The Audience's Fulfillment Paradigm


In his series of essays on the Internet called Essays on the Craft of Dramatic Writing [URL], Bill Johnson develops a story paradigm that, when applied to screenwriting, pays an unusual amount of attention to an obvious fact: movies are watched by people and their success or failure is judged by how people react to them.

Johnson asks why people want to hear stories in the first place. Because:

"...a story can create a sense of hope. Of life with a sense of meaning and purpose that touches us in a way that life's events don't, or don't in a satisfying way. Even a story about chaos and the meaninglessness of life, if well told, can ascribe a quality of meaning and purpose to those states....A well-told story is a place the unmet desires and needs we carry within our hearts can be satisfied."[URL]

How then do we write stories to satisfy this basic human need? Johnson, more than most teachers, places great emphasis on what a story means at its foundation:

"Understanding what a story's about is the first step in this process of creating a story.

"The second step is the ability to create a one sentence premise that sets out a story's dramatic issue/idea, movement and fulfillment.

For example, the premise of Romeo and Juliet is:

Great love defies even death.

Love is the dramatic issue at the heart of the story.

Defies describes the movement of the story. Its main characters, Romeo and Juliet, defy all who would keep them apart, even death. Thus, their actions, and the collective actions of all the story's characters, move the story toward the resolution of its dramatic issues and ideas that revolve around love.

...Storytelling is a process. A process that involves understanding the dramatic issue or idea at the heart of a story, and arranging a story's elements to bring that issue to resolution in a way that offers the story's audience a dramatic experience of fulfillment." [URL]

Johnson places great emphasis on the writer's need to know the fundamental meaning of the story at a level much deeper than "plot":

"...every action of the story must serve that deeper purpose of what the story is about and move it toward its fulfillment.

"When writers fail to understand what their story is about at its essence, and how that drives their characters, they can also struggle with this issue of how best to describe the elements of their story in a way that brings it to life. Instead of describing characters and actions and issues at the heart of their stories, they describe characters and events the reader doesn't "feel" are relevant. Or they describe such characters and events in a way that fails to generate a dramatic quality of moving a story toward its fulfillment.

"The storyteller, then, needs to be able to make the subtle distinction between what their story is about on that deeper, foundation level, from what's at stake for their characters and what they need to do to set up their plot."[URL]

Comments

If more screenwriters and filmmakers not only read but paid attention to these essays by Bill Johnson, there would be far less dissatisfying fluff in the marketplace. Johnson holds movie storytelling to a high standard, for which I congratulate him.

Johnson is less articulate when it comes to the nuts and bolts stuff. However, that is far easier to find than the kind of commentary Johnson gives us in his essays, which urge the writer to remember, and remember always, that stories fill a basic human need - and as such, the writer has a great responsibility to fulfill that need.

I recommend that you read his essays on the Internet.

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MODULE 4: SCREENWRIGHT: the craft of screenwriting

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