Studying Aristotle’s “Poetics” — Part 9(C): Episodic

As I’ve been interviewing screenwriters, I typically ask what some of their influences are. One book title comes up over and over again: Aristotle’s “Poetics.” I confess I’ve never read the entire thing, only bits and pieces. So I thought, why not do a daily series to provide a structure to compel me to go through it. That way we’d all benefit from the process.

For background on Aristotle, you can go here to see an article on him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

To download “Poetics,” you can go here.

Part 9(C): Episodic

Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a plot
‘episodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without
probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their
own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they write show
pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity,
and are often forced to break the natural continuity.

I chose to excerpt this small section because it is important in at least two ways.

First, the concept of an ‘episodic’ plot helps Aristotle drive home what ‘unity’ means. Let’s remember this from Part 8:

As therefore, in the other imitative arts, the imitation is one when
the object imitated is one, so the plot, being an imitation of an action,
must imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union of the
parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the
whole will be disjointed and disturbed.

Note: “imitate one action and that a whole, the structural union.” Each of these three expressions is a reflection of the idea of unity of action. Combined with the discussion in the first half of Part 9, where the focus is on possibility, probability and necessity, the sort of guiding principles for a writer in constructing a narrative, then if a story has “acts that succeed one another without probably or necessary sequence,” we are dealing with something that is ‘episodic’ in nature.

My take on this is that ‘unity of action’ is not just about a story being about one thing, it must also have a flow from scene to scene, event to event that is as well both probable and necessary.

The second point is this: In terms of screenwriting, where we have limited time to tell a story (as compared to a novel), we must create that sense of flow, or what can be called narrative drive. As screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Misery) says:

Rule of thumb: You always attack a movie scene as late as you possibly can. You always come into the scene as the last possible moment, which is why when you see a scene in a movie where a person is a teacher, for instance, the scene always begins with the teacher saying, ‘Well, class…’ and the bell rings. And then you get into another scene because it’s very dull watching a man talk to people in a room… In a book you might start with some dialogue, and then describe your clothing, and more dialogue. The camera gets that in an instant. Boom, and you’re on. Get on, get on. The camera is relentless. Makes you keep running [emphasis added].

How to deal with a “relentless” camera? It almost always involves some sort of ‘engine’ to propel the plot forward. If we do not find that ‘engine,’ if our story has little or no narrative drive, scenes happening one after the other in a kind of random or thoughtless manner, a script reader is likely to critique the script for being ‘episodic.’

In fact, I have a name for this: The Dreaded Episodic Curse! I came up with that because when I receive notes on a script where a producer or exec says, “It feels episodic,” I know I’ve got work to do.

It’s a complex circumstance because some movies which have a rather free-form or random feel to scene placement and transitions can work fine in part because that is a conscious part of the filmmaker’s style or more likely the characters are so compelling, our emotional connection to those characters creates a narrative drive of our own, our desire to learn what happens to them propels us through the script, one page after the other.

But for most mainstream commercial movies, we have to find that ‘engine’ that moves the story forward, one scene to the next.

So a takeaway from Parts 8 and 9 of “Poetics” for a contemporary screenwriter is that the narrative we construct must move, scene to scene, according to what is probable and what is necessary, as Aristotle states. If not, that in and of itself will lead to a story that feels ‘episodic.’

But that is not enough. We also need to create some type of narrative drive to propel the story ahead because even if each event is probable and necessary, it can nonetheless suffer from The Dreaded Episodic Curse.

I welcome the input of the traveling feast of Aristotelians who have taken to gathering here for a weekly discourse. If you have just stumbled onto this series, you should really go back and read the comments in each post as the folks who have been participating have added incredible insight into this seminal work by Aristotle.

A reminder: I am looking at “Poetics” through the lens of screenwriting, what is its relevance to the craft in contemporary times. And I welcome the observations of any Aristotle experts to set me straight as I’m just trying to work my way through this content the best I can.

See you here tomorrow for another installment of this series.

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For the entire series, go here.