Hunter then goes on to fill a 350-page book with a few more rules that may nonetheless come in handy.

Those are the few rules we have and need.” For more demystification, buy that slim volume, read it twice, then pick it up every three or four years and read it during your screenwriting career. The beginning-middle-end concept is in Plato’s Republic, but the elaboration of this insight you will find in Aristotle’s Poetics. “Aristotle was the first to put the storyteller’s trade tricks down on paper.

screenwriting professor, on page 20 of his Screenwriting 434. “Now is the time to start talking about Aristotle’s two-thousand-year-old ‘beginning-middle-end’ structure,” begins Lew Hunter, U.C.L.A. In nearly all cases, references to Aristotle have a self-conscious quality, as if he is being displayed to legitimize the speaker’s authority. But, when examining a somewhat random collection of instructional screenwriting texts, what is curious is the great variety of ways that Aristotle’s principles are portrayed-in some cases insightfully applied, but at least as often deceptively misapplied, and not uncommonly completely misrepresented. Screenwriting is a form of dramatic literature, and many of Aristotle’s observations on the nature of drama, based on his study of the plays of his time, still do pertain.

Aristotle's poetics for screenwriters