Watch the video essay on this topic here

The first film we were required to make in NYU’s graduate film program was a classic exercise: tell a story in four minutes or less without dialog. We were required to shoot outdoors on 16mm black and white film without any lights and couldn’t record sync sound. It was a challenging but sensible exercise, as sync sound, lights, and dialog would only add more difficulties to those we already faced. (spoiler: filmmaking is hard, especially with a crew who mostly has little or no experience).

Even now, I still remember the feedback; painful experiences are hard to forget. The only positive comments praised the cinematography and the sound design. The rest of the criticism was encapsulated in this statement from the chair of the program: “This is a situation, not a story.”

So what’s the difference, and why does it matter?

Profluency defined

One of the basic principles that was hammered into us was the concept of what one teacher called profluency. It seemed like an awfully fancy word for a concept that’s easy to understand, if not necessarily to implement. I would put it like this:

**Stories must move forward.**

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “profluent” as “Flowing copiously or smoothly.” The key word here is flowing: a good story is propelled along its timeline. One of the revelations I had over the years is that the film cannot create this by itself. It’s something that the film has to stimulate within the viewer: a sense of urgency that keeps them glued to their seats because they must know how the story resolves itself. They’ve become emotionally invested.

Without forward momentum, a story dies. No matter how beautiful it might look or sound, a story without it fails. (The pace at which a film proceeds is another matter, and is as subjective as it is execution-dependent.)

This is not a principle invented by screenwriters, but something every human being knows in their bones. In real life, everything changes. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the one non-negotiable element we require from good stories is also change.

Why a story without profluency fails: an example

My little story showed a day in the life of a 40ish woman dealing with her mother, who is suffering from dementia. She picks up her mother from a care facility, drives her along a riverside in her wheelchair on a sunny day, panics when her mother occasionally runs away without knowing where she’s going, and at the end of the day, she takes her mother back to the care home.

I thought I was being clever by using some specific shots to make the sunlight a symbol of the dementia, repeating the shot in the end to suggest that the daughter feared suffering the same fate. It was a situation familiar to me from my own family, one I cared deeply about.

I already had years of experience as a cinematographer by that point, so it was skillfully shot, but at the end of my story, things were exactly the same as they’d started. Neither the characters nor the situation had changed. Nor was it evident that either of the characters were trying to do anything in particular other than just survive the situation. There was nothing to root for, no revelations, no accomplishments to celebrate.

Provoking an active viewer

As viewers, we all learn the grammar of cinema by watching many, many films (not to mention videos on social media). And one of the things we quickly learn is:

In stories, stuff happens.

We also learn that everything in a story should happen for a reason. But if every character explained why they did what they did and then just did exactly that, the story would be unwatchable (unless they turned out to be lying). The reason gets to the heart of what profluency really is: we are shown events and behaviors that provoke us to watch actively. We wonder what’s really going on and why people are behaving as they are. If the story engages us, we start actively imagining the best and worst outcomes for the characters we come to care about.

We didn’t acquire this habit from watching movies. Human brains are wired for pattern recognition. We are fiercely predictive. If we weren’t reasonably successful at guessing the implications of sounds, weather, animal and human behavior around us, our species would have disappeared eons ago, surprised by predators, killed or defeated by competitors.

We bring this automatic habit of predicting the future to reading, listening to, or watching stories unfold, calculating the implications of every scene and guessing how they connect. We wonder how we would fare if we were in the same situation.

The build-up of complications raises the stakes and makes the protagonist’s desired outcome seem increasingly impossible, escalating the tension and our desire to know the outcome. More than anything else, the tension between what we hope will happen and what we fear is what propels a story forward.

In an effective story, we cannot remain passive observers. We actively imagine how things will turn out. You might have even found yourself shouting a warning to a character out loud, forgetting it’s just a movie. In a sense, every story is a detective story. We are both Sherlock Holmes and the person to whom the crime is happening. And nothing is more mysterious, confusing, fascinating, and high stakes than other human beings.

In part two of this topic, I discuss practical techniques for launching a story into motion right from the beginning and specifically what kind of change is the engine of all effective storytelling.

Profluency: the momentum of stories

In part one of this topic, I defined profluency as a sense of forward momentum that all stories need. Today I want to clarify exactly what it is that fuels that momentum, driving our need to see the story’s conflicts resolved. This anticipation is something that needs to be infused into a film as early as possible. In the best cases, anticipation begins before the movie begins - just from the poster! Here’s how.

Even if you’ve never seen this blockbuster, you can probably imagine what the main conflict of the story is going to be just from a well-designed poster that encapsulates “the problem.”

Launching a story into motion

The most common way to kick a story into gear is to confront the protagonist with a seemingly insurmountable problem (preferably embodied by a formidable antagonist) or a challenging goal. Our curiosity to see them meet this challenge hinges not just on how difficult it is, but how ill-suited the protagonist seems as a candidate for success given their beliefs, awareness, and skills.

