Friday, Aug. 13

The Hummingbird Doesnt Need to Know How He Flies

Guest blogger and produced screenwriter Christopher Riley makes mountains of sense in regards to story structure:

I aspire to create films that explore and expand the boundaries of cinema in all its forms. If I could craft a story with no structure, or with some radically new structure heretofore unknown to humankind, I’d love to do it and take home the Nobel in Screenwriting. But I don’t want to commit the cardinal sin of the would-be entertainer, boring the audience. And I must tell you that having read thousands of scripts, and watched many, many films, and worked with hundreds of students on their stories, and written an award-winning European film, and written scripts for Hollywood studios, and written scripts for the Web, I’ve made this observation. Stories without structure don’t work. They don’t sustain audience interest from beginning to end. They bore.

Writers who think they can write without structure generally have no intention of communicating anything to an audience – there is nothing they are trying to say with their work. Structure-less stories are only entertaining for those who write them, a self-conscious endeavor that rivals the world’s oldest self-stimulating exercise in wasted potential.