Author Christina Baker Kline (Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be) did us the great favour of transcribing a recent interview with director James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic) in which he offers storytelling wisdom that is simple but oh so true:
It’s always about the characters and about how those characters express something …
This visual jamboree CAN improve your stories –via UNK
Pop over to The Unknown Screenwriter for an impassioned plea to screenwriters to dig deep down and unearth their emotional cahones. UNK is p.o.’d at the state of filmmaking today and I say, “here, here!”
What are you afraid of? Maybe YOU don’t know how to feel. That would certainly explain why YOU don’t make me feel… Anything. You’re so caught …
The sometimes brusque Flannery O’Connor is quoted as having said that you cannot create emotion by using emotion. More precisely, from Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose:
The fiction writer has to realize that he can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought. He has to provide all these things with a body; he has to create a world with weight and extension. [...] The reason is usually that the student is wholly interested in his thoughts and …
Identifying your hero’s tragic flaw is likely to be the most powerful first step you can take when creating or rewriting a story. Why? Let The Unknown Screenwriter (UNK, to y’all) fill you in:
A Protagonist’s tragic flaw is actually more like his or her ego defense mechanism. In the beginning of the story and through approximately the third quarter of a story, the Protagonist continually relies on this tragic flaw to get as far as he or she has gotten. Up …
As you probably already know, one gesture from a character can communicate more in an instant that anything they might say in a paragraph of diagloue.
Here is a nice little case-in-point. Behold the music video for “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes. Notice the many, many ways these people are conveying their love without uttering a single word (a nose on a shoulder, stroking a forehead).
G’head. Mute it, even. I dare you.