WHERE'S THE DRAMA?
Script Tools & Tutorials
5 INT/EXT CHARACTERS DAY
Dialogical cinema cannot be meaningfully reduced or pigeonholed into any preconceived genres or categories. It is not a style, so much as the essence of style - the source of freshness and originality that defies elucidation in terms of either a linear or non-linear form of narrative. It is not limited to or subsumed by experimental, alternative or hybrid films or filmmakers, nor is it susceptible to description by means of appeal to the conventional jargon that is commonly employed in delineating and analysing the usual component processes of that most unusual of obsessions, that strangely occult occupation that calls characters out of the darkness to enact and play-out their dramas round and within the virtual campfire of cinematic storytelling.
Whether the story is fictional or factional, whether the screen is large or small, in a theatre or on one’s laptop, it is the interactive impulse made present that is the core of the dramatic action and the soul of character-based, screen drama. From idea to script to production through to post, an dynamic and interactive environment continually shapes and paces the emotional energies expressed by the actions of all of the characters necessary to the finding the drama.
Depending upon one’s perspective, and at which point one embarks upon one’s relationship with the characters, the dialogic operating within, behind and through the characters’ actions may be viewed as either a process or an outcome, or both. It is important, therefore, not to interpret “Dialogical Cinema” as merely a consequence or product of a certain kind of methodology. Likewise, it would be inexact to think and speak of it merely as a technique for the development of story.
Dialogical cinema is a way of being – a way of being with oneself and one’s characters, and with whatever story is trying to get itself born by means of whatever the storytellers are attracted to it.
Dialogical cinema takes seriously the idea that dramatic stories are not merely ABOUT relationships and problems; they ARE relationships and problems. And the relationships and problems are not confined to the script. The actual screenplay is but an artefact of a dynamic, interactive continuum that all the characters undergo in the process of becoming acquainted with one another; it is but one side of a dialogical interface that echoes and mirrors what is being played out – often unconsciously – in the inner and outer dramas of the filmmakers, their audience and their tribe/s.
The central question facing the prospective screen storyteller is where do I position myself in terms of the drama? Basically, there are only two choices: in or out. One is either inside the drama, or a mere spectator. Alas, the experience of viewing a spectator-generated film is something with which most of us are all-too-familiar; it is equivalent to, and about as exciting as, listening to a blow-by-blow account of a heavyweight-title fight filtered through the intermediary of some guy who heard about it from some guy who heard it on radio.
Far too many screenwriters, “create” their stories at arms-length, or even farther. Whether it be due to a fear of “cheesiness” or simply a lack of insight or an impoverishment of taste, the great majority of screen storytellers – would-bes and already-have-beens - creep uncertainly into that most dangerous region on Earth – the world of character-driven drama.
Screenwriting programmes, cameras, lighting rigs, sound recording devices, monitors and editing software; the deals and tax breaks, the casting agencies and training schools that feed into the materialisation of the dream - that make it shareable – all of these are unquestionably necessary to the enterprise. However, regardless of how important they may be – and I often wonder whether films schools generally are a boon or a bust as far as eliciting native creativity is concerned - they are merely the MEANS by which a story is told. The means, unfortunately, is of little use without a MEDIUM.
To effectively enter the world of character-based drama, both cast and crew must work as mediums. The job of the medium is to conduct emotional energy – to be open and receptive to it, to continually free it and keep it moving and building and releasing according the deep emotional logic of the characters’ actions and understandings.
To work as a medium is to been intimately connected with the emotional energies of a story as these energies flow from scene to scene, and within each scene. To work as a medium is to have the courage to let go, to allow oneself to listen to and respond authentically to the other characters, to give them permission to become what they will, to trust.
A storyteller caught up in the thrall of dialogical cinema conducts the life of the drama by becoming the life of the drama, and allowing the Drama to become the storyteller’s life.
Dialogical cinema is revolutionary, not necessarily in a political sense, or even aesthetically; but as a powerful, living energy that flows freely every time a screen storyteller has to courage to relinquish control, to set aside the sophisticated chauvinism that refuses to treat the other characters as less than one’s equals.
The success of any dramatic screen story – its ability to move us, to change us – depends on the quality of the interactions that occur both inside and outside the script. The evolution – or “making present” – of any story world, is necessarily interactive. Indeed, the dialogical drama can have no being apart from the living interaction of MEDIUMS – a collaboration whose alchemical-like union swirls with equal amounts of dread and delight around and within the field of original characters whose problems, goals, plans, anxieties and points of view are made fully present only when the emotional energies at play are conducted mediumistically.
