A Story is a Promise Blog

As I was driving a friend to watch this movie, I heard an AI on my cell phone creating a response to a text or phone message. I'd never had that happen before, although I've had an AI offer to respond to a friend on Facebook Messenger. Returning to the movie, the film is well made, about a journalist and an employee of Facebook creating a series of articles for the Wall Street Journal about how Facebook was allowing false information to radicalize part of the U.S. population. The goal was to keep a subset of Facebook users connected several hours a day. Powerful storytelling and acting. Well made film. It just felt out of date. If this movie had come out a year ago, before AI and data centers and life on the cusp of a major change, it would have had a stronger impact. I wondered if there could have been some kind of epilogue about AIs being integrated into Facebook, but also if AIs like Claude and Chatgpt might draw users away from current social media. I also wond...

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...

The unconscious is where we store memories. To help compact this storage of a huge volume of memories, feelings are shorn from each memory. Scientists have discovered that when people retrieve memories, they can be guided to attach different feelings to them than those that were originally experienced. The unconscious is also where fixed ideas about who we are and what we think about our place and role in the world are embedded. Think of ideas buried there broadcasting a message, like a radio transmitter. 24/7. You might think of yourself worthy, but buried in your unconscious could be the message that you are not. Or any powerful message that drives your conscious feelings and awareness. The conscious mind is, in most people, consumed by measuring and weighing things. Our relationships, our standing compared to others, how we judge and measure ourselves compared to others. In most people, a significant part of the conscious mind is engrossed in these issues. Narrative tension...

The power of a story is in the intensity of its scenes. Each scene should be a complete experience unto itself, something readers can immerse themselves into. In a powerful scene, readers can surrender themselves to the story. They can let the situation take care of them. But this requires not a dry description of events, but an unexpected revelation of feelings and illuminations of ideas and understanding. To write an intense scene, write it as an evocation of what an environment feels like to character, what a character feels in reaction to events. To do this, feel your way into a story, into a scene, into a moment in a scene. Many writers enter a scene from their head, a conceptualizing of details, what's going to happen next. It's a map of a journey, an outline, if you will, but not the journey itself. For many, once they start down this path of understanding their story by conceptualizing where it's going next, they can't stop drawing that map. To liv...

The set up for this film is a young girl is traumatized when her family's car goes off a mountain road and she spends days alone with the bodies. Later in life, she becomes a mortuary assistant to recreate the family she lost. This is horror like Hitchcock's Psycho, or a story by Poe. It's a true descent into madness. The film making is striking and beautiful, the main actress a marvel, and I appreciated seeing it on a large screen. I suspect the film will find a wider and appreciative audience when it's available on streaming. It might even be considered a cult classic some day. The film is a singular vision, but not for everyone. I offer capsule movie reviews on my website at https://www.storyispromise.com/quikcuts.html . The reviews are meant to offer a glimpse into the mechanics of a film and what it did to satisfy - or not - an audience. To follow Bill on Substack, visit https://storyispromise.substack.com .

I've rebuilt my writing website, Essays on the Craft of Dramatic Writing! | A Story is a Promise with the help of Claude, at https://www.storyispromise.com . It was a long process that started with some simple fixes and became more complex and detailed. I really needed the help to navigate the Google Search Console , to interpret messages and to figure out problems, like a word processing program that used curved apostrophes that didn't work with the Console. My original site went up in 1995 when people thought you were talking about spiders when you mentioned the web. Those were the salad days of my site, reaching a hundred visitors a day. Ah, youth. My latest post of the website is Storytelling and the Superconscious Mind It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with so many talented writers over the years. Blessings on your journeys. Bill Johnson

Buddha in the Garden is a charming and delightful book about how someone seeking to live by the tenets of the Buddha can manage a garden. The author moved from creating an organic garden in the lush Willamette Valley, with abundant rainfall and fertile earth, to a place in Arizona where limited rainfall and scarcity of nutrients made a garden a target for insects and animals. To protect a garden in such an arid climate, how is the concept of no killing resolved? Or can it be? By looking at each pest and guest with a calm mind, the author developed a deeper appreciation of how to avoid just being reactive. Right View leads her to Right Action. To replace a 'Fix it Now!' mentality with a calm 'how does this action reflect the wheel of life?' guides her to a deeper understanding that the order of life and death also leads to renewal and rebirth. Her individual chapters on dealing with specific guests and pests ranges from the deeply insightful to the playfully ...

I found reading Al Handa's story about his experience of being homeless to be thoughtful and observant about the different kinds of people who experience that life. In the title of his work, 'Becoming A Face' has a specific meaning. Al lived in his car with his companion, Ivy, a small dog. Becoming a face meant law enforcement recognizing that Al was homeless and living in his car. So anytime there was a problem or a complaint about the homeless, that could make Al a target. In Al's situation, he put in the effort so his car did not obviously appear to be lived in. He kept things in a trunk, and brought out items as needed. Having Ivy as a companion also served a purpose. Ivy's senses meant he could alert Al to a problem before Al was aware. I've often wondered why so many homeless have a dog as a companion. Al answers that question. In the community Al lived in, he realized different people were taking care of each other's dogs when someone had an...

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. E...

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/ Discover the Hidden Maps of Your Spiritual Anatomy Have you ever felt a sudden, light buzz in your for...

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 fat...

I'd mentioned a band of energy around my skull and a friend asked for a fuller explanation. This explanation comes from my years of experiencing my energy body and what I did to effect changes to it. I was born with this awareness. I didn't know until my early twenties that others didn't share this experience. When you see Christian paintings with halos, the halos are symbolic of a band of energy that goes around the crown of the skull. Think of the spine as a 220 volt current, and the body 110. In the arms and legs you have a strong lines of current. Same for chest and back. The restrictions in the flow of energy in the body are a reflection of and embodiments of the patterns of thought on the mental landscape. The muscles tend to hold those restrictions, so when I did the bellows breathing, the muscles in my arm would spasm as that restricted flow opened up. Took a year of doing bellows breath 3 to 4 hours a day to open the various restrictions in energy flow ar...

The outsider is an enduring character type in fiction, TV series, and movies. There are many reasons for this. When an outsider arrives in a new environment, he or she upsets the current status quo. This naturally generates dramatic questions. What will be the outcome of this upset? Will the outsider replace a current leader? Change the direction of a group? Another form of this character type is someone within a group who changes. An example of this is S. E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders . The POV character is Ponyboy. He's a Greaser. Wears his hair long, carries a switch blade, and fights in rumbles with his gang against others, mainly SOCs, pronounced SOSHes. He's also a high school freshman who gets straight As. His family is a brother named Soda who has already dropped out of high school, and an older brother, Darry, who at 20 works two jobs to support his brothers after the death of their parents. Darry also yells at Ponyboy a great deal out of concern ...

A cornerstone of the a story is a promise concept is that a story creates movement and the movement transports an audience. Simply put, if a story isn't going somewhere from its opening lines, it fails to create the effect of a story. Plot often operates to set a story into motion around a central question and sub questions. Each chapter in a novel can be a clearly defined step along a plot line. It's a concrete way of understanding the ground a story is covering. A beginning of a novel also needs to set a story in motion. This can be subtle or obvious, but it needs to be done to convey meaning to the action. You resolve a plot, you fulfill a story's promise. In The Queen's Gambit , eight year old Beth's parents die in a car accident and she ends up in an orphanage. To keep the children docile, they are given tranquilizers. Beth is afraid and alone. She hides one tranquilizer a day to help her sleep at night. Noises at night were setting her mind racing. T...