Mark Travis: My goal is to create an experience that and audience can go through over and over again without ever getting bored.
A story gives some kind of journey of
some kind of
characters.
A journey has three aspects:
1) The linear or
chronological
aspect (not necessarily told in order).
This is the
events of the journey.
2) The emotional journey.
Each character
will have a different emotional journey,
going through
the same events.
3) The emotional journey of the
audience.
This is the most elusive aspect.
The writer must
be clear on the emotional journey
he will take
the audience through.
When the story (film) ends, what do you want the audience to be a) thinking, b) feeling, c) talking about?
A story involves manipulation of the audience's emotions.
All the audience demands is not to be bored.
The protagonist is the character who hooks us in. A story begins with an inciting incident (precipitating event, catalyst). The protagonist has one simple and broad-based overall objective. This may or may not be explicitly stated, but the audience knows what it is. This is what keeps the audience hooked, asking, "How is he going to achieve that?" When it doesn't, the audience's attention disengages. Every character in the story has an objective. Every scene has an objective.
The events in a story are basically not that interesting. What is interesting is the character's attempts to achieve his objective.
There is a public objective and a private one. The public objective is the one the character would acknowledge to others. The internal objective, which may or may not be known to the character, is what drives the character. Both the public objective and the private one are true.
The screenplay is not the story. The actions and speeches of the characters are the result of the story. The story is what is really going on with the characters (i.e. with the internal objectives).
There are three kinds of obstacles. 1) Other characters. 2) The physical and social environment. (The social environment consists of attitudes, etc.) 3) The obstacles inside the characters (usually not explicitly stated, especially in screenplays) . Every character in a good story has internal obstacles. It's almost impossible for the story to explicitly state them.
Ask any character at any moment in the story: What's the risk and what do you risk if you fail? The characters must risk something of real importance, something that seems of life or death importance.
The gap. A character starts with objectives and expectations. Then he runs into obstacles. There is always a gap between the original objective and expectations and what is actually accomplished. Life turns out to be different from what we expect and hope for.
The character can either accept the actual objective attained, perhaps even finding it better than the one hoped for, or rejecting it, thus initiating a new phase of the story.
What an audience wants, Mark Travis believes, is closure.
Many times closure is not what the characters wanted, but it does end the story. (For instance, ironic closure.) Closure doesn't necessarily mean ending the gap, but it does mean that the story can't go any further.
The inciting scene at the beginning of the story will call for the "obligatory scene" at the end which provides closure.
Writing fiction should begin with this structure. One then creates the scenes to create this structure.
In autobiographical writing, on the other hand, the story already exists. The way to proceed is to write down separate events, chosen haphazardly. The story will emerge. In autobiographical writing, the writer himself will often be the last (in a workshop situation, for instance) to see what the story is about.
Some examples of stories: King Lear. To Kill a Mockingbird (the novel). The Last Picture Show (the novel). The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks. Cookie's Fortune (Robert Altman film).
Many times what hooks an audience is not so much the protagonists objective as a mystery. In one case, the audience keeps saying, "I've got to find out how this comes out." In the other case, the audience is saying, "I've got to find out the answer/the explanation." Mark Travis believes that we are especially hooked in when we want to find out the character's motivation for seemingly inexplicable acts.
Finding the solution to a mystery may be the objective for a protagonist. But what we care about is often not so much the character's success, but learning ourselves what the solution is. This is true, for instance, in many hard-boiled or procedural detective novels, where we don't mind that much is the detective stumbles on the solution almost by accident. Of course in the classical mystery paradigm, this would be considered a flaw, a violation of the principle that the reader himself should in principle be able to find the solution. Cookie's Fortune is one example of many movies that hold the audience's attention for quite a while before there's any hint of a plot, simply by posing the mystery, "Who are these strange characters and why on earth are they doing what they are doing?"
Added Comment by Lee Lady: I have to disagree that all the the audience wants is closure. It wants closure in certain prescribed ways.
Basically the audience for a piece of fiction is looking for two contradictory things. On the one hand, it is looking for something really new with several unpredictable twists.
On the other hand, it is looking for reassurance. It is looking for a story where characters are confronted with the basic problems that we all obsessively worry about, and it wants to see, one way or another, the same solutions to these problems that occur in story after story.
In thriller with a really nasty villain, it is not sufficient that the villain be arrested at the end and led off into prison. He must die, and his death must be violent. It is often okay, though, if the death occurs from an accident during the final shoot-out: by accidentally backing into a propellor, or triggering the bomb he was planning to use on the hero. There doesn't have to be much logic to the villain's death, provided it is violent enough.
In a romantic comedy, we want to hear the hero say, "I love you," and we want to see the two romantic leads kiss at the end, as a bare minimum. Usually we want to be assured that they will have sex together. In an old fashioned romantic comedy, we want to be assured that they are about to marry.
In a soap opera, we want to hear the male lead say, "I love you, Joan. Even during those times when things were most difficult, I never stopped loving you and I never will."
The audience will be pleased if there are lots of unpredicted twists in the story. But it will not be satisfied if one of these twists is the omission of some of the obligatory elements from the ending. Because we look to fiction for reassurance that the problems which torment us so much will eventually be resolved satisfactorily.
We may despise soap operas, for instance, because they are so predictable. But it is their very predictability that keeps people watching them.
Somebody like David Lynch may violate this principle and create movies that are fantastically popular for a few weeks because they are so bizarre. But to succeed, these movies have to be really bizarre. And people will not keep going back to the video store to rent these movies to watch over and over again.