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Story Structure and
Development
A Guide for Animators,
VFX Artists, Game Designers,
and Virtual Reality
Story Structure and
Development
A Guide for Animators,
VFX Artists, Game Designers,
and Virtual Reality
Craig Caldwell
CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300
Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
© 2017 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
No claim to original U.S. Government works
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Caldwell, Craig, author.

Title: Story structure and development : a guide for animators, VFX artists,
game designers, and virtual reality / Craig Caldwell.
Description: Boca Raton : Taylor & Francis, a CRC title, part of the Taylor &
Francis imprint, a member of the Taylor & Francis Group, the academic
division of T&F Informa, plc, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016048892| ISBN 9781498781732 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781138708358 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Video games--Authorship. | Virtual reality. | Online
authorship. | Computer animation.
Classification: LCC GV1469.34.A97 C35 2017 | DDC 794.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048892
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at

http://www.taylorandfrancis.com
and the CRC Press Web site at
http://www.crcpress.com
Dedicated to
Dee, Ryan, and Joanna
Contents
Author xi
Part 1 Story Structure (the Plot)
1 Plot: The Structure 3

What Is a Dramatic Story?.....................................................................................4
Plot… What Is It?....................................................................................................6
Story Elements....................................................................................................7
3 Act Structure.........................................................................................................8
Act Structures........................................................................................................10
Plot: The Hero’s Journey...................................................................................... 12
Plot Structures: The Short....................................................................................14
Structure Comparisons........................................................................................16
What They All Have in Common?.....................................................................18
References.............................................................................................................. 20
2 Setup: Act 1 21
Types of Setup....................................................................................................... 22
Where to Start................................................................................................. 22
Traditional Setup Sequences......................................................................... 23
Opening Image(s)................................................................................................. 24
Exposition............................................................................................................. 26
Show Don’t Tell..................................................................................................... 28
Inciting Incident................................................................................................... 30
Types of Inciting Incidents.............................................................................31
What’s at Stake?.....................................................................................................32
Story World........................................................................................................... 34
Story Question...................................................................................................... 36
References.............................................................................................................. 38
3 Middle 39
Middles.................................................................................................................. 40
vii
Types of Conflict.................................................................................................. 42
Elements of Conflict....................................................................................... 43
Increasing Conflict............................................................................................... 44
Turning Points/Reversals.................................................................................... 46
Five Story Turning Points.............................................................................. 47
Cause and Effect................................................................................................... 48
Crisis...................................................................................................................... 50
References...............................................................................................................52
4 Endings 53
Endings.................................................................................................................. 54
Climax.................................................................................................................... 56
Resolution.............................................................................................................. 58
Deus ex Machina..............................................................................................59
Meaning................................................................................................................. 60
References...............................................................................................................62
5 Story Types 63
Genres.................................................................................................................... 64
Story Concepts...................................................................................................... 66
Only a Few Basic Plots......................................................................................... 68
Five Story Goals.............................................................................................. 69
References...............................................................................................................70
Part 2 Story Elements
6 Story Elements 73
Premise: What Is It About?..................................................................................74
Theme: What Does It Mean?...............................................................................76
Emotion..................................................................................................................78
Generating Emotion....................................................................................... 79
Setting.................................................................................................................... 80
References.............................................................................................................. 82
7 Story Mechanics 83
What Is a Scene?................................................................................................... 84
Purpose of a Scene.......................................................................................... 84
Scene Components......................................................................................... 85
How Do Scenes Work?........................................................................................ 86
Types of Scene Endings.................................................................................. 86
Scene Checklist................................................................................................ 87
Narrative Questions............................................................................................. 88
Types of Narrative Questions........................................................................ 88
Surprise.................................................................................................................. 90
Techniques for Surprise..................................................................................91
Suspense................................................................................................................. 92
Techniques for Suspense................................................................................ 92
viii Contents
Comedy.................................................................................................................. 94
Subplot................................................................................................................... 96
Foreshadowing: Creating Anticipation............................................................ 98
References............................................................................................................ 100
8 Interactive Narrative 101
Why Story in Games/VR?..................................................................................102
Story versus Narrative....................................................................................... 104
Environmental Storytelling.............................................................................. 106
VR Story (Telling?)............................................................................................. 108
References.............................................................................................................110
Part 3 Character Development
9 Character 113
Character..............................................................................................................114
What Are the Dramatic Qualities of a Character?...................................114
Character-Driven Story......................................................................................116
Character-Driven Categories.......................................................................117
Archetypes...........................................................................................................118
Stereotypes.......................................................................................................... 120
Backstory versus Character Profile................................................................. 122
Backstory Questions (External).................................................................. 123
Character Profile Questions (Internal)...................................................... 123
Identification/Empathy..................................................................................... 124
Love Your Characters........................................................................................ 126
References............................................................................................................ 128
10 Character Elements 129
Story World as Character.................................................................................. 130
Goal: What a Character Wants........................................................................ 132
Goal Traits......................................................................................................133
Need: What a Character Really, Really Wants.............................................. 134
Conflict Reveals Character............................................................................... 136
Choices that a Character Must Make.............................................................. 138
Change................................................................................................................. 140
Types of Change............................................................................................ 140
Character Arc..................................................................................................... 142
Types of Character Arcs............................................................................... 142
Character Flaws.................................................................................................. 144
Types of Flaws................................................................................................ 144
References............................................................................................................ 146
11 Character Values/Motivation 147
The Role of Conflict........................................................................................... 148
Fear: The Inner Journey.................................................................................... 150
Unity of Opposites..............................................................................................152
Creating Interesting Characters...................................................................... 154
Contents ix
Character Traits.............................................................................................155
References............................................................................................................ 156
Part 4 Idea Development
12 Generating Ideas 159

Ideas..................................................................................................................... 160
Generating Story Ideas................................................................................. 160
Research................................................................................................................162
What If?............................................................................................................... 164
Cliché................................................................................................................... 166
Cliché Problems ............................................................................................167
Point of View....................................................................................................... 168
References.............................................................................................................170
13 Story Development 171
Development and Checklists.............................................................................172
Development Techniques..............................................................................173
Opposition: Antagonism....................................................................................174
Memorable Villain Traits.............................................................................175
Problems at the Beginning................................................................................176
Know Your Ending.............................................................................................178
Ingredients to a Good Ending......................................................................179
Dialogue: Its Functions..................................................................................... 180
What kills Dialogue.......................................................................................181
Subtext..................................................................................................................182
Subtext Techniques........................................................................................182
Metaphors and Symbols.................................................................................... 184
Making the Story… Short................................................................................. 186
References............................................................................................................ 188
14 Viewer (the Audience) 191
The Viewer’s Expectations................................................................................ 192
Who Knows What? When? (Directing a Viewer’s Attention).................... 194
A Story Trick.................................................................................................. 195
Gaps...................................................................................................................... 196
Internal Gaps................................................................................................. 197
External Gaps................................................................................................ 197
Believability......................................................................................................... 198
Coincidences....................................................................................................... 200
References............................................................................................................ 202
Index 203
x Contents
Author
Craig Caldwell is USTAR (Utah Science Technology and Research) professor

