What makes a scene move: want, obstacle and change

1 The bottom line

A scene moves when a character wants something, meets an obstacle, and leaves changed. Check every scene for those three, and cut or rework the ones that lack them, because a scene without them has nowhere to go.

2 Key takeaways

• Every scene needs a character who wants something and something in the way. Without both, the reader's attention drifts.
  • Harry Potter wants to live and Voldemort is trying to kill him, and Shaan Puri7:05 says the same test works on any movie.
  • Will Storr1:04:25 points to Nomadland, which sets up theme, obstacle and goal in about three minutes with almost no dialogue.
• Make the want cost something. Without stakes, it does not matter whether anyone decides anything.
  • In Nash Falls, an FBI agent tells a businessman he loses everything whether he helps them or not David Baldacci21:13.
• Send the character out of the scene different from how they came in. The outcome becomes the setup for the next scene.
  • Nat Eliason48:10 says a driving scene ends one of two ways: yes, but, or no, and.
• When a scene is dead, back up and change the want, the obstacle or the cast. The fault is usually a wrong turn, not the prose.
  • Bill Browder5:17 spent a month reading transcripts to find the tension in a dull deposition.
• Cut the scenes and the stretches that do no work. Short scenes that end on a question pull readers forward.
  • Patrick Radden Keefe39:49 boils 300 pages of court transcript down to five.

make sure on every page every character wants something even if it's only a glass of water.

Michael Connelly, Harry Bosch

2.1 Pause the scene and name the want

Freeze each scene and ask who wants what and what blocks them.

• Run the pause test on every scene. Shaan Puri7:05, citing Aaron Sorkin
  • Say what the hero wants, why they want it, what happens if they fail, and who or what is in the way.
  • Will Storr1:04:25 says even experienced storytellers forget this. When you feel bored or confused, check whether it is unclear who wants what.
  • Puri says if five minutes pass without that being clear, attention drifts.
• Name the character, the want and the obstacle, and you have a story. Michael Dean30:57
  • Pick an obstacle that can resolve more than one way, so the reader stays suspended until the consequence arrives.
  • Orwell wants to avoid shooting the elephant, but 2,000 people behind him expect it.
• Give every character a want on every page, however small. Michael Connelly24:36
  • Check a page against the rule and ask whether everybody wants something.
  • Early in the Bosch books he made Bosch a smoker who could not smoke, so there was a small conflict on every page.
• Put one character in the way of another. Nick Bilton46:00
  • One character tries to do something and another stands in the way. That is where tension comes from.
  • Jonathan Franzen2:01 sets wants that collide: one character wants the other to get on a plane, and the other has no intention of going.
  • Walking into a kitchen for a glass of water is no story. Add someone blocking the way with a knife and it is (Bilton).

2.2 Raise the cost of the conflict

A want with nothing to lose makes a flat scene, so make every option cost something.

• Force a choice where every option costs. David Baldacci21:13
  • Put the character where they must make a life-altering choice and live with the consequences.
  • Stakes need not be a ticking bomb. They can be a personal loss tied to something readers believe in.
• Ask whether the conflict can be bigger and more meaningful. Steven Levitan1:12:53
  • If it feels like nothing is happening, the conflict is probably too small. Make it core to the characters so someone must take extreme measures.
  • A quick apology that ends it is not enough.
  • He notes Jim and Pam on The Office had little conflict once together, so it had to come from elsewhere.
• Put characters in the situation they have organized their lives to avoid. Jonathan Franzen43:19
  • He writes about families because even people living through screens cannot avoid real interaction with relatives.
  • Gillian Flynn6:00 does the same with setting. She moved Gone Girl from Chicago to Missouri because Chicago let Amy remake herself too easily.
  • She made the move after about 100 pages (Flynn).
• Give the opposition weight. Steven Pressfield44:07
  • Ask who the villain is. It can be a person, a thing, a societal force or something in someone's head.
  • The greater the villain, the more the hero has to fight, so a weak villain means a weak story.
  • Derek Thompson11:20 says every good scene is a fight. Ask whether your favorite movie scene had characters agreeing on everything.

2.3 Check that the scene changes something

A scene should end with the character in a different place from where it began.

• Compare what the character enters with and what they leave with. David Gelb1:02:37
  • The character tries to get something, hits an obstacle, then adjusts or hits a wall. The next scene picks up from that blockage.
  • Gelb says actors ask directors the same two questions, especially when a film is shot out of order.
• End the scene with a yes, but or a no, and. Nat Eliason48:10
  • Either the character gets what they wanted with an unseen cost, or they don't and something worse happens that changes their goal.
  • Stakes rise because the character never simply gets what they asked for.
• Push the character further from the goal before they get close. Nat Eliason50:10
  • Each easy fix fails and takes them back a step. Ask in each scene what new tension pushes the character back.
  • He says steady progress is boring because the stakes are not going up. He credits a tweet saying Christopher Nolan sketches his plots as descents, like Inception's levels.
• Look for change in small forms too. Andrew Stanton43:30
  • Change can be an eye shift, or a pause where something was active and then is not.
  • He says the cable car disconnects and the beach ball disappears when there is not enough change.

2.4 Rework the scenes that stay dead

When a scene fails the check, change its want, its obstacle or its cast.

