Capsule Movie Reviews That Explore Storytelling

These capsule reviews offer a basic overview of what these Hollywood movies did (or didn't do) to engage an audience. They are not meant to convey a full review of the movie, or a scene by scene breakdown of story characters.

Caught Stealing

I was going to skip this movie as a generic action film until I saw the director was Darren Aronofsky. The main character is young man who missed a chance to play major league baseball because of a car accident that killed a friend. As the story opens he's a bar tender in New York with a great girlfriend who wonders if he'll ever be able to live in the present and not perpetually mourning the life he lost.

When a British punk rock apartment neighbor asks him to watch his cat for a few days, he finds himself beaten by a crew looking for the neighbor. The violence keeps escalating, with more deaths, and threats to his mother.

The movie has wonderful, gritty details of New York in 1998.

In the end, the young man realizes it's time to stop running from the accident and start his life again.

The hitman are a strange crew of odd balls.

Fun movie to watch.

I do wish it had a stronger, odd title. I didn't make the baseball connection in the title until the end of the movie.

Weapons

Unusual and thoughtful horror film. 17 of 18 grade school students all wake and leave their homes at 2:17 am. Destination, unknown. The boy who didn't disappear and his teacher are interrogated but offer no clues. Many parents believe the teacher is complicit.

She's the focus in the early film, as she tries to deal with the fall out of what's happened and connect with the boy who didn't disappear. She's warned to leave him alone, and just when she realizes something odd is happening at his house, she wakes to a nightmare of a clown-like figure on her ceiling.

Now we go back and meet a father, who paints the teacher's car, branding her a witch. We see many scenes from his point of view. Then the movie shifts to other characters.

What's unusual, there's almost nothing conveyed about the investigation to find the children. It's not the focus of the story or plot.

Eventually there's a revelation about what is happening. It's spooky, but didn't quite work for me.

The movie than builds to clever and violent scenes of the children getting vengeance.

The focus on the visual details on the screen always held my interest. The director was always in control of telling the story his way.

I had one small nit pick based on the film's ultra realistic tone. There's no media scrum on the sideway outside the young boy's house.

I love stories that create an unusual structure. I look forward to seeing more work by this director.

The Fantastic Four

This good-natured movie is quite up front that it's a story about family. The idea of family runs through every aspect of the movie, which makes it unusual in the super hero movie realm. The only such story I would compare it to is the early years of Smallville, when Clark's father serves as the moral center of the series.

There are special effects and action scenes, but they are secondary to the story.

I recommend the film to new screenwriters who would like a lesson about how to convey story in an action film.

Megan 2.0

The set up for the first Megan film was simple. A scientist creates a doll with artificial intelligence and programs it to protect her niece. When a bully comes along, we know what to expect. The movie is quirky fun.

Megan 2.0 is complicated and violent and features a beautiful young woman who is an A.I. bot assassin working for the FBI that goes rogue. Megan comes along about a third of the way in the movie.

Megan 2.0 is an action film with a high body count and some fleeting humor when Megan returns. Someone must have thought the violence would appeal to fans of action films. The niece barely registers.

28 Years Later

This is the sequel to 28 Days Later, a film about a rage virus turning most of the population of Great Britain into fast zombies.

28 years later, Great Britain is surrounded by a naval military quarantine to prevent any infected zombies from escaping and spreading the infection.

A small community survives on an island connected to the mainland via a causeway that is submerged at high tides. One aspect of the story is how the survivors try and hold on to pieces of their former lives while they create a new normal.

The main characters are a young boy, his father, and his ill mother. As the story opens, the father is taking the young boy onto the mainland to have his first experience killing zombies. It's a rite of passage. After the experience is being celebrated, the young boy learns that a doctor is still alive on the mainland.

The boy takes his mother to find the doctor. After many harrowing escapes, the doctor diagnoses the mother and the boy faces another rite of passage.

The scenes with the mother, son, and doctor develop a heart felt quality.

28 Years Later is an example of how a horror film can be thoughtful and have something to say about life.

The Phoenician Scheme

A quirky, fun, Wes Anderson film with his trade mark stylized acting and odd composition of shots.

An amoral business man decides to make a daughter/nun his heir and to help him navigate with five different people to save a huge project. He's survived many assassination attempts and near death experiences in heaven, but he knows his luck could run out.

The plot is straight forward and direct. Can he save the project by getting five people to agree to new terms for already signed contracts?

The story, about family, however, is thin. The business man has a stable of children from different mothers who live in a boarding house across the street from his mansion. The daughter accuses him of having her mother murdered. It also comes out the nun might not be his daughter.

But most of the family material is conveyed via dead pan humor. It's only at the end of the film when the now failed business man is a cook in a cafe that he runs with his now retired nun daughter (who also manages all his children) that it registers this is a story about a fractured family coming together. This is conveyed when the business man and nun play a game of hearts, which is a sly way of conveying the business man now has a heart and a family.

It just doesn't register clearly in the way the plot is clear and direct.

