Author Neil Gaiman was once on his blog was once asked what words or quote would he inscribe “on the wall of a public library children’s area” and this is the core of his answer from his essay Just Four Words (found in his book Stories: All-New Tales) mixed with his Masterclass on storytelling:
I’m not sure I’d put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I’d just remind people of the power of stories, of why they exist in the first place. I’d put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it’s working, and that pages will be turned:
‘. . .and then what happened?’
The four words that children ask when you pause telling them a story. The four words that you hear at the end of a chapter. The four words, spoken or unspoken, that show you, as a storyteller, that people care. And then what happened? And those words, I think, are the most important words there are for a storyteller.” Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Good Omen)
“I like to think about sequences. I really believe less in a three-act structure and much more in sequences that are sort of eight-to-12 pages. Roughly about ten-minutes that work almost like chapters in a story. Nobody is better at building a story this way than Steven Spielberg… The sequences have their own beginning, middle, and end that are satisfying—it really pulls you along.”
Director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind)
Masterclass
“Drama has rules. We’re given a premise. The hero wants something. To find the cause of the plague on Thebes, or to free the Jews, or to establish civil rights, or to fly the Atlantic. We get it. We are going to follow his or her journey until the end. And the end is going to be surprising—and inevitable. Just like in a great football game.” Screenwriter/ Playwright David Mamet Masterclass/Purpose of Drama
Mamet (like Aaron Sorkin) points to Aristotle’s Poetics for direction and says, “The rules are pretty simple. Start at the beginning. Go on until you get to the end. Don’t stop. Be interesting. Make sure everything is on the line.”
And by “on the line,” Mamet means that if the story is about a character who needs to go from NY to LA that you must stay on that through line or plot line.
There is a tendency to think that art is finally the place where there are no rules, where you have complete freedom. I’m going to sit down at the keyboard and it’s just going to flow out of me onto the paper, and it’s going to be pure art. No. What you’re describing is finger painting. Rules are what makes art beautiful. Rules are what makes sports beautiful…Think about the rules to baseball. Abner Doubleday was a freaking genius. That’s a great game. Football is a great game. It’s the rules that makes sports beautiful, and it’s the rules that make art not finger painting. Think about music and all the rules that music has. Anyone who studied music for a year or two when they were in elementary school, anyone who picked up a flute or a trumpet, knows that at the beginning of every piece of music, there’s a time signature and a key signature. If you’re in 4/4 time, it means there are four beats in a measure and a quarter note gets one beat. There can’t be five beats in a measure. There can’t be three beats in a measure. If you’re in the key of C, it means that there are no sharps and no flats. There can’t be a sharp. There can’t be a flat. These rules also apply to writing. The rulebook is The Poeticsby Aristotle.All the rules are there.” Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) Masterclass/ Rules of Story
Link to Poetics. (S.H. Butcher version on The Project Gutenberg site.)
P.S. Tomorrow I’ll follow this post with David Mamet taking the torch from Sorkin and driving this point home. You can believe what you want to believe about rules, but if Aaron Sorkin and David Mamet agree on something then you might want at least pause before you embrace the “there are no rule” viewpoint.
But Sorkin is also clear that the “The only rules there are are the rules of drama.”
Here’s the difference between an idea and a premise; An idea is ‘what if I wrote a show about gangsters?’ A premise is really filling that out. It’s ‘what if I wrote a show about modern day gangsters who lived in New jersey, and that gangster went to see a therapist on a weekly basis because they had problems?’ —The Sopranos…You should be able to tell someone your premise in a couple of sentences. And have it be clearly stated so that they can understand it. ‘I want to do a show about competitive surgical interns at which the center is Meridith Grey, a woman who is hiding the fact that her mother has Alzheimers.’ (Grey’s Anatomy). You really want to be concise so that when you’re telling your story you know what you’re talking about. If you don’t know what you’re talking about no one else will either. “
Writer/Producer/Creator Shonda Rhimes(Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal) Masterclass
“Is there a thematic narrative question that’s being asked? And is it answered? Because without that it’s not very fulfilling storytelling.”
Director Ron Howard
(On one of the questions he asks when considering a screenplay.)
The screenplay for the 1984 filmSplash received an Acadamy Award nomination (Bruce Jay Friedman, Lowell Ganz, Brian Grazer, Babaloo Mandel). Splash director Ron Howard, fresh off directing Solo: A Star Wars Story, explains an angle he brought to the fish out of water story that he directed early in his career.
