- 注册
- 2014-04-06
- 消息
- 8,521
- 荣誉分数
- 16,491
- 声望点数
- 1,323
P334 Show，Don't tell
Dramatized exposition serves two ends: its primary purpose is to further the immediate conflict. Its secondary purpose is to convey information. The anxious novice reverses that order putting expositional duty ahead of dramatic necessity.
Confident writers parse out exposition, bit by bit, through the entire story, often revealing exposition well into the climax of the last act. They follow these two principles: Never include anything the audience can reasonably and easily assume has happened. Never pass on exposition unless the missing fact would cause confusion. You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information, except that which is absolutely necessary for comprehension.
Pace the exposition. Like all else, exposition must have a progressive pattern:Therefore, the least important facts come in early, the next most important later, the critical facts last. And what are the critical pieces of exposition?Secrets. The painful truths characters do not want known.
Don’t write “California scenes”, in which two characters who hardly know each other sit down over coffee and immediately begin an intimate discussion of the deep,dark secrets of their lives.
Evelyn Mulwray’s confession, “She is my sister and my daughter”is nothing she would share over cocktails. She tells Gittes this to keep her child out of her father’s hands. “You can’t kill me, Luke, I’m your father” is a truth Darth Vader never wanted to tell his son, but if he doesn’t, he’ll have to kill or be killed by his child.
P337 Save the best for last. For if we reveal too much too soon, the audience will see the climaxes coming long before they arrive.
Reveal only that exposition the audience absolutely needs and wants to know and no more. Since the writer controls the telling, he controls the need and desire to know...create the desire to know by arousing curiosity. Put the question”why”in the filmgoer’s mind. Why is this charater behaving this way? Why doesn’t this or that happen?Why?
With a hunger for information, even the most complicated set of dramatized facts will pass smoothly into understanding.
P338 Farewell, my concubine:
When he is a child, the masters of the peking opera ruthlessly beat, brainwash, and force him to confess that he has a female nature--when he does not, if he did, torture wouldn’t be necessary. He is effeminate, but like many effeminate men he is at heart male. So, forced to live a lie, he hates all lies, personal and political. From that point on all the conflicts in the story stem form his desire to speak the truth. But in China only liars survive. Finally, realizing that truth is an impossibility, he takes his own life.
“Table dusting” is unmotivated exposition
P340 Powerful revelations come from the Backstory,--previous significant event in the lives of the characters that the writer can reveal at critical moments to create turning point.
Do not bring in flash back until you have created in the audience the need and desire to know.
“Show, don’t tell” is a call for artistry and discipline, a warning to us not to give in to laziness but to set creative limitations that demand the fullest use of imagination and sweat.
“Show,don’t tell” means respect the intelligence and sensitivity of your audience. Invite them to bring their best selves to the ritual, to watch, think, feel, and draw their own conclusions.
Suggest a close analysis of JFK
P346
Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns
Concern, on the other hand is the emotional need for the positive values of life:justice, strength, survival,love, truth, courage. Human nature is instinctively repelled by what it perceived as negative, while drawn powerfully toward positive. It seeks the center of good.
Mafia logic runs like this:
People want prostitution,narcotics, and illicit gambling. When they are in trouble, they want to bribe police and judges. They want to taste the fruits of crime, but they are lying hypocrites and won’t admit it. We provide these services but we are not hypocrites. We deal in realities. We are the good people.
P349 Mystery, suspense, Dramatic Irony
In mystery the audience knows less than the characters.
--In the mystery form the killer and detective know the facts long before Climax but keep it to themselves. The audience runs from behind trying to figure out what the key characters already know.
In suspense the audience and characters know the same information
Suspense combines both curiosity and concern
Characters and audience move shoulder to shoulder through the telling, sharing the same knowledge. As the characters discover expositional fact, the audience discovers it.
In Dramatic Irony the audience knows more than the characters
Dramatic Irony creates interest primarily through concern alone, eliminating curiosity about fact and consequence. Such stories often open with the ending, when the audience is given the godlike superiority of knowing events before they happen, its emotional experience switches.
P354 Problems and solutions
A certain amount of audience curiosity is essential, but no dirty tricks, no cheap surprise, no false mystery.
The problem of coincidence:As a rule of thumb do not use coincidence beyond the midpoint of the telling. Rather, put the story more and more into the hands of characters.
