Writing, Arts & Entertainment

Rules of Story

Lesson time 08:07 min

The rules of great drama aren't new. Here, Aaron explains how most of them were laid out more than 2,000 years ago by Aristotle in his Poetics, and how to use those lessons to become a diagnostician for your own story ideas.

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Topics include: Rules of a story • Aristotle's Poetics • Becoming a diagnostician

Aaron Sorkin

Teaches Screenwriting

Aaron Sorkin teaches you the craft of film and television screenwriting.

Preview

The best way you're going to learn about screenwriting, about writing for television, about writing plays, is by watching movies, watching television, watching plays. And mostly, reading screenplays, reading teleplays, reading plays. Pick your favorite movies. Pick your favorite five movies. Find the screenplays for those movies. Sit and watch the movie with the screenplay on your lap. See exactly how what's there on the screen, what it looked like when it was on the page. People who love cars, they take apart cars. They started by opening the hood of a car, getting underneath a car, and just taking everything apart and laying it on the floor. Do that. People who are super into computers, they all have one thing in common. When they were 9 years old, they built a computer or took one apart. They took their parents' computer apart and laid it on the floor. There are some people who have never taken a music lesson, can't read music, and they sit down in front of a piano, and they just get it, and they can play. I'm sure that there are people who can sit down and understand what a story is without ever having been told what a story is. I wasn't, but I learned the rules of story first by I went to college and got a BFA in theater. You know, it was an academic approach to drama, which is learning Aristotle, learning the parts of drama, theater history, reading a lot of plays, and talking about, OK, there was the exposition. Here's the inciting action. Here's the action, reversal, climax, and denouement. [MUSIC PLAYING] There is a tendency to think that art is finally the place where there are no rules, where you have complete freedom. And I'm going to sit down at the keyboard, and it's just going to flow out of me onto the paper, and it's going to be pure art. No. What you're describing is finger painting there. Rules are what makes art beautiful. Rules are what makes sports beautiful. Most popular sport in world, soccer. If you were allowed to pick up the ball, run into the stands, run down to the other end of the field, shoot the goalkeeper in the head, and toss the ball in the net, it wouldn't be a very interesting game. It's the rules that make it beautiful. Think about the rules to baseball. Abner Doubleday was a freaking genius. You know, that's a great game. Football is a great game. It's the rules that make sports beautiful, and it's the rules that make art, not finger painting. Think about music and all the rules that music has. Anyone who studied music for a year or two when they were in elementary school, anyone who picked up a flute or a trumpet, knows that at the beginning of every piece of music, there's a time signature and a key signature. If you're in 4/4 time, it means there are four beats in a measure and a quarter note gets one beat. There can't be five beats in a measure. There can't b...

About the Instructor

Aaron Sorkin wrote his first movie on cocktail napkins. Those napkins turned into A Few Good Men, starring Jack Nicholson. Now, the Academy Award-winning writer of The West Wing and The Social Network is teaching screenwriting. In this class, you’ll learn his rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell. By the end, you’ll write screenplays that capture your audience’s attention.

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Aaron Sorkin

Aaron Sorkin teaches you the craft of film and television screenwriting.

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