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YOUR STORY
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Your insight is the fruit of those years. How, now, can you convey to strangers some of this insight, when — as in any motion picture — you have not more than thirty minutes in which to portray your friend’s personality? How make him known through the medium of not more than one or two thousand words of speech — or even in five hundred words, as sometimes happens? How convince your audience that his nature is what you know it to be, when you can show him in only twelve or fourteen short acts?
Here is the deadly simplicity of plot building. It lies in the necessity of depicting men in action in such a manner that the onlookers grasp the characters and the significance of their deeds just as clearly as if they had been watching them for years, instead of for minutes. You, the author, must distill a lifetime into an hour. You must select episodes which reveal most flagrantly the traits of your heroes and villains. You must choose with exceeding care the phases of these same traits which enlighten the audiences most easily.
Let us now inspect very briefly your problems and methods. We shall not attempt a thorough survey, inasmuch as it has been made in earlier volumes ^ and would be too extensive to publish here. Furthermore, we are looking at the more specialized problem of the plot in sound pictures.
WHAT IS A PLOT?
What is a plot? It is a climactic series of events, each of which both determines and is determined by the char
1 Walter B. Pitkin, The Art and Business of the Short Story (Macmillan) ; and How to Write Stories (Harcourt, Brace) .