The Way of the Screenwriter

Amnon Buchbinder

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780887849336
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Escritura de guiones de cine

A story is a living thing. And you don't work on a living thing, you work with it. This is the way of the screenwriter, and it is something that writer and director Amnon Buchbinder believes all masterful screenwriters understand intuitively: learning how to work with story through a painstaking process of trial, error, and self exploration.

Amnon Buchbinder draws on his knowledge as a teacher and his experience as a script doctor and a story editor to explore this creative process. Along the way he illustrates principles often inspired by the philosophy of Laozi (Lao Tze) with examples drawn from major motion pictures such as Memento and The Piano.

For the beginning or seasoned screenwriter who aspires to more than mere competence, Buchbinder illuminates a path towards mastery of the craft. For the lover of the cinematic experience, he opens a curtain to reveal a rarely seen world behind the big screen.

II: Storytelling

Story

OUR METHOD THROUGHOUT this book will be to consider a whole before we examine its parts.

This is particularly important in the case of story, for story is so much a part of our lives (and vice versa) that we tend to take it for granted. So before we dive into the practice of creating stories, let’s take a big step back and consider what story is, and look at some of the special qualities of screen stories.

The Purpose of Story

Story embodies, and reveals, the human condition in progress. The purpose of story is to make us more conscious of what it means to be human, so that as humans we can continue to evolve. The purpose of story, in a word, is meaning.

Yes, story is also meant to entertain. But stories hold the potential to entertain us precisely because we want the wisdom that story offers; it is a pleasurable experience. The entertainment dimension of story is like the delicious taste of good food. Reason enough to eat, but not its ultimate purpose.

The multiplexes offer lots of movies that forsake the nourishing dimensions of story in favour of brightly flavoured entertainment, while film festivals include plenty of pretentious tedium. But that does not mean revelation and entertainment need be opposed to one another. A fully formed story is both meaningful and entertaining.

It is a cliché that movies offer escape, but like most clichés, this one holds a grain of truth. Story lifts us above the turmoil, uncertainty and disappointment of our daily lives. But why does story do this? Because we can see our lives more clearly from up there. Story is a tool by which we recognize ourselves, in the deepest and fullest extent of our being. Because, paradoxically, story makes life small enough that we can truly behold it.

The Life Cycle of Story

One day I blurted out to a group of students — without prior thought — that “a story is a living thing.”

One of the students quite sensibly put up his hand and asked: “How can that be? I’m inventing my story; it comes from me. It does only what I tell it. It doesn’t have a life of its own, separate from mine.”

True enough. Neither does a tree have a life that is separate from the soil, the air and the rain. Without us, stories would have no life.

But stories do have us, and they do live. And without question, stories grow. And not only because more words appear on the computer screen as our fingers move across the keyboard. Every writer knows that stories do most of their growing while the writer is engaged with other things, just as plants seem to do most of their growing while the gardener sleeps.

The screenwriter is the god of his story. He is involved with only one phase of its life cycle: creation. Creation can be broken into three components: a living story is conceived, it grows, and finally it is released into the world.

As it is where all living things are concerned, conception is probably the most mysterious part of the process. Where, indeed, do story ideas come from?

In traditional cultures, there are practices set out for people who are having trouble conceiving a child — for example, carrying a small wooden doll close to the body. Psychologically, one might see this as a process of engaging the unconscious with the task. But if you asked the person with the doll, she might tell you that it was there to attract the soul of a child. There are even technologies in some cultures to attract a desirable type of soul, since the nature of the soul will determine the characteristics of the child.

While some may find such “magical” practices naïve where physical conception is concerned, in screenwriting, conception must be an imaginary process!

The master doesn’t need to sit down and “think up” an idea for a story; she has made her being — through practices of writing, of appreciating living stories, of developing her craft — into a lightning rod for story. Ideas come to her. There is no effort involved here, except for the effort of holding a sufficiently empty space within which conception can take place. It is a question of intent. Every successful writer has been taught by his source how to receive what it has to give; the result is instinct. The beginner needs only openness and reverence towards story.