It's easy to enjoy the spectacle but to still want something more during the body of the story.

I loved the dead pan humor and the heavenly interludes.

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Capsule movie reviews.

Notes on Emma Pattee's Novel Tilt

In Emma Pattee's Tilt, a young, heavily pregnant mother is in an IKEA in Portland, Oregon searching for a baby bassinet when a major earthquake levels parts of Portland and all but one bridge over the Willamette river. At first trapped, she's rescued but loses her purse and phone in the rubble.

Her rescue can also be viewed as a metaphor, a birth into a new life.

Her first goal is to track down her husband at his job working at a cafe. When she reaches the cafe, she finds out he lied about working and instead is auditioning for a play, something he said he wouldn't do with the baby's birth immanent. To find him, now she must find a way to cross the Willamette river on the only standing bridge.

The novel is organized around going from the present to the past, meeting her actor husband when she's had a first play produced and has a fantasy about becoming a famous playwright. When she meets her later husband, he has a fantasy about becoming a famous actor.

Each jump to the past brings us nearer to the present. We learn how she gives up her fantasy, but her husband has clung tightly to the idea that somehow he can become a famous actor.

The chapters in the past collectively operate as a series of jolts that affect her marriage; mini earthquakes, so to speak.

When she finally reaches the last bridge standing across the Willamette river, it's blocked. The metaphor is that it's one of the last bridges that connected her to her marriage to her husband.

The novel makes the young woman's grueling journey heart-felt, compelling, and painful. By the end of the novel, she's ready to begin a new life.

I very much enjoyed the soon to be mother's journey through the broken city, passing by many, many landmarks I'm familiar with.

Recommended.

For more of my novel reviews, visit https://www.storyispromise.com

Introduction to Experiences With the Energy Body

This journal is an account of my experiences of my energy body, also known as prana or life force.

I began this exploration at a time I had started to practice hatha yoga postures. It opened a door I passed through to learn about my energy body over a period of a year, with 3-4 hours a day of meditative work.

I considered this the first quest of my life.

Later I did some visualization and energy body work that opened a tight band of energy around the crown. I considered that the second quest of my life, and my experiences were detailed in the first edition of this work.

This 3rd edition of my journal conveys the beginning of a third quest, to understand the flow of energy around my face and head, including some drawings with renditions of energy flow.

I'm now including drawings of principle lines of energy throughout my body in this edition created July 2025.

My explanations of my understanding of my energy body will be interspersed with details of my life.

The journal is my attempt to share what I have learned.

Facebook Posts

As I began this quest in May of 2025 to map the energy flow around my face and head, I decided in August to begin offering posts on Facebook that tracked my progress. I will continue to add those posts here.

July 27th, 2025

For the last week I've been feeling two currents of energy running on both sides of my chest and over my heart. I enjoy it when I can feel the energy flow in part of my body. It's part of the process of fully opening the flow of energy.

I've been walking on a treadmill in a gym. While walking I visualize two bands of current running up the back and top of my head.

I expect this to be a slow process to open the energy flow in those channels.

Here's an image of my initial map of the energy flow around the top of my head. The map becomes more detailed as I continue this work.

August 4, 2025

In my energy body work, I'd spent time visualizing currents running through channels that came down my face. My goal was to open those constricted channels. I was surprised when those channels ran down my body and met at the base of the lumbar spine. There are also channels of current that run down each arm and leg. I knew about that from my energy body work in my twenties, when I did bellows breathing 3-4 hours a day for a year.

Interesting path to be on.

One way to understand energy flow in the body, think of a new house. Turn on water faucet, full flow. House 30 years old, turn on faucet, 50% flow. 60 year old house, 25%.

Various things constrict the energy flow in the body over time. Diet, lack of exercise, aging, dumping life force into negative thought patterns, just giving up.

Here's a map of my full body, front view.

Experiences With the Energy Body Available in Print and in Color

Bill Johnson offers a detailed account of how he developed and expanded an awareness of his energy body. In his twenties, Bill did bellows breathing for a year. That experience helped him to open restrictions in his body's energy flow. In this 2nd edition available in print and color from Amazon, Bill maps the energy flow around his face, head, and body and records his experiences and suggests techniques others can use to experience their energy bodies.

His book offers an insider's peek to those who struggle with managing and learning from the integration of body, mind, and energy body and what it means for the creative process.

Additionally, he provides some biographical details and endeavors that add color and insight into his treatment of this little-explored realm.

Available at https://www.amazon.com/Experiences-Energy-Body-Understanding-Together/dp/B0F5P47FK5/

Throwing Your Characters Over The Edge,­ Setting Out What’s at Stake in a Story, by Bill Johnson

When a story’s action shatters the lives of its characters, those characters are thrown over the edge into new worlds. They become dramatic characters because the choices that face them are stark: how will they, can they, survive in these new worlds? How will they change? Can they avoid changing?

In years past, several movies found different ways to throw characters over the edge: The Sweet Hereafter, The Five Senses, and Last Night.

