Man, Machine and the Law of Diminishing Scripts

A warning should be attached to John Truby’s “StoryLine” software program for screenwriters: Formulaic writing suffers the law of diminishing returns (Film Clips, May 24).

Long ago character was like the human face before the onset of cosmetics, fashion magazines and reconstructive surgery: infinitely varied. Look at Nadar’s daguerreotypes and you will see that people didn’t know how to see themselves. They were seen. And like undiscovered islands, each was different.

Before, a screenwriter was a writer. He or she wasn’t using the profession as a bridge to becoming a director or a producer. Ambition was horizontal, across the page. Writing, whatever the genre, was a commitment to craft--not to craftiness.

Up to a generation ago, producers receiving screenplays could turn the first page and see if it were such: a screenplay. Many times it was not, for the story failed to conform to the demands of form. Still, the stories tried. Many fine writers failed a priori simply because they didn’t assimilate the structure.

Then something happened. Something always happens. Screenwriting began to be taught at universities; books on screenwriting proliferated on chain bookstores’ shelves, and with the advent of the home-computer industry, programs began to provide the structure. All the would-be writer had to do was fill in the words. It was paint-by-numbers taken into the world of writing. Agents and producers found themselves deluged with scripts, ones that could no longer simply be inspected and discarded, for these new scripts were screenplays--yet they contained no life. For the most part, they were dramatically anemic.

The shadow of experience didn’t fall across the page.

For young people today, the rites of passage are gone. The armed forces no longer offer an unproblematic world of men together; seaman’s papers are no longer handed out to a college graduate willing to sail around the world on a rusty freighter. Dropping out for a year to live in a chambre de bonne in Paris while teaching English for 10 francs an hour is woefully impossible. That room is gone.

The death of experience is the birth of the simulacrum. With the world being “democratized,” as Truby states as one of the goals of his writing program, we will all find ourselves drinking from the same Styrofoam cup. I’d rather mine remain chipped and leak a little than have no feel or weight in my hand.

Instead of spending $345 on a program that will “chart the action sequences and explore deeper layers of a story,” why not buy a one-way ticket somewhere--and write your way back, no matter how long it takes? This will still be here; that won’t.

Of course, I believe in a dying god: the awe and wonder of experience itself, around the next corner or in the next second: new, untried, approaching like a stranger in the midst of one’s life.

Yet once virtual reality arrives, even programs like Truby’s will be discarded, for a person will be able to lower a helmet over his or her head and live out one screenplay after another, without having to write, without having to live, without having to return tired, sweaty, holding up the stains of the place on one’s hands.

We’ll all be programs then.

STEWART LINDH

Los Angeles

Lindh, an English teacher at Marlborough School, has a feature (“Blind Side”) in pre - production at HBO.