New Directions and the Dignity of Drama

The Story Arks Institute 

Over the past 2 years, while my writing and seminars have continued to grow, I have also been actively dialoguing with my colleagues in the film and TV media about the impact of climate change——and specifically about how we in the media can become more proactively involved in helping society envision and create a more sustainable future.

This led me to create, in 2009, The Story Arks Institute—you can find out more about it in the Upcoming menu.  In September 2009 I attended the UNESCO conference on Broadcast Media and Climate Change at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.  The conference was instructive for me in many ways and gave me a chance to make new friends in scientific, administrative, and communications fields related to climate change and the challenges of the future.  It also led me to ask the question: "In relation to climate change, to what extent are the media part of the solution, and to what extent are they part of the problem?"  Out of this are growing new articles, the outline for a new book, and a new impetus for The Story Arks Institute.

I will be part of a panel discussing these topics at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn, Germany on June 21.  See the About Me/News menu for more information about the event.

I am very interested to have your input on the subject of the media and climate change, and on the media's relationship to society in general.  Feel free to use the e-mail links under Contact on the main menu bar.

The Dignity of Drama

I am working on two new feature film projects that I plan to direct as well as write, and I find myself having some new reflections on what drama means to me.  As a seminar leader and consultant, my job is to be flexible, to be able to help a writer no matter what idiom, genre, style, or budget he or she is working in, with whatever character/plot/theme challenges.  I have to find the objectivity to stand back and ask what will serve the story.

With my own personal projects, the question becomes: what authorial choices are best suited to what I have to express?  One of these projects is very contemporary, gritty, and in a realistic idiom—while the second is an adaptation of a novel that mixes romanticism and expressionism as they both move through the life of a painter.  So, what is important to me that I want to bring to both projects?

One element is what I have come to call the dignity of drama.  For me, drama is a humanistic science whose field of study is human conflict: its sources, its motives, its dynamics, its consequences.  Drama is about how people move through crisis and dilemma, and how they are changed by that process.  Here is where Joseph Campbell's paradigm of The Hero's Journey comes in.  The models elaborated in my seminars and in my book The Soul of Screenwriting are all tools to arrive at the integrity of human motives and actions in the process of growth through crisis.  If our work did not arrive at such a level of artistic integrity, then drama would have no lessons to give its audience.

I think that it is in the act of seeking this integrity that I experience the dignity of drama.