly analysed and discussed by the great Noh playwright Zeami,[12] who viewed it as a universal concept applying to the patterns of movement of all things.

Karagöz plays are structured in four parts: Sources:[15][16] Ta'zieh or Ta'zïye or Ta'zīya or Tazīa or Ta'ziyeh (Arabic: تعزية, Persian: تعزیه, Urdu: تعزیہ) means comfort, condolence or expression of grief.

the word can signify different cultural meanings and practices: Ta'zieh, primarily known from the Persian tradition, is a shi'ite Muslim ritual that reenacts the death of Hussein (the Islamic prophet Muhammad's grandson) and his male children and companions in a brutal massacre on the plains of Karbala, Iraq in the year 680 AD.

In his Poetics, a theory about tragedies, the Greek philosopher Aristotle put forth the idea the play should imitate a single whole action and does not skip around (such as flashbacks).

[21] Aristotle ranks the elements of a tragedy, in order of importance, as follows: Plot, Character, Events (or "Reason": the rationale for the actions that occur), Diction, Music, and Spectacle.

[26] The stage should also be split into “Prologue, Episode, Exode, and a choral portion, distinguished into Parode and Stasimon...“[27] Unlike later, he held that the morality was the center of the play and what made it great.

The Roman drama critic Horace advocated a 5-act structure in his Ars Poetica: "Neue minor neu sit quinto productior actu fabula" (lines 189–190) ("A play should not be shorter or longer than five acts").

The fourth-century Roman grammarian Aelius Donatus in his criticism of Terence's plays Adelphoe and Hecyra in the book Aeli Donati qvod fertvr Commentvm Terenti: Accendvnt Evgravphi Volume 2 and in his review of Terence's Play Andria in P. Terentii Afri comoediae sex used the terms prologue (prologus), protasis, epitasis and catastropha.

For example for Terence's play Adelphoe he comments, "in hac prologus aliquanto lenior inducitur; magis etiam in se purgando quam in aduersariis laedendis est occupatus.

"[29]: 4 He further adds that Hecyra, "in hac prologus est et multiplex et rhectoricus nimis, propterea quod saepe exclusa haec comoedia diligentissima defensione indigebat.

[30] Born in Spain in the 16th century, the picaresque novel is a type of narrative told in the first person by a lowborn protagonist ("pícaro") in a realistic setting, often with a satiric tone.

[35] The term was coined in the 1819 by Karl Morgenstern, but the birth of the Bildungsroman is normally dated to the publication of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1795–96,[36] or, sometimes, to Christoph Martin Wieland's Geschichte des Agathon of 1767.

Introduction can be conveyed through dialogues, flashbacks, characters' asides, background details, in-universe media, or the narrator telling a back-story.

In it he outlines the following plot elements and ties it to a drawing,[59] following Whitcomb's prescriptions: Incident, emotion, crisis, suspense, climax, dénouement, conclusion.

when quoting "Short Story Writing 1898, Charles Raymond Barrett, p 171" but further expounds here as, "rise of interest and in power to its highest point."

"[61] He does not state the center of stories is conflict, but rather on page 3 that, "The purpose of fiction is to embody certain truths of human life in a series of imagined facts.

Sprung originally from Christianity, it is often an account of a person's life that was first secularized by Jean Jacques Rousseau and then popularized in 1919 with the magazine True Story.

[62] Their formula has been characterized as "sin-suffer-repent": The heroine violates standards of behavior, suffers as a consequence, learns her lesson, and resolves to live in light of it, not embittered by her pain.

The aim of Lubbock is to give a shape or a formula to books, because he states: "We hear the phrase on all sides, an unending argument is waged over it.

But though the discussion is indeed confusingly worded at times, it is clear that there is agreement on this article at least—that a book is a thing to which a shape is ascribable, good or bad.

The book, I take it, begins to grow out of the thought of the processional march of the generations, always changing, always renewed; its figures are sought and chosen for the clarity with which the drama is embodied in them.

The book was wildly, popular, but Virginia Woolf privately wrote of the work that, "This is my prime discovery so far; & the fact that I've been so long finding it, proves, I think, how false Percy Lubbock's doctrine is--that you can do this sort of thing consciously."

He outlined in the 2005 edition of his book Foundations of a Screenplay, that he wanted to give a more set structure to the work that Lajos Egri had laid out.

[83] Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "The Theatre of the Absurd", which begins by focusing on the playwrights Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugène Ionesco.

Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Boy Meets World, and Batman: The Animated Series all had story arcs.

recurs in literature as the standard shape of comedy, where a series of misfortunes and misunderstandings brings the action to a threateningly low point, after which some fortunate twist in the plot sends the conclusion up to a happy ending.

At the bottom of the U, the direction is reversed by a fortunate twist, divine deliverance, an awakening of the protagonist to his or her tragic circumstances, or some other action or event that results in an upward turn of the plot.

The parable opens at the top of the U with a stable condition but turns downward after the son asks the father for his inheritance and sets out for a "distant country" (Luke 15:13).