For hours last week I worked on my half of the workshop that Billy Mernit and I taught Saturday at UCLA Extension about core elements of storytelling in film and fiction. We’d had at least five long meetings about it, a zillion emails back and forth, and lots of:

What were we thinking of? This is way too much work. This is a huge project. This is about a hundred quotes from novels and God knows how many film clips, and it’s really a ten week course at the very least and how are we going to teach it in six hours etc. etc.

On Saturday morning over 50 students showed up for the workshop and Billy and I began the intricate dance of team teaching two different genres of storytelling. And it was fun! Fun to teach with Billy and fun to have fifty smart, attentive students who wanted to learn what we had to teach.

And as always when I teach, I learned too. As a fiction and memoir writer, I envy the structure of screenwriting. The freedom of writing a novel is a double edged sword. Yes, freedom in theory is liberating, no page limits, no rules, but as Robert Frost once mentioned, writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net. That net of structure for a screenplay can actually be freeing for a writer; and it’s helpful for fiction writers to think of structure for their own novel. Billy also presented structured methods for getting deeper into your characters; I took notes. (All you fiction writers out there: consider taking a screen writing course.)

And teaching my own side of the street, the elements of fiction, I realized all over again that if it’s good fiction you read it fast and love the characters so much and get into the story and the hell with theme and point of view and all the rest of it. It’s an emotional experience, not an intellectual one. But then, if you’re a writer you go back and figure out how it was done and what can you learn from it. You try to separate those tightly woven strands of character/plot/theme/setting.

The two works of fiction I taught from this weekend, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and the short story by Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain”, I devoured the first time I read them. Characters, story, setting – I fell in love. I’ve now read each at least four times, and have also seen the films a second time. What I realize of course is that in good stories and novels, you always discover something new, something deeper each time you read, you never get to the bottom. (True of films too.)

I also realized I put my own spin on the elements of storytelling and that’s about all that any teacher can do: your own spin, your own take on the characters, plot, theme, and setting. A real work of art (which I believe both these stories to be) possesses its own mystery, is so faceted and layered, that no one can parse it into theory, not even the author. Plot comes out of character, theme is part of plot, character can come from setting – it’s all woven together, tangled. But we study these elements, try to separate them, because we need to discover how we can write our way into our own stories.

To Do: Read The Hours by Michael Cunningham – First of all, fall in love with his writing, his characters, themes and plot. Then check out what he does with point of view on page 13 while also giving a description of a character, and the plot when you discover the connection of two characters in the interconnecting stories. Think about the themes – creativity and death (my spin). Or find your own themes. Read the story “Brokeback Mountain” and the script (there’s a great book out combining story, script and essays by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Osanna), and see how a work of fiction can be translated into film without loss of integrity.