In "Crafting Short Screenplays that Connect" the writer Claudia Hunter Johnson is not a great friend of the desperate need of conflict.
I can’t find the quote in the book right now, but my impression of her opinion was that she believed that adding conflict to a story was backwards; conflict is a result, not something you add.
The most important quality in her opinion seems to be connection – between characters as well as towards the audience. Connection together with conflict you might get a great script.
I agree with her that connection is an underestimated quality of a script.
There are a lot of writings about how to create a character that we feel for and want to follow and know more about, but very little about the more abstract quality of connection.
I remember a Swedish child’s program based on a series of popular books about the cat “Pelle Tail-less” written by Gösta Knutsson. Pelle was the hero and Måns the bad guy. And in the tv-program everybody loved Måns.
Måns was the guy that connected with the audience when he got out in the cold, denied access to the social network with the other cats.
Pelle was simply too good, too nice and too perfect.
Connection is a powerful tool.
But if I look at conflict in a wider perspective, it’s not about argument, but two or more desires in contradiction. You don’t need two people arguing to have a conflict.
And if conflict is result, or something you add, well, I would say that the whole story, the whole script, is a construction. If you add characters and get a conflict, or have a conflict and add the characters to create it – I’m not sure it really matters.
But I do feel she has a vital point in her emphasis on connection.
Conflict might be what drives the story forwards, but without connections nobody will be interested.
7 comments:
Very interesting. You are right the connection is the foundation of a script and I must say indispensable. A story without connection is weak and bores easily.
Yes. But yet, as the writer of the book points out, conflict is discussed most in screenwriting books and advices.
That's a true point of view.
When my scripts fail its not the lack of conflict but not having a connection with the people that will view the finished movie.
I've experienced the same. Like in my script Kim. It's not lack of conflict that is the problem.
I'm so happy for this book. New point of views are never a bad thing to experience.
This really caught my attention:
But if I look at conflict in a wider perspective, it’s not about argument, but two or more desires in contradiction. You don’t need two people arguing to have a conflict..."
And as William Faulkner pointed out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, you even can have conflict with only one person! Look at this excerpt:
the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
And of course he gave the speech in Stockholm!
William Faulkner was very right and has a very interesting point. Thank you for this quote.
It is so true, yet I've not thought about it much, that conflict could be within a single human.
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