thefly

And, of course, there's Bull Moose Jackson, who's much better endowed.

Thanks for commenting on my blog.

Dramatic writing has to be more structured than long-form fiction because it has to fit the story into a fixed period of time. A movie needs to tell its story in about 2 hours. A show on commercial TV needs to be even more structured.

That's because shows are a set length and commercials have to be inserted. There's a basic format, typically a Teaser (a pre-title sequence) and 4 acts, the act-breaks being where the commercials go, and a Tag, the very short scene at the end.

Within that format, each show has its own rules: The number of pages per act, the overall length, etc. Gilmore Girls scripts, where every talks super-fast, like their in a Howard Hawks' screwball comedy, is much longer than other shows with the same running time. A writer has to study each individual show, learn these rules and follow them.

With plays and movies, you're not under the same time constraints, but you still have to worry about holding an audience's attention. Nothing I've read by Truby really speaks to this basic problem. Lajos Egri, in "The Art of Dramatic Writing" does, but his prescription, is to write Well-Made Plays in the manner of Henrik Ibsen. But, as Walter Kerr noted in his excellent "How Not to Write a Play," this approach tends to produce characters who are more mouthpieces than human beings. To be fair to Ibsen, though, his plays do keep an audience wondering "what happens next?"

And isn't that the key to fiction writing, keeping the audience wondering what happens next. Truby, with his very left-brain, very rational system, isn't likely to yield a story that surprises an audience, or keep it in suspense. He actually advocates that writers come up with the "self-revelation" first. Come to think of it, so does Egri, who claims your play should have a premise. So the Premise for "Romeo and Juliet" is, according to Egri, love conquers allsomething trite like that.

This kind of writing is good, if you're writing "After School Specials" and the premise is look both ways before you cross the street. This type of writing tends to get boring for an adult audience, especially where the premise is something an audience already knows and agrees with.

There are, however, valuable lessons to be learned from Lajos Egri and, as I've said before, from John Truby. I guess, what I'm really saying, is, with advice on dramatic writing, as with advice on everything else, you take what makes sense to you, and you leave the rest.