• Use your own reaction as the test, then back up. Dean Koontz2:50
  • If he feels nothing, something has gone badly wrong, and he backs up to find where it went off.
  • People walking past his office hear him laughing or see him in tears, so he knows a scene works.
  • Jonathan Franzen37:10 keeps asking how to make a scene more extreme. Four times out of five it will not work, but one time in five it is something great.
• Let the scene refuse to be the one you planned. Noah Hawley1:02:12
  • Ask what if the character refuses to play your scene.
  • He planned an action set piece when a villain shows up at Juno Temple's house. She sets him to work making biscuits and raises forgiveness, and it became the emotional peak of the Fargo season.
• Shake a frozen scene by adding someone new. Anne Lamott46:15
  • Bring in a person who was not there, such as someone who knows both of you and is astonished you are standing so close, or who hates the same person you do.
• Find the thread that makes a dull scene tense. Bill Browder5:17
  • He says it is the storytelling, not the prose, that makes a scene work.
  • In his dull deposition, the thread was a former lawyer who switched sides and was fishing for personal information the Russian mafia could use to kill him.
  • Eric Roth45:27 offers another route. Ask how the dead scene connects to the theme of the whole piece. It can go far afield, as long as it ties back.
  • Readers called Browder's deposition chapter exciting. A chapter on a Chinese wall at an investment bank also worked once he found the rival who wanted to turn him in.
  • Roth used justice as the theme of Killers of the Flower Moon and returned to it whenever a scene needed direction.

2.5 Let pressure reveal the person

The best scenes show who the character is while they fight for the want.

• Write soul drama, not just events. Andrew Hunter Murray31:42
  • Build scenes around how people relate and struggle with themselves. What two trapped characters say to each other matters more than the runaway train.
  • In Die Hard, the wristwatch that comes loose and frees McClane to save his wife carries the whole marriage in one object.
• Give the scene a hidden backstory that sets its tempo. Amor Towles5:16
  • The language, rhythm and tone should change with what the character secretly knows, even if the other character cannot know it.
  • His example is a kitchen scene played two ways: the mother has just discovered her husband's affair, or has just had one herself. A later reveal then lets the reader see it was all there.
• Set small, familiar frustrations beside the big conflict. Michael Connelly26:39
  • Add things everyone knows, like traffic and bureaucrats who will not help. Make them specific.
  • Bosch checks the traffic report from his deck. Connelly says 99.9 percent of his readers have never solved a murder.

2.6 Cut what does no work

Trim each scene to the part that carries the want, and drop the rest.

• Enter late, leave early, and cut away on a question. Patrick Radden Keefe39:49
  • Cut away where readers want to know what happens next, deliver any needed exposition, and trust them to come back.
  • Nick Bilton7:25 says skip the arrival and the small talk, start mid-conversation, and let the next scene supply the answer.
  • Keefe learned from screenwriting that a four-minute scene is already long.
  • Bilton's old couple at dinner: he asks for the salt and she answers with his doctor's warning about cholesterol. That delivers exposition without a lecture scene.
• Rewrite any page where nothing important happens. Jimmy Soni48:35
  • He cites Raymond Chandler's rule that every page must have something important happen. If nothing does, scrap the page and rewrite it.
• Make every scene do at least two jobs. David Baldacci26:31
  • A scene or a line should advance the plot, flesh out a character, or give the reader information they need.
  • If a scene is there only because you did research and hate to cut it, that is the wrong answer. Producers and directors asked him constantly why a scene had to be in the film.
• Make dialogue work through issues, not kill time. Eric Roth1:04:09
  • Avoid what the business calls shoe leather, characters wandering around without purpose.
  • In his Sicilian mafia script, the hero falls for the daughter of his rival, so each scene grows more fraught until her father says "you're dead to me."
• Tell the slow parts fast and the fast parts slow. Will Storr41:28
  • Compress dull stretches and give moments of change full scenes.
  • As a ghostwriter he hunts for scenes where the client changed or learned something, then asks for extreme detail: what they wore, the weather, what they ate for breakfast.

2.7 Where writers disagree

Sources differ on how big the stakes must be and when to plan, and some tactics fit only some stories.

• Small stakes can carry a scene, if the reader believes them. Shaan Puri29:02
  • Stakes do not have to be life and death. Embarrassment in front of your mom over Brussels sprouts is enough.
  • He says vacation and party stories fail because no one has anything at stake in them.
• Plan the scene in detail first, or find it in the draft. Amor Towles14:51
  • He pictures each scene while walking to work, then writes it by hand in notebooks, in whatever order he likes.
  • After a couple of years he knows everything that happens before he writes chapter one. Hawley and Franzen, above, found their better scenes while writing.
• Think about the villain, but not for long. Michael Connelly47:58
  • He cites Steven Bochco's sign over his desk: "What's the bad guy thinking?" The villain is out there doing something, and that keeps the plot moving.
  • Still, Connelly spends little time on villain psychology and puts his energy into what the hero sacrifices.
• Some tactics fit only some stories.
  • Andrew Stanton25:23 pairs opposites for a romance or buddy story. There must be an obstacle to the two simply getting along.
  • Adrian Tchaikovsky36:49 gives fantasy magic a price and limits, or nobody has a problem.
  • Steven Pressfield56:32 agrees a hero needs a quiet solo beat before the climax.
  • In WALL-E he was visually a box and she was a circle (Stanton).
  • In Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, godlike people with free magic are bored, and the whole story is their search for a way out of that ennui (Tchaikovsky).
  • In The Godfather, Michael finds the gun behind the toilet tank, a subway rumbles louder, and he combs his hair before crossing over (Pressfield).