The Sweet Hereafter begins with a man, woman and baby girl sleeping in an idyllic setting. This quiet, peaceful opening begins a story about loss, by starting with a scene that suggests the opposite, a loving, fulfilling moment in life.

We then cut to Mr. Stevens, played by Ian Holm, a lawyer, who takes a call from his estranged daughter. She’s a drug addict and also, we later learn, the baby in the first scene. Because of her drug addiction, he has ‘lost’ his daughter even though she’s alive.

We go from Mr. Stevens, to a father watching his teenage daughter, Nicole, getting ready to perform at a country fair.

Each of these scenes takes place at a different time, but each carries embedded meaning that serves the dramatic purpose of the story. The chronology of the events of any story is not linear. A storyteller chooses those moments in time that best evoke a story’s journey.

Mr. Stevens arrives in a small Canadian town as a lawyer seeking to represent the parents of children who died in a tragic bus accident. Because he’s tormented over the loss of his daughter, he’s focused his life on using others to prove that someone is at fault for every tragedy, that every tragedy has a root cause that can be known and understood. He says to a potential client, “You’re angry, aren’t you? That’s why I’m here. To give your anger a voice. To be your weapon against whoever caused that bus to go off the road.”

As we learn more about each parent and the children involved in the accident, the scenes that lead up to the accident develop more and more dramatic power. But when the accident finally happens, we see very little of it. What we see is the shocked look on a father’s face as he watches the accident unfold, then later sees a blanket put over the bodies of his dead children.

Then he looks up and sees them laughing, running toward him in the snow. At the moment of their deaths, they are more alive to him than ever.

Later, as he looks at the hulk of the bus after the accident, he hears the screams of the trapped children. This is a motif that recurs several times. People looking at the bus hear the screams.

The loss for Nicole’s father is not that she ends up in a wheelchair, but that he loses his dream of helping her become a rock star, a dream he wants to share with her in an intimate way.

As the story advances, one thread occurs years later. On a plane, Mr. Stevens finds himself sitting next to a young woman who was a childhood friend of his daughter. This brings us to a revelation of what happened in that opening scene. In that idyllic bed a hidden menace struck; baby black widow spiders bit the baby girl. As she began to swell, there is a long ride to the hospital during which Mr. Stevens holds his daughter in his lap, a knife ready to cut into her throat if she can no longer breath. Was this the turning point that turned his daughter against him? He can’t know, only wonder and grieve.

The story turns when Nicole is asked to testify at a deposition. When she balks, Mr. Steven’s tries to manipulate her by telling her that people feel sorry for her because she’s in a wheel chair, and testifying is her chance to be angry and get revenge.

She appears ready to go along, but instead, she lies at the deposition, and there is no longer the basis of a law suit against the town or bus manufacturer.

Nicole’s reason for lying is set out by her voice over recital of the Pied Piper, in part, “One was lame and could not dance the whole of the way/and after years, if you would blame his sadness/he was used to say/it’s dull in our town since my playmates left/I can’t forget that I’m bereft/of all the pleasant sights they see/which the piper also promised me/for he led us he said/to a joyus land...where waters gushed and fruit trees grew...and everything was strange and new.”

Nicole has left behind the world she once knew. As she narrates at the end of the story, about Ian, “I wonder if you understand, that all of us, Delores, me, the children who survived, the children who didn’t, that we’re all citizens of a different town now. A place with its own special rules and its own special laws. A town of people living in the sweet hereafter.”

Unlike many films, the Sweet Hereafter does not suggest grief and loss can be resolved. It only suggests that life goes on for the grieving, and that we all grieve in our own way.

A beautiful film.

Another recent film, Last Night, uses a great device to throw its characters over the edge: it’s the end of the world; it’s happening at a clearly defined moment; no one will be spared.

Each character in the story reacts to this situation according to what’s important to them. Some simply want to gather with family like it’s a Christmas dinner and pretend all is well. Others riot. Another character arranges to have sex with every woman he’s ever had a fantasy about, including his high school English teacher. Another man spends his last hours calling people to let them know the local gas utility has appreciated their patronage.

The story’s main character, a young man, wants to die alone. The natural question, why? Fate brings him together with a young woman desperately trying to find her way home to a lover. This also naturally raises a question, why her desperation to get home if the world is ending?

He tries to help her, because helping her means he can die alone. But fate keeps bringing her back. And as the time draws near the end, we find out why he wants to die alone: the loss of his wife who taught him about love has left him bereft. He doesn’t want to go through that loss again. Then it comes out why she’s so determined to go home: she doesn’t want to die a death at the hands of a common fate; she and her lover have made a suicide pact.

She asks him if he’ll kill her. The catch is, she needs to fall in love with him to go through with her plan.

He doesn’t want to get this involved, but the story ends with the two of them facing each other, guns pointed at the head of the other. But instead of killing each other as the world ends, they do something else that acts out what each was really looking for, what each really wanted to share with someone else.

This story raises a question that has stayed with me, what would I do if the world were coming to an end in the next 24 hours? >p> A lovely film.

