When talented people write badly it’s generally for one of two reasons: Either they’re blinded by an idea they feel compelled to prove or they’re driven by an emotion they must express.
When you think about it, going to the movies is bizarre. Hundreds of strangers sit in a blackened room, elbow to elbow, for two or more hours. They don’t go to the toilet or get a smoke. Instead, they stare wide-eye at a screen, investing more uninterrupted concentration than they give to work, paying money to suffer emotions they’d do anything to avoid in life.
For those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well. These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desire are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite.
A revered Hollywood axiom warns: “Movies are about their last twenty minutes.” In other words, for a film to have a chance in the world, the last act and its climax must be the most satisfying experience of all. For no matter what the first ninety minutes have achieved, if the final movement fails, the film will die over its opening weekend.
In life, idea and emotion come separately. Mind and passions revolve in different spheres of our humanity, rarely coordinated, usually at odds. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you’re having a religious experience. But whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion.
The minimalist storyteller deliberately gives this last critical bit of work to the audience.
As you create your story, you create your proof; idea and structure intertwine in a rhetorical relationship.
For most writers, the knowledge they gain from reading and study equals or outweighs experience, especially if that experience goes unexamined.
First we must dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning, then create a story vehicle that expresses our interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world.
We shape the telling to fit the substance, rework the substance to support the design.
We cannot ask which is more important, structure or character, because structure is character; character is structure.
Within the first pages of a screenplay a reader can judge the relative skill of the writer simply by noting how he handles exposition.
We must believe, or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested, we must willingly suspend our disbelief.
Generally, great writers are not eclectic. Each tightly focuses his oeuvre on one idea, a single subject that ignites his passion, a subject he pursues with beautiful variation through a lifetime of work.
Values are the soul of storytelling.
Ninety percent of all verbal expression has no filmic equivalent. “He’s been sitting there for a long time” can’t be photographed.
The art of story is not about the middle ground, but about the pendulum of existence swinging to the limits, about life lived in its most intense states. We explore the middle ranges of experience, but only as a path to the end of the line. The audience senses that limit and wants it reached. For no matter how.
A storyteller puts a friendly arm around the audience, saying: “Let me show you something.
The audience wants to be taken to the limit, to where all questions are answered, all emotion satisfied – the end of the line.
You might forget the day you saw a dead body in the street, but the death of Hamlet haunts you forever.
Only by using everything and anything you know about the craft of storytelling can you make your talent forge story. For talent without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.