WHAT WRITERS WANT.

How I found out what advice for writers really works

I am an awarded writer, my TV shows and movies have been seen by millions of viewers. I am also a producer who has helped more than a dozen budding colleagues to find a footing in the industry. Yet I have never really understood what rules and advice really work, be it for myself, be it for the writers I worked with.

To find out, I set up an experiment. I took the most cited screenwriting how-to books, according to Google Scholar, (Aristotle, Johann Lessing, Gustav Freytag, Gottfried Mueller, Semjon Freijlich, Lajos Egri, Syd Field, Christopher Vogler, Robert McKee, Linda Seger) determined to find out which had the best and most efficient advice.

I took each book and boiled it down to the real, actionable advice it contained. The result was a list of work instructions following the basics of the writing process as I understand it:

• Brainstorming: What to do in front of a blank page?
• Character creation: How to know the creatures that populate your story?
• Plot construction: What event comes first? What happens then?
• Scene construction: How does the world you invented work and look like?
• Dialogue: How do the characters relate to each other?
• Script revision: What to do with your (terrible) first draft?

Over the next two years I recruited students, divided them into groups of 4–6 people and gave them writing tasks, to come up with a thriller or a romance movie. The students were exposed to one of the set of rules. The experiment lasted one semester each. Then I invited TV executives to evaluate the results.

500 students went through the process, 120 outlines and screenplays were evaluated in the course of two years: Four screenplays were optioned, half a dozen writing careers resulted from the experiment.

The evaluation results were merged with data from student’s feedback about the writing process. From this a ranking of rules emerged according to their contribution and usability. The result is now available to you.

In this article you will find the results of my extraction from Aristotle’s The Poetics. In further installments the essential tools extracted from the other books will be made available.

The idea behind this is that a how-to book should contain actionable advice and that clarity and usability of this advice is measurable.

The TOOLBOX gives you fast and easy access to some of the best advice on screenwriting ever given. You will probably find that you relate more to the advice and rules of one or two of these amazing teachers, to how they talk about screenplays and writing. In this case you have found your master. You should go and buy the book and start or restart your journey into writing.

To make the rules that emerged from each book tangible and comparable, I chose a template: CHINATOWN by Robert Towne (and Roman Polanski)

So here you go:

TOOLSET 1 — ARISTOTLE

WHO WAS ARISTOTLE?

Aristotle lived around 400 A.D in Greece and was a student of Plato.

Aristotle probably drove his teacher, Plato, crazy. He was literally interested in everything. He is cited as a foundational thinker in zoology, astronomy and he has also invented logic.

For Plato, everything that exists was an image of an idea. To reproduce this thing in a poem or a piece of theater made it a copy of a copy which for Plato was despicable. Aristotle probably wrote The Poetics to put one over on his teacher Plato.

Theaters at the time of Aristotle were eerie places: After sunset torch-lit figures appeared from the dark, sang, and recited poetry; some of them — the choir — spoke in unison, and all wore masks that made them recognizable as a specific character to the audience.

Reading The Poetics is no small feat. Critics have said that it is a “thorny read.” The book appears to be unfinished. It contains a part I about tragedy, a planned second part about comedy is missing. What’s more to it, it seems to be notes on a planned book rather that a book proper.

Then there is the ancient Greek language. It has many expressions that aren’t easy to translate. Take for example the word Myth. For Aristotle it was the composition of actions chosen by the poet to render the deeds of a hero. Inventing stories from scratch as we do today, was a fact unknown to Aristotle and his contemporaries.

So: How can the rules and laws that Aristotle found in that weird environment more than 2400 years ago still apply today?

Here is how:

Aristotle’s first rule was that a play (drama or comedy) imitates life. The fundamental characteristic of life is activity. Therefore, Aristotle’s first rule is:

Characters in a drama need to be active.

Secondly, Aristotle wanted the drama to be of a certain size. A drama needs to show how a war begins, how a king is killed, how a kingdom perishes. Today, “size” is best translated with the word “relevant.” So here you go with Aristotle’s second rule:

A story must be relevant.

You’ll ask how you can know if your story is relevant. Aristotle gives you three ways of testing it for relevance:

A story must be complete.

It must have a beginning, a middle and an end.

A story must be about change.

The events must have a movement that leads from happiness to misfortune (tragedy) or from misfortune to happiness (happy end)

A story must be memorable.

Each event must follow the previous one not just because you put it there but because it results logically from the previous one.

For Aristotle the audience (the recipient) has the deciding role. Only what the audience recognizes or feels is really there. Everything else remains stuck in the imagination of the writer.

Aristotle gives writers these tools to make their audiences feel something:

Write something that makes your audience wail and shudder.

This is best done if events occur contrary to audiences’ expectations. They nevertheless must consistently emerge from each other.

Create heavy suffering for your hero.

Serious suffering results from painful events, such as death, severe pain (also metaphorical pain), wounds (also those of the soul) and the like.

Work with peripeteia and recognition.

Peripeteia is when things turn in an unexpected way. Recognition is when the hero learns about a truth or a fact that triggers such a 180.

Use appropriate language.

Each character has a language typical to her/him. Each character uses different styles; she/he uses a different style in a private setting than when in public.

So to sum it up until here:

A DRAMA is a self-contained ACTION of RELEVANCE which imitates ACTIVE PEOPLE who speak in their APPROPRIATE LANGUAGE; it makes the audience WAIL and SHUDDER, because they feel PITY and FEAR watching the protagonist(s) go through a process of PERIPETEIA and RECOGNITION towards a LASTING CHANGE of themselves and/or their situation.