Media is best conducted when conducted by mediums. But it will always do whatever it is told to do by whoever is manipulating it. The written word has given us The Koran as well as Mein Kampf, and the advertising jingle employs the same seven-note scale as Beethoven’s Pastoral.
Every dramatic story develops from the interactions of those characters relevant to the story’s natural history and final cause. However, if one works only with the characters in the script, one aborts whatever opportunities the other characters had to become actively involved in living the drama, and thus contribute to its potency. The damage done by storytellers whose ignorance of these characters is allowed to pass unchallenged and uncriticised, thus subverting the potential of the story that is trying to birth itself, is incalculable.
Standing in marked contrast to this narrow-minded, fearful, and controlling style of filmmaking, is Dialogical Cinema, in which ALL of the characters relevant to the finding of story are engaged and interacting with one another. One of the great – and mostly ignored - lessons of the new, so-called interactive media is that it provides a rather vivid metaphor of a largely hidden process whose usual domain is the imagination. It externalises the fundamental dialogical relationships and elements of mediumship in ways that the black squiggles of a written language seem less and less able to convey with any degree of power or eloquence.
But the “new media” is only another means to an end, in a universe teeming with means, and like any other means for expression must go begging for a storyteller – who is ready and eager to step away from the “second-life” we so carelessly and habitually understand as “reality” and take up the adventure that is the true and enduring territory of the MEDIUM.
the art of getting a character going
Even if you don't have the foggiest idea what your story is going to be about, or what will happen or exactly when and where
it is to be set, it would be helpful if you could at least complete the following: "My main character wants _________ more than anything else in the world."
What does your character WANT? Love, respect, courage, revenge, a kidney for his kid sister, to find the son that was given up for adoption? If you want to write a DRAMATIC screenplay, the minimum requirement is that you have a character that wants something.
At about the same time you allow yourself to start discovering what your character wants, and who or what opposes them, you'll begin to find out where your story is going, and what it’ll be about, both narratively and thematically. Dramatic characters can only be dramatic insofar as they are fighting for something.
Fighting does not necessarily mean using fists or guns or joining an army, but they must be striving for something that is not easy to attain. In short, dramatic characters are goal-driven, and in order to achieve their objectives they have to act.
A character’s actions involve both confrontation and avoidance. Avoidance? Yes! Characters also want/need to avoid things, like being killed, or captured. But whatever it is that the character is avoiding, it only has meaning (i.e.: emotional power) if it is enacted within the context of what it is that the character hopes to win, gain or achieve.
What scares your characters? Humiliation, disfigurement, pain, terminal illness, poverty?
What lengths will they go to to avoid what they fear?
What have they already done to avoid their greatest fears?
Discover what it is that will cause your characters to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, hands clutching the covers, body rigid with terror.
If you want to really make your characters come to life, choose something that terrifies YOU! -- you'll find that when you write something that makes you shake, you'll also make your reader shake.
A rule of good storytelling is that the protagonist will confront the thing s/he fears the most and overcome it in order to win the thing s/he desires the most.
This isn't a hard-and-fast rule. For every 100 successful dramatic films where the writer followed it, you'll find at least one successful drama where the writer ignored it completely.
It's the CHARACTERS, stupid!
Powerful and believeable characters are essential to the life of every dramatic screenplay, and the screenwriter's relationship with the characters is the primary relationship without which the enterprise of finding the story becomes stale and predictable.
What binds the writer and the writer's interest to a character is a PROBLEM or disturbance that upsets or undermines the habits (actions) and habits of thought (beliefs) of the character in question. The problem must also carry a sense of urgency - unless the character acts NOW, the problem will get much worse.
As the writer's relationship with the characters in the script develops, the writer will find him/herself forming relationships with characters that are seemingly extraneous to the script. These are not characters in the strict sense of the word, but they are imaginary entities grounded in the writer's experience and essential to the birth of the drama that is unfolding. These metascript characters include the writer's AUDIENCE and the writer's TRIBE or TRIBES. If a screenwriter is to work mediumistically it is absolutely necessary that he/she cultivated working relationships with these characters as well as the characters within the screenplay. While the fundamental relationship between the writer and the characters remains, it is unlikely to attain a profound degree of intimacy and emotional connectedness unless the writer works as a MEDIUM, that is, unless the writer relinquishes control of the unfolding story and allows the characters to freely interact and influence the decisions and responses of one another unfettered by the fears and personal ax-grindings of the ego-centered writer.
As might be expected, character-based screenwriting is fraught with pitfalls and is, at times, supremely frustrating. One does not create compelling characters as one might bake a cake. One must woo them, entice them, get to know them, enter into a frank and open exchange with them, if they are to reveal anything at all of their hidden potentials, including the anxieties, wounds and secret prayers that lend them their emotional depth.
