We’re all storytellers. Humans love to tell stories, hear them, watch them unfold. Many moments in our daily lives are stories with a beginning, middle, and end that we may not even think of as more than events, but put into proper context, the drama of the every day is full of stories.
I’ve been working as a actor and a director and a writer for decades now and one of the things that I started to notice in giving written feedback on screenplays is I could talk about some structural things and what is or isn’t working, but I never had the opportunity to ask questions and get deeper into WHO the writer was and what they could bring of THEMSELVES to the work. Asking questions is one of the best ways to get into deeper and more personal ideas, as well as keeping you more connected to your intuition.
One of the things that I really love to do is talk one-on-one with my clients. Get a sense of who they are, what they find important or interesting, or the way they see the world. Because that’s what makes a good storyteller – HOW a story is told, not the story itself. I want to ask questions to find out what your subconscious immediately goes to. Why are they working on this project? What interests them about it? What are some of the things that inspired them? Why is this character acting this way? How can you look at this scene in a more unique way to you? What fuels you emotionally about what’s going on? And that is the way to pull out so much more creativity and making sure that it’s original and unique to you.
We all know that there are what five plots and that’s it. We’ve seen so many movies that have the same structure, right? Star Wars is the Matrix, is Harry Potter, is the Odyssey, etc. These all have a very specific Hero’s Journey, a mainstay or Western storytelling, certainly in pop culture. But the stories themselves and more importantly the WAY they are told, is unique to the storyteller. And that’s what makes your story interesting: YOU.
Story crafting is about collaboration. A collaborative effort to find the purest version of you and your story and what you want to say.
Thank you for joining me. I think this is going to be an awful lot of fun.
Write on.
-Matt
