We’re getting close.
Next week is Scene Showdown!
What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
So I wanted to give you one last article to beef up your scene-writing skills. And the concept we’re going to tackle today is something called “The Scene Soundboard.”
I’m going to be upfront with you—I’m not an expert on soundboards by any stretch. However, I do understand that audio engineers work with these giant mixing boards packed with sliders, knobs, and controls. By adjusting specific faders or tweaking certain dials, they can manipulate the audio output.
The same thing is true with scene writing. You have these knobs. And you can either dial them up or dial them down and, by doing so, you change the intensity of the scene.
In order to understand how to do this, you must first understand how 90% of scenes are constructed. You have a character who wants something in the scene then you have a character who stands in the way of them getting it.
That person may actively not want to give it to them, or they may just obliviously be in the way. For example, on the former, a husband may want to hang out with his buddies tonight. Meanwhile, his wife wants him to come to her boss’s dinner party. The hubby’s goal is to hang out with his friends and his wife is actively trying to prevent that.
As for the latter, imagine a bank robber scoping out a bank for weaknesses (his goal) that he wants to rob later. There may be a bank manager who strolls up and starts annoyingly asking him if he wants to open an account at the bank. The manager doesn’t know this guy is casing the joint, yet he’s still in the way of our bank robber achieving his goal.
By the way, note how each situation changes the dialogue. In the first, the conversation is straightforward. The married couple is *literally* debating whether he should get to hang out with his friends. The conflict in the second conversation, meanwhile, is happening below the surface. Neither character is talking about what the protagonist actually wants to do, which means much of the focus of the scene is being conveyed through subtext.
But anyway, that’s not what today’s article is about.
Today’s article is about understanding how to amp up any scene with basic scene structure (a person who wants something and a person who stands in the way). Getting back to our original analogy, I want you to imagine this giant mixing board. On that board are these KNOBS. You can dial these knobs up a little, a medium amount, or a lot, depending on how much you want to juice up the scene.
These four knobs are…
Stakes
Resistance
Urgency
Emotion
The number one way to amp up a scene is, without question, stakes. The more that’s on the line in the scene, the more compelling the scene is going to be. It’s simple math.
Let’s say we have a character who’s going to steal something. Remember that Netflix movie, Emily the Criminal? Let’s say Emily has to steal a random guy’s wallet for her new boss. We have our goal (steal the wallet) and we have our stakes (she’s doing something illegal, which is dangerous, and the mark could potentially catch her in the act, creating a problematic situation).
But let’s say we get on our Screenplay Soundboard and dial up the stakes knob. Instead of having her try and steal a guy’s wallet, she tries to steal… A CAR. Now we’ve got some REAL consequences. Grand theft auto is no joke. And guess what? That’s the scene they went with in the movie and it ended up being the best scene. Coincidence? I don’t think so. That’s the power of dialing up the stakes knob.
Next, let’s look at resistance. Resistance is simply upping the knob that has the opposing character in the scene getting in the way of our hero achieving his goal. The more you turn this knob up, the more intense the interaction gets, which creates more conflict.
Let me use one of my favorite scenes ever as an example – Jerry Lundegaard meeting with the two criminals he’s hiring to kidnap his wife in the film, Fargo. Just like any scene, there was a way to write this scene with the resistance knob turned down. You could’ve made the kidnappers annoyed, but eager to get their money and, therefore, cooperative.
But that’s not the route the Coen brothers went. Instead, they turned up that resistance knob to 11, making the two kidnappers highly resistant to help Jerry. Carl is determined to get Jerry to admit he fucked up about the meeting time, leaving them sitting there around for an hour, and Psycho Gaear intermittently stares at Jerry like he’s going to kill him. This creates all sorts of conflict and makes Jerry’s goal much more challenging.
Again, a lesser writer would’ve made the two kidnappers annoying, but ultimately agreeable, so he could get what he wanted out of the scene and move on to the next one. The good screenwriter ups that resistance knob and makes it very uncertain whether Jerry is going to achieve his goal or not.
Moving on, let’s check out the urgency knob. The urgency knob is effective but, if we’re being honest, it’s the most simplistic of the four knobs. By upping this knob, you condense the amount of time that the protagonist has to achieve his goal in the scene.
So, let’s say you have a scene where a wife has a last minute change of plans and needs her husband to take their kid to school tomorrow. So they’re getting ready for bed, the wife puts forth the problem and what she needs from the husband, but he’s got his own big day tomorrow so he’s resistant.
Could you get a good scene out of this scenario? Sure, an okay one. You’ve got a character who wants something. You’ve got a character who’s resistant, which is going to create conflict. The stakes are pretty low, though, and there isn’t an obvious way to dial that knob up. So what can you do? Well, that’s when you bring in the urgency knob.
Instead of setting the scene at night, before they go to bed, where the two have all the time in the world, rewrite the variables so the wife finds out about the problem 5 minutes before she leaves for work. In other words, set the scene in the morning, with 5 minutes before everybody has to leave, and now the URGENCY of the situation is going to dial up the intensity of the scene considerably.
Lastly, we have the emotional knob. Now, the emotional knob is the hardest knob to play with. It’s way way up there in the far corner for a reason. Because unless you know what you’re doing, it can hurt you just as much as it can help you.
The way that you use the emotional knob is to move away from the logistics of the scene (goal, resistance, stakes, urgency) and go internal. Ask yourself what’s going on INSIDE the characters that could up the intensity of the scene.
There was this old teen comedy from the late 90s called Can’t Hardly Wait. It followed a bunch of characters throughout the night at a giant house party. One of the main subplots had these two characters, Denise and Kenny, both of whom were looking forward to the party for their own reasons, get stuck in the bathroom together all night.
Now, the directive for this subplot was, obviously, having these two characters fall for each other over the course of the movie. But let’s say you’re writing that story (or just a scene from that story), and the scene is dull. Whenever you go back to them, there’s something lacking. Stakes aren’t really relevant here. Urgency is a non-factor cause you want them here the whole movie. And resistance isn’t really relevant either cause neither character has the active goal (they’re both stuck in the same situation – neither of them wanting to be here).
Well, this is where you want to reach up as far as you can to the right side of the board and play with the emotional knob. Which is exactly what the writers do. They create this backstory with the characters where they used to be really great friends in middle school and then, when they reached high school, the guy moved on and got a whole new group of friends, leaving the girl behind.
Note how turning up this dial ups the conflict considerably. Now there’s this unspoken thing that one of the characters did to the other lingering under everything that they say. Now we’ve got a storyline we can keep coming back to, one that consistently gives us strong scenes.
And there you go. This is how you use your Scene Soundboard to dial up the intensity of scenes. And remember, like I said, you control the degree to which you turn up the knob. You can dial any of these knobs up a little or, depending on how intensely you want the scene to play out, a lot.
Believe it or not, you don’t always want to dial a scene up to 100. If every scene were 100, then no scene would stand out. But what you don’t want to do is write scenes where all the knobs are set to 0. And I see that far too often. As in, when I read an amateur script, 75% of the scenes are set to 0 on all four knobs. That’s unacceptable.
But that’s often because the writer doesn’t know about these knobs or how much power they have to create great scenes with them. Now you know. So, I give you permission to unleash these powers on the scenes you write for the showdown and the scenes you write for all your scripts going forward!
