The art and science of storymaking with dialogue

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In my book The Science of Storytelling, I advocated a character-first approach to making stories. In doing so, I was pushing against a plot-first mindset that has dominated story scholarship since its inception. For thousands of years, the only way we could figure out what made stories work was by gathering a bunch of successful examples together and seeing what they had in common. This process inevitably produces a list: this thing happens, and then this thing happens and then this thing happens. In other words what you get is a plot and, with it, a promise: use this plot-recipe and you too can be a master storyteller.

And so, plot-first thinking became the norm. Nearly 2,500 years ago Aristotle wrote that,“The plot, then, is the first principle… character holds the second place.” Filmmaking in the second half of the 20th Century was dominated by Joseph Campbell’s ‘Heroes Journey’ which, in its full incarnation, has a 17 step plot, from ‘the call to adventure’ to ‘freedom to live’. The current most-popular storytelling guide is probably Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat, which instructs writers to use a 15 step plot-recipe, starting with an ‘opening image’ and moving through a ‘theme states’ and ‘set-up’ and ‘catalyst’, and so on.

I believe that developments in the sciences have shown this approach to be wrong – perhaps most importantly via the dominant theory in psychology that says human language evolved to allow us to gossip. Ours is a species of highly cooperative ape that uses gossip to teach and police its groups. Gossip taught us about other people – who were heroes and who were villains – and motivated us to reward and punish good and bad behaviour.

Gossip seems to be at the root of human communication, and therefore storytelling. And gossip is powered by questions about character. It asks of its subject, who is this person really? In archetypal storytelling the plot, although essential, has a secondary function. It’s there to test a character and change it, so that the answer to the question of ‘who is this person?’ keeps altering, and we see them learn and grow (or, in the case of tragedy, we don’t). Even in storytelling in which characterisation is weak – superhero movies; James Bond; the current era’s conveyer belt of ’girl bosses’ – a character will usually move between phases of coping with the plot’s challenges or not, thereby playing with our understanding of how capable they actually are, and how sure their claim to heroism. In the best kind of storytelling – tales that are memorable and profound and play with our whole palette of emotions – plot emerges from character, and is defined by the particular goals, values and flaws of its cast of players.

I bring all this up because I’ve just read an interesting paper by Robert Greens, a senior lecturer in Art and Media at the University of Brighton. In Character Over Concept, Greens argues too for a character-first approach. “There is a consensus within screenwriting manuals that the writer should discover the concept of their film before they write a first draft,” he writes. As a result, Greens finds that students who have read plot-first guides such as Save The Cat often start with a hook, logline or premise and then try to bend their characters around it. Then, as they write, they “become detached from their work... When a writer focusses on concept over character, the characters may become shallow and unreal, their actions implausible, and the audience may feel disconnected from what the protagonist may lose or gain.”

For Greens, story-making should be a character-led process, and a writer’s initial creative step can actually be the conjuring of dialogue: by first making its characters talk, a story can be created, developed and explored. This method, he believes, can lead to the creation of “compelling, engaging, true-to-life stories and characters.”