If one works as a medium, one cannot be in too big a hurry. The mediumistic revelation of dramatic characters often takes time. Wham, Bam, Thank-you-Ma'am won't work - does it ever??? And yet, there are so many writers that are driven to turn out any number of bad scripts rather than spend their time making one good one. There are far too many premature ejaculators in this industry.
In my experience, the conventional route taken by most mediocre script writers is
CONCEPT --> PLOT --> CHARACTER
A writer has an idea - or what I refer to as a notion (usually intriguing but invariably undramatic). The writer hatches a rough plot-line, that illustrates the notion in some (all too frequently) predictable or illogical manner. Often, the writer already knows the ending and works assiduously arranging events so that the characters will eventually intersect with the pre-ordained target.
This is the TARGET-SHOOTING METHOD of screenwriting - a paint-by-numbers approach that hordes of neo-Artistotleans crow about, the leading exponents of which churn out books and workshops like proverbial snake-oil salesmen, advantaging themselves at the expense of hapless and gullible knowledge bags who may end up spending thousands of dollars discovering there is no recipe.
The Writer-as-Big-Game-Hunter in the shooting gallery of mediocrity takes a bead on every target the gurus have told him about, tracking down each beat, turning point, and climax with somnolent enthusiasm. Employing this method, every event in the plot becomes "a dot" and the behaviour of the characters functions merely as a way of connecting all the dots so as to arrive at the "picture". Because it is invariably formula-driven, one usually anticipates the picture before it actually appears, thus rendering the experience predictable.
Such an approach to drama is both chauvinistic and manipulative, chauvinistic in terms of the characters ("cut-outs" might be a more appropriate word for them) and manipulative in terms of the audience and the audience's response. Invariably, such stories boil down to propaganda, sentimentality or pornography.
Alternatively. the character-based approach to screenwriting starts with CHARACTER and with a PROBLEM that compels the character to act. Motivated by the PROMISE of justice, salvation, freedom or merely something better or safer, the character struggles to make the promise a reality - to achieve his or her objective or goal. Drama arises when the quest is frustrated by forces that are antagonistic to the character's struggle or predicament, thus forcing the character to fight for what he/she desires. In some powerful, unpredictable and thoroughly credible way, the character must find a way of transforming or over-coming this opposition if he/she is to succeed.
In Character-based screen storytelling, one accompanies each character on their journey - protagonist and antagonist - finding in each one the inner strengths and weaknesses that are relevant to the strategies and actions employed.
Plot vs Story
Plot is NOT the same thing as Story. Plot is the selection and ordering of actions that dramatise the Story.
Plot is ACTION and ORDER in TIME.
Story is ACTION, ORDER, TIME, as well as WHY and WHAT.
Plot is a journey towards the revelation of the WHY and the WHAT.
A satisfying and emotionally powerful plot withholds information about the why and the what, wrapping them both in MYSTERY and SUSPENSE and keeping the mystery and suspense viable up to the final climax.
Drama is about emotion, getting a powerful emotional response from one's audience - a response that is powerful enough to provoke insight. Plot is one thing happening after another; Story is about why do the characters care; and more importantly, why do I - the audience - care?
Guns, car chases, and explosions can only take you so far. How many screenplays have I read that are about characters wanting money? Or wanting to keep or save their jobs? Who cares?
Unless there is something in the story that allows me to enter the emotional life of the characters and identify with them, in short, to have a relationship with them that I care about - then no amount of car chases or special effects will make any difference. While it may seem natural to want to impress a script reader or a producer with a BIG story, when it comes to intimacy and creating emotionally compelling drama it's always best to remember the old adage, "size doesn't matter". If you aren't able to get the most intense and exciting scripts from small stories you won't stand a chance of doing it with big ones.
The key to it all is open-ness - the kind of openness that relies on courage and vulnerability. It will be impossible to have meaningful (emotionally viable) relationships with your characters without the courage to become open and vulnerable.
The truth of your characters resides in their emotional life, a life that is not only buried deep within them, but deep within you as well. If you are to plumb their depths you must also plumb your own. What characters do must be TRUE to them emotionally, with all the complexity their emotional life contains, as well as all the disguises and repressions they employ and harbour.
The search for character cannot adequately proceed without also making a search of oneself. A dramatic character is invariably an aspect of ourselves that we do not yet fully recognise. The process of writing a dramatic screenplay is - in part - a revelatory process of revealing some hidden aspect of ourselves to ourselves. The reason we write a screenplay, it seems to me, is to find out why we are writing it.