The Five Senses has a plot that revolves around a missing little girl. The mother of the young girl blames a masseuse whose daughter was supposed to be watching the little girl. The mother’s feelings of grief, loss and anger are deeply felt.

There are many beautiful scenes in this film, but several stand out. In one, a young man begs the masseuse for a massage. The masseuse at first refuses, then gives in. During the massage, the young man begins to cry. The only time he’s touched is when he pays for a massage. Something in his life has thrown him over the edge, outside of normal human contact, and he craves being touched.

Another character is a doctor who eavesdrops on the conversations of others in the office building. The natural question, why? It comes out that he’s going deaf and he’s trying to store as many auditory sensations as he can. After he admits his situation to someone, he’s taken to a concert and shown that he can ‘listen’ to the music by feeling its vibration on church pews. This moment allows him to feel he can survive in what to him would be the most barren of all worlds, one without sound.

In a turning point, the mother of the missing girl accepts the masseuse in her life as someone who understands how she feels. The lost girl is found, and what else is found is the relationship that had been lost between the masseuse and her teenage daughter.

This is a beautifully told story about how we perceive the world through the senses, and through the memories of our sense experiences.

* * * *

One way to discover what drives a character is to ask, what is the one thing a character would miss the most if he or her were to lose everything? What a character craves most in life might be a commitment to the truth, a loving relationship, a sense of justice. Throw that character over the edge into a world where what they value most is taken from away, and that character must react.

Another way to frame this question, what is most important to YOU, the reader, in life? Create a character who loses that, and you can explore your own feelings and thoughts to understand what drives your character to act, to gain some goal, to discover how to exist in the new world you’ve created.

* * *

The Sweet Hereafter. Writing credits, novel by Russell Banks, script, Atom Egoyan. Directed by Adam Egoyan. Released 1997.

Last Night. Written and directed by Don McKellar. Released 1998.

The Five Senses. Written and directed by Jeremy Podeswa. Released 1999.

For more of my movie reviews, visit https://www.storyispromise.com

Perceiving The Foundation of Storytelling, by Bill Johnson

When many people consider how to tell a story, they think in terms of plot and character. While these are often the most visible aspects of a story, there is an underlying foundation of principles that support a well-told story. These principles could be compared to a house foundation. Without a solid foundation, the other effects of a house -- its character and design -- cannot be fully enjoyed. In the same fashion, these principles of storytelling are also mostly out of sight, but a badly laid story foundation has effects just as damaging as a badly constructed house foundation.

While these story principles are presented in a particular order, a storyteller can come at these issues from any direction. There is no inherently right or wrong way to understand them.

1) Understanding the human need for stories.

A story is a world where every character, every action, every story element has meaning and purpose. This makes a story fundamentally different from life, which offers facts and ideas that don't necessarily have a clear meaning; events that generate emotional states that have no clear resolution; or, events engage the senses, but not in a meaningful, fulfilling way.

Real life, then, can be chaotic, or appear to lack a desirable purpose and meaning. We don't marry the love of our life...or we do, and things go terribly wrong. Or, the one we love is taken from us by a freak accident. Or, we work hard but don't get the rewards we desire. Worse, they appear to go to someone who appears to be completely undeserving of the reward and honor we have worked to attain.

So real life can be painful, unpredictable, or even wildly rewarding. But in spite of our best laid plans or efforts, we can never predict the outcome of any action or series of actions.

Most people, then, have a need for something that assigns a desirable, discernible meaning and purpose to life. This is what a story does. A story promises its audience a dramatic journey that offers resolution and fulfillment of life-like issues, events and human needs.

2) How stories meet the needs the human need for resolution and fulfillment.

Because stories promise experiences of life having meaning, a story fills a basic human need that life have purpose. All stories, then, from the simple to the complex, revolve around some issue that arises from the human need to experience that life have a discernible meaning and purpose. That allows us to experience states of love, honor, courage. Fear, doubt, revenge. To feel a part of a world, even an imaginary one. To feel the freedom to explore new worlds. Or, to experience a desirable state of the movement of the senses, intellect, or feelings to an engaging, desirable outcome. To experience insights into life we might not see on our own, or see deeply. Only when a story engages the attention of its audience via what a story is about at this deeper, foundation level does a story promise something of value to its audience.

Romeo and Juliet, as an example, is a story not about its title characters, but about the power of love. When readers enter its world, they are led to experience something deep and potent and dramatically satisfying about love. This makes the story Romeo and Juliet totally unlike a life-like, factual telling of the courtship and deaths of Romeo and Juliet. To be told that two teenagers committed suicide because their families kept them apart, and to go over the true, factual events that led up to their deaths, is not the same as to create a story around those same events. The story Romeo and Juliet uses the deaths of Romeo and Juliet to create a deeply felt, fulfilling story about the power of great love.

4) Perceiving how a well-written story is true to its purpose.

