"Your job is to tell a story." - David Mamet Teaches Dramatic Writing

“The rules to me are very very simple: your job is to tell a story; a story has a hero and he or she wants one thing.”

“Poetry is the music of speech.”

David Mamet is a playwright, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and film director. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross, and later adapted it for the movie.

Other screenplays of his include The Postman Always Rings Twice; The Untouchables; Hoffa; The Verdict; Wag the Dog; The Edge; Ronin; Hannibal; and the HBO film, Phil Spector.

» Learn more about his Masterclass: David Mamet Teaches Dramatic Writing.

From the video:

“Hemingway said, ‘Writing is easy. All you got to do is sit down with the typewriter and bleed.’

“Throw away all the distractions and write something.

“You got to stand being bad if you want to be a writer, because if you don’t, you’re never going to write anything good.

“We’re given a great gift and a great responsibility, which is to tell stories as honestly as we can.”

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“Poetry is the music of speech.”

In an interview, Mamet commented:

“People remember Shakespeare’s words all their lives. We remember the rhythm of it.

So as Freud said, it’s polymorphous perversity. It’s a priori...we can’t get beyond the fact that there’s something in music that gets to us.

And for me, poetry is the music of speech.”

From article: “Writer-to-Writer: A Conversation With David Mamet” By Mark Rubinstein, Novelist, psychiatrist, physician. HuffPost Nov 18, 2013.

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