in digital media, University of Utah. Having worked for Walt Disney Feature
Animation and Electronic Arts games he has extensive experience in the industry
approach to creating animation and games. Caldwell has been a co-founder and
arts director for one of the top-ranked interactive games programs, Entertainment
Arts and Engineering (EAE – University of Utah) with its numerous award win-
ning games. He has served as head of the largest film school in Australia—Griffith
Film School, Griffith University as well as chair of the Media Arts Department
and associate director of the New Media Center at University of Arizona; as well
as having been selected as a DeTao Master, Institute of Animation and Creative
Content on the SIVA campus, Shanghai, China. Caldwell speaks frequently on
story at major conferences such as SIGGRAPH, FMX, Sundance, CCG Expo, and
Mundos Digitales. He earned his PhD from the Advanced Computing Center for
Art and Design, Ohio State University.
xi
Part 1
Story Structure
(the Plot)
1
Plot: The Structure
3
What Is a Dramatic Story?
Every day we tell each other stories, but these are not the dramatic stories we see
in the movies or encounter in interactive games. Dramatic stories are more than
just what is happening… they are about why things
are happening and how it affects the viewer.
The dictionary definition of story is a sequence of
events. Dramatic stories are still a sequence of events,
but the fundamental difference is that they are a
sequence of connected events. Many years ago, E. M.
Forster (Figure 1.1) indicated that a story can be about
“the king died and then the queen died” but a dra-
matic story is “the king died and then the queen died
of grief.”1 The emphasis moves from what happened to
why it happened.
Stories connect audiences to what individuals
think, and what cultures value. The important ques-
tions in a story are: What do people want? Why do
they want it? How do they go about getting it? What
Figure 1.1
stops them? What are the consequences?2 These are
E. M. Forster, novelist. fundamental. Dramatic stories are about a main char-
acter, who goes after something but it gets increas-
ingly difficult (conflict)… and by the end, they are
changed, and see the world differently.
The Why underscores how we use a story to under-
stand life; why things work the way they do. Stories aid
human beings in their search for meaning; to make
sense of why we are alive. They give us a perspective
on priorities in our lives. For generations, cultures
have proposed answers to these questions through
myths (Figure 1.2): Greek plays, Shakespearean plays,
Chinese proverbs, folk tales, and interpreted dreams.3
Today, we get this information through novels, mov-
ies, animation, and interactive games. In dramatic
stories, we see a main character that (1) has a prob-
lem which can’t be avoided, (2) is faced with difficult
Figure 1.2 choices, and (3) which has serious consequences if
Ancient mythology. they are not successful.
4 1. Plot: The Structure

Today, audiences have even higher expectations
from dramatic stories. Joseph Campbell, author We are trying to find what we hope the
of the Hero’s Journey story structure, emphasizes audience will feel while watching this movie.
that audiences have evolved from searching for Every other department is on board… the
clues on the meaning of life to additionally seek- environment, the coloring, the lighting, the
animation, to make the strongest possible
ing an “experience of being alive” in stories.4 The
statement; that when people are in a theatre
key is to engage audiences emotionally, by linking they are going to… Wow, this is something
the external action to the internal emotions of the special, this is something that affected me.
characters. Joe Ranft emphasizes that connecting
a viewer’s internal emotions with the main char-
acter enhances their ability to identify with the
story (Figure 1.3).
Linda Seger (Figure 1.4) asks the question:
What is a story? She indicates that it sounds like
an obvious question but believes that many films,
animations, and games are released every year
where there is not a story… but episodes. Episodes
are defined as the daily events that happen in our
lives. The difference is that episodes are how we
live most of our lives; we get up, go to work, see
friends, go to lunch, but none of these events are
intrinsically linked to each other.5
Figure 1.3
All dramatic stories have a similar set of
elements—connected actions, with conflict that Joe Ranft, Head of Story, Pixar, 1990–2005.
intensifies, which force difficult choices with con-
sequences. Along the way the ever-increasing con-
flict results in a crisis that leads to a climax, with a
surprise along the way that the audience didn’t antici-
pate. This leads to a resolution (gives meaning to the
story) and in the end the character is changed. These
are the universal components of a story today.
Figure 1.4
Linda Seger, story consultant and author
of Making a Good Script Great, Samuel
French Trade, 1987.
What Is a Dramatic Story? 5

Plot… What Is It?
What is Plot? Plot is the sequential arrangement of the story elements (i.e., char-
acter, setting, and theme); what happens and when it happens in the story. It is
the arrangement of which events come before (or after) something else… that
results in increasing conflict, leading to a climax, to produce a particular end-
ing to the story. In The Three Little Pigs, the order of the houses getting blown
down sets up increasing tension in the telling of the story
(Figure 1.5).
Plot is to story as composition is to art and music. The
hard work of story is not just selecting the correct story ele-
ments but also putting them in the right order—this is just
as important. While the terms story and plot are often used
interchangeably … they are not the same thing.
The more familiar an audience is with a particular plot
structure (i.e., mystery, horror, comedy, etc.) the better an
audience understands what is happening in the story. A plot
connects the events in a story, to not only grab an audience/
player’s interest, but also to keep them interested in what
happens next. This arrangement of events uses plot devices
such as suspense, surprise, coincidences, reversals, emo-
tional moments, etc. Alfred Hitchcock (Figure 1.6) explains
that the difference between suspense versus shock/surprise
depends on what the audience knows ahead of time. The
most critical information in a scene where a bomb has been
planted is whether or not the audience knows about the
Figure 1.6 bomb before it goes off (5 minutes of suspense) or after it
Alfred Hitchcock on suspense, https://
goes off (5 seconds of surprise).6 Such plot devices directly
www.youtube.com/watch?v=md6 impact the level of emotional engagement of the viewer/
folAgGRU player.
Figure 1.5
The Three Little Pigs by Francis Glebas, Directing the Story.

Story Elements
Plot is the writer’s choice of events and
•• Character—who the audience identifies their design in time.7
with—Maximus (Figure 1.8).
•• World/Setting—where, ancient Rome, its
territories, and the Roman Coliseum.
•• Goal—what the main character wants—
revenge, to kill the emperor.
•• Theme—why—to be with his family. This is
the meaning of the story. The theme is real-
ized at the climax as a result of the choices
the character makes.
•• Conflict/Obstacle—the things that prevent
the character from reaching their goal—he
is injured, becomes a slave, the guards pro-
tect the emperor. Collectively, these result
in….
•• Change—the main character goes through
or they bring to the world around them.
Maximus frees Rome from the emperor’s Figure 1.7
tyranny, frees his fellow slaves, joins his Robert McKee.
family.
Robert McKee clarifies that what a plot organizes are story elements
(Figure 1.7). Paradoxically, if the plot is well done… it won’t be remembered.
What is remembered is the story (the characters and situation). Successful story
telling is when the audience is so engrossed with the story—nothing else is
noticed. The audience is unaware of how the story is being told. Similar to VFX
(visual effects); when VFX is done really well, it is invisible.
Figure 1.8
Story elements in Gladiator.
Plot… What Is It? 7

3 Act Structure
The classic plot structure is often referred to as 3 acts, corresponding to setup,
increasing conflict, and resolution. Even something as short as a scene, or inter-
active game level, has a similar 3-part structure (Figure 1.9):
Act 1—the setup introduces the characters and the rules
of the world. The audience/player learns where the
story takes place (the setting), what the main character
Ridley Scott, director of The
Martian (referring to the screen-
wants (motivation), and the dramatic question (what
play for Gladiator) … I needed all the story is really about, that the audience can relate
this information converted into a to). This act contains only the minimum amount of
good 3-Act play… drama.11 information the audience needs to start the story.
Act 2—Increasing Conflict forces the main character to
confront obstacles that stand between them and what
they want, their goal. These conflicts build until the
final crisis that has to be resolved… one way or another.
This act is where the bulk of the conflict takes place.
Act 3—Resolution follows the Climax that is the tran-
sition to Act 3. Here, the conflict is resolved, the big
questions are answered, and a new status quo is estab-
lished. It’s the shortest act, with a resolution which
gives the story its meaning.
Each act has a different purpose, but what that purpose
is can vary depending on the author’s point of view. The
Figure 1.10 terminology and the style depend on what is most impor-
Ridley Scott, director, The Martian, tant in how the story is told (Figure 1.10):
Alien, Gladiator. • Conflict/crisis, climax, and resolution8
• Departure, tests/choices/change, and return9
• Setup, confrontation, and resolution10
Figure 1.9
3-Act plot structure.

