Quite!

Quite a lot of time has gone by without a post, and to those very few people who read this blog, apologies.
The writing bug seems to have been beaten out of me, but never fear, I'll be back writing about my interpretation of The Drama.
Thanks!

Building Tension

I've just read a wonderful one-page article on writing SciFi by a Wen Spencer about building tension in which the author recommends a gradual build to action that is sure to create a sense of impending calamity instead of the staid and all too normal “suddenly”.  Suddenly is a shortcut—the author says—that doesn't work well.

Giving the reader clues to what is coming works best because they (the audience, really) can start building an image in their minds what is about to come.  Setting up a flow of action then breaking from it in a jarring manner and the true action of suddenly is there without resorting to the packaged, freeze-dried word.

His (or her) example:

Rainlilly drew her sword and crouched into readiness. Instantly all the other sekasha went tense, hand to their weapons, pulling in tighter around Tinker.

“What is it?” Pony scanned the thick underbrush that Rainlilly faced.

“Something is going to attack,” Rainlilly whispered. “Something large.”

“?” Pony spoke a word that Tinker didn’t recognize in question.

Rainlilly nodded.

“What does she see?” Tinker whispered.

“What will be,” Pony made a gesture to back the way they had come. “We’re in an position of weakness. We should retreat to —”

Something huge and sinuous as a snake flashed out of the shadows. Tinker got the impression of scales, a wedge-shaped head, and a mouth full of teeth before Pony leaped between her and the monster. Pony shouted the deep guttural command to activate his magical shields. Magic spilled out of the cobalt blue stones threaded into this hair, traced down the blue tattoos on his arms and flared into a shimmer blue force that encompassed his body.

The creature struck Pony with a blow that smashed him back into Tinker, his shields flashing as they absorbed the brunt of the damage.

I'm not normally a fan of fantasy and SciFi, but I take the point, don't you?

Humility

The meeting of the Idaho Screenwriter's Group is underway and a middle-aged man sitting to my left has just handed me a copy of his script.  I am to be the narrator, in charge of reading out the slugs and description while others in the group will be the actors.

At the end of 15 minutes, it was over and the inevitable critique session kicked in: what do we think, he asks.  Since I was reading, I thought I should skim the work again as before, I was busy concentrating on my diction and so on—I've been known to murder the pronunciation of words.

I liked a lot about it and in ten pages, the script was shaping up to be an intelligent comedy.  I didn't like the dialog of some characters, but the setting was real enough and the description was on-point.  I offered my analysis as such.

He offered me his thanks, told me I'd made a good point and the meeting went on ... cut to the end of the gathering when we were all to introduce ourselves and I found out that this guy whose work I'd been criticizing was a writer on Mr. Belvedere and a script doctor on The Two Jakes and The Honeymooners.

Ehem.

I blushed a bit, of course, but as he was so humble and accommodating, it was okay.  That's humility and more of us would be well-advised to adopt such a strategy.  If only to have an unknown admirer pen a praise post!

Outlining

As a new writer, I have only recently become involved in the spurious debate about outlining. I say it's spurious because eveyone who doesn't want to waste time outlines. In one way or another, they outline. This free-wheeling attitude about writing from the heart is fallacy and results, I believe, in disjointed stuff.

To quote from Alastair Fowler's new book, How To Write, “It is unprofessional to put finger to keyboard or pen to paper without any idea of the scale of a piece; no one has time to write words that will have to be discarded.”

So there.

Tough Questions

What went wrong?  Why didn't that guy duck?  No one can be that stupid, can they?  Why is she with him?  No one told her it was going down?

Every story is an unconscious game between the storyteller and the audience; a puzzle with a race to The Answer.  That Answer is what the storyteller is trying to keep from the audience as long as possible while the audience is nimbly trying to guess it.

