Good drama is surprising and inevitable

An interview with playwright David Mamet in the Weekend FT has a useful discussion on the challenges of compelling writing:

I take the opportunity of having this master craftsman in front of me to ask about writing. He commences by defining where others go wrong. “Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It’s hard to write a good play because it’s hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.”

So what is the basis of drama? Mamet gazes at me blankly as if the question is naive, then elucidates in one long sentence. “The basis of drama is … is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.”

Indeed, there are certain truths which speechwriters can heed to maximize the dramatic impact of a talk:

  • Good theater “shows” rather than “tells” an audience.
  • The audience can envisage themselves within the story.
  • A dramatic story is not just based on character and personality, but on plot. Aristotle defined this as the “arrangement of incidents” and the way these are presented to the audience is the structure of the play (or speech).
  • The speech must have a beginning, middle and end: an inciting moment, climax and resolution.

There’s a lot more about the importance of plot applied to corporate presentations in Nancy Duarte’s book Resonate.

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There is nothing like the power of story whether a speech or a presentation. Many people focus on “telling” rather than “engaging.” A story allows the speaker/presenter to engage his/her audience.

Economy of expression: it doesn’t just work for playwrights. I am reminded of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony ba-ba-ba-BOOM! There’s not a sforzando out of place. Like the rest of his major works, this one didn’t come quickly; typically he’d mull it over for a year or more – tweeking, embellishing, condensing, but they were worth it. He wasn’t called Maestro for nothing!



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