Video: “Breaking Suture”

Another in the excellent screenwriting series Raising the Stakes.

Jonathan W. Stokes is a screenwriter with a unique credit to his name: Five of his original screenplays have been named to the annual Black List. That alone should get your attention, but there’s also this: Over the last few years, he has produced an excellent video series called Raising the Stakes.

In the Season One, Episode 2 video (“Breaking Suture”), Jonathan says this:

“When i first saw Pulp Fiction, I was so thoroughly stitched into its world that I remember being bewildered when the credits rolled and I once again realized that I was a person watching images on a movie screen. Suture is the film theory term that refers to that transcendent feeling of being so completely immersed in a story that you forget you are a viewer. Suture is the high we are chasing when we watch a movie hoping to be swept away, when we pick up a book hoping to be lost in it for hours.

This is not a video about how to achieve suture. That’s a topic for an entire book. This is a video for how stories break sutures which I actually think is more instructive.”

Here is that video:

I tell my students one of the most fundamental goals we have as screenwriters is to lure the reader into the story … then keep them there. Think of what Jonathan explores with this concept of “breaking suture” this way: We go to all this trouble to entice the reader into our story universe. The last thing we want to do is create something which disrupts that viewing bond.

Riffing off Jonathan’s excellent video, here are two related observations:

• Audience Identification: Perhaps the single most powerful way to create suture is to engender a connection between the reader and the characters. Most importantly, the Protagonist. Because almost always, we experience a movie or TV episode through the Protagonist, we live vicariously through them. The combination of a engaging Protagonist and a compelling situation is a path which can lead directly toward suture.
• Writer’s Convenience: Perhaps the single surefire way to break suture is have a character do something entirely out of character. This is especially egregious when it’s clear the only reason the character acts out of character is because the writer needed them to make that choice. In other words, it was more convenient for the writer to compel a character to do something to facilitate the movement of the plot than do the harder work of living with the character and see how they get out of a complication, create a situation, overcome a roadblock, and so forth.

Takeaway: If you can create a sense of audience identification with your Protagonist, you shrink the emotional and psychological distance between the reader and your story universe, creating a bridge for them to go into the story. Once there, at all costs, avoid writer’s convenience. Instead, immerse yourself more deeply into the lives of your characters and imagine how they can handle sticky situations.

Movies and TV series Jonathan references in this video:

Check out all of Jonathan’s Raising the Stakes videos.They offer an excellent foundation in grasping the essence of screenplay structure.

For more background on Jonathan W. Stokes, you can go here.

Twitter

Instagram

By the way, I recently interviewed Jonathan. Look for that chat later on this summer.