How quickly can the audience guess all the answers if at all?  If it's too soon, we dismiss the tale—too easy, too pat.  If we don't or can't or God help you, won't guess it at all, then the pivotal point is whether we can't because the story is incredibly cryptic and/or illogical or because the story's development is sluggish (not enough clues in the proper places) and the tale becomes boring.  However, the salient characteristic here revolves around questions and as a storyteller, you'd better be ready for them.

So, here's the deal: better to ask yourself those questions now while you're building your story than afterwards.  And here's another deal: those questions have to be tough, the ones that blow holes in your story.

You know the ones.

To refer back to my chess analogy once again: you've got to play both sides and mercilessly so.  You've got to ask and answer those tough questions and you'd better answer those questions with a modicum of logic or you'll really anger your audience who will have invested the time.

If the audience is not able to guess correctly, then they'd better be able to follow the logic of the story backwards after the revelation.  This is one of the best scenarios and it can be seen to good effect in The Usual Suspects.  As an audience member myself, realizing who Keyser Soze was in the few final scenes brought on an immediate series of interconnections spanning the length of the story as I asked myself: did it make sense that this man is Keyser?  And after, when those questions were asked and answered adequately, I realized how much I enjoyed the tale.

So prepare for those questions and if, in crafting your tale, the answers are too pat, or too easy, or too difficult, or too illogical, revise the story.

Opposing Force

One thing you will learn about me if you read this blog for any length of time is that I'm a voracious, rapacious reader.  Sometimes (who am I kidding, all the time), I read several books at once.

Don't ask me if I remember what I read.  Alas, only splinters of outstanding, excellent information remain.  There are some books that require re-reading (Story by McKee is one that comes to mind) and some that quickly start gathering dust.

The one I'm reading now (in addition to three others) is 20 Master Plots (And How to Build Them) by Ronald B. Tobias.  For those with a love of plotting story, this is a must-have.

Here's a thought for the day from Tobias:

Writing a story without presenting a meaningful opposing force is propaganda.

Think on that for a while if you can.  This is an important and deep thought that will benefit almost any writer.

It is also the reason for the downfall of such movies as Lions for Lambs and many politically-motivated movies.  Forcing one's characters into a stereotypical response or characterization is foolhardy storytelling.

Tobias continues:

As a writer you have your point of view—your prejudices, if you will.  Let's say you were a battered wife for twelve years, the victim of a controlling and abusive husband.  When you go to write about it, the story unfolds as it happened:

He storms in from work at night, throws his jacket down on the sofa and demands, “What's for dinner?”

“I made you a lovely duck a l'orange, dear.”  The table is set with their best china and crystal; the candles are lit.  She's obviously gone to a lot of trouble for him.

“Duck!  You know I hate duck.  Can't you ever do anything right?  Make me a sandwich.”

A tear collects in the corner of her eye, but she accepts his abuse stoically.  “What kind of sandwich?”

“I don't care,” he says abruptly.  “And get me a beer.”

He turns on the television and is gone.

Enough.

I don't have to go on.  You know the score and you know the story.  The characters are already defined as types.  She is the silent-suffering, kind-hearted, devoted wife; he is the loud, obnoxious, cruel husband.  You can't wait for him to get his comeuppance.  You hope he suffers.

But this is propaganda.

Propaganda?

The author's point of view here is obvious and one-sided.  I've sided with the wife and exaggerated her just as I've exaggerated the husband beyond belief.  They're types. “Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “begin with a type and you find that you have created—nothing.”  The author is trying to settle a personal score.  The fiction may be therapeutic and help the writer work out hostility, but that's not the purpose of fiction if you intend to show it to someone else.  The purpose of fiction is to tell a story, not to get even or to work out your own personal problems.

You can always tell propaganda because the writer has a cause.  The writer is on a soapbox lecturing, telling us who is good and who is bad and what is right and what is wrong.  Lord knows we get lectured enough in the real world; we don't read or go to the movies so someone else can lecture to use some more.  If you use your characters to say what you want them to say, you're writing propaganda.  If you characters say what they want to say, you're writing fiction.  Isaac Bashevis Singer claimed characters had their own lives and their own logic, and that the writer had to act accordingly.  You manipulate the characters in the sense that you make them conform to the basic requirements of your plot.  You don't let them run roughshod over you.  In a sense, you build a corral for your characters to run around in.  The fence keeps them confined to the limitations of the plot.  But where they run inside the corral is a function of each character's freedom to be what or who he/she wants within the confines of the plot itself.

