Why Did Trump Win? Because It Was Written.
How the Iron Rules of Storytelling Predicted Trump's Win
Bad stories are bad in their own ways.
But all good stories are alike.
With apologies to Tolstoy, what I mean is that good stories all have in common the rigid, iron laws of storytelling; this is what in fact makes them great.
I am not talking about prose or character or setting or adjectives. I’m talking about the beats.
You know about the law of the three-act story arc, or the hero’s journey, or you’ve read
Joseph Campbell and you know the basics of narrative storytelling. Set ups must be paid off. A gun shown in the first act must be fired in the third. The fate of the world is at stake and only one man knows how to save it. Tales as old as time.
The Trump saga contains all those mythic storytelling elements, but it also somehow fits absolutely perfectly into the master cinematic storytelling beat sheet. It’s almost supernatural. It fits so well that if you had applied the beat sheet to the story weeks ago, you would have immediately realized that there was only one way for this stor…