While a story premise sets out the overall scope of a story's world, every element within that world must be true to it. To visualize this, consider a race with several runners. It has a beginning, middle and end. The varied actions of the different runners makes the action of the race from its start to finish -- its movement to resolution -- visible and concrete. So far, the same could be said of a factual accounting of the race.

In a story, however, the events of the race and its outcome are arranged by the storyteller to create a particular state of fulfillment for the story's audience, in the same way Romeo and Juliet is shaped so readers can experience a deep sense of the nature of love. So the storyteller understands the why a race matters enough that an audience internalizes its movement to resolution. To be story-like in its movement, then, the outcome of a race would revolve around the nature of courage, or faith and determination defeating overwhelming odds, heroism, victory achieved even in defeat, hard work its own reward, some issue of human need being acted out to fulfillment.

When a story's movement -- on this deeper foundation level -- comes across as unclear, a story's audience can struggle to internalize and assign meaning to the actions of the story's characters and its plot. Such characters and plot events can appear to be life-like, i.e., unclear and unfocused, and not story-like, i.e., acted with meaning and purpose. The result of faulty movement is that the story's audience turns aside. Even when the members of an audience can't consciously identify why a story feels false, false movement jars them out of a state of being able to internalize a story's movement. This is comparable to out-of-tune notes in a song detracting from the experience of listening to the song (unless the out-of-tune notes serve some purpose that satisfies the song's audience).

In the case of Romeo and Juliet, the story is true to its movement because every action and expression of Romeo and Juliet moves this story about the nature of love toward its fulfillment. They become the embodiments of the story. But it is what the story itself is about that gives birth to these characters and assigns meaning to their actions.

5) Perceiving how story elements are arranged in a particular way.

A storyteller arranges the elements of a story to create the effect of dramatic movement toward the fulfillment a story promises its audience. Referring again to Romeo and Juliet, this is a story about the nature of love, but its opening scenes play out the hatred of the Capulets and the Montagues via a confrontation on a street in Verona.

Because Romeo and Juliet is about the nature of love proving itself, it is clear what kind of action generates opposition to that: Hate. In Romeo and Juliet, then, the story starts out by demonstrating the hatred of the Montagues and Capulets, because that shows the depth of hatred the power of love must overcome to prove itself. So the story, in its arrangement of its elements, immediately sets out what's at stake in the story; what is at stake for the story's characters, AND, by extension, its audience; and what love must overcome to fulfill the story.

Again, keep in mind that the opening lines of the story refer to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, so the story's drama is not over the outcome of its plot, but in the arrangement of its dramatic elements in a way that creates a powerful experience of the nature of love for its audience.

Because a story's arrangement of its elements also creates questions about the outcome of events and character issues, a story generates a continuous pull on the attention and interest of its audience.

10) The Craft of Storytelling.

Part of the craft of being a storyteller means learning to create images with words. That requires a willingness to learn the craft of language, how to use words to create metaphors, evocative descriptions of scenery, strong dialogue, just as being a qualified carpenter or mechanic means a mastery in the use of the tools of that trade. The storyteller must have a mastery of words, or be willing to study and master that craft.

11) Technical knowledge.

To set a story on a ship, one must have some knowledge of ships. To set a story on an airplane, one must have some knowledge of planes.

This is not a call that to set a scene on a ship one must be a ship's captain, but the writer must be clear about what they describe. Otherwise, by lying to the reader in some detail, they give readers a reason to set aside their stories, to question whether the storyteller understands how to fulfill a story's promise in a way that rings true.

12) The desire to be a storyteller.

In the main, one does not become a storyteller out of a desire for wealth, or fame, or prestige, although some do...and a few even succeed for those reasons. People more often write stories because they feel moved to do so. A storyteller's first audience is themselves. The trap for many inexperienced writers is mistaking their feelings about their stories for the craft of writing stories that evoke potent experiences of fulfillment for their audiences.

13) Understanding the role of characters in a story.

Characters in a story operate to make a story's movement visible and concrete. But a storyteller needs to make the subtle distinction between what a story is about on a deeper, foundation level, from what's at stake for its characters.

In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is hot blooded and impulsive. He will not be denied the woman he loves...even if death is an obstacle that must be overcome. So Romeo is a character of great strength of will. All characters in well told stories must have this strength of purpose. Whether the issue is love, greed, revenge, compassion, hate, jealousy, characters must be willing to confront and overcome whatever obstacles the story places in their path. Weak characters often fail to offer readers/viewers a reason to internalize their actions because their actions fail to generate a quality of movement. No movement, no drama. No drama, no fulfillment. No fulfillment, no audience.

14) Perceiving how a plot operates to make a story's movement concrete and dramatic.

This issue -- understanding what a plot is -- is easily the most misunderstood in writing.

The purpose of a plot is to make visible and concrete the dramatic movement of a story. A plot serves to make the movement of a story dramatic and potent by taking character concerns and intertwining them with what's at stake in the story itself, then compelling characters to act to resolve what's at stake in the story while plot-generated events block their actions. As characters face increasing obstacles, they must strive with greater purpose to shape the outcome of a story. This generates the effect of a story's plot, a heightening of a story's movement to fulfillment.