Jorge Luis Borges said it best: “Many of my characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.”

More of a slave than a god.

How, then, do you  avoid writing propaganda?  First start with your attitude.  If you have a score to settle or a point to make, or if you're intent on making the world see things your way, go write an essay.  If you're interested in telling a story, a story that grabs us and fascinates us, a story that captivates the paradoxes of living in this upside-down world, write fiction.

Start with a premise, not a conclusion.  Start with a situation.

William Goldman

Is a genius.

Here he is in three parts.

Unity

This topic came to me as I was playing the Royal Game a few months back. The Royal Game is of course, chess.

In chess, it is imperative that every move made fulfill several requirements at once. That move not only has to be the best possible move, it also has to fit in with the game plan.

There are some moves that need not be so strictly categorized. There is a need for considerable flexibility, but the general guidelines are that a move perform the duties outlined earlier.

By way of example, about to make a move, a player notices that the opponent's piece is unguarded or en prise as chess players call it. Some questions pop up: is that piece really unguarded or is it a trap? Has my opponent been playing badly or well so far? That answer will go some way to understanding whether or not that piece is really up for grabs without repercussion.

I haven't played competitive chess in a while, but the other night I happened to be at a local Borders Bookstore on chess night. I decided to put down the book I was reading (Aristotle's Poetics) and play a game.

As I started adjusting the pieces, I wondered if it would be possible to apply any dramatic principles to the game. The Aristotelian principles of unity was uppermost in my mind as I made the first move as black. Since the white side always moves first, I was responding to his move and I almost always play the Caro-Kann defense as black.

The Caro-Kann is a specific sequence of moves in response to those also of a specific sequence made by the player on the white side. That sequence, regardless of the opening, usually ends after about 10 to 12 moves. It's been worked out by strong players which the best moves are up to a point; chess players call this “theory.” After that, the players leave that realm (Vogler's the “ordinary world”) and attempt to construct plans that will take them from the opening into the middle game and hopefully, into the endgame.

Sound familiar?

Since I hadn't played in a while, I remembered only the very first few moves (around five) and I hoped he wouldn't divert quickly from theory. This is the great danger of simply memorizing theoretical moves: your opponent doesn't cooperate and that's it, you're lost. Indeed, after only a few moves, I noticed my opponent was quickly veering off the well-trodden path.

I resolved then to play each move for maximum efficiency and kept up the mantra of unity: each move had to be based on a plan. I remembered that the black side of the Caro-Kann usually ended up attacking on the queen side of the board so every move I made, I needed to maneuver pieces over to that side while making sure I wasn't too particularly open on the king side.

White's general plan in the Caro-Kann is to attack on the king side. The reason this is dangerous for black is that chess is decided by the “capture” of the king, the checkmate. While the black side was playing to attack white's queen side—a decidedly less dangerous option as you may imagine—white would be gunning for my king so I had to juggle these two options (attack while simultaneously defending), a type of dilemma I guess.

I'll be talking about dilemma in one of my next few posts. I'm intrigued by this tool that Jeff Kitchen explores in his book, Writing a Great Movie.

So every move I made had to do almost triple duty: defend, attack, or stabilize. Sometimes one more than the other two but very often all three. This is not an easy thing to do need I say? Jeff Kitchen says that structuring a play is like being in a fight in which you can only throw one punch. Well I was in a fight now.

I ended up winning the game because my plan was better. It was better and faster and balanced. I got to demolish white's queen side faster than he got to my king. I started making him react to me rather than the other way around even though I started the game by reacting. This is something you'll notice not only in chess, but in many other fields: the person reacting is usually the loser.

