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Storytelling in General

Anyone who has ever been confronted by a small child’s searching gaze or seen an infant gulp down its surroundings with its eyes (Where am I? Who are you? What’s going on here?) will recognize that from early in their lives, human beings have an intense need to understand the world around them, to make sense of things. Inventing and embellishing stories are ways to satisfy that need; the first stories human beings told themselves and one another were about how everything in the world came into being, how things came to be the way they are.

A Working Definition

For the purposes of this book, which deals with writing the short screenplay of 30 minutes’ length or less, we will define a story as any narration of events or ...

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