I am new to story structure: in Sargent's 1916 photoplay manual (Chapter XIII, Struggle and Suspense), what are struggle and suspense, what must a story have before it can have either, and how concrete must the goal be?
1916 practice (Sargent, Ch. XIII): struggle arouses interest and suspense holds it; both need an objective, and the objective must be concrete enough that achieving it ends the story at a definite point. A mere record of events is "history" and a string of incident without an objective is a "tale", not a plot. The Tim Smith book-agent story, the Trojan war and the horse race are his illustrations, not separate rules. He gives no test, number or measured effect; this is one trade writer's teaching for silent-film scripts.
1916 practice (Sargent, Ch. XIII): struggle arouses interest and suspense holds it; both need an objective, and the objective must be concrete enough that achieving it ends the story at a definite point. A mere record of events is "history" and a string of incident without an objective is a "tale", not a plot. The Tim Smith book-agent story, the Trojan war and the horse race are his illustrations, not separate rules. He gives no test, number or measured effect; this is one trade writer's teaching for silent-film scripts.
Curator qualifications: Struggle/suspense/crisis/climax/anti-climax rules verified as Sargent claims, with examples labelled; relayed Aristotle/Phillips/Archer comparison is by candidate ID (relayed rows, not re-read); -07 agent check and L10 experiment are proposals, untested.
Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.
Structured fields
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"url": "https://archive.org/stream/techniqueofphoto00sarg/techniqueofphoto00sarg_djvu.txt",
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- [sourced_fact] 1916 practice (Sargent, Ch. XIII): struggle arouses interest and suspense holds it; both need an objective, and the objective must be concrete enough that achieving it ends the story at a definite point. A mere record of events is "history" and a string of incident without an objective is a "tale", not a plot. The Tim Smith book-agent story, the Trojan war and the horse race are his illustrations, not separate rules. He gives no test, number or measured effect; this is one trade writer's teaching for silent-film scripts. · locator: sar.flat (a3cff7eb) offsets per candidate source
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| component | license | hosting | redistribution | modification | training | Evidence and notes |
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