Aristotle12 (352 bc) originally defined plot as having begin-
ning, middle, and end. Today, stories continue to have a
beginning, middle, and end… just not necessarily in that
order. Today, the traditional link between beginning, mid-
dle, and end and the 3-act structure has been decoupled.
This is evident in films such as Memento (Figures 1.11) and
Edge of Tomorrow: Live, Die, Repeat which don’t follow
the traditional linear order of beginning, middle, and end.
This is possible because viewers have seen so many stories
they innately understand the 3-act structure and can reas-
semble a 3-act story sequence in their mind… even when
it is not presented in a linear order.
This enhanced capability of the viewer/player permits
game designers to break story elements into narrative
blocks. These blocks are distributed across a variety of Figure 1.11
sequences, with the player piecing together the narrative Christopher Nolan, director, Memento,
as they interact with a game or virtual reality (VR). Inception.
Screen media (i.e., video games, VR, film, and animation) is expanding its use
of narrative blocks. Such narrative blocks are an extension of the axiom that All
stories start in the middle. Action movies (i.e., James Bond, Mission Impossible)
always start the story in the middle of the action. In Act 1, the conflict has always
begun earlier than when the story opens. Although the viewer didn’t see that
beginning action, they use their innate story knowledge to puzzle their way
through and put the pieces together. This innate capability has permitted direc-
tors to shift narrative information from its traditional sequence (i.e., beginning,
middle, and end) to dispersing these narrative elements throughout the plot
structure (Figure 1.12).
Figure 1.12
Narrative elements distributed throughout the plot.
3 Act Structure 9
Act Structures
Although the beginning, middle, and end structure is the standard today, there
can be more, or less, than just 3 acts in a story. The number of acts varies. It
depends on story length, cultural standard (Bollywood vs. Hollywood), and
screen media (i.e., film, VR, games, novel, etc.).
History tells us that the ancient Greek dramas were conceived in a 3-act
structure13 (Aristotle). This expanded the concept of beginning, middle, and
end to 5-acts14 (Horace in ancient Rome). Five acts
were the norm for classic Renaissance dramas and
Shakespearean plays.15 In the late nineteenth century,
there was a resurgence of 3-acts. The early twentieth
century saw an 8-Act16 (Sequences) structure emerge,
corresponding to the number of film reels that had
to be changed every 10–15 minutes for a movie.
Television had an even greater impact on act struc-
ture—ranging from one act for cartoons to many acts
for a miniseries. The 3-act structure is synonymous
with Aristotle’s beginning, middle, and end; yet, where
it can get confusing is that stories, whether they have
one act or eight acts, also have a beginning, middle,
Figure 1.13
and end structure. That continues to be the standard
One act stories. starting point for a story… even as the number of acts
changes to fit various lengths in screen media.
1-Act stories (Figure 1.13) are found in cartoons,
commercials, shorts, cut-scenes in games…
anything with a 1–8-minute length. One act
stories are best limited to two characters, one
location setting, one familiar social situation,
and one turning point ending the story (i.e.,
Bugs Bunny, Pixar Shorts, SpongeBob).
2-Act stories (Figure 1.14) are found in television
shows and situation comedies, 30 minutes or
less. These work best within the constraints
Figure 1.14 of a limited number of characters, only a few
Two act stories. location settings, familiar social situations, and
a limit of two major turning points before the
resolution (i.e., Friends, The Big Bang Theory).
3-Acts (Figure 1.15) are traditionally found in
movie genres (i.e., Mystery, Action, Romance,
Comedy…). 3-Act plots communicate stories
that can connect the audience to their more
personal experiences. This format includes
three major turning points… at a minimum.
Epic movies often require a larger number of
acts to tell their story. Narrative interactive
Figure 1.15 games often have a 3-act structure within
Three act stories. each distinct level.

4-Acts are commonly found in television dra-
mas, 60 minutes in length—Law & Order,
NCIS (Figure 1.16), with the commercial
breaks signaling the change to the next act.
Such shows are primarily centered around
the inherent conflict found in crime and
medical shows. While these shows have
a formulaic structure, audiences relate to
the drama due to their own legal or medi-
cal encounters. These stories offer much in Figure 1.16
the way of life’s lessons with potential situ-
ations. The 4-act structure relates to those Four acts with a middle Act II [2A + 2B].
story theorists who advocate breaking Act
2 into 2A and 2B (e.g., Trottier, Snyder, and
Hauge).
5-Acts are seen in emotional dramas such as
Shakespearean plays and contemporary
relationship stories with their multiple
points-of-view and multitude of turn-
ing points—Silver Linings Playbook, Four
Weddings and a Funeral (Figure 1.17). A
5-act plot has a structure that is broken
into the following acts: exposition, rising
action, climax, falling action, and resolu-
tion.17 This 5-act structure also parallels
the 3-act structure as Act 1 is exposition,
Figure 1.17
Act 2 is comprised of rising action and
climax, and Act 3 includes both falling Five act stories.
action and resolution.
8-Acts (and more) are found in epic mov-
ies, video games levels, and stories with
numerous characters—Breaking Bad,
Game of Thrones (Figure 1.18). Eight acts
are the standard in the USC story theory
Sequence Approach which evolved in the
early days of cinema when film reels had
to be changed every 10–15 minutes. Robert
McKee warns that multiple acts can reduce
the impact of the final crisis and invites
clichés.18 Phil Parker encourages seeing
acts as dramatic movements, as opposed
to structural units. As movements, story
development will be more effective in see-
ing “[the viewer’s] engagement with the Figure 1.18
narrative as a whole….”19 Eight + act stories.
Act Structures 11
Plot: The Hero’s Journey
There are different plot structures that lay out the basic steps of a dramatic
story. One of the more popular today is the Hero’s Journey20 credited to Joseph
Campbell (Figure 1.19). This structure has gone on to become one of the most
familiar structures for action movies and first person shooter (FPS) games today
(Mission Impossible, Star Wars, Battlefield). Viewers see it so often they now
expect it, but at the same time, they want to see it in fresh configurations (Avatar,
Suicide Squad, Call of Duty). Ironically, the Hero’s Journey is based on some of
the oldest cultural stories… yet is also one of the more recent
story structures to have emerged. It heavily influenced the
plot for Star Wars which has a direct correspondence with
the Hero’s Journey structure (see Figure 1.20).
This structure is derived from Joseph Campbell’s research
on common narrative patterns in myths handed down from
generation to generation. Campbell detected that the princi-
pal myths from numerous cultures around the world share
a fundamental structure; the monomyth21 (one great story).
Campbell summarized this structure as…
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into
a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there
encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back
from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons
on his fellow man.22
Most people want to be the hero in their own story, so they

Figure 1.19 readily identify the hero motif. With the increased popularity
Joseph Campbell, author, A Hero of this structure, it’s common to refer to the main character
with a Thousand Faces. as the hero.
Figure 1.20
Analysis of Star Wars as the Hero’s Journey.

