A poor, motherless, neglected boy is sent off to wizard school, where he discovers himself to be this generation’s—
“Oh what the hell is this?” I said to myself. “What did I get myself into? Is this some cheap Harry Potter imitation?”
It turns out no.
Late last year, I took one of my slow and creeping steps through my ever-expanding to-read list. I picked up a copy of A Wizard of Earthsea.
It turns out the book was published in 1968, 30 years before the first Harry Potter book.
The story might be familiar to you — and not just because of the Harry Potter similarities. It goes like this:
1. A poor, motherless, neglected boy is sent off to wizard school.
2. There he discovers that he has immense wizarding talent, and the promise to become his generation’s greatest and most powerful wizard. As a result, his hubris and his recklessness grow.
3. While abusing his still uncontrolled wizard skills, the boy lets an evil shadow into the world. The shadow almost kills the boy and leaves him scarred for life. The boy runs around the world, trying to escape the shadow and the evil that it brings.
4. Finally, the boy gives up running. He turns to face the shadow. He confronts it. And in so doing, he confronts his own dark side, and sets the world aright again.
The reason why this story might sound familiar to you is because it’s basically every story ever told. Well, at least it’s every story ever told in every fairy tale, every Disney movie, every Marvel movie, every Bruce Willis movie, every rags-to-riches sales letter, and every “horror advertorial” I have ever written.
The story template is called “Cinderella.” Maybe you can see why. It goes down-up-down-up and can be represented graphically by /\/.
Over the past few days, I’ve given you a lot of these canonical story templates. They started out simple — just a single / or \. Then two. Now three.
The bigger point is that in any good story, you gotta have contrast, emotional manipulation, surprise, twists.
In fact, that’s why you will often not see the typical rags-to-riches story, as I described it in my first email in this series. The contrast and drama in / is just not enough. Things are bad, then they get better, and then they get best. People feel let down. Where’s the conflict? It sounds too easy and too predictable.
You don’t want predictable. So give people twists and drama.
Which is a lesson I should take myself — this mini-series on canonical story types is starting to get predictable. So I will end it tomorrow, with the sixth and final canonical format for storytelling… along with a bit of storytelling advice that you might find to be a surprising twist.
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