(For Bob's script, My Brother's Keeper.)
...I want to make a point about horizontal and vertical narratives. I've mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again. You are consistently short in all of your scenes, which is great, but it's a bit of a misnomer to do that in EVERY scene. Keep short the setups and action that pushes the story forward (horizontal narrative), but when you get to heightened moments of great drama (vertical narratives), you can stop, build your story vertically, and take your time by really getting the most emotionally out of that scene. And I mean scenes like the one on page 100 between Sean and Michael. That can go on for a couple of pages (instead of the half page we're given) because you already know that you have your audience by the throat and you won't lose them. Do you see what I mean? The idea for horizontal and vertical narratives came from Maya Deren, I believe. (I referenced her in my final thoughts on Napoleon article.) To quote her:
“In Shakespeare, you have the drama moving forward on a ‘horizontal’ plane of development, of one circumstance - action - leading to another, and this delineates the character. Every once in a while, however, he arrives at a point of action where he wants to illuminate the meaning to this moment of drama, and, at that moment, he builds a pyramid or investigates it ‘vertically,’ if you will, so that you have a ‘horizontal’ development with periodic ‘vertical’ investigations, which are the poems, which are the monologues… You can have operas where the ‘horizontal’ development is virtually unimportant—the plots are very silly, but they serve as an excuse for stringing together a number of arias that are essentially lyric statements.”
Click here to read the full review.
...I want to make a point about horizontal and vertical narratives. I've mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again. You are consistently short in all of your scenes, which is great, but it's a bit of a misnomer to do that in EVERY scene. Keep short the setups and action that pushes the story forward (horizontal narrative), but when you get to heightened moments of great drama (vertical narratives), you can stop, build your story vertically, and take your time by really getting the most emotionally out of that scene. And I mean scenes like the one on page 100 between Sean and Michael. That can go on for a couple of pages (instead of the half page we're given) because you already know that you have your audience by the throat and you won't lose them. Do you see what I mean? The idea for horizontal and vertical narratives came from Maya Deren, I believe. (I referenced her in my final thoughts on Napoleon article.) To quote her:
“In Shakespeare, you have the drama moving forward on a ‘horizontal’ plane of development, of one circumstance - action - leading to another, and this delineates the character. Every once in a while, however, he arrives at a point of action where he wants to illuminate the meaning to this moment of drama, and, at that moment, he builds a pyramid or investigates it ‘vertically,’ if you will, so that you have a ‘horizontal’ development with periodic ‘vertical’ investigations, which are the poems, which are the monologues… You can have operas where the ‘horizontal’ development is virtually unimportant—the plots are very silly, but they serve as an excuse for stringing together a number of arias that are essentially lyric statements.”
Click here to read the full review.
