39. You have not made every scene memorable!

Try to make every scene remarkable in some way. Ask yourself, “Is there anything about this scene that I can make… better?” Just because your first draft is a boring pan across a city skyline doesn't mean you can't rewrite it… Take the Jasper Johns approach.


“Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it.”
Jasper Johns


One of the finest writing lessons of all time.

It’s the magic “what if…” What if she doesn't leave now? What if she walks out on that line? Sometimes that will really help. Persistently asking “what if” will get you a piece of gold.

Another way to think about this is to give each scene a second layer, to make it more interesting.

Tom Schulman, who wrote Dead Poets Society and What About Bob?, tries to do that in every scene. He wrote an opening “let's meet Bob” scene. In the end, it didn't make it into the film, but you'll see what I'm talking about.

First draft: Bob is standing in his bathroom brushing his teeth. Okay. That's fine. Nice. We see Bob. We see his bathroom. We’ll learn about him from the way he moves or smiles at himself in the mirror. But it's nothing to write home about. Then Schulman started wondering what he could do to make the scene remarkable.

Schulman said, “I knew we had to be ahead of the audience about this guy Bob… so in the rewrite, I put in a title card before the bathroom scene. The card read: ‘There have been 2,567 recorded cases of people swallowing their toothbrushes… The world record holder was a patient in a Russian insane asylum. In his lifetime, he had 121 toothbrushes removed from his stomach.’ Now, you cut to Bob brushing his teeth…”

Now what do you think about the scene?

The audience feels totally different just because the title card was added. The shot of Bob is the same, but not really… because we’re anticipating... something... Then he swallows his toothbrush…! He's panicked and takes a deep breath, manages to calm himself… opens his cabinet and inside... there are twenty brushes… He gets another one and finishes brushing his teeth.

THAT is a character introduction! That is a memorable scene. And it only appeared because the writer took an existing scene and did something to it.

Why wasn't such a fantastic scene in the movie, you ask. Bill Murray couldn't swallow the candy toothbrush without throwing up.

Let's pay a visit to Francis Coppola’s stunning Apocalypse Now. In the “Mr. Clean's Death” scene, imagine the writer doing the first draft… they're chugging up the Nung river, Lance having fun with a purple haze smoke bomb and all of a sudden, tracer bullets stream out of the jungle, there's a vicious firefight, and Clean is dead. Chef is torn apart by his buddy's death and the scene ends with him in agony, hold his dead shipmate's body.

It's a good scene, but as the writer, you must always think about going back for a second dip. What can you do to make the scene more memorable for the audience? How can you make the already harrowing scene… even worse? How can you make the reader / viewer worry more?

For the second layer, we get the element of everybody getting mail from home.

Chef is up front, reading a Dear John letter from his girlfriend, 13,000 miles away and Clean is in the stern, listening to a cassette tape “letter” from his mother. While Lance is playing with the smoke bomb, Clean's mom tells him the family is going to buy him a car, but that he has to keep it their secret. Then, the firefight breaks out and Clean is killed. Now, this time, with the second layer in place… when Chef holds Clean's dead body, the writer twists us on the emotional gaff as the mother’s cassette player voice continues lovingly in the background, “… bring your hiney home all in one piece, cause we love you very much. Love, Mom.”

I have no idea if the writers planned it that way or added it as a second layer, but it's gut-wrenching.