I suppose the point is, analysis of storytelling elements isn't new, there's many more books written about it than just the Cat one. An interesting question (a

I suppose the point is, analysis of storytelling elements isn't new, there's many more books written about it than just the Cat one. An interesting question (and one that the article IMO does not quite attempts to answer) would be: the Cat's description of storytelling-elements is quite formulaic, descriptive and precise. did the explicitness of this particular book cause (or play an important role in causing) the explosion of formula Hollywood plot-lines[0], or is it merely part of a general movement, flavour of the times? in short, is this "beat-sheet" literally used as a "cheat-sheet", or does it just continues the tradition of storytelling deconstruction? Maybe this is what you meant by the article not really selling you on it, though. (there's a couple more questions along this line that I would think are interesting as well, but you can probably guess them) [0] in particular, the part of phenomenon that is real and not based on selection bias.