PLOT

Asked what is the most important element of a drama Aristotle answers:

“The most important part is the assembly and composition of the events, or THE MYTH. Because tragedy is not an imitation of people, but an imitation of action and reality.”

(When Aristotle says “tragedy” he means what we refer to as “story.”)

We easily recognize that THE MYTH is what today we call THE PLOT, the “composition of events.”

Aristotle was so plot driven, he even went as far as saying:

“A tragedy is impossible without plot, but there may be one without character.”

CHARACTER

What he means is the next important rule and it refers to CHARACTER

A character is what he/she does.

For Aristotle only what IS on the stage exists. Everything that can be on the stage IS ACTION. We would say “Show don’t tell.”

CHARACTER comes in as a clear second for Aristotle. First you have to nail down your plot, then you can deal with a character’s special features.

“Tragedy (a story) is the imitation of action and therefore the imitation of active people (or characters).”

How should these “active people” be? Aristotle says:

“The characters of a drama should be better or worse than we (in real life) usually are.”

Today we would say:

A character in a drama needs to be bigger than life.

What is the most important feature of a character? Aristotle says:

“The character is what he shows to be his inclinations and their quality. Those speeches show no character in which it is not clear what the speaker tends to do or what he rejects.”

In other words:

A character needs to clearly position himself.

Who is a good protagonist?

Aristotle refers back to his rule that either happiness must turn into misery or misery into happiness. Yet, audiences will hate you if you show the story of a really good guy whose fate turns from happiness into misery.
The same is true also the other way round: Audiences will find it despicable to see an abysmal evil character moving from misery to happiness.

So the one option that remains is:

A good protagonist must have a significant flaw.

For Aristotle, protagonists fell in one of two categories: They either were characters we look up to, or they were characters we look down upon. The latter characters were the protagonists of comedies, the former of tragedies. If you combine these two qualities, the outcome would be this:

The protagonist of a comedy is someone to look down on who has though a significant potential to become a ‘good’ person. The protagonist of a tragedy is someone to look up to who has though a significant potential to fail.

WRITERS

For us, the WRITERS, Aristotle’s most important rule is:

A writer does not write about what is but what could be.

A writer must feel absolutely free to reimagine reality as she/he wishes. What Aristotle is saying here that we are not here to make sensational breaking news. Our task is to create good entertainment. Aristotle puts it this way:

“The impossible which is probable, deserves preference over the possible which is implausible.”

I would translate:

If in doubt, choose playing to the gallery.

Aristotle wants you to be passionate about your story:

“The most convincing are those who are passionate. The excited best represents excitement, the angry best represents anger.”

If a writer has to decide how to set up actions that trigger “wailing and shuddering,” Aristotle gives one advice:

“Terrible or lamentable events, as well as severe suffering, always occur in close relationships, because the closeness is often what causes the lament.”

I would say:

Always remember: Man is a wolf to man.

The composition of the events must not resemble a history book, be confusing and complicated. The war of Troy lasted for ten years, had a beginning and an end, yet, Homer has focused on one detail of it, the final weeks of the Trojan War and the Greek siege of Troy.

The smaller your timeframe and cast the likelier it is that you will write a great story.

And lastly: The solution of the action must result from the action itself and must not be caused by the intervention of a god. The intervention of a god may only be used in what is outside the stage action, or what has happened before it and what a person cannot know.

No deus ex machina, please.

ARISTOTLE AND CHINATOWN

SO WHAT WOULD ARISTOTLE HAVE SAID ABOUT CHINATOWN? Aristotle would have perceived Chinatown perhaps like this:

Gittes is the hero the tribe of the Los Angelinos rest their last hope on to end a terrible drought caused by the evil king Noah Cross. Gittes goes to war but on his way he meets Evelyn and falls in love. Evelyn is the daughter of the evil king Cross. With Evelyn on his side, Gittes believes he can outsmart king Cross and bring him to judgement; after a first meeting he is confident of victory. Evelyn tells him that Cross is not only her father but also her lover and that she hoped Gittes could free her from him. Gittes recognizes that Cross does not feel bound by human laws and is therefore an unbeatable opponent. Nevertheless Gittes seeks the fight, out of his biggest flaw, pride. Cross anticipates how Gittes would react, prepares for it and defeats him. He exposes him to the Los Angelinos as a traitor who tried to play a double game. Gittes, his honor lost, throws himself in his own sword and dies.

Aristotle would have quite liked the story:

Gittes, the protagonist is active,
the story is relevant as it deals with a life threatening drought,
It is complete as it has beginning: Gittes set out to wage war, a middle: Gittes meets and falls for Evelyn, he realizes who she is, and an end: Gittes is delusional and thinks he can play both sides and dies a tragic but deserved death.
The story is about change. Gittes is proud and overly self-confident at the beginning and ends to be defeated and dishonoured.

The story is memorable because it deals with something, the drought, that we all fear. Gittes has a flaw that we all can relate to: pride
It triggers pity and fear: Gites suffers a terrible fate caused by a forgivable flaw.
The story is not about what is or was but about what could be: The drought in LA was real, Noah Cross resembles WIlliam Mulholland remotely but is much bigger than the real person.

The deadly mistake that Gittes makes is triggered by an intimate relation, his love for Evelyn.

All events build upon each other, no deus ex machina is in play.