Characters, like the characters who write them (i.e.: writers) are driven by needs or motivating drives to attain something of value. Drama itself is an exploration of a motivating drive as it is manifested in the actions of a character and his quest (the story). The psychologist, Abraham Maslow, grouped these drives into a hierarchy of categories. Maslow's hierarchy holds that drives form a kind of Great Chain of Becoming, so that one must first fulfill the needs of one category before moving on to the next. From the most basic to the most complex these can be expressed as follows:
Physiological needs - oxygen, food, water, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.
Secuity needs - order, law, limits, stability, etc.
The need to Belong or be Loved - family, affection, marriage, etc.
Esteem needs - achievement leading to self-esteem, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, managerial responsibility, etc.
Cognitive needs - knowledge, meaning, etc.
Aesthetic needs - appreciation and search for beauty, balance, form, etc.
Self-Actualisation needs - self-fulfillment and peak experiences.
Transcendence needs - helping others to achieve self-actualisation.
A character that chooses danger or hunger must have a credible reason for doing so otherwise the audience won't understand the emotional logic of the choice. Most people avoid danger, and they avoid hunger unless motivated by a need higher and more compelling than the biological one. When a writer enters into a relationship with a character, he/she also enters into a relationship with that characters entire system of values and the tribal groups whose influence has encouraged the inculcation of those values.
Initiation
All dramatic storytelling is by defintiion TRIBAL storytelling. Each of us is a carrier of the wisdom of our tribe or tribes, and the dramatic stories mustl necessarily reflect or feature the tribal struggles we are heir to, whether they be of Capulets and Montagues or Jews and Nazis. You cannot, however, effectively write a story about a tribe that you do not belong to. To become the storyteller of a tribe you must have been touched at your core by that tribe. You must be so imbued with the emotional life of that tribe that you have no qualms of speaking on behalf of it, or allowing it to speak through you. For a character to florish with all of the emotional depth and complexity that a audience expects, a writer must write from his/her origins in a tribe. And the origins of the writer's tribe must intersect with the origins of the character's tribe if there is to be any chance at all of ORIGINality.
This is not to say that there are topics from which you are forever barred. Anyone can write about anything so long as they find a way of becoming initiated into the trobe that they wish to write about. This initiation process, once upon a time, was thought of as RESEARCH. But the term seems rather inadequate, suggesting as it does a secondhandedness that is not implied by the experience of initiation.
Director, Rolf de Heer, is not an Aborigine so far as I know, but he was nevertheless able to receive and transmit Ten Canoes, MEDIUMISTICALLY, by virtue of his obsessive interest and involvement with the people of Arnhem Land. His initiation, whilst probably not in any sense traditional, nevertheless opened him to the world, the values and emotions of the tribe with whom he worked, enabling a relationship that mitigated against the sort of interference and fear a non-initiated whitefella might have inflicted upon such a project. It is not so much a matter of writing from what you know, but writing from what you don't know, based an an abiding faith that you are in the right place at the right time with the right people because they accept you and you accept them. Most simplistically, character-based writing demands that you write from what you FEEL.
Questions
Finally, we come to the essential questions of character-based screenplay writing. As a dramatic screenwriter you have to think and feel and explore like an actor. Put yourself into a character's shoes and ask:
Who am I?
What am I?
Where am I coming from?
What do I want? Why do I want it?
Who or what is in the way of me getting it?
What do I have to do to get what I want?
You can't wait for the actor to provide the answers to these questions. They have to be in the script.