In drama, the protagonist may end up having to react for a while, and certainly to an inciting incident at first. However, as the story proceeds, the protagonist of necessity is no longer reacting. She now drives the story and subsequent reactions are no longer hers but (usually) the antagonist's.

I apologize for the rambling nature of the post, but achieving unity even in posts is a very difficult thing to do. (Grin.)

So, unity. Everything that occurs in a dramatic story not only has to be reactionary—each event or beat leads to the other, like dominoes—but also relevant. Relevance is unity. One has to choose wisely and parsimoniously those events that move the story forward, but which are also dramatically necessary. Otherwise, you'll have committed the dreaded crime (in Aristotle's view) of episodic writing.

People react in all sorts of ways up to and including irrationally. In fact, one may make the argument that humans almost always make the irrational choice, but that's another post. In drama, one has to choose the dramatically “correct” action, no matter the infinite number of actions possible. That action has got to be in unity with the story.

An antagonist, say, who does something completely out of character is a useless antagonist. In fact, he is no longer an antagonist because he's no longer dramatically relevant. In the setup that is Act I, the audience will have come to understand that no matter what happens, even if surprising, a character's actions are indeed possible, and of course!, we knew it all along that he would do such and such. In the spectrum of possibilities, dramatic characters are forced to choose from only a small chunk of choices in order to dramatic unity.

Agon (ἀγών)

Following up on my last post about argumentation, I'd like to explore a concept known as agon.

Agon is a Greek word meaning contest or challenge or race (I prefer debate or argument) and it's the root word for two terms that are indispensable to drama: protagonist and antagonist.  It shouldn't be too much of  a stretch to instantly grasp that the protagonist is the character in the drama that takes the “for” or “pro” side of the agon, argument.  Naturally, the antagonist takes the opposite or the “anti-” or, to push the limits of English grammar, the “ant” side of the agon.

To my mind, these terms instantly throws light on the essence of drama.  One side proposes, the other counters and so on, until the resolution occurs, hopefully after a great climax.  It's a clash of ideas manifest through action.  An even more interesting way of looking at this is that each side attempts to answer the Major Dramatic Question of the drama.  The protagonist in the positive and the antagonist in the negative.

Drama is not classical argumentation per se, it's more of a debate in which persuasion plays a large role through the attempted manipulation of emotion.  Usually, the audience will act as judge, deciding who wins and loses.  Both the protagonist and antagonist attempt to persuade us that their view of events is the correct one and, using a combination of logic and rhetoric (again made manifest through action) attempt to persuade us of the correctness of their action(s).

Because debate is a broader form of logical argument, both the protagonist and antagonist are allowed the use of fallacy.  In logic, committing a fallacy is grounds for instant loss.  The bell is rung (ding!) and it's over.  Life's not like this, fallacies or errors in logic are permitted and what's more, committed every day.  Both sides of the debate have to be careful nevertheless, that while fallacious argumentation is allowed, not to commit too obvious a fallacy or they will lose the audience and thereby the debate.

However, fallacious thinking carries with it not only the risk of losing the game and/or the audience, it also carries a more dangerous, inherent risk.  To me, this is the basis of the dramatic concept of Fatal Flaws.  To my thinking, it is the gaping hole in the character's logic that will appear and cause his or her downfall.

Before the tale of the particular drama the audience (judge) is now witness to, the Fatal Flaw has so far not been a factor.  In fact, the character may have even used that flaw to advance.  Hans Gruber in Die Hard is a money grubbing villain who has, until he walked into Nakatomi Plaza, obviously been successful.  His Fatal Flaw is put to the test by the protagonist and it causes Gruber's downfall.

Louise's illogic in choosing not to go through Texas, an action that could have resulted in a positive answer to the Major Dramatic Question in Thelma & Louise of “Will Thelma and Louise escape to Mexico?” results in her loss of the debate.  Her Fatal Flaw assures her downfall—I think she still “won,” but that's semantics.

