Claudia Johnson drops into a seat at a table outside a Tallahassee eatery and takes one deep breath after she introduces herself. She's come to discuss, among other things, her new book, Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect.

She won't slow down for the next three hours.

Johnson has just come from her first viewing of the hit movie Gladiator, and she wants to talk about it. The conversation is comfortable. Johnson has a knack, it seems, for drawing people into dialogue before they've had time to worry about asking the wrong question or speaking out of turn.

Listening to Johnson connect one topic to another is something akin to watching Tiger Woods lapping the field or listening to Yo-Yo Ma play the cello sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms—seemingly effortless, but it's hard to imagine doing it so well.

She turns seamlessly from her thoughts on the movie, the original topic, to something as prosaic as a brawl at a Lakers/Spurs game, which she describes as "great snowballs of humanity rolling toward the high-dollar seats."

And then back again.

"What a great ride," she says about Ridley Scott's latest directorial effort, taking a sip of sweet tea and pushing back straight brown hair accented by a distinctive silver streak. "But then again, I'm easily drawn in. I love being entertained."

Johnson is being modest. She has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a non-fiction exposé on censorship in a Florida school district where she lived in the 1980s. Obscenity, a courtroom drama that she wrote with former colleague Matt Stevens, was a finalist at Sundance. She is currently writing a road-trip narrative that requires her to weave family history with her recollections of a drive to Texas with her teenage son. Her plays have won awards that include the Warner Brothers Scriptwriting Award, the Lorraine Hansberry Award, and the American National Theater and Academy West Award. And her work has been produced and commissioned by Actors Theater of Louisville, the Province-town Playhouse, and the W.P.A. Theater, among others.

Truth be told, writing—specifically screenwriting—is Johnson's career. More importantly, articulating the images that will eventually make their way to film is also her passion.

The screenwriter cum teacher in Florida State's film school (long title: School of Motion Picture, Television and the Recording Arts), where Johnson is screenwriter-in-residence, has most recently translated a love for words and film into the book that critics say fills a long-vacant niche in the art and craft of screenwriting. Crafting (Focal Press, 2000) takes a basic premise—that screenplays too often hinge upon conflict and shallow action at the expense of making real connections between characters—and transforms the notion into a how-to guide for the writer of short screenplays.

Critics say the work is unique in the body of screenwriting literature because it's the first and only text to place primary emphasis on connection, not conflict.

"The book is dedicated to the proposition that connecting—to oneself and to others—is the source of great screenplays, regardless of length," says Johnson.

Friend and well-known novelist Janet Burroway, of FSU's English department faculty, tells of Johnson's calling her with what she thought was a trivial idea on the nature of writing. What Johnson did instead, says Burroway, was "to lay open the emotional deep structure of narrative, the principle that balances Aristotle's 'beginning, middle, and end.'

"It's also tempting to call her insight the female principle of narrative, since we are used to thinking of stories as based on conflict, crisis and resolution. That is, as feminists have pointed out for years, as a competitive structure with a 'winner' and a 'loser.'"

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Johnson's tour de force is the way it tweaks that theory of composition to give it practical application for aspiring screenwriters.

"Claudia's book is the best, and almost the only, book on making the short film," says Ray Fielding, dean of FSU's film school. Fielding has worked in the industry as a writer, producer, and director for the better part of five decades.

Fielding sees Johnson's book as a timely addition to the literature of the short film, not the least for the creative problem-solving that Johnson teaches in a world of film that seems to be moving bit by bit away from the feature-length product to something more flexible. Short films, once standard fare in movie houses the world over, are making a come-back, he says (see sidebar).

"It's the right time for this book. With the coming of the Internet, there is a possibility of a significant marketplace for the kinds of films that film schools produce."

The book, like Johnson herself, is full of energy and wit. Personalities from Florida State's own Burroway, to the late Jerry Stern, author, NPR commentator and long the popular, driving force behind FSU's Creative Writing Program, have their say, as do naturalist Stephen Jay Gould, playwright George Bernard Shaw, novelists E. M. Forster and Ernest Hemingway, and an eclectic host of aphorists, writers, and theorists. All bolster Johnson's paramount thesis: "A screenwriter's purpose is to connect."

