The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 260 - The Weight of a Scene

It all comes down to one scene. The big reveal. The climax. The inciting incident. The heart-wrenching death of the protagonist's love. We've all written, giddy for the scene we know will sell our scripts and win us our Oscars. Anything can happen in a scene, and any scene has the potential to make - or break - a movie. 

Any scene can be a bull to write.

For me, that scene this week has come within the first 15 pages of the script and is charged with no small feat: it has to establish the protagonist, his goals, and his fears. In short, it has to prep him (and therefore, us) for his entire story arc. I know it might seem silly to boil such an important task down to one scene, but the anatomy of the first act of this new script is a little atypical. Many sci-fi scripts start off with a normal world, before the foreign/unknown/extraterrestrial/fictional invades Earth and kicks things into drive. That's no different with the collaboration I'm working on. However, this script also opens with a five-page prologue. The inciting incident still has to happen around page ten and is shortly followed by the aforementioned invasion, which turns normal on its head. In the script, that happens around page 13.

Page thirteen. With the first five pages setting future events up in a way that offer very little introduction of the protagonist. So, I'm down to eight pages to establish my protagonist, his world, his friends, and the current "normal" before all goes awry on page thirteen. It's a Sisyphean feat, especially when you consider that, in this particular scene, his character is being established mainly through dialogue with a confidante. Dialogue, as I'm sure you've experienced, can be a lot of fun or incredibly sticky. You don't want to be too on the nose. My protagonist isn't going to say, "this is my opinion of myself, and these are all the skeletons in my closet that are going to hold me back, which I need to overcome to grow as a person over the coming experience." But, of course, that's exactly what the subtext has to be, and it has to be subtle enough that it sounds natural, but not so esoteric that audiences won't follow it.

The dialogue has to be crisp, revealing, and deep. And right now, I have a three pages scene set up in which I can make it happen. The whole rest of the script will follow from there - and we have it, ready for this scene to be slotted in and the following dialogue tweaked to match - but the script can't go to our producer or representatives until this one scene is reworked. One little scene. What a bear. 

The Writing Week part 52 - Next Project Underway

First, let me just wish everyone Happy Holidays. As the year winds down, I'm finding it more and more important to get a solid grasp on my next project, so as to be able to really make some headway into it in early 2009. When I met with my manager a few weeks ago, I pitched him four ideas I had, and we collectively settled on one as my next project. I've been working on it "in my head" (read: not actually writing) since then, and finally started putting those thoughts down in random order, usually in short bursts of a few cryptic sentences at a time.

The idea, which I won't give away, is a pretty big one. It's not what you would call conventional, per se. There's a lot going on and a major shift in focus and a real whammy of a twist at the end of Act One. For that reason especially, it's been a little tough figuring out where the act breaks should come into play. Now don't get me wrong, a lot of writers successfully work outside the confines of three-act structure. The sequence method - I don't know a whole lot about this approach, but in short, it involves breaking your script into eight sections, each of which is treated as a short three-act sequence, with two sections being in acts one and three and four in act two - seems to be gaining in popularity. But the truth of it is that I haven't tried sequencing yet, and three-act structure is both familiar to me and something that works. If I can make the script work in that context, I'm going to try that first.

Have you ever had an idea that you realize is pretty convoluted and difficult, yet at the same time, you can step back from it and see it as a really basic, simple idea? That's sort of where I am now. (I know I just said it was big and with a major twist, but if i can just figure out how to incorporate them, the rest ought to fall into place very quickly.) My approach has usually been to find my "tent pole scenes," the scenes that hold up the script. There are five of these: the inciting incident on page 10, the twist or push at the end of Act One, the midpoint of act two when the protagonist is either encouraged or beaten down, the end of Act Two that catapults us toward the end, and the final climax/resolution.

I've always found the writing to come easiest when I can nail down those five scenes. From that point on, the outlining and writing is sort of like taking a road trip. You know where you're starting and what landmarks you have to hit along the way. How you choose to go from A to B in between those five sites is up to you, and ultimately one route will prevail above all the others. (Unless, of course, you decide that those five sites do not make sense to go to, and you redraw the map completely.) My big goal for the next few days is to mark those five scenes down on my outline (map). If I can get the story to fit in there, I'll be good as gravy. Smooth driving ahead.

Do you use the Five Tent Pole Scene Approach?