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brevity takes time, that excellence means perseverance.
Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.
You must shape your story in a way that both expresses your vision and satisfies the audience’s desires.
Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.
craft. To that end scholars such as William Archer, Kenneth Rowe, and John Howard Lawson wrote excellent books on dramaturgy and the prose arts. Their method was intrinsic, drawing strength from the big-muscle movements of desire, forces of antagonism, turning points, spine, progression, crisis, climax—story seen from the inside out.
no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small “t.” Big “T” Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart,
A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what’s obvious to everyone on the street.
STRUCTURE is a selection of events from the characters’ life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life.
A STORY EVENT creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a VALUE.
A Story Event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and ACHIEVED THROUGH CONFLICT.
For a typical film, the writer will choose forty to sixty Story Events or, as they’re commonly known, scenes. A novelist may want more than sixty, a playwright rarely as many as forty. A SCENE is an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character’s life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance. Ideally, every scene is a STORY EVENT.
If exposition is a scene’s sole justification, a disciplined writer will trash it and weave its information into the film elsewhere.
A BEAT is an exchange of behavior in action/reaction. Beat by Beat these changing behaviors shape the turning of a scene.
Beats build scenes. Scenes then build the next largest movement of story design, the Sequence.
A SEQUENCE is a series of scenes—generally two to five—that culminates with greater impact than any previous scene.
An ACT is a series of sequences that peaks in a climactic scene which causes a major reversal of values, more powerful in its impact than any previous sequence or scene.
STORY CLIMAX: A story is a series of acts that build to a last act climax or story climax which brings about absolute and irreversible change.
plot is an accurate term that names the internally consistent, interrelated pattern of events that move through time to shape and design a story.
