The Screenwriter and the Fiction Writer

Posted by Anjuelle Floyd | Filed under Articles and Essays, Musings

Screenwriters hold a wealth of knowledge that benefits the fiction writer. Screenwriter and playwright, Kendall Williams who runs Morningside Writers’ Group sees himself as a dramatist-teacher.

Along with facilitating fiction writers and memoirists to learn the basics of story telling–character, plot, point of view, dialogue, setting, and theme, Kendall also teaches workshop participants how to stage their writing.

Scenes form the building blocks for the short story, novel or memoir as they do in a movie.

The fiction writer, like the screenwriter must set the stage for each scene. Integration of the basic elements of storytelling forms the art and craft of creative writing.

Each scene reveals the various levels of the transformation through which the protagonist moves in confronting her or his dilemma within the larger arc of the story or novel. In this purpose each scene must accomplish certain goals.

As with arc of a novel, scenes reach for a climax smaller in proportion to the larger arc of the story, but forming a foundation for the ultimate change, transcendence or epiphany the protagonist undergoes. The best stories depict this change through riveting drama. The fiction writer, like the screen and playwright is therefore a dramatist.

For Kendall Williams the fiction writer creates dramatic tension through conflict that engages the reader’s five senses. Prose, dialogue and description that address sight, smell, hearing, taste and that awakens tactile senses such that the reader identifies with the protagonist in facing her or his dilemma.

Staging a scene–describing its setting, both physical and psychological, through dimensions that the physical senses inform sets the reader in the protagonist’s world in such a manner that they become invested in the not simply the outcome of the novel. Rather the reader comes to cares about the protagonist.

They read wanting to know, hoping, and praying that all will be well. They too inhabit the protagonist’s world, externally and internally. The two become one. And the reader undergoes her or his own catharsis, and shift in consciousness.

Have you ever studied with playwrights or screenwriters?

Do you visualize your scenes when writing?

What of your physical and psychic senses are most engaged when imagining scenes?