Sustaining a Story: Part 1

Read the blog entry here: http://takezer0.com/2009/02/sustaining-an-idea-one.html

So one night at a Barnes & Noble I leafed through this Will Eisner paperback. You know, Eisner, the guy who helped define sequential narrative. In a single page he had this awfully simple definition of storytelling, illustrated in little dialog bubbles. It went like this:

Caveman: Tell me...Ol' Storyteller, where do stories come from?
Storyteller: Well, have you got something you want to tell someone?
Caveman: Yeah...a couple of things I'd like to tell. But, how?
Storyteller: Well, now...decide if you want to tell it as a joke or an adventure story. Invent a problem to illustrate the point!
Caveman: Okay!
Storyteller: Next you solve the problem, which will give you the ending. That, m'boy, is storytelling!
Caveman: Ahah!

This is what storytelling is, plain and true. I'm no authority to give vindication; but Eisner's telling is so straight-as-an-arrow, it penetrates pretension and arrives at some kind of holistic truth. A story is a problem. The ending is the solution. Got it? In the abstract, even an unsolved, downbeat ending is a solution in the requirements of the story, if not the dilemma. The bad guy gets away and the bomb goes off, but the story still ends.

If you dislike your story idea, you either have a problem nobody cares about, or you haven't the foggiest of how to fix it.

This is about writing, of any kind. Not just screenplay.
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Read the rest at Take Zer0

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