Poetics

"Aristotle’s Poetics is the user’s guide to dramatic narrative and dramatic structure. It’s just a ragged little pamphlet really. It’s story. Character is important but character comes out of story. It still impresses me. Nowadays, with instant messaging and texting, word gets out incredibly quickly. There has been a huge reduction in the power of stars because a film comes out on a Friday night and people are already telling each other to stay away from this one or that one. Take Avatar . There’s no star anybody’s heard of in Avatar . It just underscores Aristotle. People want not actors but stories. But Aristotle gets misrepresented, just like Jesus. He says beginning, middle and end, but people talk about the Aristotelian three-act structure. He did not say that. He talks about the beginning, the middle and the end. The beginning comes first and nothing comes before the beginning. When I say this in class I give a long pause and wait for someone to say: ‘That’s so obvious. What use is that?’ And I say that a lot of movies start before the beginning of the story. Why can’t you just start on page 16? Every scene has a beginning, middle and end. Every line has a beginning, middle and end. Any line that starts: ‘Look,’ or ‘I think…’ You don’t need that. Start at the beginning."