{"id":103,"date":"2016-07-27T22:40:44","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T22:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/?p=103"},"modified":"2016-07-27T22:40:44","modified_gmt":"2016-07-27T22:40:44","slug":"recent-quotes-about-writing-from-aaron-sorkin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/?p=103","title":{"rendered":"Recent quotes about writing from Aaron Sorkin"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Intention and obstacle is <strong>everything<\/strong>. Intention and obstacle is what makes it drama. Somebody wants the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia; it doesn&#8217;t matter, they just need a strong intention, and then there needs to be a formidable obstacle. The tactic that your protagonist (or protagonists) use to overcome that obstacle is going to be your story. That&#8217;s what you&#8217;re gonna hang everything on. Without intention and obstacle, you&#8217;re coming dangerously close to finger painting.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>One of the biggest mistakes rookie screenwriters make is not having a strong intention or obstacle. The drive shaft of a car, beautiful leather seats, a fantastic sound system, a really cool paint job but the car isn\u2019t going to move forward if the car doesn\u2019t have a strong intention or obstacle.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>David Mamet have written some excellent essays on this subject. You can get lost in the weeds if you sit down and try to create an entire biography for your character. If this is what they were like when they were six years old, and this is what they did when they were seven years old, and they scraped their knee when they were eight years old. Your character, assuming your character is 50 years old, was never six years old, or seven years old or eight years old. Your character was born the moment the curtain goes up, the moment the movie begins, the moment the television show begins, and your character dies as soon as it&#8217;s over. Your character only becomes seven years old when they say, &#8220;Well when I was seven years old, I fell in a well, and ever since then I&#8217;ve had terrible claustrophobia. Okay?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Characters and people aren&#8217;t the same thing. They only look alike.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>I write a lot of drafts of screenplays and plays. I keep writing and I keep writing; what I try to do at the beginning is just get to the end. Once I&#8217;ve gotten to the end, I know a lot more about the piece, and I&#8217;m able to go back to the beginning and touch stuff that never turned into anything, and highlight things that are going to become important later on. And I go back, and I keep doing that, and I keep doing that, and I&#8217;ll retype the whole script, over and over again, just to make things sharper and sharper. That&#8217;s for movies and plays. In television, there just isn&#8217;t that kind of time. In television, I have to write a 55-minute movie every nine days, so we shoot my first draft.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>I assume that the people who watch movies and television shows are at least as smart as the people who make movies and television shows. If the dialogue makes you sit forward a little, and listen a little bit more, that&#8217;s a good thing. It makes the audience active in the experience.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div class=\"usertext-body may-blank-within md-container \">\n<div class=\"md\">\n<ul>\n<li>When it comes to screenwriting or television writing, there are real rules, and there are fake rules. In 1970, a CBS executive famously said that there are four things you&#8217;ll never see on television: a Jewish person, a divorced person, a person from New York City, or a person with a mustache. Obviously, that CBS executive had no idea what he was talking about, and those are the fake rules.\u00a0 The real rules can be found in Aristotle&#8217;s <em>Poetics<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<a class=\"synved-social-button synved-social-button-share synved-social-size-48 synved-social-resolution-single synved-social-provider-facebook nolightbox\" data-provider=\"facebook\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\" title=\"Share on Facebook\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.solitairerose.com&amp;t=Recent%20quotes%20about%20writing%20from%20Aaron%20Sorkin&amp;s=100&amp;p[url]=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.solitairerose.com&amp;p[images][0]=&amp;p[title]=Recent%20quotes%20about%20writing%20from%20Aaron%20Sorkin\" style=\"font-size: 0px;width:48px;height:48px;margin:0;margin-bottom:5px;margin-right:5px\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Facebook\" title=\"Share on Facebook\" class=\"synved-share-image synved-social-image 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Intention and obstacle is what makes it drama. Somebody wants the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia; it doesn&#8217;t matter, they just need a strong intention, and then there needs to be a formidable obstacle. The tactic that your protagonist (or protagonists) use to overcome [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}