In August I got an inquiry from Le Clown & l’enfant, a French publishing company, wondering if I was interested in reading and reviewing Writing Drama by Yves Lavandier on my blog.
I was delighted and interested in reading a book from a European writer, since most of the literature I've came across have been from USA.
Close to three months later I've read the almost six hundred pages and am ready to write my review.
What I liked best with this book was that the writer brought up several cases of less successful situations and suggestions that would have brought out more of them. In all books I have read so far only examples that demonstrate the “right way” have been used, never examples where someone could have done a better job.
What I didn’t like and found very annoying was that the writer never succeeded in keeping me interested. It was a difficult reading. Page up and page down packed with text written in a very boring way and often with extensive footnotes.
And since this is a book about how to tell a story I find it remarkable that the writer cannot keep my interest on top though this is a subject that I am very interested in.
He also succeeds in throwing me off topic several times because he states theories and own opinions as facts, things that I do not recognize as facts. It could be everything from theories from Sigmund Freud to how to raise a child and political agendas.
It would have been better if he had used “I” instead of “we”, and therefore taking responsibility for his own opinions, instead of besmirching me with standpoints that are not mine.
Something that does not ring true in this book is that the first thing he does is praising the American success in storytelling and claiming that Europe lacks good storytellers and then uses the rest of the book to despise and sneer at the American ideas how to write a script and structure a story.
To mention some examples of this, the writer insists that a character does not need to change in the span of the script, that Syd Field’s way to structure a script is more or less ridiculous and that it is completely okay that characters’ dialog all sound the same; all three opinions strongly opposing the American gurus in storytelling.
If he had stated that he didn't like American movies, all would have been fine, but now he says they are good at storytelling. But he disapprove of some of the most fundamental rules American movies have.
The book was however not useless to me. Here and there I found a gem. The chapter about dramatic irony was especially interesting for me. Some things were interesting just because it was from another point of view than usual and that always brings out new aspects of things.
My feeling is that the writer wanted his book to contain everything useful for storytelling (and even some that isn’t, like subtitle vs dubbing).
Some areas I felt were too thin because of this, aspects that I never thought of and wanted to learn more about were way too short, while other subjects were way too lengthy.
This is a matter of taste and interest, of course, but some subjects are covered in many other books, some not. And since you can’t cover it all, maybe the book’s focus should have been more precise rather than wide spread.
Finally I find an atmosphere of pompous bitterness over the whole book. A whiny attitude where the writer tells us how wrong modern way of storytelling is and that good old Aristotle knew what he was doing.
Comments during reading you can find here.
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