Screenwriting 101 — Randall Wallace

I love to tell stories. Here is one.

My grandfather was a farmer in Tennessee. During the Depression he had to go into town to find work, and being a big man — six foot three, and over 200 pounds of muscle — he soon found a job doing manual labor at an ice-making plant. On the first day, the foreman came up to him and gave him this welcome: “Do what I tell ya and we’ll get on okay. But I just want you to know that we got lots of niggers that work on this crew, and I got to cuss at ’em to make ’em work, so if I ever call you a son-of-a-bitch, don’t pay me no mind, I don’t mean nothin’ by it, that’s just the way I am.”

And my grandfather, who was a Baptist deacon with a number of colored friends, looked down at the foreman and said, “I understand. And I just want you to know that if you call me a son-of-a-bitch, and I hit you in the face with a claw hammer, don’t pay me no mind, I don’t mean nothin’ by it, that’s just the way I am.”

I never met my grandfather; he died the year before I was born. And yet I know him — through his children, of course, and through my grandmother, who loved him through her last breath. But perhaps I know him most vividly and fully because of that story which tells me who he was, and how he was.

That’s what stories do. They aren’t philosophy or history lesson or sermons or propaganda; though they may contain all those elements, they are greater than them all.

 — Randall Wallace from “Why We Write”

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