Background
Published in around 335 BCE (as a treatise, not a book in the modern sense) “How to Tell a Story” by Aristotle is not a book Aristotle himself wrote, but rather a modern work summarizing and interpreting his ideas from Poetics, Aristotle’s influential treatise on storytelling and drama.
My Thoughts
Interesting notes able were the interesting stories are those that can be related to but not too predicable. Don’t have too much plot or you risk losing your audience. Use plot points that are possible and believable. Keep the voice of the author to a minimum and allow the characters to tell the story. There was a large amount of time spent on the formation of words and their placement in the work. This isn’t too much of a surprise as the ancient writers were poets. For example, Aristotle says the iambic is the closest meter to common speech and therefore should be used if the author seeks for clarity. This type of thought seems foreign to my modern sense of writing which is more focused on meaning than meter. It’s a pity I don’t speak Greek so I could see the applications of the works.
Recommendation
Very interesting read. I think this could stand reasonably well today.