Connection is important enough, writes Johnson, to "write it down on a Post-it note or a three-by-five card and stick it to your computer, desk, forehead. This deceptively simple advice is the heart of the art of writing good screenplays."

Johnson is consistent with her "deceptively simple" advice. "A screenplay is a story told in scenes for the screen," she writes, and also is "a pattern of human change told in scenes for the screen." Still, she understands that because writing screenplays that "connect" is such a daunting task, she breaks the writing process down "into teachable, learnable pieces that students can tackle one at a time. I believe in learning by doing, and the book is designed to be interactive, from the exercises that prepare you to write to the margins that allow you to noodle ideas, details, dialogue, character, scenes or anything else that flashes to mind as you read the book."

The genesis for the book came in January 1994, as Johnson stood in the shower. Something had been bugging her about the screenwriting books she was reading, the way they all emphasized rounding up the usual suspects—conflict, crisis, and resolution. Ten years of teaching conflict had prepared Johnson for a breakthrough.

"I didn't know that things would turn on connection. I was having this driving disease with conflict, conflict, conflict," she says. "The models that we had to illustrate life simply did not comprehend the human experiences that I'd had. Conflict is essential. But I realized that conflict is truly only half the story. The other is this underlying pattern of connecting and disconnecting."

The book is a perfect way for the teacher to connect—that word again—with her students. "I love the connection in teaching," says Johnson, whose parents, perhaps not coincidentally, were, at times, both teachers. "I'm such a social person that teaching is a good venue for me."

Too, teaching at Florida State's film school provides the balance that any writer needs to avoid burn-out. Johnson likens Sunday to the day that the lumberjack sharpens his ax. To work seven days a week, she has found, is counterproductive.

Instead, Johnson sets aside two or three days a week for writing, and she devotes the rest of her time to her students. "I love teaching," she says. "I love showing students how a theme works, breaking down a film. I never cease to get excited when we take a scene apart into beats of dialogue, the littlest building blocks, the Legos. A beautifully crafted scene of dialogue has arc, it has change, it has discovery. It's chaos theory. The pattern of the tiniest piece is reflected in the pattern of the larger piece."

For the most part, the students that Johnson sees now are juniors and seniors who share a passion for screenwriting and, unfortunately, a vision that some of Johnson's older students have—a get-rich-quick notion that Johnson terms the "lottery mentality." "We just had a student sell an 18-page treatment for $225,000. That got people buzzing," says Johnson. She is referring to Melissa Carter's 1999 sale of Catch of the Day to a Hollywood agent.

"I'm always quick to tell students who buy into the 'lottery mentality' that I've made more money babysitting than I've made from screenwriting," says Johnson. "I'm exaggerating a bit, but there's no point in even talking about agents unless you have a script, a property."

Still, the popularity of independent films and the strength of the medium (Fielding still marvels at the fact that in the film business, "everything is as it was a hundred years ago; that's one of the hidden secrets of the industry") seems to have little to do with Johnson's passion for teaching the screenwriter's craft by sorting out stories in terms of the relationships between characters. The writing stands for itself, she says. The book simply "came out of the love of teaching and having to articulate the elements of screenwriting."

A product of the Texas Gulf Coast, she settled in Oklahoma before beginning her cross-country odyssey. After finishing an undergraduate degree at Oklahoma University, where her mother was finishing a doctorate in history at the same time, she studied under renowned folklorist Alan Dundes (Interpreting Folklore, Essays by a Freudian Folklorist) at Berkeley. Dundes encouraged the young scholar to pursue a doctorate in folklore at Indiana University. She followed the suggestion just so far, until she "figured out that that wasn't what I wanted to do with my life."

The epiphany that brought Johnson to Tallahassee is itself something that could have sprung from a screenplay. Out of the blue, she got a phone call from her childhood best friend, with whom the young Claudia had made a pact: the friend would be a doctor, and Claudia would be a writer.

"When we were twelve, we climbed a mesquite tree in south Texas and bared our souls," Johnson recalls. "The day she got accepted to the University of Texas Medical School, she called me. I said, 'I'm not following my dream,' and it was this huge moment. I quit the doctoral program, took a second master's, waited tables, and this funny Joseph Campbell follow-your-bliss-synchronicity thing happened. I ended up doing playwriting classes with Sam Smiley at Indiana."

