Scene Choreography

Writing is not a visual medium. All of the images and “mental movies” are products of imagination – the writer’s imagination and the reader’s imagination…and the two may not quite agree.

This usually doesn’t matter when it comes to objects. The writer usually mentions any aspects of the shoes, the knife, or the piano that are vital to the plot, and lets the reader fill in relevant details. Movement, on the other hand, is far more troublesome.

The trouble comes in two parts: first, the writer has to be clear in his/her own head about which character is where, doing what; second, the writer has to get that across to the reader.

Figuring out who is where, doing what, in any scene, has a lot more moving parts than one might normally expect. First off, there’s the setting, which the writer may not have initially visualized in great detail. Then there are the characters – major, minor, walk-ons, and extras – each of whom has a starting location and each of whom may be wearing or carrying things that may come up later in the scene. Finally, there’s the action itself, which breaks down into the things that absolutely must happen (the scene where Jenny rescues Robert from the dungeon requires her to get the cell door open somehow); the things and actions that will get the necessary thing done (whether that means Jenny steals the key, picks the lock, or dynamites the door); and other stuff that could happen, but that’s not absolutely necessary (the return of the dungeon guard just as Jenny is opening the door isn’t the point of the scene; it could be a nice complication or an annoyingly unnecessary distraction, depending on many other factors).

The writer has to make all these bits work together to get the job done without contradictions or impossibilities (like having a character walk straight through the center of the room when there’s supposed to be a large dining table there). Some writers start with the setting, laying out both important features and minor details – the stone stairs leading down into a small, windowless room; the iron-banded cell door opposite the entrance, locked with an ancient padlock and a rusty hasp; the guard’s wobbly wooden stool and a square, rough-hewn table are on the right. Next, they position the characters: Jenny, on the stairs just outside; the guard, seated at the table; Robert, in the cell. Then they set the characters in motion, and improvise moves based on what they know has to happen, adding even more details as needed.

Other writers start with a bare minimum of physical setting and deduce what they need to have in the picture according to what has to be there for the scene to play out. Jenny has to rescue Robert. There’s a guard. The cell is locked. How does she get past the guard? Bashes him with a rock…OK, that means there’s a rock. How’d a rock get here? The stone walls are deteriorating and Jenny spots a loose piece. Now we know that the walls are stone and crumbling in spots. Now for the cell – is there a key around? No, that’d be too easy. How about picking the lock? Does she have a lockpick with her? Does Robert? As this writer works their way through the scene, more details come into focus.

Still other writers actually diagram the action as if it were a football play: Bad Guys are X’s; Main Character is C; Sidekick is S; Villain is V, all marked down at the place they start in on a sketch of the room or area. Then draw lines: X’s converge on C from several directions; S moves left, taking out one X and making a gap in the line; C follows through the gap to punch V, who has been standing around gloating.

Still other writers do a “sketch draft” or “scene blocking” – a description of the scene that’s longer than the one-sentence summary “Jenny rescues Robert from the dungeon,” but more condensed than the eventual scene, though it contains the key moves that each of the characters make. This gives the writer a chance to play around with alternatives – “Hey … Jenny can shove the guard up against the door, and Robert gets a choke-hold on him from inside the cell! That’ll give Robert something to do and make the scene more interesting…means the cell door has to be bars or have a window” – without having to do a major rewrite.

One of the things to watch out for when choreographing a scene is the chorus line – any people who would be sitting around the tea shop, walking down the street, standing around waiting to also board the plane, or doing other perfectly normal irrelevant activities in the area. Sometimes, they can all be lumped together as more scenery (“Rush-hour crowds”), but as soon as the bank robber bursts out of the bank or the runaway wagon comes careening down the hill, all those people will react. They usually don’t need detailed, person-by-person descriptions of where they’re running to or what they’re doing, but they can’t just vanish (unless of course this is the sort of world that has teleportation magic or technology, but that, too, should be remarked on, if only for the reader’s benefit).

Some writers make the mistake of trying to visualize only as much of the scene as their viewpoint character would see and experience. That may be all that will eventually go on the page, but to keep things believable and clear, the writer nearly always needs to know more about what’s going on than the POV does … especially if something important is happening behind the POV’s back.

Once the writer knows what each of their major characters will be doing in the scene, they get to try to make everything clear to the reader. Which I’ll try to talk more about next week.