As part of the Great Courses series, Audible has a course on story telling. Angus Fletcher is the lecturer (https://projectnarrative.osu.edu/people/fletcher.300). By title, it is focused on screenwriting. By content, it is really applicable to any kind of writing, though he talks a lot in the context of plays (going back to the Greeks) and screenplays. I'm only a few lectures in, right now listening to a lecture on reverse engineering techniques (based on techniques tracing back to Aristotle) to determine what cognitive responses a given story elicits, and what it is about the structure that gives rise to the response. One of the things he opens with is getting rid of constraining ideas--the idea that everything follows the monomyth, or that there are only X number of plots, or X number of characters that are all archetypes of this or that. It's nice to see a lecture series like this dispense with those notions, because they're so often repeated by people who are teaching others. Has anyone else listened to this lecture series? If you have an Audible credit waiting to be spent, it seems worth it to me so far, even if just to think about story and story construction from an angle one may not have considered before.
