The Scene That Will Not End: Entering Late and Leaving Early
Lenore breaks down why scenes sag, using a page from Tootsie and one from her own first draft, and shows how cutting the first and last quarter of a scene changes everything.
Characters Who Only React: Giving Your Lead a Want
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Show notes
Characters who only react
A protagonist who spends the script responding to things other people do is the second most common note in coverage. Lenore explains the difference between a goal and a want, and why the want has to be small enough to fit in a single scene.
- Why readers notice passivity by page twenty and stop rooting for the lead
- Lady Bird and a want that is embarrassing and specific
- Michael Clayton and a character who acts while seeming to drift
- The difference between obstacles and other people's plot
- Guest writer Tomas Reyes on rewriting a pilot lead from the ground up
Exercise: write one line, in your lead's voice, finishing the sentence I want.
Transcript
Welcome back to Page Ninety. I am Lenore Castellanos. Last week we made our scenes shorter. This week we look at the person standing in the middle of them. Here is a note I wrote hundreds of times as a reader and never enjoyed writing. The protagonist is passive. They get fired, they get dumped, they get a phone call, and they react, and by page twenty the reader has quietly stopped caring. The fix is not a bigger goal. It is a smaller, more specific want. We will look at how Greta Gerwig does it in Lady Bird and how Tony Gilroy hides it in Michael Clayton, and then Tomas Reyes, who just sold a pilot, will walk us through rewriting a lead from scratch. There is an exercise at the end and it is one sentence long. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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