9
The Improbable Connection
There’s no question that conflict is important. And we connect because we also strive, hit obstacles, suffer.
“Life is suffering,” Buddha said.
“And such small portions,” Woody Allen says in Annie Hall.
But, as I’ve said, there is more.
Connection is the other half of the story—of our lives and the stories we tell. Good screenwriters understand this intuitively even though, as I’ve said, connection is essentially overlooked in screenwriting books. “Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict,” Chris Keane writes in How to Write a Selling Screenplay, putting all our screenwriting eggs in one basket.
But, soft! Doesn’t Romeo and Juliet take a quantum leap forward when Romeo sees Juliet for the first time? ...
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