A Writer at the Movies by Angie Chatman

For a lot of writers, summer is a time for writing conferences. I am a conference junkie. I’ve attended the Iowa Summer Writers Festival in Iowa City three times. I went to the Whidbey Island Conference off the coast of Seattle. I’ve participated in the Wesleyan Writers Conference in Connecticut and the Hurston-Wright Workshop in Washington, DC. But this summer I hit the jackpot and was accepted to Bread Loaf in Middlebury, Vermont, the oldest and most prestigious summer writers’ conference of them all.

Bread Loaf is ten days long. In addition to workshopping poems, essays or stories, the conference is filled with readings (this year the US Poet Laureate Philip Levine was in attendance. You can hear his reading on iTunes) and lectures on the craft. One of the craft classes I attended was Van Jordan’s on time in film. Van is a poet who teaches at the University of Michigan. He also is a film buff.

Back in graduate school, during my first workshop session, I was told that I should have more scenes in my story. Or, the comment was that my scenes weren’t working hard enough. When one person tells you something it is easy to discount it. But all three of my classmates said I should have more scenes. I didn’t want to embarrass myself so I didn’t say out loud – what the $%*^is a scene?

A scene is a period of time in the story where something happens. Hopefully the something happens to your character or reveals something about your character because character is the basis of literature. But most important, a scene is a unit of energy that moves the story forward. If it doesn’t, then there is no scene.

Some people call scenes building blocks.  I like bling so I prefer thinking of scenes as beads on a string. String together enough beads and you’ve got a good story. Sounds simple.  Yet, I still have trouble with writing scenes. I write pages and pages of snappy dialogue, lyrical descriptions, and insightful character musings. But nothing actually happens.

Watching movies scene-by-scene has helped me to understand what makes a good one. The advantage of film over other forms of narrative is that the momentum of the story is built into the medium – film is a motion picture.

The current favorite movie in my household is The Incredibles. I’ve seen it multiple times already; it never gets old to my seven year old. I get to spend time with her on the couch, and count the time as writing research. A win-win.  In case you haven’t seen it the plot is as follows – a super hero has a mid life crisis. Forced to live with his family undercover, he takes an opportunity to return to his former glory and in the process he and his family foils a villain and saves the world.

In filmmaking a key plot point typically takes place around the 20 minute mark. In the Incredibles this is the scene “2 Ex-Supers” where Mr. Incredible and his best friend, Frozone, are sitting in the car talking and listening to a police scanner. In the bottom left corner of the frame an unknown woman is watching them.

This scene is critical because it reinforces Mr. Incredibles’ desire to return to his status as a superhero. It shows the relationship between him and Frozone. And, the scene heightens the movie’s tension because at this time we don’t know the woman’s identity (Mirage) or her affiliation although we are provided a subliminal clue because of the position of the woman on the left side, the sinister side, of the frame.

What makes this a great scene is its use of all three dimensions of time, at the same time.

The entire scene takes place in the present moment. The two superheroes are talking about the past. And the presence of Mirage in the scene hints at an unknown event in the future. Three in one.

Having been to Bread Loaf, I’m revising my novel (again) scene by scene, looking for opportunities to make them work harder, concentrating on the way time is handled in each one.

I ask myself the following questions –

1. Is this scene telling the reader something NEW about the character in the present moment of the story?
2. Where is the tension in the scene that moves the story forward? Is there something that obliquely or directly refers to the future?
3. How did the past affect the present? How does it affect the future in that scene? These questions are especially critical in flashback scenes, of which I have a few.

The best scene addresses all three of these questions. If it doesn’t, it’s a strong candidate for the chopping block in spite of how long it took me to write it and how much I like it. (Kill your darlings. Kill your darlings.)

I’ve also read and refer to a couple of books – Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversations with Walter Murch (the man who edited the Godfather Films) and Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sjill.

And I’m watching the movies I missed this summer – scene by scene.

Angie Chatman earned her MFA in both fiction and non fiction from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She lives in the heartland, in Des Moines, Iowa, with her husband and three children.