This weekend I attended an amazing two-day seminar with screenwriter, novellist and teacher Linda Aronson at the Danish Film School. In her book Screenwriting Updated, Aronson covers ‘unconventional’ storytelling, which means storytelling that does not strictly follow the Hollywood model of a single protagonist climing the “three act mountain” of rising suspense in a journey of personal redemption.
In stead, Aronson focuces on films with multiple protagonists (Traffic), group stories (The Big Chill) and stories constructed around flashbacks (Shine). These film obviously work as suspenseful experiences and engages the audience on an emotional level, but the question we should ask as screenwriters is “how”? Aronsons analysis (which I won’t redo here) answers at least some of the questions and her insight into why you don’t necessarily need to have one (1) protagonist or why a character can be both a protagonist and an antagonist at different points in the film was, at least to me, revolutionary. In fact it gave me some whole new ideas for the novel I’m working on at the moment.
To conclude, Aronson announced the Death of the Second Act. For writers this is actually a lot bigger than it sounds, because the Second Act is one of many dreadeds road to development hell. It’s fairly easy to come up with a compelling idea for a story, and it’s fairly easy to device a dramatic endning. The problem is getting those two together in a believable and compelling way. Trough her analysis, Aronson shows that movies like 21 Grams and The Hours simply do not have second acts in the traditional sense of the concept.
Of course, for the audience, these movies do still have openings, middles and ends, and do take the audience on an emotional journey, but if you analyze the stories they do not have the usual three-act structure. The exposition-heavy first act of 21 Grams fills up more than half of the movie, while The Hours is really three first acts of three different stories made into one movie. This shouldn’t work, and yet it does. I think that Aronson’s analysis goes a long way in explaining how. And the funny thing is: she shows how this ‘unconventional’ kind of narrative structure actually goes all the back to Homer. Nothing new under the sun – and yet the concept is so difficult to grasp.
