Basic Storytelling:A WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE CRAFT AND ELEMENTS OF A SCREENPLAY

What Makes "A Good Story Well Told"


There is always room for another really good story. But what is a
really good story or, more precisely, '"a good story well told"'? "A
sympathetic hero up against seemingly insurmountable odds who
somehow manages to prevail" accounts for a lot of very good stories-from
Shane to North by Northwest to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Star
Wars. B u t there is another whole category of equal ly successful and riveting
films that do not have an inherently sympathetic central character, yet
manage to engage an audience-from The Sweet Smell of Success to Amadeus
to The Godfather. In each of these, we still manage to care about a
character who is far from admirable, far from enviable, yet with whom we
still manage to share some small amount of empathy. We see the human
heart suffering inside the character whose actions, desires, and possibly
whose whole life we find distasteful. A great many good stories revolve
around characters who are somewhere in between-not overtly sympathetic,
because of some of their thoughts or actions, yet characters we still find compelling. Casablanca, Five Easy Pieces, The Searchers, and Body Heat all fall into this category.
So our empathy-and its outgrowth, sympathy-need not be absolute
with a character; but there must be some amount of empathy, however
small. In addition, the character must be attempting to do something; attempting
not to do something or attempting to stop something from happening
are still doing something. Trying to save a life, win a race, avoid
being drafted, keep from being touched, or paint a picture are all "wants"
that could work for the right character. But there must be obstacles to keep
the character from achieving easily whatever he or she wants. If it is easy
to save the life, win the race, or paint the picture, then the audience says,
"So what?" Audience disinterest is the result of a lack of difficulty to the
circumstance.


In 1 895, Georges Polti published Les Trente-six Situations Dramatique
in France. In his work, he sought to identify the thirty-six basic dramatic
situations that are possible to tell. Basic and helpful though this identification
may be, Polti's work still did not reveal the common thread that all
stories share. It was Frank Daniel who first formulated a deceptively simple
delineation of the basic dramatic circumstance: Somebody wants something
badly and is having difficulty getting it. If the audience has some empathy
with the "somebody," and that character wants urgently to do something,
and that something is very difficult to do or get, then we are well on the
way to a good story. If the character barely cares whether he or she achieves
the goal, or if the achievement is too easy or completely impossible, there
is no drama. Thus a good story could be said to be about a character with
whom the audience has some measure of empathy, who strongly wants
something that is very difficult, yet possible, to achieve.
"A good story well told" includes one more crucial element: the way in
which the audience experiences the story. What the audience knows, when
they know it, what they know that one or more characters don't know, what
they hope for, what they fear, what they can anticipate, what surprises
them-all of these are elements in the telling of a story. The management
of these and other parts of an audience's involvement in the story is the
greatest achievement of the screenwriter. Without these elements, a good story becomes just so many events in a sequence, not an experience the audience craves.
The beginning writer tends to feel that writing with the audience in mind
is an evil to be avoided at all casts. But this mistakes writing with the
audience in mind for pandering to the audience. Pandering should be
avoided; just delivering up, without thought or genuine emotion, so much
predigested emotional glop for an audience to consume is a waste of everyone's
time and energy. But it is no more sensible, or even possible, to
write effective drama without the audience's experience of it in mind than
it would be to design clothes without the wearer in mind. Three arm holes,
no legs, or a seven-inch waist would be the result; the same would happen
in drama-a story no one would want to experience.
The difference between writing with the audience in mind and pandering
comes down to who is in control. If the writer panders to the audience,
what determines the action is the writer's guess at what the audience wants
a priori of the story at hand. The control is squarely in the hands of the
audience. The writer who writes with the audience in mind, and succeeds
in making it care about the characters, circumstances, and events, of the
story through skillful management of its perceptions of them, is in control;
this writer offers an experience and essentially seduces the audience into
joining in on it. The storyteller is in control.
The two principal concerns of this book are how to develop a good story
and how to tell it well. The two are so intertwined that it would not be
possible to deal with them separately. As Frank Daniel says in the introduction
to this book, ''It's simple-it's telling exciting stories about exciting
people in an exciting form." The essential elements of "a good story well
told" are:
1 . The story is about somebody with whom we have some empathy.
2 . This somebody wants something very badly.
3 . This something is difficult, but possible to do, get, or achieve.
4 . The story is told for maximum emotional impact and audience participation
in the proceedings.
5 . The story must come to a satisfactory ending (which does not necessarily
mean a happy ending).

"A good story well told" is simple, but it's not easy.



The Division into Three Acts

gome writers work with a division into five acts, television movies
often employ a seven act division, but in this work we deal with
dividing the material of a story into three acts. In reality, the only
difference in the number of acts results from how the writer organizes his
thoughts about the story, not in how the audience experiences it. Used
properly and effectively, the three-, five-, or seven-act division would put
the same story events and revelations in more or less the same places and
sequence.
A great many teachers and authors talk about "'the three act structure"
rather than about a division into three acts, but the former phrasing gives
rise to the implication that the telling of a story is like the building of a
bridge, that once the design is complete, it remains unchanged forever. In
reality, a story evolves; its "structure" changes as the story unfolds; it is
constantly in flux. Moreover, there is no fixed structure that works for the
telling of a story; each new story is its own prototype, each must be created
anew. There is no recipe, there is no blank form that must only have the
blanks filled in for a story to take shape. Good storytelling requires a great
deal more invention than that.
The reason we employ a three act paradigm is that it is the simplest to
understand and it most closely adheres to the phases of an audience's
experience of a story. The first act gets the audience involved with the
characters and the story. The second act keeps it involved and heightens
its emotional commitment to the story. The third act wraps up the story and


The World of the Story
Protagonist, Antagonist, and Conflict
Externalizing the Internal
Objective and Subjective Drama
Time and the Storyteller
The Power of Uncertainty

By David Howard and Edward Mabley