To illustrate, consider the novel The Hunt For Red October. On the surface, this story might appear to be a plot driven thriller about a Lithuanian-descended commander of a Russian nuclear submarine attempting to flee to America and freedom. But on a story level, this story is about a clash between freedom and authoritarianism. Because many people desire to experience that state where the values of freedom win out over oppression -- which many times doesn't happen in real life -- the story's audience readily internalizes this story's movement. Because the story, in its every action, proves that freedom can, indeed, overcome oppression, it drew in readers and rewarded their interest.

To describe a story's plot is not the same as describing what a story is about on its foundation level, but to understand a story's movement is to see what gives rise to a story's plot.

To conclude...

A storyteller should to be able to perceive what a story is about at its deepest level, and how to move that to a resolution that offers fulfillment to a story's audience. Understand what about the movement of a story engages the interest, the needs of an audience. Such a writer can better perceive how characters, plot devices and POV work to create a dramatic movement of a story toward its fulfillment. How every element of a story works together in its characters, plot, environment and ideas to make vivid and potent a story's world.

That's why I say that at its heart, a story must have an issue at stake that is of consequence to the story's audience. Something the members of the audience will desire to experience in a state of resolution and fulfillment. Love. Courage. Redemption. Renewal. Some issue that revolves around the aching need of humans to feel they matter, that they have a place in the world.

Even though I assign character, plot and point of view as the last of these principles, it is not to suggest that most writers don't come to a story through some insight or interest in a character, scene, or plot. Some issue that pulls at them. That won't let them sleep at night. But the underlying issue I've sought to explore and illuminate here is the why an audience desires stories, the how a story meets those needs of its audience. From that foundation of understanding, a writer can more easily perceive how words create vivid, potent images that move audiences.

The ideas expressed in this essay are developed more comprehensively in my workbook, A Story is a Promise , available on Amazon and Draft2Digital. Each chapter of the workbook concludes with a series of questions designed to help writers integrate this story as promise concept of thinking about stories. Each class is designed to take students from a story idea, through creating a potent, dynamic plot, to deep into the nitty-gritty of writing evocative, potent sentences and visual images.

For more of my essays about storytelling, visit https://www.storyispromise.com

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Power of Ambiguity

For an audience to get involved with a play and how and why its characters act to shape its course and outcome, what a play is about generally needs to be accessible. Even in a play like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which revolves around ambiguity. This review explores how the ambiguity of the story happens within the context of some very concrete plot questions that allow viewers to track the course and outcome of the story.

The title of the play suggests an academic setting; the question, who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, applies to academics who've made a career out of teasing new meaning from Woolf's work, and, conversely, those in academia who have failed to find new meaning and faced a grave loss of face and stature.

While from the outside academia can be viewed as genteel, for those who've been involved in the politics of being a tenured professor, academia can be a brutal life of publish or perish, with collecting students in large classes taught by TA's a necessary evil to justify a budget, space, control, authority, stature, etc. In an environment where people have to establish their credentials through intellectual or pseudo-intellectual means or accomplishments, even holding one's ground can require great effort. When people have to fight to establish themselves, or maintain their rank and status, or advance in status, there can be great drama and tension.

One goal of a storyteller is to understand the tensions and conflicts and desires that can bubble beneath the surface in characters, and then create the environments and situations where these public persona are stripped aside to reveal what is true. This process is what makes a story different than life, where events and people are diffuse, or situations have outcomes but they aren't what someone wanted or expected.

This dynamic appears in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as the persona of the characters are stripped away. While the ‘game' the main characters play is ambiguous, the process of creating a situation that gets to a deeper truth about the characters in the play is not.

The three acts of the play are titles Fun and Games, Walpurgisnacht (a European holiday on a night when witches gathered to celebrate), and The Exorcism. These act titles give a road map to the path the play takes.

The play opens with George and Martha returning home from a college party at 2 a.m. He wants her to be quiet, but she insists he name the title of a movie based on a line of dialog. This sets out a central feature of the relationship between this couple, game-playing that becomes biting when Martha says of George, "Don't you know anything?" Status in this relationship is conferred by 'winning' these challenges. But Martha's taunt does raise the question, why does George subject himself to this wife? What status does he get from being with Martha?

George, who is younger than Martha, does get in a cutting return to her taunt, "Well, that [movie] was probably before my time."

These characters know how to hurt each other and aren't afraid to lash out punishment. If this is fun and games, one can only imagine what real cruelty would be. And the play answers that question.

When George refuses to play because he's tired, Martha retaliates that since he's not really doing anything (in his life or at the college), he has no reason to be tired. George fires back about Martha's father, president of the college, and his Saturday night parties, with Martha "braying" at everyone, which zings Martha. This brisk dialog is working in the background details of these two people. This exchange sets out why George is with Martha, his status as a college professor is due, in part, to being married to the college president's daughter, which makes George dependent on Martha for his status.