The Hero’s Journey is made up of a number of stages
that the main character goes through in a story.23 Joseph
Campbell broke it down into 12 stages. The Hero’s Journey
pattern of stages is familiar in many of the world’s spiri-
tual narratives (i.e., Buddha and Jesus) which in turn
influenced The Matrix (see Figure 1.21).
Do movies and games have all these stages? No… but
all dramatic stories have some of them, in one form or
another. Christopher Vogler, in the Writer’s Journey, con-
solidated them into 12 stages for the film industry. He
stresses that “the order of the stages… is only one of many
possible variations. The stages can be deleted, added to, and
drastically shuffled without losing any of their power.”24
There are a number of examples where writers tried to
follow this structure as a template only to come to ruin (i.e.,
Delgo: A Hero’s Journey). The Hero’s Journey continues to
evolve across cultures and with the times we live in. Those
who have built on the stages of the Hero’s Journey include
(8-point arc [Watts],25 22 steps [Truby],26 and 31 functions
[Propp]27). Which ones to consider depend on the content
and story to be told. These stages provide familiar points of
reference that a viewer uses to track where they are in the
story and gain insights into the character’s motivation as
well as enhancing the entertainment through anticipation.
Figure 1.21
Analysis of the Hero’s Journey in The
Matrix.
Plot: The Hero’s Journey 13

Plot Structures: The Short
While the Hero’s Journey works well for epic stories, there are other plot struc-
tures that are better adapted for short stories. These structures differ from the
Hero’s Journey in that they have a fewer number of stages and use contemporary
terms. Even if not used in each story’s plot structure, these stages can serve as a
checklist to be considered. It is important that each person select (and assemble),
their own set of plot stages that match their sensibilities and media (i.e., anima-
tion, film, games, VR, etc.). For each stage has its strengths as well as its tradeoffs.
Nigel Watts proposes that all classic plots pass through eight stages—similar
to the Hero’s Journey (Figure 1.22).28 Stories pass through predictable points: the
beginning of a story that sets up the basic problem (everyday life and trigger),
the middle that build the story’s rising conflict (quest), and the end that pro-
vides a resolution (surprise, critical choice, reversal, climax, and resolution [the
meaning]).
1. Stasis (everyday life)
2. Trigger (inciting incident)
3. Quest (middle)
4. Surprise (obstacles)
5. Critical choice (leading to crisis)
6. Climax (climax)
7. Reversal (change of status quo)
8. Resolution (change is visible)
Figure 1.22
8-Point arc.

A comparable 8-point structure has emerged for Karen Sullivan
in Ideas for the Animated Short (Figure 1.23).29 This also echoes
the stages of the Hero’s Journey but is a more realistic plot struc-
ture adapted for animated shorts—under 5 minutes and scoped
to fit within the time allotted. This structure can also be seen in
the successful Pixar shorts (i.e., Presto, Luxo Jr., For the Birds) as
well as award winning shorts found in the major competitions
(i.e., Oscars, Emmys, SIGGRAPH, Film Festivals [e.g., Tropfest]).
Short stories work best when limited to no more than two
primary characters, one setting, and one theme (i.e., Looney
Tunes [Bugs Bunny]). There is limited time to establish what
a character wants and the obstacle(s) that are preventing the
character from getting it. Sullivan proposes in “Ideas for the
Animated Short” that shorts are more successful when the sto-
ries are direct, simple, and have an economy of structure and
plot (Figure 1.24). Figure 1.23
1. A character wants something badly 8-Point structure, Ideas for the
2. Something happens that moves the character to action Animated Short, Karen Sullivan. 29
3. The character meets with conflict
4. Things gets worse until the character is in crisis
5. Almost all is lost
6. Lesson is learned
7. Hard choice must be made
8. Success
Figure 1.24
Analysis of For the Birds as 8-point structure.
Plot Structures: The Short 15

Structure Comparisons
There are two major categories of plot structure: Hero’s
Journey and an (updated) Aristotelian paradigm. Hero’s
Journey is today’s most well-known story structure based on
Joseph Campbell’s research, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
on the commonalities between narratives found in myths
from around the world30 (Figure 1.25).
Popular story theorists that ascribe to the Hero’s Journey
structure include Christopher Vogler31 and John Truby32
(Figure 1.26). This approach took off when Vogler’s 7-page
summary, written when he worked at Disney, was distrib-
uted and embraced by the Hollywood studios in the 1990s.
Vogler expanded his summary into the definitive book—
The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.
Figure 1.25
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
by Joseph Campbell. 30
Figure 1.26
Hero’s Journey story theorists.