Smiley, who wrote a best-selling dramatic structure book, Playwriting: The Structure of Action, and acted in bit parts in Hoosiers, The Untouchables, and Terminal Velocity, was a strong influence on Johnson because he had immersed himself in every aspect of the creative process.

But while Smiley influenced Johnson's writing, it was Burroway who encouraged her to apply for a position in the Ph.D. program in creative writing at Florida State.

The road to Tallahassee was not without obstacles. Under Smiley's tutelage, Johnson worked as a dialogist for The Catlins, Ted Turner's family-values answer to the rabid popularity of the prime-time soap Dallas. The Catlins, Johnson laughingly admits, was "the worst soap opera in history."

To label the show "low-budget" would be to overestimate the show's production values, she says. In fact, not two decades after the show's demise, apparently very few, if any, copies of the show exist.

"The guy who played the patriarch of the Catlin family was not an actor, he was an SEC basketball referee," Johnson recalls with glee, remembering the turn of fortune her writing career had taken. "The directors on the show never did second takes, so phones would not ring, and people would still answer them. It was so horrible that it began to get a cult following. Lewis Grizzard wrote a hilarious article where he said that The Catlins was spreading across America like an outbreak of mouth sores."

The termination of Johnson's short career as a soap writer was no less interesting than the job itself. One day the story outlines the writers used to create the show's dialogue didn't show up in the mail. Johnson's corporate credit card had also been cancelled without her knowledge. "That was how I found out I had been fired," she recalls. "That, and my dad read a piece in the Miami Herald that said the producers had hired a new team of writers for the show."

The humor of the situation has obviously long since overshadowed any small disappointment she might have felt at the time. "That's show biz," she laughs.

While the Catlins have gone away for good, the relationship that developed between Johnson and Burroway remains strong. The two, along with Tallahassee writers Pam Ball and Elizabeth Stuckey-French ("a comfortable coven," in Burroway's words), carry on a never-ending conversation linking family, teaching, and writing. "We continue to explore—not particularly intending to; it just happens—the myriad ways that fiction, drama, film, and nonfiction play out the connection-disconnection theme," says Burroway.

"Aspiration makes us write. Communication makes it better." The conversation turns back to Gladiator, and Johnson points out that her theory of connectivity works nicely even on the random sample. The conflict for the gladiator Maximus, she points out, is simply to get home. She mentions tongue-in-cheek the impetus for the protagonist's rage (DOSO, or "death of the significant other," an integral part of enough films that the acronym serves nicely), and goes on to detail the different relationships—not just the various conflicts—that the film develops.

Despite the lightheartedness of the conversation, Johnson's attention turns, again and again, to the notion of connection, which runs deep in the story on the screen. The parallels with her own life are inevitable.

"The metaphor that works best is DNA. The two strands—conflict and connection—are interwoven. Writers know that sort of thing instinctively. It's there in the great stories, but it hadn't been articulated before." In fact, one of the joys for Johnson of publishing Crafting Short Screenplays has been the response from teachers and writers who have thanked her for describing in cogent prose what they have always merely felt.

"For a long time, people have had this uneasy notion that the model that we had just didn't do everything it could," she says. "It was great to be able to articulate the connection theory, what other screenwriting books haven't told us."

Johnson, meanwhile, looks at her plate and muses the projects ahead. Along with Matt Stevens, she's currently working on another screenwriting book, tentatively titled The Art of Collaborative Screenwriting, for Focal Press. Also, she's been shadowing the Florida State football team in preparation for her sixth feature, the story of a big-time Florida football coach whose son—the freshman quarterback—teaches him that human connection is more important than competition.

When it comes right down to it, Johnson and her work are about a lot of things, but passion is always at the top of the list. In one final connection, she mentions the work of Florida State alumnus Alan Ball, who penned the screenplay for the phenomenally successful American Beauty. "You know why that was such a brilliant film," Johnson asks rhetorically. "You look at the surface action, the protagonist starts out alive and ends up dead. You look at the deep action, its character arc, the protagonist starts out dead and end up alive. How elegant is that?