“I think writing can be learned but never taught,” reckons Stephen King. I must admit, after writing professionally for fifteen years and both teaching and learning writing in formal environments, I agree.
The best writing ‘teachers’ I’ve ever had have been coaches. Out of all the mediums, playwriting has this squared with ‘dramaturges’. They are like publishing editors but (in my experience) more protective of your creative instinct. Anytime a play of mine has been successful, it’s usually because I had a great dramaturge like Louise Gough or Saffron Benner on it.
I’ve always felt writing is best understood under an apprenticeship model. I learned more working with mentors and mates like Sean Mee, Jason Klarwein, Marguerite Pepper and Michael Gurr. Michael was a great one for sticky advice, managing to Tik-Tokify playwriting hints in neat nuggets.
Scenes are rivers, not lakes. (They must always be moving.)
Start late, finish early. (Arrive in a scene as late as possible, and finish it as early as possible.)
The scene is over as soon as everyone on stage knows the same amount of information.
I love Michael (he passed in 2017), and he taught me a lot. He was a phenomenal playwright. At his urging, I was infatuated with the cleanliness of Western plot structure for a long time—the neat engineering of a Chekhovian plot, or Lawler or Williamson or Shakespeare.
But as I’ve aged, I also realised that most of these ‘rules’ are brittle. They all dissolve in the face of Samuel Beckett’s genius or Caryl Churchill’s. Or even some scenes of Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet.
They are essential for commercial television and film, although they have nothing to do with why an audience likes the characters on screen. Take Succession, for example, which offers a masterclass in Western dramatic writing in every episode. Except, of course, for the scenes and episodes that turn out to be everyone’s favourites. For example, the third episode of the final season features a scene where everyone learns of a character’s passing. They find out roughly the same time and let the scene play for over fifteen minutes. According to most writing advice and things you learn in writing classes, you’re not supposed to do that.
“I’ve always felt plot can get in the way of a good novel,” says Stephen King (I’m returning to him a bit lately as he was at the centre of last month’s book club). King, of course, is probably the most adapted living novelist of our time. His books tend to make big hits at the box office. But all of his novels shrug off the plot for lengthy (and insanely compelling) meditations on character. The Shining, for example, is one long, slow burn of a dysfunctional family dynamic with a slaughterhouse of horror in the final fifty pages.
Yet most screenwriting manuals and teachers will force you to kneel at the altar of plot structure. I’ve been one of those teachers. And part of me thinks perhaps you must begin there to learn your craft. It’s only after some time that you can break it. But this falters when I consider the larger historical and cultural context that built that altar in the first place.
The ubiquitous screenwriting manuals (Story by Robert McKee, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder) are built upon ancient Western story ideals first articulated by Aristotle. Joseph Campbell calcified this in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, then further distilled by Dan Harmon into the ‘Story Circle’ technique. Notice anything? All of these guys are white men, and, bar Aristotle, speak English as their first language.
So what?
In 2016, Chantal Bilodeau articulated some of the issues with precision in her essay: ‘Why I’m Breaking Up with Aristotle.’
On the most basic level, ancient Greeks were ruled by a bunch of unpredictable gods whose whims directly affected every aspect of human affairs…the underlying assumption—that power is at the top and everybody below is subservient—has remained unchanged. In fact, it is so deeply embedded in our culture that most of the time we don’t notice it.
The simplest way to illustrate this concept is with a pyramid. Power and wealth live at the top, in the hands of a minority, while the majority exists at the bottom to support the top. This is how religions are organized, how monarchies thrived, and how today’s capitalist system functions. But as Green points out in her presentation, the pyramid model is not an absolute truth. It’s a worldview. Or, put another way, it’s a function of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It should come as no surprise then that the structure we use to build our societies, and the structure we use to shape our stories, are one and the same. Aristotle’s theory of dramatic writing, later modified by German playwright and novelist Gustav Freytag, is a pyramid. Rising action on one side, climax at the top, and falling action on the other side.
This form of storytelling flourished at a time where man needed to conquer in order to survive.
But now, Bilodeau argues, we are being urged to consider a different worldview. In the face of climate change, late capitalism and social media, human beings are more connected than ever. Class and capitalist structures still exist, and they run the world. But most of us are sick of them and acknowledge they are no longer appropriate structures that will helpfully address the fault lines in our culture that expose our interconnectedness: climate change, pandemics, and gross economic and educational inequality.
So then, can writers stop writing in ways that enforce the narrative assumption of pyramid-like power?
This is the new(ish) frontier of contemporary dramaturgy. But as I point out, it’s always been there across television, film, theatre and literature, which configure new story-telling patterns as sparkling acts of narrative rebellion.
If you put me in front of a writing class today, I will still talk about McKee’s tome, Freytag’s pyramid, and the clean mechanics of Western plot structure.
But I will attempt to temper everything with a constant caveat:
This is also very limited, and all of this can be broken.
After everything, I only know there are only two rules that writers ever need to pay attention to.
Start writing.
And:
Keep going.
No one can teach you anything. But you can always learn.
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