The Screenwriter & the Characters
Knowledge is often cited as the conventional remedy for prejudice and fear, but in the case of dramatic, screen storytelling, it will only take you so far. An intellectual grasp of plot construction and character development will neither inspire nor sustain the depth of insight or courage required for the task of finding and effectvely exploring complex dramatic characters and character actions. Even when armed with the necessary jargon and possessed of an academic command of genre, structure and comparable methodologies one can do little to assuage whatever doubts and insecurities accompany the process of grappling with a character’s inner and outer problems and contradictions. Quite simply, knowledge very often only reinforces and legitimises the underlying anxieties that stand between us – the storytellers – and the story we are trying to find. Much of our fear is stimulated by an unwillingness to confront or acknowledge the emotional messiness that inecessarily accompanies every dramatic action. There is something inexplicably distasteful about dirtying one’s hands in the morass of anyone's hidden obsessions and desires, let alone our own. Such disgust is usually compounded by our studied ignorance of the characters’ origins or by a native lack of confidence when challenged to journey to the emotional source of the characters' actions. If we surrender to our fears and allow our confidence to be undone by bad faith or laziness, it is unlikely we will ever produce anything other than stereotypes that illustrate rather than dramatise emotion. But if fear and prejudice serve only to drive the anxious storyteller ever deeper into the complacency of formula, and if knowledge is of little or no use in combating these conditions, by what means might we fruitfully uncover the characters and actions that form the basis of energetic drama? How does the screenwriter bring about or enter into that essential connectedness between him/herself and the characters that will invigorate the soul of the dramatic partnership? If one’s goal is to become a medium for character, how is it possible to identify so strongly with our characters that we become the characters, or, more precisely, that the characters themselves “create” their own story? Try as you will, it is almost impossible to force them out of hiding by merely assigning them biographies or moving them around the page whilst thinking up new ways of describing their appearance and what they are drinking or eating. The imposition of traits, attitudes and actions, short of our own, emotional involvement, breaks faith with the kind of relationship that allows a character to become a partner with the screenwriter/filmmaker in the creation of the story. Such a relationship is impossible so long as the storyteller maintains his or her narrow role as cold-blooded manipulator. What is required is some degree of openness accompanied by a willingness to trust the characters. The storyteller/character relationship provides the usual vantage point from which dramatic screen stories are conceived and constructed, and owes almost everything to the storyteller’s continued and developing interest in each character's as-yet-undiscovered possibilities, which, if the character is dramatic, necessarily involves a high degree of curiosity on the part of the dramatist concerning the character's problems, goals and plans. The initial stage of this engagement usually involves an informal “dialogue” between the storyteller and the characters in the script, in which the actions and motives of every character, as well as the storyteller, are interrogated and thoroughly scrutinized, both on and off the page. During the re-writing phase – which is not unlike a kind of a prolonged and some times frustrating seduction – the screenwriter gradually develops a familiarity with the characters that permits a closer examination of the weight and rhythm of the emotional energies and transformations that are inherent in every character's actions. Even as one’s interest in the character grows, however, one is still only partially cognizant of the totality of the problems and circumstances with which the character is struggling. Because a great deal of our knowledge concerning the characters is based upon previously established sets of assumptions and prejudices that we have brought into the process in order to calm our doubts and sooth our insecurities concerning the story we think we want to tell, our knowledge ultimately proves an impedient to any genuine acts of discovery, either on the character's part or our own. Too often, the storyteller/character relationship is grounded in the storyteller’s need for the character to comply with a set of presupposed prejudices and expectations, thus forcing the character and the story to move in a direction that has already been preordained. This is hardly conducive to promoting the kinds of interactions one normally associates with genuinely creative relationships. To avoid the staleness and predictability that this sort of non-relationship breeds, one must engage with one’s characters in ways that allow them to contribute something. Whenever obstacles or complications intrude, threatening to block, frustrate or altogether stop a character in the realisation of some vital and urgent need, desire or objective, the screenwriter has an opportunity to observe and explore a variety of possibilities concerning the character's emotional and intellectual make-up, including their fears, ingenuity and other inner resources that may never rise to the level of consciousness were the character merely operating with the predictable and comfortable regularity of untroubled routine. As the characters navigate from one one crisis to the next, one begins to gain ever more intimate insights into their identity. The openness that results brings with it a growing sense of familiarity. As the character meet each test and manage or fail to manage the impediments and threats encountered, their actions and non-actions reveal possibilities as to their authentic nature. Central to this developing awareness is a growing sensitivity to what the characters are not expressing and why. Also, as one becomes more open to the characters’ possibilities, one becomes increasingly inclined to jettison the old habits of thought that have bolstered and legitimised one’s ignorance at the expense of knowing one’s characters. As the need to manipulate and control your characters begins to be recognised for what it is – a strategy of avoidance, based on fear and prejudice – one is more likely to see and hear the characters in terms of themselves rather than as predictable functionaries of your own thinly disguised insecurities. Dramatic stories that evolve from characters that insinuate themselves in this way create the impression – at least, within the screenwriter – that the story is writing itself. Indeed, from the point of view of the