A Story is a Promise Blog

The End of Oak Street - The Dinos Are Back The set up for the film is a suburban community is transplanted to a time of dinosaurs. Instant, fun chaos as folks realize the situation they are in and react. The film opens with a family in crisis, a wife planning on divorcing her husband, a husband who works nights as a pizza delivery guy, a son and daughter, a family dog. This type of movie generates some quick questions: will everyone survive? Can they return home to the present? The family dog disappearing and then reappearing sets the middle section of the plot in motion. The son goes off in search of the dog, the sister in search of her brother, the husband and wife in search of their children. I harbored a hesitation about this, but let myself enjoy the encounters with dinosaurs. Eventually, the family reunites and rebonds, the fulfillment of the film. Dinosaurs in a suburban community gave the movie a fresh feel. Recommended to dino lovers. I do capsule reviews of movies ...

https://astoryisapromise.blogspot.351c2818304045c2a953facefbf0c66d.txt Many stories are a journey of feeling for a story's audience. As characters overcome or pass through various obstacles to get what they want, they pass through stages of feeling, and readers who identify with these characters or become invested in what happens to them, share these feelings. This makes a story different than real life, where some people struggle to access their true feelings, feel a need to take drugs to mute or control their feelings, or feel unable to express or experience feelings. Some writers struggle with writing about feelings because they tend to be thoughtful and reflective, waiting until after an experience to process their feelings. Writers who deal with their feelings with detached reflection tend to create story characters who deal with their feelings with detached reflection, often off-stage and out of sight of a story's audience. The story's audience gets a...

Beginning a story in an active voice is a crucial aspect of storytelling. Creating a story premise can be a great help toward accomplishing that goal. A story premise sets out a story's core dramatic issue , the movement of that issue toward resolution, and the fulfillment that resolution sets up for the story's audience. Dramatic Issue A story's core dramatic issue is the issue at the heart of a story's promise. Dramatic issues or ideas revolve around human needs. The need to be loved. To have control of one's fate. To feel needed. To be able to overcome obstacles. To be able to grow and heal from life's wounds. To understand and make sense of the events of life. To experience life in a deeply-felt way. The important point is that storytellers be able to name the dramatic issue at the heart of the stories they are telling. If perceiving a story's core dramatic issue is difficult fo...

A fundamental principle for a popular Hollywood film is that it asks the audience to care, typically about a main character. Disclosure Day starts by introducing us to a young man involved in tech who has stolen some data storage devices from a powerful organization. He manages to escape with a young woman. We’re given no reason to care. She had studied to be a nun, but that feels more like a plot device when she discovers what the young man is trying to reveal to the world. When we meet Emily Blount’s character, she's the live wire that runs through the film. She wants to be more than a local weather girl in a backwater TV market. I call this a dramatic truth. We meet her, we learn her dramatic truth. I’ve been posting about this since I put up a website in 1995. My writing disclosure day, so to speak. This explains the mixed reviews for Disclosure Day. We eventually learn a dramatic truth for the young man, and even deeper into the film, the ‘Bad’ guy. For anyone wh...

James Merriot has a shiny new space engines certification, a mountain of self-doubt, and exactly zero job offers. Desperate for work, James swallows his anxiety and takes a leap of faith, applying for a position in a remote, tiny mining village hidden deep in the asteroid belt. He expected to fix heavy machinery and hide from the world. He didn't expect the station's beautiful manager to steal his heart the moment he arrived. He gets the job, but James quickly realizes this station is nothing like he imagined. Here, mining isn't done with massive drills, but with a unique herd of mechanical animals that ingest and smelt the ore. As the new mechanic, James is thrust into the role of lead caretaker for the robotic pack. Between wrestling with his own insecurities and keeping the mechanical sheep, cows, and bulls running, James has his hands full. His quiet life gets beautifully complicated when his feelings for his gorgeous boss deepen—just as her wonderfully eccentri...

One aspect of a well told story is to evoke an environment; what it feels like to be in it. Paul Hollis' novel, Loose Ends , from his Hollow Man series, offers some wonderful examples in its first chapter. A note in passing, even the title, Loose Ends , conveys something about the story and plot. Both a character and a situation can be at loose ends. Opening line... "Life goes on," he said, "even when you don't want it to." This conveys something about the main character's state as the story begins. Continuing... 'The words hung in the air, heavy with resignation, as if he uttered them not for comfort but to confirm some unwavering truth. Outside, he knew the world would press forward with its usual indifference; down in the street bus brakes screeched, car horns blared, and pedestrians and pedestrians weaved through crowds of living ghosts as the world moved on with us or without us.' Note how clearly this evokes this place bu...

I recently viewed the film Obsession and found it thoughtful and intelligent in the vein of Good Dog, Broken Bird, and, going back, Companion. These films all have strong, visual stories and thoughtful storytelling and ideas. They are about something. In Obsession, an emotionally stunted young man treated by psych meds turns out to be practicing how to tell a young woman he works with that he has feelings for her. Later, she even invites him to tell her how he feels, but he can't. In a curio shop, he finds the One Wish Willow and asks that his friend be in love with him. His wish is granted. The first few days are glorious, but then she creates a shrine with the body of his recently dead cat that passed from an overdose of his spilled psych meds. The film slowly develops what it's like for the young man to be with someone who is obsessed with him. Until the ending, when he understands he can only escape her obsession through his death or hers. The utter horror...