Maybe I was a little too hard on JJ Abrams in my last post. After all, he is telling stories for television, and television requires viewers to keep watching. On network television, shows that keep viewers watching stay on as long as they can continue doing that. It is rare for a show on one [...]
Posts tagged as:
narrative
One quick way to know the story your reading is being spun by an inferior storyteller? Secrets.
Is there a character, or worse, more than one character, who has a secret? Do they let someone else in the story know they have a secret, but won’t reveal it? Is this secret crucial for the protagonist to [...]
tell :
to relate in detail
read:
to receive or take in the sense of
to interpret the meaning or significance of
Thus storytelling is the relating in detail of a story, and storyreading is taking in the sense of a story and interpreting its meaning or significance.
I am a storyreader.
When I was in the corporate world, my personal bête noire was PowerPoint. It is a massive timesink, and its potential to cause great boredom is limitless. 99% of all presentations I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot, were simply bulleted versions of what the speaker was saying. But, oh the time said speaker spent [...]
“Find your obsession.”
Tough words, from Merlin Mann. Tough for me anyway.
I have never been one to obsess about any one thing for very long. This world is far too interesting and life is far too short to devote myself to one tiny sliver of a sliver of it. I learn about one thing, and after [...]
After reading all of these books about story and narrative, I now have a clearer view of what a story is and what narrative is. Though I am not certain I can put my definitions into a single, succinct sentence, I believe I can illustrate them through example.
More than 2000 years ago, Aristotle said that [...]
Syd Field is apparently the pre-eminent authority on screenplays in Hollywood. It is said that some agents and producers will not even look at your screenplay unless you have read all of Field’s books. At the same time, there are many who blame him for the lack of orginality sometimes exhibited by Hollywood. One reviewer [...]
One measure of success for any story must be audience pleasure. And, as loathe as I am to say it, the larger the audience, the more successful the story. This is not to say that the quality of a story can be determined solely by the size of its audience, but that the more people [...]
After reading Aristotle, I wanted to stay in the realm of theory for a while, so chose to read the books I had picked up on Narrative Theory. As I mentioned before, I had taken many classes in literary theory while in college, but as that was some time ago, I needed a bit of [...]
For 2300 years, this book has loomed over everyone who has ever tried to tell a story. Even those who would deny Aristotle’s influence must admit that, by ignoring his prescriptions for good storytellying, they are tacitly acknowledging that they must grapple with him. The book starts with a line that has been quoted perhaps [...]