storyteller-as-medium, it is probably more accurate to describe the process as a finding rather than a making; and so long as the storyteller continues to be intrigued, the relationship will develop. ADVERSITY BUILDS CHARACTER In drama as in life, adversity builds character. When seriously threatened or in danger of losing what is most valued or prized, the dramatic character will act – must act – and through that action show us the stuff of which the character is made. Whatever other tricks the storyteller may employ to entice, cajole or coax the character out of hiding, nothing is more revealing of a character’s innermost attitudes and motivations than what they actually do – and don’t do - in the face of life threatening circumstances. Hence, a character with his back to the wall will act in ways that reveal much more information about what he really thinks and believes and feels than a character that casually discusses the weather over an undramatic cup of tea. One soon comes to realise that the screenwriter/character relationship also involves a process of self-interrogation in which the screenwriter must find, challenge, and sometimes transcend, those personal anxieties, beliefs and prejudices that serve only to obscure one’s relationship with the story and its characters. In the quest to penetrate into a character’s emotional core, the screenwriter may open up old wounds, awaken childhood fears or resurrect old memories, any one or all of which may act as triggers to be tested, exploited, examined, employed or rejected in accordance with the emotional energies at work within one's characters and the story-being-found. Fundamentally, the storyteller/character relationship begins where Drama begins – with a PROBLEM. In fact, the problem is the first, single most important dramatic artefact that the character and the storyteller have in common. But a problem only becomes a dramatic problem – with an implicit dramatic question – when it goads a character into action: action that is directed towards achieving a desired objective or goal. This goal must, in turn, stimulate a plan of action that, when enacted, carries significant risk for the character. A dramatic problem is the kind of problem that gets worse if it isn’t dealt with. It’s also the kind of problem that gets worse because it’s dealt with, and will go on producing even bigger problems – with ever increasing risk - as a result of the character’s actions to fix it. In this way a dramatic story goes on building tension and emotional energy until the characters (and the storyteller) are confronted by a problem of such profound magnitude that it appears unresolvable. This seemingly unresolvable problem is the brick wall at the heart of every dramatic story worth telling (See CONFRONTING THE WALL), and is the source of the terror that lies at the base of the storyteller/character relationship. A writer who is brave enough to journey with the characters, and undergo the risk, urgency and anxieties that their problems visit upon them, might very well be thrown into temporary despair when faced with the seemingly solution-less riddle of the story’s last great obstacle; for unless a solution can be found the story cannot proceed, nor can it be finished. And not just any solution will do. Less imaginative writers, driven by despair and the whiff of ruin, will cast about, in search of an already-existing story or screenplay that contains a similar problem, and adapt it to their own needs. Unfortunately such a strategy undermines the essential freshness that characterises an enduring dramatic story, not to mention the fact that because it is an appropriation it will more than likely appear as a contrivance.
DRAMA, CHANGE & INGENUITY
Drama is concerned with the meaningful movement and transformation of emotional energy. This energy – as expressed in action – should appear coherent and necessary in terms of the character, the character’s given circumstances and the character’s back story. Everything has to fit, and must have its source in the life of the character, including the character’s origins. This is especially true of each character’s actions, which reflect their problems, plans and goals. Actions evoke changes and the transformations that occur will only command our attention if they are significant.
Change is made significant – or emotionally satisfying – when it is authentic, i.e.: when it is the expression of a character’s genuine emotional state. In order to transcend technique and method (formula) – and thus make one’s characters authentic – the storyteller must find ways of making the characters present.
In order to become present, a character must become more than an idea or even a collection of ideas or word/images that refer to that character. To become present means to inhabit the realm of the utterly original – which is to say, the character is possessed of a nature that is unique to that character, which flows from every action the character makes. a nature that allows that character to understand and be understood (susceptible to our empathy) in its own terms – including the terms of our world – without reference to characters extraneous to the story or any number of formulaic reductions (stereotypes) that serve only to rob it of its uniqueness.
A storyteller experiences a character coming to life when the character has been actualised in such a way that its attributes multiply their meanings by virtue of the internal and external relationships one ascertains in the act of witnessing the actions that are peculiar them. The addition of personal details does not guarantee this multiplication of meaning because only part of the life of a character actually exists on the page. A character’s most profound existence operates as a vital exchange between storyteller and character, mediated by text, context and subtext – but not limited to these. It involves not only those elements of character and story that are fully articulated and materialised, but also those aspects that are vividly implied by virtue of the imaginative associations inspired by what is stated and shown, as well as whatever is discovered as a result of the storyteller’s willingness to engage with character at a meta-linguistic level. This multiplication of meaning – which is really the essence of “modernism” – is elucidated more broadly in Eisenstein’s theory of montage and Ezra Pound’s ideogrammatic method, both of which, unfortunately, lie beyond the scope of this book.
According to legend, when Duke Ellington was asked to define jazz, he replied simply: “it’s what you leave out”. The same might be said of the very best dramatic screenplays if, that is, one “knows” what to leave out. One might even conceive of dramatic screen storytelling as the “art of the invisible, for so much of its meaning depends upon what is neither seen nor heard, but merely implied. Indeed, one frequently finds that it is the subtext of a dramatic story that lends it its potency.
