Alternative Scriptwriting, 5th Edition

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Dramatic Voice/Narrative Voice

David Burdwell notes that maintstream film subordinates everything to narrative causality and character motivation. “In Hollywood cinema, a specific sort of narrative causality operates as the dominant, making temporal and spatial systems vehicles for it.”¹ These subordinated temporal and spatial systems—the actual elements of film language—are rendered transparent by the functioning of a conventional structure that creates the illusion that the story would happen exactly the same way regardless of whether the camera were there. Most of our dramatic concerns—the plausibility of motivation, the consistency of character, the avoidance of overt coincidence, the construction of a believable backstory—come out of ...