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And then first the political tension within the Faustian world-
consciousness discharged itself. For the Greeks, Hellas was and
remained the important part of the earth’s surface, but with the
discovery of America West-Europe became a province in a gigantic
whole. Thenceforward the history of the Western Culture has a
planetary character.
Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and
fatherland, which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in
words, full of dark metaphysical relations, but nevertheless
unmistakable in its tendency. The Classical home-feeling which tied
the individual corporally and Euclidean-ly to the Polis[420] is the very
antithesis of that enigmatic “Heimweh” of the Northerner which has
something musical, soaring and unearthly in it. Classical man felt as
“Home” just what he could see from the Acropolis of his native city.
Where the horizon of Athens ended, the alien, the hostile, the
“fatherland” of another began. Even the Roman of late Republican
times understood by “patria” nothing but Urbs Roma, not even
Latium, still less Italy. The Classical world, as it matured, dissolved
itself into a large number of point-patriæ, and the need of bodily
separation between them took the form of hatreds far more intense
than any hatred that there was of the Barbarian. And it is therefore
the most convincing of all evidences of the victory of the Magian
world-feeling that Caracalla[421] in 212 A.D. granted Roman citizenship
to all provincials. For this grant simply abolished the ancient,
statuesque, idea of the citizen. There was now a Realm and
consequently a new kind of membership. The Roman notion of an
army, too, underwent a significant change. In genuinely Classical
times there had been no Roman Army in the sense in which we
speak of the Prussian Army, but only “armies,” that is, definite
formations (as we say) created as corps, limited and visibly present
bodies, by the appointment of a Legatus to command—an exercitus
Scipionis, Crassi for instance—but never an exercitus Romanus. It
was Caracalla, the same who abolished the idea of “civis Romanus”
by decree and wiped out the Roman civic deities by making all alien
deities equivalent to them, who created the un-Classical and Magian
idea of an Imperial Army, something manifested in the separate
legions. These now meant something, whereas in Classical times
they meant nothing, but simply were. The old “fides exercituum” is
replaced by “fides exercitus” in the inscriptions and, instead of
individual bodily-conceived deities special to each legion and ritually
honoured by its Legatus, we have a spiritual principle common to all.
So also, and in the same sense, the "fatherland"-feeling undergoes a
change of meaning for Eastern men—and not merely Christians—in
Imperial times. Apollinian man, so long as he retained any effective
remnant at all of his proper world-feeling, regarded “home” in the
genuinely corporeal sense as the ground on which his city was built
—a conception that recalls the “unity of place” of Attic tragedy and
statuary. But to Magian man, to Christians, Persians, Jews,
“Greeks,”[422] Manichæans, Nestorians and Mohammedans, it means
nothing that has any connexion with geographical actualities. And for
ourselves it means an impalpable unity of nature, speech, climate,
habits and history—not earth but “country,” not point-like presence
but historic past and future, not a unit made up of men, houses and
gods but an idea, the idea that takes shape in the restless
wanderings, the deep loneliness, and that ancient German impulse
towards the South which has been the ruin of our best, from the
Saxon Emperors to Hölderlin and Nietzsche.
The bent of the Faustian Culture, therefore, was overpoweringly
towards extension, political, economic or spiritual. It overrode all
geographical-material bounds. It sought—without any practical
object, merely for the Symbol’s own sake—to reach North Pole and
South Pole. It ended by transforming the entire surface of the globe
into a single colonial and economic system. Every thinker from
Meister Eckhardt to Kant willed to subject the “phenomenal” world to
the asserted domination of the cognizing ego, and every leader from
Otto the Great to Napoleon did it. The genuine object of their
ambitions was the boundless, alike for the great Franks and
Hohenstaufen with their world-monarchies, for Gregory VII and
Innocent III, for the Spanish Habsburgs “on whose empire the sun
never set,” and for the Imperialism of to-day on behalf of which the
World-War was fought and will continue to be fought for many a long
day. Classical man, for inward reasons, could not be a conqueror,
notwithstanding Alexander’s romantic expedition—for we can discern
enough of the inner hesitations and unwillingnesses of his
companions not to need to explain it as an “exception proving the
rule.”[423] The never-stilled desire to be liberated from the binding
element, to range far and free, which is the essence of the fancy-
creatures of the North—the dwarfs, elves and imps—is utterly
unknown to the Dryads and Oreads of Greece. Greek daughter-cities
were planted by the hundred along the rim of the Mediterranean, but
not one of them made the slightest real attempt to conquer and
penetrate the hinterlands. To settle far from the coast would have
meant to lose sight of “home,” while to settle in loneliness—the ideal
life of the trapper and prairie-man of America as it had been of
Icelandic saga-heroes long before—was something entirely beyond
the possibilities of Classical mankind. Dramas like that of the
emigration to America—man by man, each on his own account,
driven by deep promptings to loneliness—or the Spanish Conquest,
or the Californian gold-rush, dramas of uncontrollable longings for
freedom, solitude, immense independence, and of giantlike contempt
of all limitations whatsoever upon the home-feeling—these dramas
are Faustian and only Faustian. No other Culture, not even the
Chinese, knows them.
The Hellenic emigrant, on the contrary, clung as a child clings to
its mother’s lap. To make a new city out of the old one, exactly like it,
with the same fellow citizens, the same gods, the same customs,
with the linking sea never out of sight, and there to pursue in the
Agora the familiar life of the ζῷον πολιτικόν—this was the limit of
change of scene for the Apollinian life. To us, for whom freedom of
movement (if not always as a practical, yet in any case as an ideal,
right) is indispensable, such a limit would have been the most crying
of all slaveries. It is from the Classical point of view that the oft-
misunderstood expansion of Rome must be looked at. It was
anything rather than an extension of the fatherland; it confined itself
exactly within fields that had already been taken up by other culture-
men whom they dispossessed. Never was there a hint of dynamic
world-schemes of the Hohenstaufen or Habsburg stamp, or of an
imperialism comparable with that of our own times. The Romans
made no attempt to penetrate the interior of Africa. Their later wars
were waged only for the preservation of what they already
possessed, not for the sake of ambition nor under a significant
stimulus from within. They could give up Germany and Mesopotamia
without regret.
If, in fine, we look at it all together—the expansion of the
Copernican world-picture into that aspect of stellar space that we
possess to-day; the development of Columbus’s discovery into a
worldwide command of the earth’s surface by the West; the
perspective of oil-painting and of tragedy-scene; the sublimed home-
feeling; the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest
of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of
almost impossible mountain-peaks—we see, emerging everywhere
the prime-symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those
specially (in form, uniquely) Western creations of the soul-myth
called “Will,” “Force” and “Deed” must be regarded as derivatives of
this prime-symbol.
CHAPTER X
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
II
BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM
CHAPTER X
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
II
BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM
We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of

Morale,[424] the intellectual interpretation of Life by itself, to ascend
the height from which it is possible to survey the widest and gravest
of all the fields of human thought. At the same time, we shall need
for this survey an objectivity such as no one has as yet set himself
seriously to gain. Whatever we may take Morale to be, it is no part of
Morale to provide its own analysis; and we shall get to grips with the
problem, not by considering what should be our acts and aims and
standards, but only by diagnosing the Western feeling in the very
form of the enunciation.
In this matter of morale, Western mankind, without exception, is
under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone
demands something of the rest. We say “thou shalt” in the conviction
that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or
arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy
of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable. That, and
nothing short of it, is, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West
everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here
Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians,
Socialists with Jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a
claim to general and permanent validity. It is a necessity of the
