by Diana Black
That blank page stares back at us…if we’ve had the good fortune to land an assignment and there’s a serious deadline involved, Holy Crap! Okay, we take a breath; confident in our knowledge and understanding of what the hell we’re doing and we’ve got a kit-bag of kick-ass skills at our side. Like our hero/heroine, we will prevail.
As artists, we are at some fundamental level, observers and explorers of the human condition. Our job/compunction is to observe and interpret human behavior. We perceive ‘a moment’ in time, intimately associated with either our own human experience or someone else’s – real or imagined. It fascinated/horrified us. We then lift that compelling ‘moment’ out of the day-to-day and embed it within a dramatic narrative in all its ugliness, beauty, terror, gut-wrenching sorrow or triumphant joy. When we’re ‘done’, we reflect it back to the society from whence it came – “See, this is who you really are and this is what drives you.”
While we’ve learned and mastered the mechanical skills necessary to construct a teleplay that should stand up under the subjective scrutiny of the gatekeeper – at least structurally, does that mean we have the insight to recognize the salient ‘moments’ let alone the creative ability to weave them into a compelling narrative? Let’s assume that we do or at least, the potential.