Martha reveals to the surprised George that they have guests arriving shortly. The guests will turn up at 2 a.m. because of Martha's status as the daughter of the college President. Their arrival will turn what would have been a typical Saturday night of low-key quarreling between Martha and George into something more explosive. There will be an audience for the games George and Martha play, and thus more at stake in terms of who George and Martha are. They'll both want to win this new game.

When George protests guests coming over at 2 a.m, Martha wins this argument by saying that her father asked her to be nice to the new math professor. Martha wins this round, and it reveals something about Martha's hold over George, that keeps his job because of her. When one person is dependent on another for a job of livelihood, there can be tremendous feelings of anger over the dependency. This raises the question, will Martha be able to use this power to win any game she and George play this night? What would George have to do to win? The set up for this plot question for the story is clear and unambiguous.

As the bickering continues, Martha says, "I swear...if you existed, I'd divorce you..." This comment about whether George exists or not foreshadows the game coming up. It's also a way to undercut the status of another person. For example, the way servants can be treated as if they don't exist; or the way African-Americans were often treated in the United States before the Civil Rights movement; or the lack of status held by women in many places in the world. Clashes around status are powerful tools in storytelling.

When the doorbell finally rings announcing the impending arrival of the guests, who will answer the door turns into another verbal brawl. There can be drama about the outcome of any moment in a story. Plays fail when the moments of a story lack dramatic shape.

George is forced to open the door, which is a reflection of his status, but he does so in a way that reveals something unpleasant about Martha to the guests. Score one for George.

One of the new guests is named Honey, and she giggles a lot and says inane things. In a few words, Albee gets across her dramatic truth and her status in life. Nick, her husband, comes across as guarded. As the new professor on campus with Martha's father the president of the college, he has the most to lose if anything goes wrong at this private party and the most to gain in terms of status if he plays his cards right.

George and Martha use their dialog with their guests to continue jousting.

When Martha and Honey leave the room, George starts in with the verbal games with Nick, who turns out to be no fun at all; he's fussy and literal. Nick is a contrast to George, or perhaps a younger version of George before marriage to Martha and a life of servitude.

To keep Nick from fleeing, George turns down the verbal jousting and reveals more about himself, that he's in the history department, but not the history department (a distinction in status). Marriage to Martha has not gotten him to the top of his particular academic heap.

When Nick asks if George and Martha have children, George responds, "That's for me to know and you to find out," foreshadowing the duel at the heart of the play.

When Honey returns and lets it out that Martha is upstairs changing into something more ‘comfortable,' George's reaction suggests her action is taking the evening into an ominous place. Honey confirms that with the announcement to George that she didn't know that he and Martha have a son, which cues George to what a deadly evening this will be.

This is where the ambiguity of the place is fully in place. Do George and Martha have a son, or an imaginary son they've created to use in their verbal jousting? I found the meaning comes down on the side of the son being imaginary, but the play could be played as if the son really existed. But the real issue between George and Martha is over who's the dominant one in this relationship. Martha has, up to this night, won that issue with the trump card of her father being the president of a college. The verbal jousting up until now has been pointed and barbed, but it's soon to go deeper and begin to strip away the facades the characters maintain.

Then Martha returns more...comfortable, Nick is obviously aroused. This raises the question, who will seduce who tonight?

Within a few pages, Nick and Martha are doing a seduction dance within the sub text of their dialog.

Martha then relates a story about hitting George while he was supposed to be training at boxing, and somehow that bollixed his life. As Martha says, "I think it's what colored our whole life. Really I do! It's an excuse, anyway."

As Martha finishes, George appears with a shotgun that he aims at her head. As Nick and Honey verge on hysteria, it turns out to be a toy shotgun, but it gets across the underlying point about George's feelings.

As Honey continues to drink, she keeps bringing the conversation back to George and Martha's son. Martha escalates to relating her expectation that George would become head of the history department, but he didn't make it beyond being a lowly professor, a loss in status for both of them.

The act ends with everyone drunkenly singing, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Martha has opened George's wound in public.

What will he do about it?

To get that answer, the audience has to attend Act Two.

Act Two – Walpurgisnacht

This act opens with Nick and George, with Nick unhappy about the previous scene, and, according to him, George and Martha going at it like "animals."

This act brings the play back to a quiet intensity as George relates a story about a friend who accidentally killed his mother, than his father, then ended up in an asylum. Is this a story? A commentary on George's life? It's ambiguous.

What comes out is that Nick's marriage happened under false pretenses (a hysterical pregnancy) and he's struggling to stay non-involved with George's and Marsha's style of fighting.

Then after a jibe by George it comes out that Nick married Honey for her father's money. Nick's facade is being stripped away, partly by alcohol, partly by the corrosive environment, partly because it was never that far from the surface.

This is what a good story does; it gets to the truth of its characters.

George now considers whether Nick is starting to tell him stories about his life as an attempt to play George's and Martha's game, and whether the stories are true. How would George know? How would the audience know? This idea of ambiguity is seeping into things other than George's and Martha's marriage.