“Splash is an example of basically a 30s romantic comedy. It makes all the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, all the obstacles—they’re right out of the screwball comedies. Which I always adored. Even in the 80s when we made Splash it was already too tired to do it in a literal way, yet adding the fantasy element of her being a mermaid it made all of that okay. So sort of the traditional idea, the sort of quaint idea, was suddenly fresh, visual, funnier, and more interesting. Along the way, I also came up with this other theme that love is not perfect. I actually got the John Candy character to say that line. And it became really important to me. It was the idea that you’re going to have that initial rush of romance and excitement and then may discover there’s some complications, there’s some problems—yet what are you going to do with that love? Is that going to be the thing that chases you away or are you going to accept it?” Oscar-winning director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind) Masterclass
It’s hard to hear John Candy say, “Nobody said love’s perfect” and miss the echo of the line “Well, nobody’s perfect” from the end of the 1959 movie Some Like It Hot. And to show what’s old is new again, check out the video below to show the connection between Splash and the 2018 Best Picture Oscar-winner The Shape of Water.
I don’t think we’ve seen the last of literal fish out of water stories. A couple of years ago there was a reboot of Splash in development with Channing Tatum and Jillian Bell attached with this twist—Tatum as the mermaid.
“Baseball players say they don’t have to look to see if they hit a home run, they can feel it. So I wish for you a moment—a moment soon—when you really put the bat on the ball, when you really get a hold of one and drive it into the upper deck, when you feel it.” Producer/screenwriter Aaron Sorkin Syracuse University’s 2012 commencement speech
Just today I learned that I share not only a birthday month with Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), but we were born the same year. That’s about where the similarities end. (Well, he co-wrote Moneyball and I’ve seen that movie a bunch of times so we have that in common, too.)
One of the themes of Moneyball is how one can have incredible baseball talent in high school—even be a first round pick—and still not have an appreciable career in the major leagues. While I imagine the attrition rate is pretty high of writers, directors, and actors who hit the ground running with Sorkin after he graduated from Syracuse University in 1983, he’s been able to find tremendous and lasting success in both film and television.
In the great production pyramid today, Sorkin is tucked away somewhere in the little corner at the top. So when MasterClass announced last week it was soon releasing Aaron Sorkin Teaches Screenwriting, a 5 hour plus video workshop, I was pretty excited about the news.
I haven’t seen the MasterClass videos, but can’t imagine it not being worth the time and money ($90.) to gather a few takeaways on your way to becoming a better writer. Here’s a list of Aaron Sorkin-centered posts I’ve written over the years that give you a glimpse into what he could touch on:
And since those Sorkin teaching videos won’t be released until later this month, here’s a story from his graduation speech where he talks about a lesson he learned while a student:
“As a freshman drama student, I had a play analysis class—it was part of my requirement. The professor was Gerardine Clark. The play analysis class met for 90 minutes twice a week. We read two plays a week and we took a 20-question true or false quiz at the beginning of the session that tested little more than whether or not we’d read the play. The problem was that the class was at 8:30 in the morning, it met all the way down on East Genesee, I lived all the way up at Brewster/Boland, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but from time to time the city of Syracuse experiences inclement weather. All this going to class and reading and walking through snow, wind chill that’s apparently powered by jet engines, was having a negative effect on my social life in general and my sleeping in particular. At one point, being quizzed on Death of a Salesman, a play I had not read, I gave an answer that indicated that I wasn’t aware that at the end of the play the salesman dies. And I failed the class. I had to repeat it my sophomore year; it was depressing, frustrating and deeply embarrassing. And it was without a doubt the single most significant event that occurred in my evolution as a writer. I showed up my sophomore year and I went to class, and I paid attention, and we read plays and I paid attention, and we discussed structure and tempo and intention and obstacle, possible improbabilities, improbable impossibilities, and I paid attention, and by God when I got my grades at the end of the year, I’d turned that F into a D. I’m joking: it was pass/fail.” Aaron Sorkin
And just to make that lesson a It’s a Wonderful Life moment, years later Sorkin was asked by Arthur Miller if he could fill in as a guest lecturer at NYU where the subject was Miller’s play Death of a Salesman. (Cue the Walk of Life music.)
I did finish watching the HBO mini-series Chernobyl and plan to write a post about it tomorrow. In the meantime, yesterday I saw the trailer for Once Upon a Time in . . . Hollywood and it triggered a few things. A few days ago a friend of mine was in outside his midcentury home in […]