Argument

Long ago, when men were men and women were won by those who deserved them, people who were considered well-educated studied under a medieval theory of education known as the Trivium. Forgive the somewhat chauvinistic beginning, that's a line from a boyhood favorite novel—The Passport of Mallam Ilia by the African writer, Cyprian Ekwensi.

The Trivium consists of learning three subjects: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The word in Latin means “Three Roads” one each for the three subjects listed. The theory is a sound one and follows the general pattern by which human beings grasp knowledge.

Isn't it interesting that most things we do as humans involve patterns of threes? One is born, one lives then one dies. A beginning, a middle, and an end. The Trivium is also one of those “threes.”

First comes grammar, ostensibly the mechanics of language. Next is logic, the art of thinking and finally, the last and highest of the arts, rhetoric which is the use of language to persuade.

If one thinks about it, the way we learn a new skill follows the pattern of the Trivium. First we learn the grammar or mechanics of the subject. The mundane, everyday things we need to know about that subject. In language, it's first learning the alphabet then come words, sentences, parts of sentences, etc. We learn syntax, why words belong only in certain locations in a sentence, how to string them together to form something meaningful.

In, say, Tennis, the beginner learns the basic strokes, fixing muscle memory with how to actually hit a ball. The rules and so forth come in later, they don't form part of the mechanics of Tennis.

Thereafter, logic is the next station on the road to attaining knowledge. Now that we understand the basics of the subject, we need to put them in a form that makes sense. It is not enough to know the words and how to construct a sentence if that sentence doesn't make sense.

This sentence is grammatically correct: “The cat barked.”

While correct, it doesn't make sense, it's illogical. The study of logic teaches the student how to analyze the content of grammar for consistency and truth.

Finally, rhetoric—the one area with which screen and dramatic writing concerns itself—the high art of communication, the adaptation of language to circumstance. I call this a high art because it is the terminus, this is what we're all trying to achieve. This is what all that study is for, communicating our grammatically correct, logically consistent thoughts to others.

What does this hold for the dramatist? Plenty. First, it is imperative that as a dramatist, one grasps the fundamentals, the mechanics of drama. We first concern ourselves with structure and plot, narrative, premise and theme, character. We need to understand these in the “grammar” stage.

The dramatist next concerns himself with the logic of drama. There is a reason why the term premise is used in drama and what passes for formal logic. They both share that term because in both (with some variations), premise means the same thing.

The logician starts with a premise, something presumed true such “as all men are mortal.” In drama, premise refers to the fundamental concept that drives the plot such as “a small boy sees dead people.” Once the premise is in place, both the dramatist and the logician attempts to prove the truth of the premise and by so doing, teach us a lesson in humanity.

And how both the logician and the dramatist proves this premise is through the application of logic through rhetoric . The dramatist persuades the audience using rhetoric that the premise of the story is true and thus fulfills the theme of the argument or story (theme is what I take to be the moral of the story).

So drama is argument. As dramatists, we ask a question in the set up of the story. Some call this Act I. The second part of the story, the middle or Act II, consists of deliberating on the question, examining its every facet and finding logical holes. The third and final part, the end or Act III, finds us either answering the question or not.

In the case of not answering the question, we fail at proving the premise or, as logic would have it, we fail to reach a conclusion or we reach an illogical conclusion. Whatever the outcome, the theme of the story always teaches the audience a lesson.

Ackerman on Writing

About?

The Photo Dramatist, as a name, is based on what screenwriters were called in the early Hollywood years. I was inspired to create the blog while reading a book titled, How I Did it by H. H. Van Loan. It was written in 1922.

My aim with this blog is to write about drama, specifically drama as it exists in the movies. And by drama, I speak of theoretical drama, the drama of Aristotle's Poetics. The drama of conflict, rising tension, crisis, decision and action, resolution, etc.

I aim to discuss dramatic theory and practice, both mine and sometimes quoting from the work of others. Actually, a lot of the time, quoting from the work of others and providing an analysis.