Nick sets out how he'll insinuate himself into the college, bed a few wives and groom the right contacts. He seems to be playing along with George, unaware that there's some real truth about himself here as George suggests Martha could be one of the wives he mounts like a dog.

When Martha and Honey return, George and Martha get into another escalating fight about their ‘son,' this time with George accusing Martha of drunkenly coming on to the boy.

It comes out that George wrote a book about a young man who killed his father and mother and Martha's father wouldn't allow it to be published. Is this a story? George reacts strongly to the story, but what does that mean? Is it a true story, as Martha alleges?

Goaded by Martha, George tries to strangle her. But, again, is his anger real? Or just another game?

Then George suggests it was all a game, and for Nick, another game could be Hump the Hostess. But instead the new game is Get the Guests, and to start it out, George says he wrote a second novel, and the characters are clearly Nick and Honey.

George's novel exposes Nick as vain, weak and nasty. Nick tells George he's going to get him for this. What this 'getting' will be, the audience must wait for the answer.

When Martha protests that George has gone too far, it comes out that from Martha's point of view, she's been whipping George for 23 years to get him to acknowledge that he married Martha exactly because she would emasculate him and give him an excuse to be a failure in life. Martha's answer to George's game, "I'm going to finish you." The tension in the story has just gone up another notch, not because of the ambiguity of the game playing, but because of how straight-forward and on-stage this battle is between George and Martha.

George, "I warned you not to go too far."

Martha, "I'm just beginning."

George accuses Martha of living in a fantasy world, and George intends to have her committed. True? Another feint in their battle for supremacy?

Then, George, "Total war?"

Martha, "Total."

The final gauntlet has been thrown.

At that moment, Nick re-enters the room.

When Martha taunts George that she's entertaining a guest by necking with Nick, George encourages her to continue while he reads a book. It's clear that Martha isn't quite sure what to make of this. That by his own reaction George has changed the rules of the game. Some of the insults about George being a failure aren't having the usual effect.

Martha goes off to join Nick in the kitchen and George is joined by a dreaming Honey. Speaking to Honey, George comes to the realization that Honey is taking birth control pills to ensure she won't get pregnant.

Honey keeps talking about hearing bells in lieu of hearing her husband having sex with Martha in the kitchen, and that triggers a thought in George. That it was a call telling him that his imaginary son is dead, a new wrinkle in the game.

The act ends with George, laughing and crying, rehearsing how he'll tell Martha their son is dead.

How will Martha react?

Will this be the end of the George and Martha as a couple if George's gambit means he's beaten Martha at her own game? That he's finally achieved a higher status?

To find out, the audience needs to return for the final act.

Exorcism.

Act Three – Exorcism

Act Three begins with Martha making her appearance in the deserted living room.

When Nick shows up, Martha is sure to let him know he has dandy potential, but at the necessary moment he's been a flop, which sets off the masculine Nick.

Martha reveals to Nick that George does make her happy with his ability to keep up with her games. But the audience knows this lull cannot last. One aspect of good storytelling is the audience knowing more than a character about what's going to happen next. The audience knows what George intends to spring on Martha.

As George banters with Nick and Martha he says, "Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference?" This line restates what's been going on all night.

Sending Nick out to get Honey, George announces, "One more game."

George goads a tired Martha into playing the final game. S she joins him in reciting the details of the son's birth.

Martha wants to end the game with the son going off to college, but George will not stop. He begins to speak the truth about the relationship between Martha and her father, that her father can't stand her, that she needed a son to use as a weapon against her father. This is cutting Martha to the quick in the same way she's been cutting at George all their married life. He is stripping away the facade of her life, that she has power because of her father, but it's only an illusion of power because her father hates her, just as Honey and Nick have the illusion of a marriage more frail then George and Martha because they've both accepted their artificial persona as a means to stay together in some kind of peace.

Martha wants to stop, but George continues on to relate the telegram about the death of their son that afternoon. George continues to goad Martha about this until she spits in his face.

Then, as Martha realizes that George has won the game, "It will be dawn soon. I think the party's over."

Nick and Honey finally leave.

Martha realizes it will be just her and George now, without a son.

The play ends with George chanting, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

And Martha's reply, "I...am...George. I...am...."

Final Thoughts

This play demonstrates the power and intensity and drama that can be unleashed when the persona people have created are exposed. While ambiguity drives the action in the second half of the play, the set up for the story began with the question, on this night who would win the games played by George and Martha? Setting up a simple question and moving dramatically toward an answer gives a story meaning and purpose while deeper issues can be explored, the life of academia, the rise of science as a means to understand the future of culture and society, marriage in the early 60's stripped of niceties.

While Nick and Honey will probably slip back behind their facades and nurse their grudges and irritations and fantasies, something happened between George and Martha, something shifted in their relationship. Will they continue together as a couple, or was this just another night of fun and games?.

Great storytelling is about getting to the deeper truths of a story's characters, and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf shows how it can be done.

To read more essays about plays, movies, and novels, visit Essays on the Craft of Dramatic Writing.