For example:
Eric desperately seeks his estranged lover, Laura, but she’s moved. After searching in vain, he stops for a beer. On the stool next to him sits the real estate agent who sold Laura her new house. He gives Eric her exact address. Eric leaves with thanks and never sees the salesman again. Not that this coincidence couldn’t happen, but it’s pointless.
On the other hand, suppose that the salesman can’t remember the address, but does recall that Laura bought a red Italian sports car at the same time.The two men leave together and spot her Maserati on the street. Now they both go up to her door, still angry with Eric, Laura invites them in the flirts with the salesman to annoy her ex-lover.....this triangle could build meaning fully through the rest of the story.
P359 The problem of comedy
The dramatist admires humanity and creates works that say, in essence: Under the worst of circumstances the human spirit is magnificent. Comedy points out that in the best of circumstances human beings find some way to screw up.
P364 The more time spent with a character, the more opportunity to witness his choices. The result is more empathy and emotional involvement between audience and character.
The unique strength and wonder of the novel is the dramatization of inner conflict.
P370 The problem of melodrams(狗血剧情）
Melodrama is not the result of overexpression, but of under motivation, not writing too big, but writing with too little desire. We feel a scene is melodramtic if we cannot believe that motivation matches action.
The problem of holes
A hole s another way to lose credibility. Rather than a lack of motivation, now the story lacks logic, a missing link in the chain of cause and effect.
E.g. Casablanca: Ferrari is the ultimate capitalist and crook who never does anything except for money. Yet at one point Ferrari helps Victor Laszlo find the precious letters of transit and wants nothing in return. That’s out of character, illogical. Knowing this, the writers gave Ferrari the line:“Why I am doing this I don’t know because it can’t possible profit me....” Rather than hiding the hole, the writers admitted it with the bold lie that Ferrari might be impulsively generous. The audience know we often do things for reasons we can’t explain.
P374 Character
A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they are superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable, whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift--just when we think we understand them, we don’t. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in Casablanca better than I know myself.Rick is always Rick, I am a bit iffy.(含含糊糊）
The Character can only be expressed through choice in dilemma. How the person chooses to act under pressure is who he is--the greater the pressure, the truer and deeper the choice to character.
The key to true character is desire.
Ask: What does this character want? Now?Soon? Overall? Knowingly?Unknowingly? With clear, true answers comes your command of the role.
Behind desire is motivation.....A touch of the irrational perhaps, room fro the audience to use its own life experience to enhance your character in its imagination.
A character is the choice he makes to take the actions he takes.
Self-explanation, there is always a subtext, if by chance, what a character says about himself is actually true, we don’t know it’s true until we witness his choices made under pressure. In Casablanca,when Rick says, “ I stick my neck out for no man”, we think, “well, not yet, Rick, not yet.” We know Rick better than he knows himself, for indeed he is wrong, he will stick his neck out many times.
P377 Character Dimension
Dimension means contradiction: Macbeth is a brilliantly realized character because o fthe contradiction between his ambition on one hand and his guilt on the other .
Consider Hamlet, the most complex character ever written. Hamlet isn’t three dimensional, but ten, twelve, virtually uncountably dimensional.He seems spiritual until he is blasphemous. To Ophelia, he is first loving and tender, then callous(冷淡的）, even sadistic. He is courageous, then cowardly. At times he’s cool and cautious, then impulsive and rash, as he stabs someone hiding behind a curtain without knowing who is there. Hamlet is ruthless and compassionate, proud and self-pitying, witty and sad, weary and dynamic, lucid and confused,sane and mad...
The protagonist must be the most dimensional character in the cast to focus empathy on the star role.
P379 Cast design
Imagine a cast as a kind of solar system with the protagonist as the sun,supporting roles as planets around the sun, bit players as satellites around him to delineate his contradictions. Characters toward whom he can act and react in different ways at different times and places. These supporting characters must round him out so that his complexity is both consistent and credible.
P384 Writer should fall in love with all your characters.
An interviewer once remarked to Lee Marvin that he’d played villains for thirty years and how awful it must be always playing bad people. Marvin smiled,“Me?I don’t play bad people, I play people struggling to get through their day, doing the best they can with what life’s given them. Others may think they are bad, but, no, I never play bad people.”
