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DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
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DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
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This study will establish the credibility of The Story Template in two potential applications.  The first application is the use of The Story Template by editors and agents to increase their efficiency when choosing publishable material and later pinpointing errors in the story construct that must be revised before it is published.  

 

The second application of The Story Template is its use by novelists and screenwriters while they develop their stories.  In either case, The Story Template hopes to add structure to a now solely intuitively-guided field.  This structure may help to limit time wasted to 'reinventing the wheel' in the context of story.   It may serve as a starting place from which artists may get past 'writers' block' when designing story.  

 

Before writers and editors begin using The Story Template as it is intended, they should validate its credibility - an element indicated in this study by final sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy scores.  Further validation trials will be required to establish The Story Template as a reputable theory, but this research will provide the ground-breaking step in that corroboration process.

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Slide 28

It’s interesting to speculate about this 16th component: the hidden need triplet. The hidden need triplet is a series of three scenes taking place consecutively at the beginning of the third act (of a story divided into four acts).  They show the main character’s internal progress in himself.  At the beginning of the story, the protagonist should have some kind of character flaw that must be resolved before he can finally defeat the antagonist.  A simple example would be a high school kid who needs to learn to value real but quirky friendships over shallow but popular allies.  The hidden need triplet is the focal point of the story’s teaching of a moral if it has one.  The reader or watcher learns a lesson from the protagonist’s ethical realization that can then be taken away, whereas the superficial story world and fireworks, however creative will leave the reader or watcher entertained, but not educated.  This data demonstrates that the only difference seen between those stories that carry on (classics) and those that are immediate hits, but do not last (non-classics) is this moral component.  Morality is the only aspect of story that stays with us.
 
The Story Template algorithm failed to detect this hidden need triplet in the objectively-identified classic, Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Raiders was an enormously popular film that spawned three sequels, the latest made in 2008 (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).  Although there was no prominent change in the protagonist’s way of thinking the story line of Raiders of the Lost Ark centered upon a well-known religious/Biblical artifact (the Ark of the Covenant) and had a Nazi antagonist, which might trigger an emotional response from the audience through implied but not explicit teaching of morality.  Furthermore, the uniqueness of the protagonist and concept, the special effects, and the unpredictable stunts definitely made the movie a fun experience.
 
Interestingly, the second Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, was not nearly as popular.  While this second film was darker, it also did not add anything new to the Indiana Jones character; either or both factors may have contributed to its flop.  The third film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, added a new character, Jones’ father, and also a renewed childhood in his relationship with his father (and a solved hidden need) that would suggest this film would be quite popular, as indeed it was.
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