If you hear the words “once upon a time,” you might guess that you’re hearing the beginning of a child’s fairy tale. And if you hear the words “and they all lived happily ever after,” you know you’ve ...

This is an excerpt of a piece written by former NPR editor Jonathan Kern. It has been lightly edited. One of the under-appreciated challenges in putting a radio report together is ensuring that the ...

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was considering the possibility that there might be more to screen drama than external conflict-driven plotting when, as if hit by a thunderbolt, a new paradigm of ...

“Despite huge changes in the technology of news, the structure of a story today doesn’t look hugely different from one in, say, 1932.” At the risk of sounding self-serving (you’ll see why below), ...

When you watch a lot of film and television, you begin to sense a pattern. In the beginning, you meet characters. In the middle, you see them struggle. At the end, you watch as they succeed or fail.

Rising action is the piece of a story that leads up to the most exciting part—the climax. It consists of: Rising action in a plot follows the exposition and is instigated by the inciting incident.

This audio is being stored here for use by NPR's Editorial Training team. You can find the audio and the related post - about story structure - at training.npr.org.