Characters Who Only React: Giving Your Lead a Want
Lenore looks at passive protagonists, why readers put those scripts down by page twenty, and how a small, specific want fixes the second act, with examples from Lady Bird and Michael Clayton.
The Scene That Will Not End: Entering Late and Leaving Early
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Show notes
The scene that will not end
Most scenes in a first draft start too early, with a greeting and a sit-down, and end too late, with someone leaving a room. Lenore reads the famous restaurant scene from Tootsie against her own early draft of a hospital scene to show where the energy actually lives.
- What a scene is for and why most have one job
- The entering late test, reading a scene from its third line
- Why the last line of a scene should pose the next question
- Transitions as a writing tool, not an editing afterthought
- Guest writer Priya Dhawan on a scene she cut by half
Exercise: take any scene in your draft and remove its first and last four lines.
Transcript
Hi, I am Lenore Castellanos and this is Page Ninety, a show about the craft of screenwriting for people who actually have to finish the draft. I spent six years reading scripts for a studio, and I promise you the most common note I wrote was the same one I keep writing on my own pages. The scene goes on too long. It starts with hello and ends with goodbye and the good part is buried in the middle. Today we are going to fix that. I will read a page from Tootsie, then a page from my own first feature that I am slightly embarrassed by, and my friend Priya Dhawan will tell us about a scene she cut in half the night before a table read. There is an exercise at the end. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let us get to the page.
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