I’d like to share a thought that writers don’t often discuss: is screenwriting actually progressing, or is it simply changing?
To me, stories do not “progress” in a linear way. They transform. Like a person changing clothes every day, a story may look different on the surface, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has become something fundamentally new.
The most powerful stories have largely already been told. They come from the literature and myths of many cultures, and today’s stories often feel like new combinations of old elements. In that sense, they are like the digits 0 through 9: with the same basic parts, we can create endless variations.
Many adventure stories carry the influence of Jules Verne. Much of modern socially or politically critical writing echoes the boldness of Dickens and Shakespeare. Supernatural elements in storytelling often draw on ancient myths and legends from the Middle East, the Far East, and beyond.
So I’d like to ask: Can we ever truly write a story that has no roots in literary history?
Or is every “new” story really just a fresh variation of something older?
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Hi Mohammad Ali RANJBAR - To me, it sounds like the term 'progressing' in this post connotes a positive value, the linear opposite of 'regressing', in relation to 'just changing'.
I would contend that storytelling is neutral on it's surface, how it connects with audiences always changes, usually in relation to technology. There were plenty of critics at the time that lambasted the transition from 'silent' films to 'talkies' as a negative change. I suspect most, nearly all, would refute that notion today. Storytelling always changes, it is up to the receiver to determine if it is progressive or regressive and that will always be an individualistic determination.
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Every author is influenced in some way by what he has seen or heard. This has been true since the first oral transmission. So, certainly, it is difficult to abstract yourself from the accumulated baggage; it would be something like disconnecting a part of the brain, from our past, that we do not want to come into play, and that is impossible because without that past ours we would not be authors or would be anything. We need to pull our backpack of experiences to create new ones. Everyone did it before us and others will do it after. We are an accumulation of experiences and we are eager to share them. But let's not give them away to the first producer on duty.
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Hi Darrell A Pennington, I think there should be a distinction between the art of storytelling and the story itself. Judging a work of art is deeply human and always depends on the individual reader or viewer, and in that sense, I completely agree with you.
However, the story itself — its underlying structure and content — is something more concrete. A useful comparison might be the difference between evaluating the artistic style of a building’s architecture and evaluating the structural engineering behind it. Architecture as an art form is subjective and depends on perspective, while structural engineering is based on more objective principles.
What draws me most to a story is its content rather than the artistic style in which it is told. For example, I may not fully appreciate the literary artistry of Dickens or Shakespeare in the same way a native English speaker might, but the ideas and themes in their writing still point to something concrete and universal.
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Antonio Quiñonero, I completely agree. Everything we say or write is closely tied to our experiences. However, when I speak of ‘progress,’ I am referring to the degree of our influence, rather than how much we are influenced.