The Importance Of Narrative Drive Episode II

You can of course read ever-more complex models of story. Personally I can’t believe anyone in the history of the world has ever written a story to those formulae: story-by-numbers. It might be that you can use a formula after the idea, to see if the narrative has legs or needs something else: but I do doubt  powerful drama could ever come from thinking: oh, now I’ve thought of my inciting incident, so now I need a mentor and something to raise the stakes…
Much more likely, you get an exciting idea that grabs you by the throat and you can’t wait to scribble down what will happen next…

​For me, the best way to think about story is to think about example narratives that really work. Stephen Pressfield
https://stevenpressfield.com/2019/02/the-understory-2/
uses the first Bourne movie as a brilliant example (ps I wouldn’t call it the understory: it is simply the story, what gives the movie its narrative drive. Without this mystery, the movie would be a series of disconnected incidents. Serial events are not story).
When Bourne, the mystery man fished out of the Mediterranean one stormy night with total amnesia, is picked up by police as an itinerant on a Zurich midwinter park bench, he flips, knocks them cold in micro-seconds and disarms them. I remember this scene well, the first time I saw the movie: it is breathtaking in its intensity, and the emotion it engenders in the viewer. Instantly we know what we suspected: that Bourne is no ordinary man. That his amnesia is due to some deeply traumatic event. That he is a man of violence, and there are dark and turbulent events in his past. That he needs to find out who he really is, before that past can catch up with him…
That is the problem before us. The inciting incident, I suppose, has already happened: Bourne has apparently been shot and tossed or fallen overboard from some anonymous vessel. But the real mystery now, is his identity. And we are desperate to find out, to follow his journey (Matt Damon is a brilliant actor, understated but we root for him so much). And then it is given increasing urgency (raising the stakes relentlessly) by the fact that he is being pursued.