Dramaturgy in Scripture and on Screen : 300 Storytelling Devices Explained and Illustrated in Cinema and the Bible
Overview
One grammar, told twice.
Every story, however new it feels, is built from parts that older stories used first - a hero who refuses a call, a planted detail that returns to fire, a prophecy fulfilled in the one way no one foresaw. Dramaturgy in Scripture and on Screen gathers three hundred of these storytelling devices and, for each one, does three things.
- Explains it - a clear definition that names, wherever it can be traced, the mind or the work that first gave the device its name: Aristotle, Freytag, Campbell and Vogler, Blake Snyder, Robert Alter, and many more.
- Shows it on screen - a familiar moment from film, from Casablanca to Parasite.
- Shows it in Scripture - a biblical scene that turns on the very same device, with its reference given so you can look it up.
The result is a claim made quietly, three hundred times over: that the grammar of storytelling is one grammar - that the same device a screenwriter uses in a darkened cinema is the one an ancient narrator used on the page, and that seeing the two side by side illuminates both.
Arranged not alphabetically but by kind - from the structural beats that give a story its shape to the many ways a story can end - and gathered into nineteen thematic chapters (A-S), it is at once a study of craft and a companion to keep close. Seven appendices lay out the great frameworks (Aristotle's Poetics, Freytag's pyramid, the hero's journey, Field's three acts, Snyder's beat sheet, and more), with diagrams; three reference lists credit every source, literary work, and film cited; and a full index leads to every entry by page.
For screenwriters, novelists, students of the Bible, teachers, and anyone who loves how stories work.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9798185914090
- ISBN-10: 9798185914090
- Publisher: Independently Published
- Publish Date: August 2026
- Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.34 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.36 pounds
- Page Count: 158
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