Faustian soul that this should be so. He who thinks or teaches
“otherwise” is sinful, a backslider, a foe, and he is fought down
without mercy. You “shall,” the State “shall,” society “shall”—this form
of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning
that we can attach to the word. But it was not so either in the
Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a
pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both
undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-
element.
What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral
dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic,
sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on
behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no,
wittingly or no, Socialists. Even Nietzsche, that most passionate
opponent of “herd morale,” was perfectly incapable of limiting his
zeal to himself in the Classical way. He thought only of “mankind,”
and he attacked everyone who differed from himself. Epicurus, on
the contrary, was heartily indifferent to others’ opinions and acts and
never wasted one thought on the “transformation” of mankind. He
and his friends were content that they were as they were and not
otherwise. The Classical ideal was indifference (ἀπάθεια) to the
course of the world—the very thing which it is the whole business of
Faustian mankind to master—and an important element both of Stoic
and of Epicurean philosophy was the recognition of a category of
things neither preferred nor rejected[425] (ἀδιάφορα). In Hellas there
was a pantheon of morales as there was of deities, as the peaceful
coexistence of Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics shows, but the
Nietzschean Zarathustra—though professedly standing beyond good
and evil—breathes from end to end the pain of seeing men to be
other than as he would have them be, and the deep and utterly un-
Classical desire to devote a life to their reformation—his own sense
of the word, naturally, being the only one. It is just this, the general
transvaluation, that makes ethical monotheism and—using the word
in a novel and deep sense—socialism. All world-improvers are
Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.
The moral imperative as the form of morale is Faustian and only
Faustian. It is wholly without importance that Schopenhauer denies
theoretically the will to live, or that Nietzsche will have it affirmed—
these are superficial differences, indicative of personal tastes and
temperaments. The important thing, that which makes
Schopenhauer the progenitor of ethical modernity, is that he too feels
the whole world as Will, as movement, force, direction. This basic
feeling is not merely the foundation of our ethics, it is itself our whole
ethics, and the rest are bye-blows. That which we call not merely
activity but action[426] is a historical conception through-and-through,
saturated with directional energy. It is the proof of being, the
dedication of being, in that sort of man whose ego possesses the
tendency to Future, who feels the momentary present not as
saturated being but as epoch, as turning-point, in a great complex of
becoming—and, moreover, feels it so of both his personal life and of
the life of history as a whole. Strength and distinctness of this
consciousness are the marks of higher Faustian man, but it is not
wholly absent in the most insignificant of the breed, and it
distinguishes his smallest acts from those of any and every Classical
man. It is the distinction between character and attitude, between
conscious becoming and simple accepted statuesque becomeness,
between will and suffering in tragedy.
In the world as seen by the Faustian’s eyes, everything is motion
with an aim. He himself lives only under that condition, for to him life
means struggling, overcoming, winning through. The struggle for
existence as ideal form of existence is implicit even in the Gothic age
(of the architecture of which it is visibly the foundation) and the 19th
Century has not invented it but merely put it into mechanical-
utilitarian form. In the Apollinian world there is no such directional
motion—the purposeless and aimless see-saw of Heraclitus’s
“becoming” (ἡ ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω) is irrelevant here—no
“Protestantism,” no “Sturm und Drang,” no ethical, intellectual or
artistic “revolution” to fight and destroy the existent. The Ionic and
Corinthian styles appear by the side of the Doric without setting up
any claim to sole and general validity, but the Renaissance expelled
the Gothic and Classicism expelled the Baroque styles, and the
history of every European literature is filled with battles over form-
problems. Even our monasticism, with its Templars, Franciscans,
Dominicans and the rest, takes shape as an order-movement, in
sharp contrast to the “askesis” of the Early-Christian hermit.
To go back upon this basic form of his existence, let alone
transform it, is entirely beyond the power of Faustian man. It is
presupposed even in efforts to resist it. One fights against
“advanced” ideas, but all the time he looks on his fight itself as an
advance. Another agitates for a “reversal,” but what he intends is in
fact a continuance of development. “Immoral” is only a new kind of
“moral” and sets up the same claim to primacy. The will-to-power is
intolerant—all that is Faustian wills to reign alone. The Apollinian
feeling, on the contrary, with its world of coexistent individual things,
is tolerant as a matter of course. But, if toleration is in keeping with
will-less Ataraxia, it is for the Western world with its oneness of
infinite soul-space and the singleness of its fabric of tensions the
sign either of self-deception or of fading-out. The Enlightenment of
the 18th Century was tolerant towards—that is, careless of—
differences between the various Christian creeds, but in respect of
its own relation to the Church as a whole, it was anything but tolerant
as soon as the power to be otherwise came to it. The Faustian
instinct, active, strong-willed, as vertical in tendency as its own
Gothic cathedrals, as upstanding as its own “ego habeo factum,”
looking into distance and Future, demands toleration—that is, room,
space—for its proper activity, but only for that. Consider, for instance,
how much of it the city democracy is prepared to accord to the
Church in respect of the latter’s management of religious powers,
while claiming for itself unlimited freedom to exercise its own and
adjusting the “common” law to conform thereto whenever it can.
Every “movement” means to win, while every Classical “attitude” only
wants to be and troubles itself little about the Ethos of the neighbour.
To fight for or against the trend of the times, to promote Reform or
Reaction, construction, reconstruction or destruction—all this is as
un-Classical as it is un-Indian. It is the old antithesis of Sophoclean
and Shakespearian tragedy, the tragedy of the man who only wants
to exist and that of the man who wants to win.
It is quite wrong to bind up Christianity with the moral imperative. It
was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian
man who transformed Christianity—and he not only made it a new
religion but also gave it a new moral direction. The “it” became “I,”
the passion-charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great
Sacrament of personal contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the
passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a universal truth,
and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or
destroy everything otherwise constituted—nothing is more
characteristically our own than this is. And in virtue of it the Gothic
springtime proceeded to a profound—and never yet appreciated—
inward transformation of the morale of Jesus. A quiet spiritual morale
welling from Magian feeling—a morale or conduct recommended as
potent for salvation, a morale the knowledge of which was
communicated as a special act of grace[427]—was recast as a morale
of imperative command.[428]
Every ethical system, whether it be of religious or of philosophical
origin, has associations with the great arts and especially with that of
architecture. It is in fact a structure of propositions of causal
character. Every truth that is intended for practical application is
propounded with a “because” and a “therefore.” There is
mathematical logic in them—in Buddha’s “Four Truths” as in Kant’s
“Critique of Practical Reason”[429] and in every popular catechism.
What is not in these doctrines of acquired truth is the uncritical logic
of the blood, which generates and matures those conduct-standards
(Sitten) of social classes and of practical men (e.g., the chivalry-
obligations in the time of the Crusades) that we only consciously
realize when someone infringes them. A systematic morale is, as it
were, an Ornament, and it manifests itself not only in precepts but
also in the style of drama and even in the choice of art-motives. The
Meander, for example, is a Stoic motive. The Doric column is the
very embodiment of the Antique life-ideal. And just because it was
so, it was the one Classical “order” which the Baroque style
necessarily and frankly excluded; indeed, even Renaissance art was
warned off it by some very deep spiritual instinct. Similarly with the
transformation of the Magian dome into the Russian roof-cupola,[430]
the Chinese landscape-architecture of devious paths, the Gothic
cathedral-tower. Each is an image of the particular and unique
morale which arose out of the waking-consciousness of the Culture.
II
The old riddles and perplexities now resolve themselves. There

