Customer Reviews

Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets From the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Many screenwriting gurus say "Everything you need to know about how to write good drama is in Aristotle's Poetics," but then they never explain what's actually in that work! I've tried reading Aristotle's original text, but it is really tough going. Tierno's book is a real find - it boils down a rambling, classics text into concise concepts, tips and techniques that I could understand and use. Tierno provides examples of how all this stuff really works in a variety of films, too. This book is not only practical, but pretty inspiring, too. It gets to the "heart" and "roots" of good drama, something you can forget about when you get bogged down with a script. After reading this, I was excited and motivated to return to my own work.

This book is useful for fiction writers as well as screenwriters. The author interprets Aristotle's ideas and suggestions and then renders them with examples into language applicable to modern drama. Many of Aristotle's original ideas are quoted and have timeless power. For example: "Beginners succeed earlier with Diction and Characters than with the construction of a story."

Tierno relates how the parts of a modern script evaluation (Log Line, Brief, Plot Summary, Comments, Idea, Story, Character, Dialogue, and Production Values) mirror Aristotle's examination of the same elements. I especially liked how the film "Gladiator" was used for the example of "the mistake in a hero's reasoning, leading to the hero's subsequent related misfortunes."

The short length makes the book a fast but powerful read.

If you are (or want to be) a serious screenwriter, you probably already know names like Robert McKee, Syd Field, Linda Seger, David Trottier and even David Bordwell...

The good thing about Mr. Tierno's book is that it goes back to the one fundamental text who, 2300 years before the birth of Cinema, already thought about many of the things all other screenwriting authors still talk about - what do we do in order to achieve higher drama?

And it is surprising how fresh Aristotle still sounds today, according to Mr Tierno's reading. Even if we consider that the object of Aristotle's thought was not the Cinema, but the Classical Greek Theatre - or the mimetic form of representation.

In fact, there is nothing new about Aristotle (or Cinema, or narrative, or screenwriting) here besides the fact that Mr. Tierno does an accurate reading of the great greek thinker and explains many of his key concepts.

In a nutshell, this book is an excelent reminder of how important, necessary and universal, good drama can be. Also it is a great reminder that screenwriting is a natural heir of most of storytelling's past traditions.

It is also a proof that screenwriting is an art form by itself.

This book has not only helped me to understand the somewhat complex art of dramatic stroy telling - but it has helped me to help others. Recently working on a documentaty project with a first time director, this book allowed him to internalize and distill his thoughts into a more cohesive vision, that was readily translatable to an audience. I would reccomend this book to any one who wants to gain insight and understanding to "the movies."

Being a professor of ancient Greek classics, I am impressed that a mass-market book about Aristotle's Poetics possesses such keen insights into the breadth of the work, including Tierno's fluidity with tying back the Poetics to Aristotle's greater system of thought. Perhaps if more Hollywood screenwriters would adhere to Tierno's teaching of Aristotle there might be more sophisticated enjoyable adult films coming out of the modern studio system. -Being a professor of ancient Greek classics, I am impressed that a mass-market book about Aristotle's Poetics possesses such keen insights into the breadth of the work, including Tierno's fluidity with tying back the Poetics to Aristotle's greater system of thought. Perhaps if more Hollywood screenwriters would adhere to Tierno's teaching of Aristotle there might be more sophisticated enjoyable adult films coming out of the modern studio system.
-Ancient Greek Classics Professor

Having taught Aristotle's Poetics for many years at the college and university level, it is refreshing to read an "improvised" commentary on this foundational lecture on structural and dramatic theory. It can be a flawed interpretation of the Poetics to dismiss the importance of the sacred 1-2-3 structural patterns in sonnets, dramatic poems, dramatic vignettes, epic poetry, stage plays, screenplays, short-short stories, short stories, novellas, and novels. Aristotle used examples of playwrights and poets, who adhered to these precise breaks. It is almost impossible to find an exception to the rule among the literary classics.

For the record, the Prologue has three parts; Act I, three scenes; Act II, three scenes; Act III, three scenes; and the Epilogue has three parts. There are three dominate parallelisms for professional writers throughout the world: the 1-2, the 1-2-3, and the 1-2-3 & 4. Of these three, the 1-2-3 parallelism or pattern is dominant. To be honest, I never used a commentary on the Poetics when teaching theory and application (from this text); we read directly from the textbook, compared Aristotle's structural theory to the classics in front of us, and pinpointed the breaks; this was done in order to study the ascendancy of the crescendo through the two minor climaxes, right up to the major climax; thus, creating the "moment in time" for the unravelling of the plot into the denouement, followed by the decrescendo (structured within the Epilogue). Artists labor long and hard on that fine-tuned crescendo.

Reference the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; and the works of Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. Reference the artistic works by poets and writers throughout the Latin-based languages throughout the world (that's 20 languages right there); and that's just for starters. That includes virtually every professional screenplay from 1925 to 1960; their treatments indicated the breaks in the Prologue, Act I, Act II, Act II, and Epilogue with storyboard precision, script delineation, and "blocking" efficiency for the director, the production team, the script supervisor, the producer (who studied the structural breaks in terms of financing the production), so on.

So, did you know that Hollywood execs assess screenplays using 'exactly' the same criteria found in Aristotle? Or that the film 'Rocky' can be analysed following the 'story structure' of Sophocles' 'Oedipus Rex', which the Daddy of Lit.Crit examined to demonstrate 'timeless universal truths' about drama?

