{"id":24,"date":"2006-12-13T19:16:02","date_gmt":"2006-12-13T07:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/?p=24"},"modified":"2012-07-27T14:30:35","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T02:30:35","slug":"telling-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/telling-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Telling Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This one’s for Mr Power<\/strong> – we just ran out of time after that screening.)<\/p>\n

Disclosure<\/span>: I still haven’t read Robert McKee<\/strong>‘s Story<\/a> (which I’ve requested from the local library<\/a>). But I can heartily recommend William Goldman<\/strong>‘s Which Lie Did I Tell?<\/a>, Alex Epstein<\/strong>‘s Crafty Screenwriting<\/a> and Stephen King<\/strong>‘s On Writing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mr Epstein gets it in one<\/a>: just tell a good story that keeps people interested<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Okay.\u00a0 So all the good stories have been told already and there’s no pressure to be, like, truly creative. Therefore it’s not necessarily the story<\/em> I’ll be worrying about – it’ll be how<\/em> I’m going to make it interesting<\/em>. My mission will be to grab the reader’s – and eventually, the audience’s – attention, take ’em for a ride and then afterwards, drop ’em back in their seat, exhilarated, excited and begging for more.<\/p>\n

How do I do it then? I write the story how I’d<\/strong> like to see it done.<\/p>\n

This springs partly from all the films I’ve watched and thought, I could’ve done better’n that!<\/em> Fighting words – and extraordinarily naive ones, in hindsight. (Ah, those were the days – watching bucketloads of films and videos and television, taking it all in and un\/sub-consciously figuring out what worked for me and what didn’t, and why<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

I believe I’ve seen enough films, videos and television, and read enough books, comics and stories, to know what stories worked.\u00a0 I survived film school and have had people pay me<\/em> to write to trust my own sense of story telling and sturcture. I may have foolishly uttered in a script meeting, “I don’t necessarily think and write in terms of protagonist and antagonist,” but I certainly made up for it by referencing enough films to show that I knew what I was talking about.<\/p>\n

For me – and at this stage in my career – I still see the script as a story<\/em>: ninety-plus pages to be read<\/em> by someone. That script had better transport the reader into my world for each and all of those pages. And all the while, hidden in the text is a subliminal message: Wouldn’t this just make a freakin’ great movie?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This one’s for Mr Power – we just ran out of time after that screening.) Disclosure: I still haven’t read Robert McKee‘s Story (which I’ve requested from the local library). But I can heartily recommend William Goldman‘s Which Lie Did I Tell?, Alex Epstein‘s Crafty Screenwriting and Stephen King‘s On Writing. Mr Epstein gets it … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Telling Stories”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[350,355,352,348,351,353,354,349],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scriptwriting","tag-alex-epstein","tag-crafty-screenwriting","tag-on-writing","tag-robert-mckee","tag-stephen-king","tag-story","tag-which-lie-did-i-tell","tag-william-goldman"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2694,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/2694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}