Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization

Aristotle tells us that the plot should be so tight that if you took away any one incident, the whole would literally collapse:

Write your screenplays to raise, develop, and answer one central dramatic question so that your reader or audience will stay hooked.

Aristotle insists that in a unified dramatic story the subject is an action, not a person.

Make your ACTION-IDEA the driving force behind every scene and the subject of your story.

It is important to understand that the first cause of action must occur after the movie begins, not in the back story.

Every tragedy [dramatic story] is in part Complication and in part Denouement; the incidents before the opening scene, and … also of those within the play, forming the Complication; and the rest the Denouement. By Complication I mean all from the beginning of the story to the point just before the change in the hero’s fortunes; by Denouement, all f

Aristotle teaches us to think of ACTION as the IDEA of a story. In fact, he says that action is more important than people; that is, characters. Aristotle is fanatical about the need for our stories to be about action, about action that is larger than life itself and greater than the persons who partake in it.

Your ACTION-IDEA should be able to move listeners who merely hear it just as they would be moved if they saw an entire movie made from your screenplay.

It is through the resolution of the hero’s moral conflict in the denouement that the “theme” of the movie is stated. The theme reveals a truth about the human condition that has been demonstrated by the story’s action.