But here’s the funny thing: we don’t need to care about what they care about - their external goal. What fuels stories is the internal change required for a protagonist to get what they need, which is rarely the same as what they want. A story worth watching forces them to confront their deepest flaw. Overcoming it is what we really come to stories to see. It isn’t just entertaining; it provides the kind of hope and wisdom we can bring to our own lives and struggles.

Here are examples of a protagonist’s dilemma from three well-known movies (whose titles you can try to guess - answers are at the bottom):

An unemployed, uneducated single mother hits rock bottom when she’s injured in a car accident and wants quick compensation to pay her bills.
A young upper-class socialite has promised to marry a wealthy, controlling man she doesn’t love in order to pay her family’s debts. When she falls in love with a homeless, penniless artist, she has to choose not just between two suitors and loyalties to her mother versus herself, but between completely opposite ways of life; lovelessness but financial security vs. love but financial uncertainty.
When a miserable man in a stale marriage is fired from his long-hated job, he abandons morals and convention to turn his life around and seduce a teenage girl with whom he’s appallingly obsessed.

Action versus drama

While the middle half of a movie typically follows a protagonist as they pursue their goal, no action is inherently dramatic. If the action doesn’t challenge a protagonist’s deepest illusions and reveal the true source of their suffering to them, it’s just business - story busy work. It’s not what they do that really matters; it’s why.

“Rain Man? *You’re* the Rain Man?” Charlie begins to realize what he was really deprived of when his brother Raymond was secreted away.

Here’s an example (spoilers!!): In the 1988 masterpiece Rain Man (screenplay by Barry Morrow and Ron Bass), we don’t care about what protagonist Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) cares about, which is wrangling his “fair share” of his father’s $3M inheritance away from his autistic brother in order to save his struggling exotic car business. While we understand the stress of his financial troubles, if the film was only about satisfying Charlie’s sense of entitlement with money, it would have left us unmoved, if not outright disgusted.

While kidnapping his brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) as a bargaining chip comprises the main action of the story, what drives the story forward is that we see what Charlie does not: while he wants money, what he needs is to care about someone other than himself (not to mention forgiving his father).

Discovering that his autistic brother is vulnerable and impossible to control initially aggravates Charlie and creates obstacles to traveling cross country. But the true purpose of the brother character is to challenge Charlie to be a nicer person, to give him a chance to recover his humanity. Having seen Charlie behave with staggering cruelty and selfishness in literally every scene of the story, it is initially impossible to imagine how he could ever change. But in his brother Raymond, Charlie is confronted with the first person he cannot simply bully into submission.

Things finally start to change just after the midpoint when Charlie realizes that a comforting figure from his childhood that he’d thought was imaginary was actually none other than his brother Raymond. Institutionalized after their mother died in fears that Raymond might inadvertently harm Charlie, who was still a toddler, Charlie realizes just how much Raymond cared about him and was traumatized by being banished from the family. His real loss was not money; it was missing the opportunity to have a relationship with his only brother.

What stories are really about

The action of stories is never what they’re really about. What affects us deeply is the transformation of someone who initially seems incapable of it. That difficult process of internal change is the real propellant of forward momentum, what makes it dramatic and provides a sense of urgency to see how things end - and is what gives a film a lasting impact on us.

To recap, there are two realizations that we have along with the protagonist:

What they want isn’t actually what they need.

They’re never going to get what they need unless they change something about themselves internally - their greatest flaw or most limiting belief.

This is dramatic because we know people don’t change easily - especially when it comes to something so big that it was the driving belief behind their personalities. We humans hate being wrong and will go to insane lengths to avoid admitting it. Even after we recognize that we’re on the wrong path, it takes time to regroup, to surrender a deeply held belief, and to come up with a new plan that’s more true to the person we’ve realized we really are. The ripple effects could change not just our plans but our relationships, our careers, and our way of viewing the world.

Profluency begins with a journey toward a difficult goal. But even the profluency has to change: a story has to accelerate toward the ending. The stakes have to be raised. The desired ending has to seem increasingly impossible. The closer the protagonist gets toward disaster, the more vividly their soul hangs in the balance, the more our hopes and fears for them escalate. As a result, our desire grows to see it all satisfactorily resolved.

If we could grab the movie and pull the ending toward us more quickly to relieve our anxiety, we might. It’s a fine line between building anticipation and exhausting our patience. But the amazing thing is that we love stories that take us for a good ride. Something about being given time to imagine the worst makes it that much more satisfying when the protagonist finally achieves a transformation that seemed utterly impossible.

In the end, we come to stories looking for hope that we too can find the courage to live according to our highest principles, to overcome tremendous difficulties with our souls intact, and to relieve some of our unnecessary (usually self-imposed) suffering.

Ironically, change is not only the engine of dramatic writing, but meaningful change in characters is what every good story is really about.

Profluency part 1: how stories [must] move forward