There is an ebb and a flow to what I obsess over in the screenwriting space. Sometimes I’m obsessed with high concepts. Sometimes I’m obsessed with a great opening page. Sometimes I’m obsessed with second acts.
But as time has passed, there is one obsession that seems to keep coming back to the forefront again and again. Wanna take a guess what it is? While you rack your brain, let me explain WHY I continue to be obsessed with this particular element. It’s because if you are good at this thing, it is one of (if not the) biggest indicator that you are good at writing screenplays.
Wanna know what it is?
Scene writing.
I know, I know. I talk about this all the time. But that’s the point! It’s so important that I keep coming back to it.
The reason it got triggered this time is that I was doing a script consultation while I was in a pretty lousy mood. In script-reading parlance, I was a “tough crowd.” Since my baseline is “tough crowd,” this made me an extremely tough crowd. Despite that, I was pulled into this screenplay immediately. I can’t give you the opening scene for privacy reasons but it amounted to a woman letting a stranger in need of help into her home and the stranger being suspicious. In other words, we know bad things are coming. And if the reader knows bad things are coming, they have no choice but to keep reading.
But if that’s all the scene is, it won’t be enough. You have to build, you have to create conflict, you have to deliver a satisfying resolution, maybe do something unexpected along the way. That’s writing. You’re TELLING A STORY in that scene. Which seems like such an obvious point to make but it should shock you when I tell you I read entire screenplays (a lot of them!) that don’t have a single entertaining scene within them. They’re all scene fragments or exposition or setup for later scenes or a bunch of crap the writer stuffs into the scene to get it out of the way.
Let me make this clear: If you are incapable of consistently writing compelling scenes, you will never advance anywhere as a screenwriter.
In other words, stop focusing on the bigger picture of finishing your scripts if you haven’t even been able to write good scenes yet. How do you know you’ve written a good scene? The reader brings it up! “Oh man. The house invasion where they try and tie Anora up (in the movie, “Anora”). That was a crazy scene!”
Now… does the ability to write a good scene mean the writer will write a good script? Of course not. This is because someone can get lucky. Which I see happen all the time. See, there are these things called “dramatic situations.” These are naturally compelling situations that effortlessly keep a reader’s interest. In the example I used above, a potentially dangerous man alone with a woman in her home… that’s a dramatic situation. Conversely, if those same two people, under the same pretense (he’s a dangerous person), started talking in the middle of Times Square? The scene would lose much of its dramatic punch.
What I’ve learned is that writers can stumble into dramatic situations accidentally. There was never a plan to find the situation. They just got lucky and picked one that was naturally dramatic. Therefore, when you have that writer extrapolate that scene into an entire script, they will rarely, if ever, include a dramatic situation again. And even if they do, it *too* will be an accident.
Once you become a writer who has accumulated enough experience that you have a breadth of dramatic situations to choose from, you will increase the number of dramatically compelling scenes you write, which, in turn, vastly improves the chances that the totality of your script will be good.
Now, does it GUARANTEE it will be good? No. Because writing a series of individually compelling scenes does not equate to telling a story. The challenge with writing full scripts is connecting those scenes together in a story that, like the scenes themselves, builds, then conflicts, then resolves.
The reason that’s so challenging is that a script is long. And there’s a pacing element to all of this. A storyteller needs to know when they’ve been on a road for too long. They must know when to deviate onto a new road – maybe smaller, maybe bigger – that has new things to see, new things to throw at the driver. Learning how to bob and weave and twist and turn to always stay on the road that best maximizes your story takes a lot of trial and error.
Once you become good at scene-writing, you want to become good at SEQUENCE WRITING. That may sound fancy but it isn’t. It’s just the next measurement up from scene-writing. If scene-writing is a teaspoon, sequence writing is a tablespoon (and a script is the entire bowl).
It just means that several scenes will be strung together to create their own story. Let’s say a married couple trying to repair their marriage is having dinner at a restaurant. The act of driving to the restaurant, getting their table, ordering their food, and then eating – that’s technically four scenes. But it’s one sequence that all relates to the same thing (going out for dinner).
Do you need to write four individual dramatically compelling scenes there IN ADDITION TO a dramatically compelling sequence? No, you do not. I would encourage you to try. But I get that sometimes, due to the nature of the script, it doesn’t make sense. Maybe this is a section of the script that needs to move quickly. In that case, staying too long in a couple of these scenes is going to hurt the pacing.
However, let me make something very clear. If you are not including a dramatic situation in each individual scene, you BETTER be creating a dramatic situation with the sequence those scenes reside in. Cause if you’re doing neither, I GUARANTEE you the reader will not make it past that sequence. They WILL stop reading.
The simplest way to create dramatic situations is to introduce a problem to your character, either one that requires a physical solution or a conversational one, try to have them solve it, but put things in the way that make solving the problem uncertain. That’s a key word: UNCERTAIN. If we are uncertain that they will be able to solve the problem, we need to keep reading. But if we’re REASONABLY CERTAIN they’ll figure it out, that scene or sequence loses any trace of drama and we don’t need to keep reading to know what happens.
The best scene in the movie Civil War operates under this formula. A rogue soldier is casually murdering people. He has two of our protagonists with him. The rest of our protagonists have the problem: Their co-workers are about to be assassinated by this dude. They need to convince him not to. Their attempts to persuade him and the uncertainty of his response are what make the scene a dramatic tour de force.
This is NOT the only formula for creating dramatic situations. Just the most used one. In fact, I would love it if you guys shared some of your favorite go-to dramatic situations you pull from when writing your scenes. Together, maybe we can come up with a big enough list that nobody from this site will ever write a boring scene again. :)
If you mention this article, I will give you $100 off a screenplay consultation and $5 off a logline consultation. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested!