We start with the inspiration of a subject or idea: “a contemporary version of the Fisher King myth,” “a road trip from urban Brazil to the hinterlands,” “a battle between good mutants, bad mutants and bad humans,” “an adult confronting his father, the oppressive patriarch, at a family gathering,” etc. I am only guessing at the initial idea for these stories, but the point is that this initial spark is where the writer’s work begins.

To “conceive” literally means to take something in, to take hold of something. The word itself can refer to an idea or a physical being. The master, working with story as a living thing, knows that she is participating in an act of love with something invisible.

The second process in a story’s creation is that of growth. The writer works consciously to transform the initial conception into the fully developed being of a screenplay. Here is where most of the writer’s work lies.

The final phase of creation is release, in which the writer gives his story over to others. A story’s destiny is to grow into the world, to be taken in by the hearts and minds of the audience. As a motion picture is released and embraced by the audience, the story, once something that lived inside the writer, becomes something the audience lives inside, and then finally something that lives inside them. This is the fulfillment of the story’s creation, and the continuation of its life.

Species of Story

As with other life forms, there are many species of story; each shares a common set of attributes. Some, like The Sixth Sense, are scary; others, like Galaxy Quest, are funny; some, like X2, portray an imaginary reality; still others, like Central Station, stir the heart. Along with each of these fundamental attributes comes a whole set of patterns and conventions. Species of story evolve over time, shaping audience expectations and being shaped by audience response.

The accepted term for a species of story is genre. Genre provides a template for the screenwriter, one whose value comes from its connection to a set of audience expectations and which therefore provides a ready-made language to communicate about a story. In the living screenplay, genre is one more source of energy. In formulaic screenplays, genre is the only source of energy. Just as any organism draws a considerable part of its energy from its genetic inheritance, the living story rests at least partly upon its generic predecessors. The screenwriter’s conscious understanding of this “heritage” must be at least as great as the audience’s unconscious awareness of it.

Every organism not only receives the genetic bequest of its ancestors, but it seeks to contribute its own life to that great evolutionary project. We belong both to the past and the future of our species. So it is with the living story. The masterful screen-writer seeks, in some way, to evolve the genre within which he is working. There are few things more exciting to the audience than a story that breaks new ground in a familiar genre.

Later on, in our filmmaking section, we’ll consider the role of genre in more depth. For now, let it suffice to say that the masterful screenwriter, in the early stages of encountering her story, pays attention to its species.

A Story Is Not a Slice of Life, It Is a Life

“Storytelling reveals meaning, without committing the error of defining it.” — Hannah Arendt

Aristotle, whose teachings still account for a large portion of what is at the core of the teaching of dramatic storytelling, pointed out that a drama is an imitation of an action — an imitation of life. Robert McKee has paraphrased Aristotle to define story as a metaphor for life.^†

My claim is that a story is potentially more. It isn’t merely an imitation of or a metaphor for life, but rather a life itself.

This is not to be confused with a slice of life. A slice of life — particularly someone else’s — is, generally speaking, not that interesting. When we go to the multiplex, we want heightened reality for our thirteen dollars.

Like “love” or “freedom” or other important words, the term “story” is tossed around as though its meaning is rather vague: any account of people doing things. I use the term “narrative” for this generalized activity. A story is something more specific: it is, in a sense, a specific evolution of narrative.

The formal characteristics of story, which we will explore in detail later in this book, are the collective creation of humanity, the achievement of many generations of storytellers and audiences. In the same way that — the scientists assure us — the process of natural selection guides the evolution of the human organism, those qualities that spoke to the experience of tellers and listeners were kept, while others were discarded. This evolutionary process not only mimics biological evolution, but it expresses something of the same creative mystery. The creator becomes, not the unconscious processes of life itself, but the conscious, specifically human, engagement with life. Story is evolutionary. Not only does story evolve, but it plays a role in our evolution. Evolution of consciousness, successful or not, is the subject of all stories.

