The mystery of storytelling: Julian Friedmann at TEDxEaling

I'm Julian Freedman I'm an agent and I'm going to try and talk to you from an agents point of view and you may not realize it but agents are in the business of rejection we reject a lot of people all the time at my agency we get about 6,000 submissions from writers every year and we probably do not take on more than six writers a year so we know that there are millions of people who want to write who want to tell stories but we also know that most of the time what they write isn't

very good in fact it's extremely boring and I really want to try and demystify the process because it appears that storytelling is somewhat mysterious there are many experts they disagree fundamentally on lots of things and I think we need to start by looking at a really important question which is why is it so difficult and the answer is partly because you've got to remember the story is much more about the audience than it is about the characters will plot and it's much more about the audience than it is about the storyteller I would even say

that storytelling cannot be taught I don't think it's the proper study for writers I'm involved in setting up writing courses I must admit that I also jump on that bandwagon but I say this because I worked with writers for 40 years I've been an editor publisher an agent executive producer I'm in all of writers I'm filled with admiration for them it takes an incredible amount of courage to put your soul on paper and have people who are probably much less talented than you certainly much less creative than you trample over in agents are often derided

we have a bad press which actually is fine someone once said to me unit were you're really good agent I said don't tell people I want to be known as someone who's nasty good agent was once described to me as a marriage broker and a bad one as a pimp and we are trying to develop long term relationships but it's difficult there's the story about wine Hollywood scientists who at the cutting edge of research into the latest cures for cancer are now using agents rather than rats and their five reasons for this the first is

that people in California are crazy the second is the animal liberation movement are targeting scientists who are experimenting on rats the third is there are now more agents in California than there are rats fourth is you can't get emotionally involved with an agent and finally there are some things that rats won't do I now want to talk about adultery because writers need to be unfaithful and with due respect to anyone here who's religious the Holy Trinity adultery and the Holy Trinity for me the Holy Trinity in my life and my work is the writer the

characters and the audience as a writer you live with your characters for a long time you nurture them after will you create them you have a kind of fidelity towards them but your audience you very rarely meet them you certainly if you're going to be successful will never meet more than a minut proportion of them they probably have prejudices and tastes that completely differ from yours you probably wouldn't want to know what their personal hygiene was like and basically you're just there to thrill them to turn them on to titillate them and by doing so

yourself and then leave them so your primary relationship has got to be with your audience not with your characters now if the proper study for writing is not right what is it I think it's human behavior it's it's why people behave the way they do why they are so irrational why they can do such outrageous and terrible things irrationality is really quite interesting my mother always used to win arguments with me by saying don't be rational about my neuroses and there are some experts some people who've written about screenwriting who I think are very good

majority I think or not layoffs egri wrote a book called the art of dramatic writing and what's interesting is the subtitle the subtitle is its basis in the creative understanding of human motivation so that's what writers should be doing now we know that millions of people want to write why what what is it that compels people to tell stories George Orwell wrote a book which is his probably as least well known but but I think is possibly his best book it's called why I write and he describes why he writes but he also says he

thinks it applies to the majority of writers and there are four reasons he gives the most important and a comprehensive one is sheer egotism sheer egotism the other reasons are immortality getting back at people who put you down and trying to make the world a better place Samuel Johnson would not have agreed with him he is famous for having said no man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money he also said one of my favorite quotes about writing when he was asked to read someone's manuscript your work is both good and original unfortunately the

part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good so I believe that stories define us not language it's often said language is what defines us but you know dolphins have language whales have language elephants have language chimpanzees have language but they don't as far as we know have stories despite Planet of the Apes most of the books about screenwriting and most of the courses tell you there is no formula many of them also tell you you must write out of your own experience which is one of the main

reasons why most of the stories a lot of these people write are very boring most of us have pretty boring lives or is there a formula years ago I was studying under Frank Daniel a famous teacher and we asked him if when in a preliterate society in others before there was any writing when the old wise men sat around the campfire telling moral tales to try and bind the clan together given that they'd not read said field or Robert would they have used the three air structure Frank said the three-act structure is actually a function

of how the human brain works you plant a piece of information it pays off you have to have a beginning to get to the middle to get to the end sometimes it said the British film industry doesn't work like that it has a beginning a middle and an end actually Aristotle then described the formula and he did that two and a half thousand years ago not only does it did it work then it still works today so actually anyone who says there's no formula it's wrong there is and Aristotle did it in a way that

makes it incredibly easy to remember there's three words pity fear and catharsis he said you need to make the audience feel pity for a character you do that usually by making the character go through some undeserved misfortune what that does is it enables the audience to emotionally connect with the character and once the writer has got that emotional connection between the audience and the character the writer begins to have some control over the audience you then put the character into a worse and worse and worse situation and because of the emotional connection the identification the

