Lewis in harmonyHopefully we’ve all gotten enough arguing done on this site as of late. Let’s get back to the stuff that really matters.
Like writing.
I want to talk about the concept of harmony within a scene. Lots of people come up with good ideas. A number of them come up with good stories for those ideas. Writing good scenes, however, seems to be a much rarer skill.
I consider a good scene to be its own movie. There’s a beginning, middle and end. There is conflict, crisis, resolution and cliffhanging. But above all, there is a harmony between the building blocks of the scene itself.
Those are?
- The internal life of the character(s)
- The relationship between the characters
- The relationship of the character(s) to the external circumstances of the story
These are your three instruments that must be played in each scene (unless the scene only features one person, in which case you’re down to two instruments).
(Side note: I don’t know if screenwriting teachers agree with me or not or so forth. This is how I look at stuff. Don’t write and tell me that I’m clashing with McKee or Truby. I’ve never read them, and more importantly, I don’t care.)
A classic rookie mistake is to write a scene with two or more characters that doesn’t use all three building blocks. The main character is realizing something about himself in the scene, and there’s an interesting thing happening between the two characters, but the scene doesn’t advance the story in any significant way, and if cut out of the film, wouldn’t be missed.
Or perhaps two characters are having a fight while accomplishing a plot point, but the fight isn’t internally relevant to the main character.
Let’s say, however, that you’ve got a scene that has all three tools working.
Are they working in parallel, or in sequence? Are the working in isolation, or in integration?
Are they harmonizing or simply playing their own tunes?
Rather than intellectualize this concept, I’m going to ask you to read a scene by a real master of the craft. Scott Frank wrote this scene for his film The Lookout. After considering how to best present this scene in the context of this web page, I opted for maximum laziness and just embedded the PDF. This should work in Safari for Mac and Firefox and IE for PC. If you need the Adobe Reader plugin, go here.
Here’s the backstory you need before reading the scene (and spoilers apply, of course). LEWIS, played by Jeff Daniels, lives with the main character, Chris Pratt. All we know about Lewis is that he’s blind and clearly more wise than the 20-something Chris, who suffers from accident-related brain damage. Lewis basically looks after Chris. He even cooks his meals for him.
LUVLEE, played by Isla Fisher, has been sleeping with Chris, but what we know is that she’s really the girlfriend of another guy who is using Chris to rob a bank. Chris has told Lewis that Luvlee is his girlfriend, but he hasn’t told Lewis anything about the plan to rob the bank.
Luvlee has just slept over at Chris and Lewis’ apartment for the first time. It’s the middle of the night…
Okay.
So let’s talk about how these pages epitomize harmony in scenecraft.
On the first page, we learn that Luvlee is a stripper, or at least used to be one. But instead of coming out and telling us, we learn this fact by way of Lewis’ internal character. It’s his blindness…and the attendant qualities of being blind…that allow him to draw the conclusion we hadn’t yet made, and thus pull something out of Luvlee that neither she, nor any other character, nor the plot itself, had yet managed to do. Meanwhile, she’s immediately thrown off guard by Lewis from the very beginning of the scene. Here’s a blind man she didn’t see…and he’s immediately seeing right through her. So who’s blind?
All on page one. Note that we’re enjoying all three axes of scenecraft working in harmony. His character pulls out plot which sets the tone of the relationship…and there are no seams showing yet.
Now…page two.
Here, we watch as Lewis and Luvlee settle into a wrestling match. Page one was just the warning shot. Lewis has announced to Luvlee that he sees more than most people. And Luvlee, with her casual “Wow. You hear about that…”, has decided that playing the dumb stripper act is probably the best strategy here to avoid revealing too much. Of course, we’ve also learned something internal about Lewis, which is that he’s not yet willing to reveal anything about his blindness. Why? And why is Luvlee lying to him? These internal and interrelational elements are working together in service to unearth a nugget of external, or plot, information.
Lewis tries the head-on approach. She clams up. He shows his cards when he asks about Gary, confirming Luvlee’s suspicions (and note…the fact that Luvlee was suspicious before Gary asks is an intentional choice in and of itself!), and she not only keeps her silence, but goes on the attack.
She decides to figure out just whom she’s dealing with here. Is Lewis a brother? A father? Just how protective of Chris is he? Is this just curiosity, or is Lewis a danger? So she smartly turns the tables on him, revealing both to Lewis and the audience a heretofore unestablished caginess. As she interrogates Lewis, her character transforms from a dingy moll into a much smarter cookie. Hell, not just smart, but a bit dangerous.
“Maybe your only friend?”
Ouch. And she was so sweet just a moment ago…
Now Lewis realizes he’s not dealing with some airhead stripper he can push around. This is a real human being in front of him who’s smart enough to hear what he has to say.
He has a goal in this scene: protect Chris. That’s plot.
In order to achieve his plot goal, he has to reveal something about his internal character. His hope is that the truth of his internal character will change the relationship between him and Luvlee, and that in turn will help save Chris.
And so, Lewis reveals how he was blinded.
And folks, that’s all in two pages.
When people talk about “tight” writing, this is what they mean. Everything’s beautifully interlaced. The elements are affecting each other and looping back around. Oh, and take note…the quality of the dialogue itself is almost secondary. Dialogue doesn’t have to be sparkling in and of itself. It just has to be properly chosen in order to achieve the harmony you need in your purposeful scene.
Now, let’s go on to page three.
We already knew Lewis was a cook, but now we come to learn that Lewis was a cook. The implication between them now is that some people cook stuff up, and other people eat it. You know…there’s con artists and suckers…and that’s the world.
When Lewis asks “What are y’all cookin’, sweetheart?” he’s not just asking, “What are you and Gary up to?” He’s saying, “I was one of you, so come clean.” When you layer significances, the scene becomes more compelling. Harmony.
Trapped like a rat, Luvlee becomes petulant. See, once Lewis tells her he used to be a meth cook, she realizes that this blind glimp can probably read her mind. They’re of the same tribe. She briefly tries a new tactic…the “saint” who wants to help Chris, but even she knows that’s not going to hold up.
So she switches to a new strategy…which is denial and then anger. And with each new strategic switch, she reveals more and more that her internal voice is guilty, guilty, guilty of a crime. In this case, the interpersonal starts to reveal the personal, and once Lewis has her on the ropes, he attempt to actualize his goal.
“So tonight, in the dark, let me help you out and ask it again: what are you doing here?”
Lewis doesn’t ever say “You’re using Chris.” Nor does he say, “I’ll go to the police.” Nor does he say, “I’ll kill you if you hurt my friend.” Nor does he ever find out what Luvlee is even up to.
What he asks of Luvlee is simply this: “What are you doing here?”
His internal revelation has changed the interpersonal dynamic to reveal something about her internal state which leads him to the best strategy to achieve his external goal.
And that strategy is clearly guilt. He’s trying to guilt her into letting Chris off her perfumed hook for whatever it is she and her boyfriend Gary are trying to pull.
Three and a half pages.
The scene isn’t great because of the information revealed or the relationship between Luvlee and Lewis or the internal truths of their characters.
It’s great because of the way those elements all worked in harmony.
And it’s the harmony that makes good writing great.
