Friday, June 17, 2016

CHARACTERS ALL THE WAY DOWN


To really understand the character-driven screenplay, you have to understand the process by which they are conceived and written. And to understand the process you have to first acknowledge that the character-driven drama is found as it written, and written as it is found, and the finding necessarily involves more than the characters in the script. It involves an active and dramatic interaction between and among ALL of the characters necessary for finding the story. These include not only the story’s characters, but also the story’s audience (the conception of which is always an imaginative act, even for producers); the writer/storyteller character, who shares in, complicates, obstructs and aids the main character/s in dealing with the dramatic problem; and the writer’s tribe or tribes which form the contextual circumstances in which the writer has been initiated, including his/her geographic, family, societal, cultural and spiritual relationships as well as the economic, political and legal traditions he/she has been heir to.

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

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