And did you know that Aristotle talked about 'the three unities of dramatic action: time, place, and action'?

Neither did I!

Poor Aristotle, and poor us! Crumpling under this veritable barrage of howlingly wrong interpretations of an ancient fragment of literary criticism by a terrific guy who was writing a work-in-progress, always looking out for new ideas, testing out his theories and modifying them as he went along.

To treat his 'Poetics' as a completed and revised treatise of the art and craft of drama is an insult to a great mind. Only one quarter of his works survive. He wasn't interested in setting the Ten Commandments on How To Write a Play in stone. And, my God, he'd be furious if he could see how perversely his work has been misinterpreted, mangled and torn and chewed over (and spat out on poor aspiring screenwriters' scripts by self-proclaimed experts).

Let's for once give this man the courtesy and respect of reading what he actually wrote, and put a stop, once and for all, to putting words into his mouth.

The Big One:
'A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.
An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessaity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.

A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.'

Let's look at the definition of 'middle'. It seems like tautology, but the context shows that the word 'follows' here marks a causal sequence, not a mere temporal sequence. So the 'middle' unlike the 'beginning' stands in casual relation to what goes before, and unlike the 'end' is causally linked to what follows.

THERE IS NO ATTEMPT TO MARK AT WHICH POINT THE 'MIDDLE' IS TO BE PLACED

What's absolutely crucial about Aristotle's ideas about the unity of tragic action is that it is an organic unity, an inward principle which reveals itself in the form of an outward whole. And what he's stressing is that the incidents of the play need to be connected in some way by an inward and causal bond. Also, he makes a point of not laying down any precise rules about the length of a play.

Related to this is a brilliant parenthesis in his Simple and Complex Plot section which has been hijacked, uncredited, by many unoriginal minds as if they're thought it up all by themselves!

'(There is a crucial difference between one thing happening merely after something else, and the same thing happening BECAUSE of it)'

1. I don't know how any criteria of assessment can be 'exactly' the same as those used by Aristotle on Greek Tragedies when there are quite a few times when his remarks are at complete variance to what the plays are actually like. (For example, Aristotle implies that characters are fixed either in their true nature or out of it, and change by sudden reversal, but Aeschylus' Orestes and Sophocles' Philoktetes grow before our eyes in a nuanced psychological change). And anyway, which criteria are these guys using? Much of Aristotle's work has been so profoundly misinterpreted by others, most people go by 'interpretations' (usually wrong ones) written later.

2. And, No, Aristotle never talked about 'Unity of Place' as one best-selling screenwriting manual tells us. Like so many Renaissance scholars and writers, the Italian theorist Lodovico Castelvetro wildly misunderstood the ancient philosopher's words, and made up 'The Three Unities' (of time, place and action). Unfortunately, everyone assumed this was a prescriptive from Aristotle himself. Including present-day authors who seem to read his work without much care.

And please, please, you guys who keep telling screenwriters how to write screenplays, don't take on great intellects and presume to 'interpret' them.

If anyone wants to find out what Aristotle was really saying, read a translation of the original.

I really like this book. I thought it was concise and insightful. I really enjoyed how straight to the point the author was since a lot of screenplay guidebook writers ramble on and repeat themselves. I take everything I read on this subject with a grain of salt but still I got a lot out of this book.

Having read the original "Poetics" several times, this rendition of the master is very welcome. It touches on the salient points and how it relates to screenwriting. Good use of examples. My only suggestion is that he could have given us a little more depth.

[4.5 stars]

The oft-stated maxim of dramatic storytelling, everyone who is anyone in screenwriting recites, is to read Aristotle's Poetics. The problem? The original work in Greek is not what one would call bedside reading; the English translations of the original are almost as bad.

So what is a budding screenwriter to do if, as suggested, he wanted to understand the underpinnings of drama without having to learn and understand ancient Greek and all the arcane references in the Poetics? Well, that budding screenwriter buys and reads the new book by Michael Tierno. It's small enough that it could be light reading; each of its 33 chapters are easily digestible, but be not fooled! It's filled with tremendous information that, if properly understood, will help a writer, any writer, tell a gripping story.

Some of the reasons I gave it a four-and-a-half star rating instead of the full five are the same as I would give the original Poetics: the language is staid and a little difficult to assimilate for the modern understanding. Tierno does a good job of interpretation, but even then, there are some hard bumps that will give the reader pause. Tierno also tries hard to tie all the chapters into a smooth narrative, but again, there are some bumps: I don't, for example, see why chapter 29 (The Non-Linear Soul of Quentin Tarantino) was added as it seems incongruous without useful information not already covered earlier.

The other star-reducing problem is the seeming out-of-context quotations from the Poetics that require close reading to see their appropriateness, although for the most part the author does a fine job of showing precisely that. It's just a slight impediment to the flow. Very slight.

That said, here's my recommendation to obtain the maximum benefit out of this book: read the Poetics first. After which, rely on Tierno to provide the necessary interpretation; a job, as I stated earlier that he does quite well.

In summary, this is a good book. With close reading, perhaps even re-reading, it is capable of energizing your stories in the way the original work by (as the tagline of the book says) The Greatest Mind in Western Civilization does. This book is definitely barely-hidden gold that is easy to pass over. That fact it's not too expensive or overly ponderous in tone only adds to the value. High recommendations.

Postscript: The book has the author's website on the back. As of the date of writing this review, it's just a placeholder. Perhaps if the author eventually gets around to putting something useful up, he'll receive the full five stars!