Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Listen Up

Listen Up

As I “teach” the One Act Play Course, the struggles of my students are a mirror to my own shortcomings as a writer. The hardest thing about the course is getting the students to embrace the Model. There is a basic story telling model and if a writer accepts it, and learns how it works then the writing that follows will be rewarded and an editor or publisher will lean forward in their chair and say “Ah hah…. At last a manuscript written by someone who understands.”

Unfortunately, the realization of how important the model is, dawns slowly to the wanna-be writer and in digressing from its form find themselves mired in frustration, tangents, and incongruities. For some who have talent, the light of its importance never comes on. They follow their own thinking believing that what comes to mind will lead somewhere besides the netherworld. The story telling model has evolved over thousands of years and countless generations of story tellers and for an aspiring writer it is a structure etched in stone.

The model begins at a point in space and time close to a life changing event. There is a Central Character (CC) . Call him Joe Schmo. Joe is tooling along in life but begins to have some difficulties. He starts to realize he has a problem. For the writer the first step is to characterize Joe. Say we ascribe to him three character traits Say these are “Me First,” “If it feels good do it,” and “Whatever it takes.” So in a One Act Play the first scene starts out with Joe on the stage showing the audience how he has it all figured out. The problem is that if Joe has it all figured how come his life is on the skids…? Towards the end of Scene 1 he faces the first crisis where he bottoms out….sort of like an alcoholic falling into the gutter. Now the audience (reader) is watching (listening) to all this and gets to see the before snapshot of Joe Schmo. There is something familiar about this fellow. In scene two there comes a second crisis. Joe has resolved at this point to turn things around but hasn’t figured out what his real want, need or desire is. He starts getting really hammered. The light comes on and he has that life changing experience. However, this presents a whole new spin on adversity. The audience now begins to see Joe in transition from who he was to what he is becoming. Then comes a third crisis even more portentous, as Joe tries to get his life back on track. As he begins to crawl out of the hole there comes the tsunami, (climax) and it washes over, leaving him changed forever. Joe is no longer who he was in the beginning of Scene 1. The audience sees him as a different person, sighs and goes home emotionally wrung out and entertained. This is the story telling model. It is the tip of the story telling ice burg. What lies beneath the surface fills volumes of how-to books and libraries of published works. The aspiring writer does well to have it tattooed into his/her psychic understanding. This is where it all starts.

A writer can do exploratory writing that digresses from the model but once they have the thread of a storyline… need to come back and use it as a starting point. They shouldn't try reinventing the wheel until becoming successful in the trade (evidenced by publication credits) and know enough about what they are doing to start breaking the rules. The model launches the story on a proven trajectory and leaves it to an author’s talent and skill to guide it to the mark.