How to Write a Story That Moves People

Hollywood screenwriter Robert McKee, whose students have written, directed, and produced notable films such as "Forrest Gump", "Erin Brockovich", and "The Color Purple", said this:

Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes. It begins with a situation in which life is relatively in balance: you come to work day after day, week after week, and everything's fine. you expect it will gon on that way. But then there's an event - in screenwriting, we call it the "inciting incident" - that throws life out of balance. You get a new job, or the boss dies of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to leave. The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist's subjective expectations [desire] crash into an uncooperative objective reality [tragedy]. A good storyteller describes what it's like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover the truth. All great storytellers since the dawn of time - from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare and up to the present day - have dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation [desire] and cruel reality [tragedy].

Robert McKee, "Storytelling That Moves People", Harvard Business Review, June 2003, 6.