Everything I learned about human nature I learned from me.------Anton Chekhov
“If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do? “the honest answer is always correct.
Dramatized exposition serves two ends: its primary purpose is to further the immediate conflict. Its secondary purpose is to convey information. The anxious novice reverses that order putting expositional duty ahead of dramatic necessity.
Confident writers parse out exposition, bit by bit, through the entire story, often revealing exposition well into the climax of the last act. They follow these two principles: Never include anything the audience can reasonably and easily assume has happened. Never pass on exposition unless the missing fact would cause confusion. You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information, except that which is absolutely necessary for comprehension.
Pace the exposition. Like all else, exposition must have a progressive pattern:Therefore, the least important facts come in early, the next most important later, the critical facts last. And what are the critical pieces of exposition?Secrets. The painful truths characters do not want known.
Don’t write “California scenes”, in which two characters who hardly know each other sit down over coffee and immediately begin an intimate discussion of the deep,dark secrets of their lives.
Evelyn Mulwray’s confession, “She is my sister and my daughter”is nothing she would share over cocktails. She tells Gittes this to keep her child out of her father’s hands. “You can’t kill me, Luke, I’m your father” is a truth Darth Vader never wanted to tell his son, but if he doesn’t, he’ll have to kill or be killed by his child.
P337 Save the best for last. For if we reveal too much too soon, the audience will see the climaxes coming long before they arrive.
Reveal only that exposition the audience absolutely needs and wants to know and no more. Since the writer controls the telling, he controls the need and desire to know...create the desire to know by arousing curiosity. Put the question”why”in the filmgoer’s mind. Why is this charater behaving this way? Why doesn’t this or that happen?Why?
With a hunger for information, even the most complicated set of dramatized facts will pass smoothly into understanding.
P338 Farewell, my concubine:
When he is a child, the masters of the peking opera ruthlessly beat, brainwash, and force him to confess that he has a female nature--when he does not, if he did, torture wouldn’t be necessary. He is effeminate, but like many effeminate men he is at heart male. So, forced to live a lie, he hates all lies, personal and political. From that point on all the conflicts in the story stem form his desire to speak the truth. But in China only liars survive. Finally, realizing that truth is an impossibility, he takes his own life.
“Table dusting” is unmotivated exposition
P340 Powerful revelations come from the Backstory,--previous significant event in the lives of the characters that the writer can reveal at critical moments to create turning point.
Do not bring in flash back until you have created in the audience the need and desire to know.
“Show, don’t tell” is a call for artistry and discipline, a warning to us not to give in to laziness but to set creative limitations that demand the fullest use of imagination and sweat.
“Show,don’t tell” means respect the intelligence and sensitivity of your audience. Invite them to bring their best selves to the ritual, to watch, think, feel, and draw their own conclusions.
Suggest a close analysis of JFK
P346
Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns
Concern, on the other hand is the emotional need for the positive values of life:justice, strength, survival,love, truth, courage. Human nature is instinctively repelled by what it perceived as negative, while drawn powerfully toward positive. It seeks the center of good.
Mafia logic runs like this:
People want prostitution,narcotics, and illicit gambling. When they are in trouble, they want to bribe police and judges. They want to taste the fruits of crime, but they are lying hypocrites and won’t admit it. We provide these services but we are not hypocrites. We deal in realities. We are the good people.
P349 Mystery, suspense, Dramatic Irony
In mystery the audience knows less than the characters.
--In the mystery form the killer and detective know the facts long before Climax but keep it to themselves. The audience runs from behind trying to figure out what the key characters already know.
In suspense the audience and characters know the same information
Suspense combines both curiosity and concern
Characters and audience move shoulder to shoulder through the telling, sharing the same knowledge. As the characters discover expositional fact, the audience discovers it.
In Dramatic Irony the audience knows more than the characters
Dramatic Irony creates interest primarily through concern alone, eliminating curiosity about fact and consequence. Such stories often open with the ending, when the audience is given the godlike superiority of knowing events before they happen, its emotional experience switches.
P354 Problems and solutions
A certain amount of audience curiosity is essential, but no dirty tricks, no cheap surprise, no false mystery.
The problem of coincidence:As a rule of thumb do not use coincidence beyond the midpoint of the telling. Rather, put the story more and more into the hands of characters.