Stories that endure do so because they reflect the life experience of many people who have heard, and then shared, the story, perhaps shaping it as they relayed it. The more universal a story is, the more durable it will be. But stories don’t only reflect meaning, they reveal it: they awaken the listener’s capacity to perceive meaning, which is to say our fuller participation in life.

Storytelling, then, is not only one of the earliest human technologies; it is the closest to life itself. It requires only consciousness and language. And it has, from long before recorded history, been a crucial tool in the human journey — not merely a means of entertainment, but a foundation of religion, art and science.

I have been in some way party to the development of thousands of film stories. In every case, I have sat down with a writer, but in fact there have been three of us at the table: me, the writer . . . and the story. And I, like some psychic social worker, have tried to guide the writer to a more palpable perception of his own creation, of the invisible. Often the story appeals to me with surprising directness, while its writer, wrapped up in his own doubt or fixed concepts, just isn’t listening to his progeny. The writer may be confused, but stories always know what they want.

What Does a Story Want?

As we have seen, all stories share a common purpose — essentially, growth in consciousness. But each story has its own unique want.

In the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady, Arthur’s life and kingdom hang on the solution to the riddle, “What does a woman want?”

The answer, and it is hard won, is “to have her own way.” Sir Gawain, who solves this riddle for Arthur, arrives at the answer only through doing it — that is, only through giving a woman her own way, even at cost to himself. The result is so powerful that it breaks the spell that had been placed on the Loathly Lady and turns her into the most beautiful of maids.

So it is with stories. The first, and most radical, step is to concede to a story its own will to become. The writer who gives a story leave to “have its own way” transforms it into something of beauty.

The need that gives rise to a story is a problem of life as a whole, one that is buried deep within the writer herself. The story’s desire is to solve this problem.

We could say, then, that where the purpose of story as a whole is the evolution of consciousness, the purpose of an individual story is the evolution of the writer.

I don’t think this is something a writer can ever really understand. The writer cannot separate himself from the fray. Like Sir Gawain, he must marry the Loathly Lady before her beauty can be revealed.

Also, it is the writer’s membership in the human family that ensures that the matter of his own evolution is relevant to many others.

Many screenplays are collaborative, rather than personal, works. A writer may also be hired to adapt someone else’s work, whether a novel, a draft of a screenplay or a producer’s concept. But if the writer is creating a living story — and writers can and do in all of these situations — she is finding the place where the story lives within her, and the story is finding the problem within her that needs solving.

Story vs. Formula

Not all narratives are alive. “Formula” is the term I use for a mechanical narrative.

A formula narrative possesses many of the properties of story — characters, plots, even theme — but without the forces of life that fuse entertainment with meaning.

As a bowl of Cap’n Crunch is to sugar cane, as a snort of cocaine is to a coca leaf, so are formula narratives to stories. Formula is manufactured in the laboratory, mimicking a natural process, isolating and synthesizing the active ingredients of the real thing. The products thus arrived at are addictive, because they burn out the very sensory capacity that takes pleasure in them. Thus ever-stronger dosages are required. The more we eat, the hungrier we become.

Just as junk food is a staple of many people’s diets, much narrative now relies on formula. It is true that formula has its origins in the same patterns as a living story, but where the key function of story is to reveal meaning, formulaic narrative serves to drain our experience of meaning.

Some sections of the video store may have more than their share of formula, but formula has nothing to do with one species of story over another. There are many action films with living stories, and many dramas that are formulaic junk. The choice that matters is not between, say, “horror” and “comedy,” but between dead formula and living story.

We may well enjoy a bowl of Cap’n Crunch now and then. The problem is when there’s nothing else in our diet. Story is like love, freedom or democracy. It is possible to be left with only the shell of something and not to notice that it is gone. The only ones who can stop this from happening to story are the storytellers themselves.

As Laozi reminds us, the key lies in the inner world, in what is hidden from view.

What Is Most Important Is Hidden

I have s...