TRANSCRIPT

One of the questions I get the most from students or writers that I coach is what makes a scene? At its most rudimentary, not even what makes a great scene, but what do I have to have in place for a scene to work? So, I'd like to go over that a little bit with you now. I find that a simple rule of thumb is that a scene, much like a great film, has three parts. It has a set up, it has an event, and then it has a series of actions and reactions to that event that happens in the scene. So let’s unpack that a little bit and think about what it means.

The setup of a scene is what's going on when, you know, the light and action comes up in the scene, like where are we, what's taking place, let's make sure that just like when we joined the film, something is happening. We're entering in media res, in the middle of things, but then an event takes place. Maybe the coffee cup falls off the desk, or somebody knocks at the door, or there’s a phone call, or a tree falls on top of the house, or a man in a mask runs past the window on the side of the house. That's the event. Now how do the characters react to that event? That's the third part of your scene. I like to make sure that I have two parts of that action and reaction: first of all, how does my protagonist react? Do they choose to do anything or do they do nothing? Doing nothing is a choice and an action in and of itself. Then, how did the other characters in the scene react to my protagonist and what they choose to do? So to go over this again, three parts: a set up, what's going on when we enter the scene; an event, something that takes place; and then the reaction to that event. Once you have those three parts, you’re going to be able to get out of the scene, but it's not quite enough to build a scene with substance.

So let's think about it from another perspective now. Let's think about it from the perspective of the character arc. Every scene that you write should challenge your character to grow or cause them to regress in some way, in other words, when we enter the scene and when we leave the scene, the character should not be at the same place. Either they should be progressing in their quest for the MacGuffin, either they should be driving the plot forward, or we should be losing ground. We cannot maintain a status quo. A scene can never be flat. So from the point of view of the plot and the point of view of character development, things have to change from the beginning to the end of a scene.

Why does this matter for me when I'm going to outline? A word of encouragement here: don’t worry about getting your outline right the first time. It might even change while you're writing. The outline is really just a blueprint that helps guide you on your journey of writing the script. I find it useful to troubleshoot in my descriptions, in the scene-by-scene outline, where I don't have that three-part structure: set up, event, and reaction, and where I don't have character growth. In other words, I’m going to take each scene individually and ask myself, “Are all the things, are all the ingredients I need for a great scene present?” Then I'm going to take a step back and I’m going to ask myself, “Does this scene create an emotion? Do I read it and feel something?” If I don't feel something, then it's probably too mechanical. Something's missing, too. The stakes aren't high enough. I like to take a deep breath and close my eyes and play the scene in my mind, and I like to gain this sort of sense of rhythm and understanding of the emotion I'm seeking to create in the mind of the viewer, and I'll flag that as well, and ultimately this allows me to test my script before I actually write it, and usually my scenes come out more developed than they would have been if I hadn't thought about it in the first place.

This is a process that’s particular to me. I'm not saying it's going to work for everybody, nor that you should embrace it, I just wanted to share so that you can see that I don't have a clearly defined idea of exactly how each one of my scenes is going to come out when I go to outline. Like you, every time I undertake a new story, I'm sort of peeling back the layers of the story and at each step it’s challenging me. It never gets easy. It’s always a process and I find that going through that process helps me really engage with the journey my character’s going through, but it also helps me to uncover the story that maybe I didn't realize I was writing when I started out. So that’s my parting word for your outlining process. Many great writers will say that it's when you get maybe 2/3 of the way through your story that you realize the story you were telling in the first place. Rather than writing out a whole script and finding that out, by doing the outline I hope to provoke that sort of catharsis moment where I realize what I'm doing during the outlining phase. That way, I don't have to write 120 pages to figure out what I'm doing. I can write 10 to 20 pages of an outline, figure out what I'm doing, and then get into writing the story that was calling to me in the first place, but that I didn't quite recognize yet. Maybe it hadn’t yet come into focus. Again, very personal to me, not something you have to do, but something I found useful over the years and that I hope will help you, too.

Video