Card 1 of 8: The Hero's Journey (Monomyth)
Campbell read myths from every continent in 1949 and found one skeleton underneath all of them: a hero leaves the ordinary world, is tested, and returns changed. He called it the monomyth.
Girard's 1961 debut argued desire is never truly original — you want what someone else wants, borrowed from a model, which is why trends, rivalries, and status races spread like contagion.
People remember stories better than raw data and make decisions based on how they feel, not just what they're told — which is why the same fact lands differently packaged as a story versus a statistic.
Taleb's warning in The Black Swan: we don't experience history, we story it. A coherent narrative feels like an explanation, but often it's just randomness given a plot.
In 2011 Emma Coats tweeted Pixar's internal story rules she had collected as a story artist: 'You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer.'
Much of East Asian storytelling doesn't require a hero vs. villain — it runs ki (introduce), shō (develop), ten (twist), ketsu (conclude), where the third beat surprises by recontextualizing rather than antagonizing.
Gottschall opens with a simple number: humans spend a huge share of waking life inside stories — daydreams, novels, gossip, games — far more than any other species.
Booker spent 34 years cataloguing plots and concluded there are really seven. Every Pixar film, every founder myth, every redemption memoir fits one of them with small variations.