Screenwriting Manuals - Text 1
There exist numerous practical books on the art of storytelling, ranging from Antiquity, such as those of Aristotle and Horace, to the fundamental volumes of the classical doctrine and the baroque period, such as Lope de Vega’s The New Art of Writing Plays in this Age (1609), the Abbé d’Aubignac’s Theatre Practice (1657), Corneille’s Three Discourses on Dramatic Poetry (1660) and Boileau’s The Art of Poetry (1674), to modern dramaturgy, from Freytag’s Technique of the Drama (1863) to Brecht’s “A Short Organum for the Theatre” (1948). The earliest true manuals appeared in the twentieth century, such as Lawson’s The Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936, 1949), Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing (1942, 1946) and Raphaelson’s The Human Nature of Playwriting (1949). Out of this vast range of practical volumes, one must grant a special place to those which attempt to reduce all stories to a few elementary plots, in the tradition of “Gozzi’s thirty-six dramatic situations” (mentioned by Goethe but of which no trace has ever been found): Nerval suggests there are 24, Polti 36, Souriau 200,000, Tobias 20, Booker 7, etc.
Some theoretical texts, with their scholarly analysis of narrative, are sometimes used for practical ends, such as Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928) and Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). This latter volume formulates the hypothesis that every myth in the history of humanity – Egyptian, Hindu, Buddhist, Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc. – is a variation on the same fundamental and universal great myth (it is thus also transhistorical and transcultural): “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”[1] This “monomyth,” an initiatory journey in seventeen stages, is used by several creators in diverse media, in particular by Vogler in cinema.