audience feels fear when you release the character from the Jeopardy or whatever the situation there in the audience experiences a catharsis pity fear catharsis now the catharsis is actually the result not of any intellectual activity but of chemicals being released in the bloodstream notably one called phenyl ethyl al-amin otherwise known as P EA or the happiness drug now you can actually cause that release in your bloodstream by taking speed or ecstasy if you want to be a bit more legal eating chocolate or having sex so we can try and save the British film industry by

giving bars of chocolate to people are going to see British films they'll come out of there and tell their friends they had a really good time but just so you can see this is not specific to two and a half thousand year old Greek I found in the program notes of a series of Beethoven concerts given by maritza Bellini this very interesting quote Beethoven's preference for happy endings is not by any means a tendency towards kitsch but rather a musical style akin to sheilas philosophy of suffering struggle and overcoming so you can see the pattern

suffering struggle and overcoming pity fear catharsis beginning middle and end it works it's always worked and it always will work so if you compound all this and you can do this in your writing will you write better no probably not you need more you need to understand how audiences actually use stories why we need stories what we do with them and there's a really interesting example for years people have known about these cave paintings that were done 25,000 years ago the famous caves in let's go in southwest France no one's ever really concluded what the

paintings meant paintings of animals with little drawings of stick people now if you know about the Maasai when they go from being boys to men these kids have to go and live in the bush they have a spear and they have to kill a lion it's really dangerous and what do they do well we know that they get very drunk we know they do a lot of rhythmic dancing until they get into a kind of trance and I think that those prehistoric caves were the earliest cinemas I think that the the hunters would go into

the caves and they would look at the animals and they would imagine the fear that they would feel when they went out into the savanna or the bush to face bears wild boars mammoths elephants saber-toothed Tigers they rehearsed their fear and I think that's what we use literature for words that we use theater forts would use cinema for so we if you now know that you can think well now what have I got to do to enable the audience to have experiences which they can then relate to themselves is that enough and actually it's not

particularly if you're working in film you've got to understand that we in Europe have evolved a very different means of telling stories for cinema than the Americans did we know that 80% of all box office in Europe goes to American movies American movies travel far better than ours why well they have bigger budgets they can spend more money on development they have bigger stars we can't really compete with that that's the given it's an uneven playing field they also have very accessible characters and they also like sentimental happy endings it's very common in the British

press to see something same great film what a shame it was so sentimental well we can do it when we need to we've done for weddings Trainspotting Bend It Like Beckham Billy Elliot is diseased they ordered phenomenally well so the solutions are you have to have accessible characters that the audience will emotionally engage with you need upbeat endings if possible because we know statistically that they like it then there's the question of dialogue American movies have only two thirds the dialogue of European movies and this is really important because it means their movies can communicate

to audiences who don't have a high level of education who aren't even literate I can explain why in more detail but I'm not going to because I'm going to run out of time the other thing that American movies do is they tell their stories much more visually because they aren't using dialogue so they think in almost in storyboards and this is important for a very simple psychological reason we believe what we see we don't believe what we hear and in fact a really clever script will sometimes have dialogue contradicting what you're seeing because it makes

the audience wake up and instead of leaning back as a passive spectator they will lean forward as an active participant in the process of watching your film we can do that the other thing we can do where we don't is shorter scenes I was told by a company that does dubbing and subtitling that American movies on average have scenes half the length of European movies it's a huge difference now if you have your scenes you cut the beginning in the end of every scene out without taking out anything that's critical to the understanding of the

film you leave a gap and the audience will fill in that gap and in doing so it makes them feel good they are actively watching your film instead of passively watching it it doesn't cost anything to cut out dialogue it also by the way gives the composer much more room to use music and as we know music is a much stronger way of connecting emotionally than words and since your job is to try and create that emotional connection you should now I started out by saying we're in the business of rejection diana rigg edited a

book once about the worst reviews ever given of theater plays and was called no turn unstoned and i think in a way we need to face the fact that there are going to be people who criticize what writers do what creative people do and writers have got to get project all great writers have had lots of rejections we know that we could in fact do an entire TEDx on rejection you know guy goes into his publishing company big marble entrance for security guy says who've you come to see sir I've come to see my editor

I've sent in my manuscript security guy looks on the computer screen and says well I'm afraid your editors not in but I'll reject it if you like all that does is it tells you that you will be rejected by people who probably aren't as creative or as talented as you and that unfortunately also often includes agents so to end I want to read you the best rejection letter I've ever seen comes from apparently from a Chinese economics journal and it was as a result of someone submitting an article we have read your manuscript with boundless

delight if we were to publish your paper it would be impossible for us to publish any work of a lower standard as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal we are to our regret compelled to return your divine composition and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity so on behalf of of agents everywhere two writers please forgive us for our short sight and timidity and if while you're egotistical E trying to get immortality while you're trying to make the world a better place

while you're trying to get back at people who put you down please don't forget you have to entertain us you have to enable us to look at ourselves because when we're looking up at the screen we're not looking at the actors who are saying you're wonderful lions we're not looking at the characters you have so lavishly and lovingly created we're certainly not looking at you we're looking at ourselves because only we are the storytellers and only we can give you immortality thank you