The dialogical nature of genuine, character-based dramatic storytelling resonates very strongly with and is illuminated by Heidegger's concept of Dasein, which posits that humans exist within a world, and that it is this very relationship between the world and the person that is significant...

When applied to stories and dramatic action, it is clear that characters also exist in a world - a story world - and to the degree that a writer, an audience and the tribe or tribes whose circumstances are being dramatised, have a stake in this world, then the relationships that exist between and among the characters, writers, audiences and tribes are significant.

A character can make no account of him/herself in isolation from the other characters (both IN and OUTSIDE the script). A character's meaning, their emotional vividness, is contingent upon the connections and disconnections enacted with the other characters. All embody in their own, individual and circumstantial ways sets of drives, needs, fears, and choices whose meaning is revealed by and through these relationships.

It is not merely the existence of the storyteller and the storyteller's ideas that inform the evolving actions and interactions within the story-world, but the matrix of interactions that are played out among the storyteller, the characters, the audience and the relevant tribe or tribes.

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING

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"The unspoken terror that grips anyone that consciously embarks on writing or making a dramatic story is that they must become, in the truest sense of the word, a pioneer. They must dare to go to those places no one has previously been, apart from the savage heart in them, which they are duty bound not to massacre."  - Stoneking

When I speak of the need writers have to acknowledge their audience, I am not referring to some faceless demographic served by the writer in a quest for some degree of acceptance and popularity. Audience is not "out there" - it is not the audience in theatre, but the audience-as-character - a perspective that contrasts with the writer's point of view. Audience, in this sense, is not a given, but another part of the creative-finding process that is the essence of story-making. Audience is "other", the personification of the writer's alter-ego - the dissident, the agitator, the adversary, whose position in regards the story is to undermine, subvert and possibly destroy what the writer is intent on doing. And because audience is not a given, it is up to the writer to imagine and inhabit a character that stands in opposition to writer's assumptions, expectations and prejudices regarding the tale that is trying to get itself told. I have seen many a film that came undone or never got off the ground because of a writer's and/or filmmaker's inability or unwillingness to grapple with the question: Who is this for and why?

- BILLY MARSHALL STONEKING