are as many morales as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer.
Just as every painter and every musician has something in him
which, by force of inward necessity, never emerges into
consciousness but dominates a priori the form-language of his work
and differentiates that work from the work of every other Culture, so
every conception of Life held by a Culture-man possesses a priori (in
the very strictest Kantian sense of the phrase) a constitution that is
deeper than all momentary judgments and strivings and impresses
the style of these with the hall-mark of the particular Culture. The
individual may act morally or immorally, may do “good” or “evil” with
respect to the primary feeling of his Culture, but the theory of his
actions is not a result but a datum. Each Culture possesses its own
standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it. There is no
general morale of humanity.
It follows that there is not and cannot be any true “conversion” in
the deeper sense. Conscious behaviour of any kind that rests upon
convictions is a primary phenomenon, the basic tendency of an
existence developed into a “timeless truth.” It matters little what
words or pictures are employed to express it, whether it appears as
the predication of a deity or as the issue of philosophic meditation,
as proposition or as symbol, as proclamation of proper or confutation
of alien convictions. It is enough that it is there. It can be wakened
and it can be put theoretically in the form of doctrine, it can change
or improve its intellectual vehicle but it cannot be begotten. Just as
we are incapable of altering our world-feeling—so incapable that
even in trying to alter it we have to follow the old lines and confirm
instead of overthrowing it—so also we are powerless to alter the
ethical basis of our waking being. A certain verbal distinction has
sometimes been drawn between ethics the science and morale the
duty, but, as we understand it, the point of duty does not arise. We
are no more capable of converting a man to a morale alien to his
being than the Renaissance was capable of reviving the Classical or
of making anything but a Southernized Gothic, an anti-Gothic, out of
Apollinian motives. We may talk to-day of transvaluing all our values;
we may, as Megalopolitans, “go back to” Buddhism or Paganism or a
romantic Catholicism; we may champion as Anarchists an
individualist or as Socialists a collectivist ethic—but in spite of all we
do, will and feel the same. A conversion to Theosophy or
Freethinking or one of the present-day transitions from a supposed
Christianity to a supposed Atheism (or vice versa) is an alteration of
words and notions, of the religious or intellectual surface, no more.
None of our “movements” have changed man.
A strict morphology of all the morales is a task for the future. Here,
too, Nietzsche has taken the first and essential step towards the new
standpoint. But he has failed to observe his own condition that the
thinker shall place himself “beyond good and evil.” He tried to be at
once sceptic and prophet, moral critic and moral gospeller. It cannot
be done. One cannot be a first-class psychologist as long as one is
still a Romantic. And so here, as in all his crucial penetrations, he got
as far as the door—and stood outside it. And so far, no one has done
any better. We have been blind and uncomprehending before the
immense wealth that there is in the moral as in other form-
languages. Even the sceptic has not understood his task; at bottom
he, like others, sets up his own notion of morale, drawn from his
particular disposition and private taste, as standard by which to
measure others. The modern revolutionaires—Stirner, Ibsen,
Strindberg, Shaw—are just the same; they have only managed to
hide the facts (from themselves as well as from others) behind new
formulæ and catchwords.
But a morale, like a sculpture, a music, a painting-art, is a self-
contained form-world expressing a life-feeling; it is a datum,
fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity. It is ever true within
its historical circle, ever untrue outside it. As we have seen already,
[431]
what his several works are to the poet or musician or painter, that
its several art-genera are for the higher individual that we call the
Culture, viz., organic units; and that oil-painting as a whole, act-
sculpture as a whole and contrapuntal music as a whole, and
rhymed lyric and so on are all epoch-making, and as such take rank
as major symbols of Life. In the history of the Culture as in that of the
individual existence, we are dealing with the actualization of the
possible; it is the story of an inner spirituality becoming the style of a
world. By the side of these great form-units, which grow and fulfil
themselves and close down within a predeterminate series of human
generations, which endure for a few centuries and pass irrevocably
into death, we see the group of Faustian morals and the sum of
Apollinian morals also as individuals of the higher order. That they
are, is Destiny. They are data, and revelation (or scientific insight, as
the case may be) only put them into shape for the consciousness.
There is something, hardly to be described, that assembles all the
theories from Hesiod and Sophocles to Plato and the Stoa and
opposes them collectively to all that was taught from Francis of
Assisi and Abelard to Ibsen and Nietzsche, and even the morale of
Jesus is only the noblest expression of a general morale that was
put into other forms by Marcion and Mani, by Philo and Plotinus, by
Epictetus, Augustine and Proclus. All Classical ethic is an ethic of
attitude, all Western an ethic of deed. And, likewise, the sum of all
Indian and the sum of all Chinese systems forms each a world of its
own.
III
Every Classical ethic that we know or can conceive of constitutes

