The Craft of Scene Writing audiobook is temporarily FREE! · 7:28pm Mar 7th, 2023
Jim Mercurio recently wrote a book, The Craft of Scene Writing: Beat by Beat to a Better Script, that I've been meaning to plug here for years, but haven't yet got around to re-reading the book to write the review. It's a book worth re-reading, but I decided to wait until the Audible audiobook was on sale.
Yesterday I checked its price, and it's now--$0!
(For mathematicians: That's $0, not $1.)
If you have an Audible membership, that is. I do. I listen to audiobooks every day now. I wear earbuds around the house and turn my current book on whenever I'm doing the dishes, doing laundry, doing yard-work, building something, fixing something, or sitting on the pot. A membership saves a lot of money if you buy a lot of audiobooks.
You can't download free audiobooks; you can only stream them. This one's 12 hours long, so start streaming now if you want to finish it while it's free. You can get the book or the audiobook on Amazon: here.
Except, I just checked that link, and the price changed back to $18.37 while I was writing this. But there's still a "Try for $0" link on audible.com. Get it before the price change propagates from amazon.com to audible.com .
Really, get this book. It's oriented to screenwriting, but everything it says applies to any kind of fiction, even blocking. I think every writer should try writing for movies, because it forces you to count the seconds in your scenes, to visualize and deal tangibly with focus, point-of-view, staging, and timing; to show instead of tell; to describe just the important things; and to make dialogue stand on its own as action as well as information.
Dialogue
Jim emphasizes making dialogue short, structured, and slanted.
Short: Don't write "Four of them?" when you can write "Four?" Convert as much of your dialogue as you can, both sentences and individual words, into action, or setting, or inaction, or anything other than words.
Structured: Put the high-information-content words at the place in the sentence where the timing is right for the emotional response you want. As in:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Right: To get to the other side.
Wrong: To get to the other side of the road.
Ending with "of the road" kills the joke, because the listener is still listening past the point where it's funny. The words after that point force the listener to focus on parsing English while the humorous catharsis evaporates. For the same reason, don't end a scene on a weak line.
This type of structure applies to everything in the script, not just dialogue. Say a woman walks in on her boyfriend while he's reading a love letter from another woman. If she sees what it is right away, the scene's blown its load without any foreplay. (Jim's not that crude; that was me.) Build up to the heavy revelation. With tension, you might not want to ultimately do a reversal (see below); just a straightforward expectation...fulfilment--but one whose fulfilment we dread. Or maybe the sequence <expectation, fake reversal that relieves the tension, sudden fulfilment of the original expectation>, like in some horror movies.
Slanted: Like Emily Dickinson said, "Tell the truth, but tell it slant." Your characters shouldn't say important things directly. That's boring. We call that "on the nose", and it's not a compliment. "I love you" may be a wonderful thing to hear in real life, but not in a movie. It's a waste of an opportunity to make the reader think, create a little tension, reveal a little character. Jim gives many examples.
Just in passing, Jim made an important point that applies to everything. He was discussing two scenes in the remake of the James Bond film Casino Royale: an action scene, followed by a talking scene. In the action scene, Bond chases a man through a construction site. The man is a parkour expert; Bond bashes his way through obstacles. In the talking scene, M calls Bond a "blunt instrument". Jim pointed out that, although as viewers we see the dialogue as the result of Bond's blunt actions in the previous scene, the causality may have gone in the opposite direction: the writer may have written the dialogue first, then rewritten the previous scene (or written it for the first time) to make the dialogue true. This habit of writing backward as well as forward applies to every aspect of writing. But most writers don't even think of it.
Reversals
Jim gives many great examples from movies of expectation and reversals. He calls creating an expectation a "zig", and its reversal (delivering an opposite) a "zag".
"An" opposite, not "the" opposite. As Jim points out, expectations never have just one opposite. A guy confronts a woman, wanting an apology; he ends up giving an apology. That's an opposite. Or she wants an apology from him. That's an opposite, too. Or she convinces him she did him a favor, and he thanks her; that's another opposite.
Jim sees the structure of a story as a fractal tree of reversals. The story as a whole tells about one big reversal (or failure to reverse); each act has a reversal; each scene has a reversal; and ideally, each line of dialogue should be a reversal.
Omit needless things
His requirements are stricter than novelists are used to. Hollywood films are very efficient. Audiences can only sit so long. Like in longsword fighting, you never make a move that does just one thing. A scene that doesn't change both the plot and a character should be cut or reworked. A line of dialogue that gives information, but has no subtext, or doesn't express character, should be cut or reworked.
All that's from just the first 1/5th of the book, which is all I've gotten through in audio. There's lots more. I reviewed one of Jim's classes on screenwriting back in 2018: Advanced Scene Writing by Jim Mercurio. Some of the same examples are in the book.
Later I went to a week-long workshop by him later, and he brought a bunch of actors and had them act out scenes from our scripts. That taught me in half an hour what I hadn't learned in a lifetime of writing stories and watching movies: what the actors add to your characters, to fill in the gaps you didn't realize you'd left, or to make them even more real. Also, if an actor forgets a line, it's a bad line. If you ever get a chance to have actors act out a story of yours, jump on it.
PS - The same audiobook is available on audiobooks.com, free with a trial membership, or $25 if you already have a membership. Books are usually more-expensive on audiobooks.com, but there's no DRM for ones you purchase.
Already have an audible membership, and I was also able to snag it for free! Good rec. I've heard of the idea of writing backwards, and it's helped me tremendously when it comes to redrafting.
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Great! You made my post worthwhile.