For example:
Eric desperately seeks his estranged lover, Laura, but she’s moved. After searching in vain, he stops for a beer. On the stool next to him sits the real estate agent who sold Laura her new house. He gives Eric her exact address. Eric leaves with thanks and never sees the salesman again. Not that this coincidence couldn’t happen, but it’s pointless.
On the other hand, suppose that the salesman can’t remember the address, but does recall that Laura bought a red Italian sports car at the same time.The two men leave together and spot her Maserati on the street. Now they both go up to her door, still angry with Eric, Laura invites them in the flirts with the salesman to annoy her ex-lover.....this triangle could build meaning fully through the rest of the story.
P359 The problem of comedy
The dramatist admires humanity and creates works that say, in essence: Under the worst of circumstances the human spirit is magnificent. Comedy points out that in the best of circumstances human beings find some way to screw up.
P364 The more time spent with a character, the more opportunity to witness his choices. The result is more empathy and emotional involvement between audience and character.
The unique strength and wonder of the novel is the dramatization of inner conflict.
P370 The problem of melodrams(狗血剧情）
Melodrama is not the result of overexpression, but of under motivation, not writing too big, but writing with too little desire. We feel a scene is melodramtic if we cannot believe that motivation matches action.
The problem of holes
A hole s another way to lose credibility. Rather than a lack of motivation, now the story lacks logic, a missing link in the chain of cause and effect.
E.g. Casablanca: Ferrari is the ultimate capitalist and crook who never does anything except for money. Yet at one point Ferrari helps Victor Laszlo find the precious letters of transit and wants nothing in return. That’s out of character, illogical. Knowing this, the writers gave Ferrari the line:“Why I am doing this I don’t know because it can’t possible profit me....” Rather than hiding the hole, the writers admitted it with the bold lie that Ferrari might be impulsively generous. The audience know we often do things for reasons we can’t explain.
P374 Character
A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they are superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable, whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift--just when we think we understand them, we don’t. In fact, I know Rick Blaine in Casablanca better than I know myself.Rick is always Rick, I am a bit iffy.(含含糊糊）
The Character can only be expressed through choice in dilemma. How the person chooses to act under pressure is who he is--the greater the pressure, the truer and deeper the choice to character.
The key to true character is desire.
Ask: What does this character want? Now?Soon? Overall? Knowingly?Unknowingly? With clear, true answers comes your command of the role.
Behind desire is motivation.....A touch of the irrational perhaps, room fro the audience to use its own life experience to enhance your character in its imagination.
A character is the choice he makes to take the actions he takes.
Self-explanation, there is always a subtext, if by chance, what a character says about himself is actually true, we don’t know it’s true until we witness his choices made under pressure. In Casablanca,when Rick says, “ I stick my neck out for no man”, we think, “well, not yet, Rick, not yet.” We know Rick better than he knows himself, for indeed he is wrong, he will stick his neck out many times.
P377 Character Dimension
Dimension means contradiction: Macbeth is a brilliantly realized character because o fthe contradiction between his ambition on one hand and his guilt on the other .
Consider Hamlet, the most complex character ever written. Hamlet isn’t three dimensional, but ten, twelve, virtually uncountably dimensional.He seems spiritual until he is blasphemous. To Ophelia, he is first loving and tender, then callous(冷淡的）, even sadistic. He is courageous, then cowardly. At times he’s cool and cautious, then impulsive and rash, as he stabs someone hiding behind a curtain without knowing who is there. Hamlet is ruthless and compassionate, proud and self-pitying, witty and sad, weary and dynamic, lucid and confused,sane and mad...
The protagonist must be the most dimensional character in the cast to focus empathy on the star role.
P379 Cast design
Imagine a cast as a kind of solar system with the protagonist as the sun,supporting roles as planets around the sun, bit players as satellites around him to delineate his contradictions. Characters toward whom he can act and react in different ways at different times and places. These supporting characters must round him out so that his complexity is both consistent and credible.
P384 Writer should fall in love with all your characters.
An interviewer once remarked to Lee Marvin that he’d played villains for thirty years and how awful it must be always playing bad people. Marvin smiled,“Me?I don’t play bad people, I play people struggling to get through their day, doing the best they can with what life’s given them. Others may think they are bad, but, no, I never play bad people.”
Everything I learned about human nature I learned from me.------Anton Chekhov
“If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do? “the honest answer is always correct.