man an individual static entity, a body among bodies, and all
Western valuations relate to him as a centre of effect in an infinite
generality. Ethical Socialism is neither more nor less than the
sentiment of action-at-a-distance, the moral pathos of the third
dimension; and the root-feeling of Care—care for those who are with
us, and for those who are to follow—is its emblem in the sky.
Consequently there is for us something socialistic in the aspect of
the Egyptian Culture, while the opposite tendency to immobile
attitude, to non-desire, to static self-containedness of the individual,
recalls the Indian ethic and the man formed by it. The seated
Buddha-statue (“looking at its navel”) and Zeno’s Ataraxia are not
altogether alien to one another. The ethical ideal of Classical man
was that which is led up to in his tragedy, and revealed in its
Katharsis. This in its last depths means the purgation of the
Apollinian soul from its burden of what is not Apollinian, not free from
the elements of distance and direction, and to understand it we have
to recognize that Stoicism is simply the mature form of it. That which
the drama effected in a solemn hour, the Stoa wished to spread over
the whole field of life; viz., statuesque steadiness and will-less ethos.
Now, is not this conception of κάθαρσις closely akin to the Buddhist
ideal of Nirvana, which as a formula is no doubt very “late” but as an
essence is thoroughly Indian and traceable even from Vedic times?
And does not this kinship bring ideal Classical man and ideal Indian
man very close to one another and separate them both from that
man whose ethic is manifested in the Shakespearian tragedy of
dynamic evolution and catastrophe? When one thinks of it, there is
nothing preposterous in the idea of Socrates, Epicurus, and
especially Diogenes, sitting by the Ganges, whereas Diogenes in a
Western megalopolis would be an unimportant fool. Nor, on the other
hand, is Frederick William I of Prussia, the prototype of the Socialist
in the grand sense, unthinkable in the polity of the Nile, whereas in
Periclean Athens he is impossible.
Had Nietzsche regarded his own times with fewer prejudices and
less disposition to romantic championship of certain ethical
creations, he would have perceived that a specifically Christian
morale of compassion in his sense does not exist on West-European
soil. We must not let the words of humane formulæ mislead us as to
their real significance. Between the morale that one has and the
morale that one thinks one has, there is a relation which is very
obscure and very unsteady, and it is just here that an incorruptible
psychology would be invaluable. Compassion is a dangerous word,
and neither Nietzsche himself—for all his maestria—nor anyone else
has yet investigated the meaning—conceptual and effective—of the
word at different times. The Christian morale of Origen’s time was
quite different from the Christian morale of St. Francis’s. This is not
the place to enquire what Faustian compassion—sacrifice or
ebullience or again race-instinct in a chivalrous society[432]—means
as against the fatalistic Magian-Christian kind, how far it is to be
conceived as action-at-a-distance and practical dynamic, or (from
another angle) as a proud soul’s demand upon itself, or again as the
utterance of an imperious distance-feeling. A fixed stock of ethical
phrases, such as we have possessed since the Renaissance, has to
cover a multitude of different ideas and a still greater multitude of
different meanings. When a mankind so historically and
retrospectively disposed as we are accepts the superficial as the real
sense, and regards ideals as subject-matter for mere knowing, it is
really evidencing its veneration for the past—in this particular
instance, for religious tradition. The text of a conviction is never a
test of its reality, for man is rarely conscious of his own beliefs.
Catchwords and doctrines are always more or less popular and
external as compared with deep spiritual actualities. Our theoretical
reverence for the propositions of the New Testament is in fact of the
same order as the theoretical reverence of the Renaissance and of
Classicism for antique art; the one has no more transformed the
spirit of men than the other has transformed the spirit of works. The
oft-quoted cases of the Mendicant Orders, the Moravians and the
Salvation Army prove by their very rarity, and even more by the
slightness of the effects that they have been able to produce, that
they are exceptions in a quite different generality—namely, the
Faustian-Christian morale. That morale will not indeed be found
formulated, either by Luther or by the Council of Trent, but all
Christians of the great style—Innocent III and Calvin, Loyola and
Savonarola, Pascal and St. Theresa—have had it in them, even in
unconscious contradiction to their own formal teachings.
We have only to compare the purely Western conception of the
manly virtue that is designated by Nietzsche’s “moralinfrei” virtù, the
grandezza of Spanish and the grandeur of French Baroque, with that
very feminine ἀρετή of the Hellenic ideal, of which the practical
application is presented to us as capacity for enjoyment (ἡδονή),
placidity of disposition (γαλήνη, ἀπάθεια), absence of wants and
demands, and, above all, the so typical ἀταραξία. What Nietzsche
called the Blond Beast and conceived to be embodied in the type of
Renaissance Man that he so overvalued (for it is really only a jackal
counterfeit of the great Hohenstaufen Germans) is the utter
antithesis to the type that is presented in every Classical ethic
without exception and embodied in every Classical man of worth.
The Faustian Culture has produced a long series of granite-men, the
Classical never a one. For Pericles and Themistocles were soft
natures in tune with Attic καλοκἀγαθία, and Alexander was a
Romantic who never woke up, Cæsar a shrewd reckoner. Hannibal,
the alien, was the only “Mann” amongst them all. The men of the
early time, as Homer presents them to our judgment—the
Odysseuses and Ajaxes—would have cut a queer figure among the
chevaliers of the Crusades. Very feminine natures, too, are capable
of brutality—a rebound-brutality of their own—and Greek cruelty was
of this kind. But in the North the great Saxon, Franconian and
Hohenstaufen emperors appear on the very threshold of the Culture,
surrounded by giant-men like Henry the Lion and Gregory VII. Then
come the men of the Renaissance, of the struggle of the two Roses,
of the Huguenot Wars, the Spanish Conquistadores, the Prussian
electors and kings, Napoleon, Bismarck, Rhodes. What other Culture
has exhibited the like of these? Where in all Hellenic history is so
powerful a scene as that of 1176—the Battle of Legnano as
foreground, the suddenly-disclosed strife of the great Hohenstaufen
and the great Welf as background? The heroes of the Great
Migrations, the Spanish chivalry, Prussian discipline, Napoleonic
energy—how much of the Classical is there in these men and
things? And where, on the heights of Faustian morale, from the
Crusades to the World War, do we find anything of the “slave-
morale,” the meek resignation, the deaconess’s Caritas?[433] Only in
pious and honoured words, nowhere else. The type of the very
priesthood is Faustian; think of those magnificent bishops of the old
German empire who on horseback led their flocks into the wild
battle,[434] or those Popes who could force submission on a Henry IV
and a Frederick II, of the Teutonic Knights in the Ostmark, of Luther’s
challenge in which the old Northern heathendom rose up against old
Roman, of the great Cardinals (Richelieu, Mazarin, Fleury) who
shaped France. That is Faustian morale, and one must be blind
indeed if one does not see it efficient in the whole field of West-
European history. And it is only through such grand instances of
worldly passion which express the consciousness of a mission that
we are able to understand those of grand spiritual passion, of the
upright and forthright Caritas which nothing can resist, the dynamic
charity that is so utterly unlike Classical moderation and Early-
Christian mildness. There is a hardness in the sort of com-passion
that was practised by the German mystics, the German and Spanish
military Orders, the French and English Calvinists. In the Russian,
the Raskolnikov, type of charity a soul melts into the fraternity of
souls, in the Faustian it arises out of it. Here too “ego habeo factum”
is the formula. Personal charity is the justification before God of the
Person, the individual.
This is the reason why "compassion"-morale, in the everyday
sense, always respected by us so far as words go, and sometimes
hoped for by the thinker, is never actualized. Kant rejected it with
decision, and in fact it is in profound contradiction with the
Categorical Imperative, which sees the meaning of Life to lie in
actions and not in surrender to soft opinions. Nietzsche’s “slave-
morale” is a phantom, his master-morale is a reality. It does not
require formulation to be effective—it is there, and has been from of
old. Take away his romantic Borgia-mask and his nebulous vision of
supermen, and what is left of his man is Faustian man himself, as he
is to-day and as he was even in saga-days, the type of an energetic,
imperative and dynamic Culture. However it may have been in the
Classical world, our great well-doers are the great doers whose
forethought and care affects millions, the great statesmen and
organizers. "A higher sort of men, who thanks to their
preponderance of will, knowledge, wealth and influence make use of
democratic Europe as their aptest and most mobile tool, in order to
bring into their own hands the destinies of the Earth and as artists to
shape ‘man’ himself. Enough—the time is coming when men will
unlearn and relearn the art of politics." So Nietzsche delivered
himself in one of the unpublished drafts that are so much more
concrete than the finished works. “We must either breed political
capacities, or else be ruined by the democracy that has been forced
upon us by the failure of the older alternatives,”[435] says Shaw in
Man and Superman. Limited though his philosophic horizon is in
general, Shaw has the advantage over Nietzsche of more practical
schooling and less ideology, and the figure of the multimillionaire
Undershaft in Major Barbara translates the Superman-ideal into the
unromantic language of the modern age (which in truth is its real
source for Nietzsche also, though it reached him indirectly through
Malthus and Darwin). It is these fact-men of the grand style who are
the representatives to-day of the Will-to-Power over other men’s
destinies and therefore of the Faustian ethic generally. Men of this
sort do not broadcast their millions to dreamers, “artists,” weaklings
and “down-and-outs” to satisfy a boundless benevolence; they
employ them for those who like themselves count as material for the
Future. They pursue a purpose with them. They make a centre of
force for the existence of generations which outlives the single lives.
The mere money, too, can develop ideas and make history, and
Rhodes—precursor of a type that will be significant indeed in the
21st Century—provided, in disposing of his possessions by will, that
it should do so. It is a shallow judgment, and one incapable of
inwardly understanding history, that cannot distinguish the literary
chatter of popular social-moralists and humanity-apostles from the
deep ethical instincts of the West-European Civilization.
Socialism—in its highest and not its street-corner sense—is, like
every other Faustian ideal, exclusive. It owes its popularity only to
the fact that it is completely misunderstood even by its exponents,
who present it as a sum of rights instead of as one of duties, an
abolition instead of an intensification of the Kantian imperative, a
slackening instead of a tautening of directional energy. The trivial
and superficial tendency towards ideals of “welfare,” “freedom,”
“humanity,” the doctrine of the “greatest happiness of the greatest
number,” are mere negations of the Faustian ethic—a very different
matter from the tendency of Epicureanism towards the ideal of
“happiness,” for the condition of happiness was the actual sum and
substance of the Classical ethic. Here precisely is an instance of
sentiments, to all outward appearance much the same, but meaning
in the one case everything and in the other nothing. From this point
of view, we might describe the content of the Classical ethic as
philanthropy, a boon conferred by the individual upon himself, his
soma. The view has Aristotle on its side, for it is exactly in this sense
that he uses the word φιλάνθρωπος, which the best heads of the
Classicist period, above all Lessing, found so puzzling. Aristotle
describes the effect of the Attic tragedy on the Attic spectator as
philanthropic. Its Peripeteia relieves him from compassion with
himself. A sort of theory of master-morale and slave-morale existed
also in the early Hellenism, in Callicles for example—naturally, under
strictly corporeal-Euclidean postulates. The ideal of the first class is
Alcibiades. He did exactly what at the moment seemed to him best
for his own person, and he is felt to be, and admired as, the type of
Classical Kalokagathia. But Protagoras is still more distinct, with his
famous proposition—essentially ethical in intention—that man (each
man for himself) is the measure of things. That is master-morale in a
statuesque soul.
IV
When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase “transvaluation of all
values” for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in
which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all
values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. For it
is the beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the
Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practises
them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and
herein lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character.
It assumes that the genuine act of creation has already occurred,
and merely enters upon an inheritance of big actualities. In the Late-
Classical, we find the event taking place inside Hellenistic-Roman
Stoicism, that is, the long death-struggle of the Apollinian soul. In the
interval from Socrates—who was the spiritual father of the Stoa and
in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment and city-
intellectualism became visible—to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius,
every existence-ideal of the old Classical underwent transvaluation.
In the case of India, the transvaluation of Brahman life was complete
by the time of King Asoka (250 B.C.), as we can see by comparing
the parts of the Vedanta put into writing before and after Buddha.
And ourselves? Even now the ethical socialism of the Faustian soul,
its fundamental ethic, as we have seen, is being worked upon by the
process of transvaluation as that soul is walled up in the stone of the
great cities. Rousseau is the ancestor of this socialism; he stands,
like Socrates and Buddha, as the representative spokesman of a
great Civilization. Rousseau’s rejection of all great Culture-forms and
all significant conventions, his famous “Return to the state of
Nature,” his practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each
of the three buried a millennium of spiritual depth. Each proclaimed
his gospel to mankind, but it was to the mankind of the city
intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the Late Culture, and
whose “pure” (i.e., soulless) reason longed to be free from them and
their authoritative form and their hardness, from the symbolism with
which it was no longer in living communion and which therefore it
detested. The Culture was annihilated by discussion. If we pass in
review the great 19th-Century names with which we associate the
march of this great drama—Schopenhauer, Hebbel, Wagner,
Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg—we comprehend in a glance that

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Story Structure and Development 1st

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Part 1 Story Structure (the Plot)

1 Plot: The Structure 3

Part 2 Story Elements

Part 3 Character Development

Part 4 Idea Development

12 Generating Ideas 159

Craig Caldwell is USTAR (Utah Science Technology and Research) professor

4 1. Plot: The Structure

What Is a Dramatic Story? 5

6 1. Plot: The Structure

Plot… What Is It? 7

8 1. Plot: The Structure

10 1. Plot: The Structure

Most people want to be the hero in their own story, so they

12 1. Plot: The Structure

Plot: The Hero’s Journey 13

14 1. Plot: The Structure

Plot Structures: The Short 15

16 1. Plot: The Structure

We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of

The old riddles and perplexities now resolve themselves. There

Every Classical ethic that we know or can conceive of constitutes

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