The primary function of subtext is the multiplication of meaning, or emotional connectedness. Its presence and efficacy, while reliant on the story’s given circumstances and the dramatic action generated by character problems, goals and plans, actually transcend action, word, image and sound, and, in concert with innumerable, often unconscious, contexts alive within the storyteller, the audience and the tribe, promotes and invites insight by way of the imaginative leaps and seemingly personal, privileged observations it evokes.
The notion that the multiplication of meaning begins with the storyteller and what the storyteller is able to show or suggest is a vast delusion. The multiplication of meaning is not only a function of the storyteller’s involvement with the characters; it is also a manifestation of the characters’ facility to stimulate discovery in the storyteller, and more specifically, a manifestation of the characters’ willingness to be involved with the storyteller.
Stated in a different way – and borrowing a phrase from Pound – the multiplication of meaning is both the cause and the effect of the storyteller’s discovery and affirmation of those unexpected qualities that make a character and the character’s relationship with the storyteller NEW.
To make a character new, ingenuity is indispensable. Indeed, effectively written drama is the presentation of ingenuity in action, wedded to needs that are important to the characters: the thing we might have done if only we had thought of it! A character, and the situation into which that character’s actions propel it, might very well be dramatic, but this is no guarantee that the character won’t be dull. Drama alone is not enough. A compelling character will also be fresh, inventive, and at the same time, thoroughly credible.
One of the by-products of the unresolvable problem, creatively speaking, is the provocation of ingenuity from the writer/character relationship, and in so doing – so long as the writer does not lose heart – provokes the character into becoming more present. Interestingly, it also provokes, or at least encourages, the storyteller into become less present! Or, at least, the storyteller’s prejudices and fears. Because the unresolvable dramatic problem defies method and formula by presenting a dilemma for which neither method nor formula can provide any fresh and satisfying solutions, it ultimately forces the storyteller to abandon his/her reliance upon those sets of prejudices and fears that parade as knowledge, thus leading the storyteller to confront the character and the character’s problems in their own terms.
Whilst caught up in the chaos of the unresolvable problem, bereft of knowledge and the slightest hint as to what might be done, the storyteller arrives at his/her first best chance to make a clean break from the methodologies and formulas that stand between him/herself and the characters. When the storyteller’s ego-self backs down, when it finally admits it has no answers, that it is in fact the veritable fool at the heart of a foolish enterprise, when it becomes completely undone under the weight of not knowing, there is a chance, to hear the characters speak, and to find the solutions that only each character-as-that-character can find.
To fully appreciate the primary storyteller/character relationship is to understand that it involves not only the storyteller’s relationship with the main character, but with all of the characters. Indeed, to produce fresh, surprising and credible dramatic actions, the storyteller must have an energetic alliance not only with the main character, but also with those that stand in opposition to the main character’s plans and goals.
This shifting of allegiance – the storyteller-as-betrayer – is itself a dialogic that the storyteller navigates by translating into meaningful actions, the inner beliefs, attitudes and motives of all the characters. In short, the storyteller must care just as much about stifling or impeding the main character’s progress towards its goal as he/she does in seeking a successful outcome to the problems that the character encounters. This shift in loyalty is, in fact, a shift in point of view. One might ask: from what psychical position or distance is the storyteller viewing the actions of the characters? From whose point of view is the writer telling the story? The question goes to the core of every dramatic problem, for without an empathetic perspective, the writer will neither hear nor see the authentic character that is struggling to escape the prison of the storyteller’s prejudices and fears.
Successful screenwriters will never limit themselves to one point of view. Only by entering into a story through every character’s perspective and with every bit as much empathy as one has for the main character, can a storyteller find authentic characters that multiply the emotional meanings of the energies being built and released by their actions. The effectiveness of the storyteller/character relationship hinges upon this inclusiveness, for unless the relationship involves all of the characters that are relevant to the story’s telling, and only those that are relevant, Drama’s bastard brother, Melodrama, takes over.
So what is the essential nature of the storyteller/character relationship? It is much more complex and subtle than any résumé of the writer’s biographical details or the character’s circumstances might imply. The relationship is both implicit and explicit.
Implicitly, the relationship is based on inquiry. A storyteller, searching to find surprising and credible solutions to the problems faced by his/her characters, probes the characters’ given circumstances and the possibilities and potentialities relevant to those circumstances. Individual attributes, aptitudes, motives, values, fears, and idiosyncrasies, expressed in actions, are uncovered, explored and tested against other actions, which promotes the possibility of fresh insights and unexpected traits that, in turn, are also tested, incorporated or dismissed. Superficially, the aim of such inquiry is to identify possible solutions to the problems that confront the characters AND the storyteller, but more profoundly it creates the conditions that make it more likely that the storyteller will intersect with the characters, experiencing – emotionally - the same anxieties that the characters themselves experience in their pursuit of answers to the problems that threaten not only their well-being but the well-being of the storyteller. Through this quest and the anxieties it gives rise to, the storyteller develops an increasingly intimate sense of the characters’ inner life, which gradually creates a pivot point.
