Arts & Entertainment, Writing
Plot
Lesson time 16:13 min
Plot is paramount. Become familiar with the essential ingredients of a plot like the precipitating event and the second-act problem. Learn how to find the plot hiding behind your scenes.
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Topics include: Precipitating Events • Second-Act Problems • Finding the Plot
Teaches Dramatic Writing
The Pulitzer Prize winner teaches you everything he's learned across 26 video lessons on dramatic writing.
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Plot is all that there is. That's all that there is. As I say the perfect example is the joke. There's nothing in the joke that does not tend toward the punchline. Anything in the joke that does not tend toward the punchline kills the joke. And if you talk to comedy writers in LA, they have a saying among themselves. What do you do all week long? I'm in there shaving syllables. They're taking out extra syllables. I wanted to tell a joke, but all the jokes I know are filthy. So I got to think if I can come up with a joke that's either clean enough to tell without breaking the camera, or insufficiently Jewish so that it might redound to the benefit of a wider audience. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock. This is me thinking. A guy is marooned on a desert island with, let us say, Jessica Chastain. And they're there for months, and months, a guy and Jessica Chastain. They become very good friends. They know they're going to be there for years. They become intimate. After a while, he gets up one morning, he says, Jessica, would you do me a favor? He said, would you put on my clothes? So she says, OK. He says, I'm going to take a little bit of burnt cork from the fire, and kind of stipple in a beard on you. Would you do that? She says, yeah sure. He says, would you mind walking down the beach with me? So they're walking down the beach, and he says, at one point, they're walking, and he says, I'm sleeping with Jessica Chastain. So, everything in the joke tends toward the punchline. It's a guy, that's all we have to know. A banker, a football player, a movie-- it doesn't make any difference. A desert island, we get it. It's a desert island. They're there for a long time. We get it. We can put in-- as an amateur would, he brings her a rose and she then-- who cares? Everything tends toward the punchline. That's what a plot is. If it doesn't tend toward the punch line, take it out. There are a lot of plays that have a title of a present participle. Being, going, achieving, feeling, blah, blah, blah. Present participle is an ongoing action. Something-- that makes a terrible play. Except for being there, it's a dead giveaway that you're looking at something that hasn't quite fought enough. A play has to have a precipitating event before which the play didn't exist. And the precipitating event has to inspire the hero on a goal, a journey, that has a specific end. At the end of which, the question which is raised at the beginning, is answered. Either in the positive or the negative. So Aristotle says-- Oedipus says, I'm going to find out the cause of the plague on Thebes. He becomes King, that's the precipitating event. I want to find out the cause of the plague on Thebes. At the end he finds out he's the cause. The play's over. We've stated a proposi...
About the Instructor
David Mamet sat in on a poker game full of thieves and left with the inspiration for American Buffalo. Now, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of Glengarry Glen Ross takes you through his process for turning life’s strangest moments into dramatic art. In his writing class, he’ll teach you the rules of drama, the nuances of dialogue, and the skills to develop your own voice and create your masterpiece.
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David Mamet
The Pulitzer Prize winner teaches you everything he's learned across 26 video lessons on dramatic writing.
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