What’s More Important: Character or Story?

Maybe it’s a false dichotomy or a trick question

Doesn’t it seem as if a new screenwriting book is published every twenty minutes?

I bear no small portion of the blame, as my three such tomes burden bookstore shelves this year. If that’s not bad enough, they’ve been published in six languages.

What’s left now except to write a book about writing screenwriting books?

My longtime pal, beautiful Viki King, author of the timeless How to Write a Screenplay in 21 Days (why should it take so long?) told me that the writers of such books do not actually compete with one another. Writers don’t buy one or the other but several such books.

In that regard screenwriting books are like cook books.

Perhaps we story gurus are merely contributing to writers block. Instead of writing their screenplays, writers read our books about writing screenplays.

The vast majority of these books, from Field to Ackerman, to Hunter, to McKee and beyond agree that the single most fundamental aspect of a screenplay is the story. Indeed, the oldest theoretical work treating dramatic narratives, Aristotle’s Poetics, asserts unmistakably that character is important too, of course, but first of all comes story.