It is at this pivot – where the storyteller’s and the character’s anxieties and understanding of one another reach critical mass – that the storyteller/character relationship becomes explicit, where the flow of energy between the characters and the storyteller undergoes a radical shift. Where once the energy flowed from the storyteller to the characters, it now begins to flow more fluently and vividly from the characters to the storyteller. Almost as if by some alchemical action, the characters begin taking charge.
Ironically, the ultimate expression of the explicit storyteller/character relationship is the obliteration of the dichotomy of storyteller and character, which is fundamental to the storyteller’s transformation into a medium. In other words, the storyteller stands aside, letting the character be what the character is, without the mediating filter provided by the storyteller’s cerebral cortex. In short, the screenwriter frees the character and the drama, which is the active, visual and oral expression of the character’s dramatic identity.
In this sense, the most eloquent task facing any dramatic screenwriter is simply to get out of the way. Once the character is in the driver’s seat, and the storyteller made into the vehicle by which the character transports his or her story from the scriptwriter’s subconscious onto the page or screen, the story begins to take on the quality of something that is telling itself. This is the finest and most complete expression of the explicit storyteller/character relationship, and is the key to building the energy that will effectively drive the dramatic story – or any series of inter-related dramatic actions (the so-called “story arc”) – in a manner that is both fresh and surprising as well as being utterly coherent and thoroughly credible. It results in the storyteller and the character becoming active partners in a story that is happening both inside and outside the script.
The storyteller/character relationship is one of four primary relationships of character-based mediumistic screenwriting.– the primordial building block upon which every successful dramatic story is constructed – for it is through this relationship, from this relationship, and into this relationship, that every particular action, image and/or sound, implicit or explicit to the story-being-found, rushes towards or away from meaning and relevance.
Meeting Ourselves in Our Characters
"The amazing, existential reality of film is that it mediates relationships through cinematic stories. These stories, already mediated by celluloid or by digital means, take place entirely in our heads because of the phenomenon of persistence of vision. Through the experience of film we... come to an understanding that something matters..." - Theresa Sanders
The philosopher, Martin Buber, who unwittingly has had a lot to say about the art of becoming a MEDIUM, contributed an extremely important insight concerning the nature of creativity when he said, "all real living is meeting".
Buber’s observation is particularly illuminating when applied to dramatic screenwriting, especially character-based screenwriting where the quest is to MEET one’s characters, not as things but as living beings who respond and react to one's presence with a presence all their own.
Indeed, every authentic meeting between storytellers and characters is an act of "making present", or what Buber has referred to as an "I/Thou" relationship. Simultaneously, the character-as-writer encounters the writer-as-character (both, as real or as fictional as one another, depending on one's bias), which gives rise to their final cause, the defining identity of which is the story itself.
As the illusion of separateness - between storyteller and character - is stripped away, the utterly manipulative and chauvinistic tactics of the would-be writer are necessarily set aside, replaced by a profound holistic vision in which both story and writer are actively and empathetically engaged in the realisation of each other.
The act of entering into this relationship also requires that the storyteller engage with those other characters who, in relationship with the writer and the characters-in-the-script, are necessary and sufficient for the birthing of any successful (i.e.: emotionally meaningful) screenplay, namely one’s audience and one’s tribe.
In the process of building and energising these relationships, one might be tempted to suddenly marvel in recognition at the profundity of one's actions. But the experience of recognition is merely one of any number of illusory by-products employed by a self-defeating ego. Indeed, the mental sensation of what passes as understanding - where understanding signifies a degree of control over the language systems germane to dramatic storytelling - is itself a diversion. One is either IN THE DRAMA or secure in the belief that one has gained a measure of mastery in the application of the knowledge of how to write a screenplay, but not both. The art of becoming a medium has nothing to do with knowledge. In fact, it is not so much a matter of recognition or understanding as it is of self-forgetting.
From a creative point of view, every dramatic encounter is a relation-event. If the storyteller enters into an authentic relationship with his/her characters, including his/her audience and tribe, then the story that arises from these relationships produces a relation-event that IS a story with its own ability to create relation-event with its own audiences and tribes. For just as the storyteller has an audience to whom his/her story is addressed, and a tribe who speaks through him/her, so too do the characters in the script have those to whom they address their actions and words and tribal groups for whom they speak and who speak through them.
